Turn up the dial.

1 writing framework that will get your content in front of more customers

Tommy Clark
March 11, 2025

Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

Hope your week is off to a good start. Another weekend spent in relative hibernation. Caught up on sleep, wrapped 1 book (early version of my friend’s upcoming novel), and dove into a new one (Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson).

Now, today’s essay.

I got a message from a founder who had been posting on social for a minute. Crickets. No traction. No leads. Kinda felt bad for him—until I saw the fix was simple. I want to let you in on it, too. Because nobody should have to post into the void.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Turn up the dial.

1 writing framework that will get your content in front of more customers

I got an email last week from a B2B founder who was struggling to grow (and get customers) on LinkedIn:

Hey Tommy

I’ve been posting on LinkedIn 3x per week for a month or so now.

Engagement is okay - but I feel like I’m missing something in my content. My posts seem to be stuck around the same number of likes, and getting comments from the same people over and over again.

I believe you when you say LinkedIn is the right channel for b2b startups - but i’d be lying if i said I wasn’t feeling a little discouraged

Any advice?

Yes. Plenty of advice, actually! But I’ll keep it focused today. Here’s what I responded.

1/ It’s been 1 month. Keep going. I posted for 5 years before launching my business. That’s why growth happened so “quick” when I Iaunched Compound. Don’t throw your hands up and say “LinkedIn doesn’t work” until you’ve posted 5 times per week for 6-12 months.

2/ Looking at his content (which I’ll keep anonymous in this public-facing piece), I noticed one glaring problem.

The content was safe.

The “value” and “tips” were there, and helpful. But everyone’s got “tips.”

There was no clear stance. No opinion to agree with, or disagree with, in the comments. Safe.

Safe is boring.

“Safe” is the killer of great content. The assassin of reach. The death-bringer of distribution. Avoid “safe” like the plague.

Thing is, you could get away with safe, sterile content on LinkedIn for a while. In the 2010s, and even the early 2020s, the baseline for great content on LinkedIn was low.

Then Gary Vee started talking about how it was a great channel for content creators and now we have “creators” posting glamorized day-in-the-life vlogs on the corporate recruiting platform. Kidding. Kind of.

For real though - more and more creators & startups are taking LinkedIn seriously. So the baseline for content quality has gone up. Meaning it’s more competitive to stand-out.

Combine that with the rapid rise of AI, and the value of basic “how-to” content is plummeting to zero, fast.

I can open Claude right now and prompt it to spit out a half-decent listicle with better B2B sales advice than most sales influencers.

How do you stand out? Is it even possible anymore? Are you screwed?

Yes, it’s possible. No, you're not screwed. At all.

Here’s how I want you to approach your content: turn the dial up by 20%.

Imagine a dial sitting on your desk, where on one end you have “corporate robot” and on the other you have “unhinged extremist.”

If you're new to posting on LinkedIn, or have been posting with little traction, I’d bet my life savings that you’ve got that dialed turned closer to “corporate robot.” Maybe not all the way there. But close.

You probably don’t even share your real opinions on LinkedIn. Just the PR-filtered version of them.

I want you to turn that dial 20% towards ‘unhinged extremist.’

Hear me out.

Don’t worry. You're not going all the way in that direction, either. Just a little bit. Just enough that some people might actually disagree with you - shocking, I know!

Your content shouldn’t be for everyone. You should alienate some people. You just want to alienate the people who were never going to do business with you in the first place.

Let’s get tactical. This polarization will usually show up in the hook of your post—those first 1-3 lines where the fate of the reader hangs in the balance.

For example, I’m looking for Content Writers for my agency. I’m using content as a magnet for candidates. In this post, I wrote about how I don’t really give a shit if your “grammar” skills are on point.

(V1) Read my hook: “I ask the same question on every Content Writer interview I take. One specific answer disqualifies the candidate immediately.”

(V2) I could have written: “Here’s 1 things we look for in a Content Writer at Compound:”

Which hook are you more likely to click on if you're a Content Writer looking for work?

V1, clearly. That reader’s inner monologue sounds something like this: Which question do I ask? One question really disqualifies someone? Seems harsh. I should see what it is.

V2 isn’t wrong. It’s something worse. Boring. Safe.

Notice the difference?

Adam Robinson is one of the best LinkedIn creators I’ve seen in this regard. Let’s look at a hook of his.

(V1 - actual): “A CEO friend of mine raised $40M at $400M valuation. Two years later? The money’s gone and his ARR is flat. If you asked him the biggest mistake he made he would tell you: hiring salespeople. Here's why:”

(V2 - PR-filtered version): “I find most startups hire too many salespeople, too early. Here’s what I’d recommend doing instead:”

At least V2 has an opinion. But it’s presented in a safe, sterile way.

Turn the dial up by 20%, and you get the hook Adam actually used. Notice how it’s more polarizing, uses a narrative-based hook, and has more specific numbers. And it’s not so far toward the unhinged extreme that it’s ridiculous.

I talk to so many founders who are terrified to stand out on social.

They don’t want the eyeballs. They fear people talking about their content poorly.

As long as you let this keep you from sharing your real opinions and industry takes, you will be losing reach on social.

And remember, nobody’s asking you to exaggerate to the extreme. Just turn the dial up 20%. Try it in your next post. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

That’s all I’ve got today. Now, off to repurpose this rant into a LinkedIn post.

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.

LinkedIn was hard, until I learned this by Tommy Clark 🎥
how brands can build cult followings in 2025 by Alex Garcia 🎥
How I use LLMs by Andrej Karpathy 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, thanks for allowing me into your email inbox every week.