Welcome to uploading the podcast, where we take you behind the wheel with the world's best creators, marketers, and professionals who have cracked the code on how to profit through content. You'll learn the ins and outs of content strategy, creation, production, distribution, growth platforms, tools, and more. If you haven't already, be sure to join Cas Magic, the all in one content workspace for professionals. We'll be sending out tips from our shows in our weekly newsletter, and we've also got a slack community of over a thousand creators, so make sure to drop in and say hello. And now get ready for the show. Welcome to today's episode of Uploading. And today we have the pleasure of speaking with Tommy Clark, who is the founder of Compound, an agency that helps founders b two b people in SaaS kind of scale their content engines, especially in the the b two b space, especially on LinkedIn.

So, Tommy, one of the reasons I'm really excited to talk about you is you've kind of been everywhere in the b two b content world. Your content crushes it. I see you on LinkedIn all the time and your content really just jumped out at me and I was like, I really have to have this guy on uploading because like, what he's saying is like right on the money in terms of like, where the industry is heading, you know, great trends, great ways to make content, all that sort of stuff. So maybe I, so I'm really excited for our conversation because I think there's going to be a lot of value that we're going to deliver. But why don't we start with, how'd you get started? How'd you find yourself in the b two b content landscape? Yeah, why don't you just take us back to that and then we'll just, we'll jump into specifics.

Yeah, it's kind of a roundabout stories if you go back far enough. I actually had the life plan of being an orthopedic surgeon. So when I went into college, that was my sort of ten year, 15 year plan, and then somehow got into health and fitness and then from there started posting on Instagram. And that was like my entry point into content, like as a way to get leads for that sort of fitness coaching side hustle that I started as a college student. That was my first experience in content. Started just devouring Gary Vee content as one does when one gets into the space and then eventually kind of figured out, oh, I like this content marketing thing. I'm actually pretty good at it. I don't really want to do this fitness coaching thing and then pivoted from that into a part time marketing role.

And then a few, like, winding turns later ended up getting a freelance gig with a b two b media company. You might be familiar with them d two c newsletter. I ran their Twitter account and LinkedIn and all that sort of stuff, and then from there got my first full time gig in b two b social, which is kind of where things really took off, which was at Wh Whale, an e commerce SaaS company that some of your listeners might be familiar with. So I was head of social there for just over a year and helped them ramp up their social presence, pretty much just taking it over the Twitter timeline, LinkedIn, all the typical b two b social channels, and then from there, accidentally built a freelance roster on the side. And it got to the point where I had this freelance roster, had the full time gig, had zero time. So towards the end of Q one last year, just kind of realized that something had to give. And that was when I went full time on the agency. And it's been about 1617 months since then, and we've been, as you said earlier, helping b two b founders launch their LinkedIn content for the past few months.

So it's been a fun ride.

That's so funny. We're in such adjacent fields, very familiar with DTC newsletter as well as triple will. So that's funny that that was also segue into comment or into content. So why don't, why don't we. Yeah, let's, let's start with LinkedIn. What about, what drew you to LinkedIn again, you're working on social for some of these b two b platforms. What opportunity did you see in LinkedIn? And, you know, how did you start, like, figuring the platform out?

What and what did you, what did.

You start to figure out?

Yeah, I think there's a few characteristics that make it very appealing to B two B founders in general, and then just to me personally. So for B two B companies, your buyers and decision makers that are going to purchase your product are active on LinkedIn, and more importantly, they're in the mind state to learn about your product and, like, read educational content on the platform so you could go and market on TikTok. And I'm not saying the SaaS companies can't be successful. I'm sure there are case studies of that being the case. But for a lot of B two B SaaS companies or just B two B companies in general, the effort that it would take to win on TikTok is or another social platform is so much higher than the effort that it would take to do LinkedIn well, because your audience is just hanging out there all day and they want to consume business related content, whereas someone might use TikTok or Instagram reels to just kind of turn off their mind after a long day at work, people are actively looking for business related educational. It has to be entertaining. But, like, educational content on LinkedIn, the second thing that draws me to it is that the algorithm right now at least, is a bit more consistent than other platforms. So like comparing, even comparing it to Twitter, which I also think is a viable platform for b two B companies.

And that was where we did a lot of our work at triple whale during my time here, during my time there. Lately, it's just been a lot more volatile. Like some weeks things work really well. The next week, impressions just go through the floor. The formats that work change, like pretty much daily. It's. It's, again, it's pretty volatile and it's hard to keep up with. Whereas LinkedIn, you do experience the fluctuations of any social platform, but it is generally more consistent.

So you can be more confident that, hey, if I invest my time here, this just isn't going to go to zero or my reach isn't going to tank three months from now for some random reason. So it's predictable. Your audience is hanging out there. And then on a personal level, I enjoy writing a lot. That's probably the content medium that if I had to pick one, I would really focus on writing. And from what I see, LinkedIn and kind of Twitter, but it's shifting away from this, are one of the last social platforms that you can really win on with just writing. Even LinkedIn now is kind of leaning more into short form video, and content with media is performing better. But if you're a good copywriter and you enjoy writing as a medium, I think LinkedIn is probably the best platform to use.

So between your audience being there, the algorithm being a bit more predictable, and organic, reach still being pretty easy to come by, and then also just the fact that it's a writing heavy platform, like that's what makes it appealing for me and a lot of the founders that we work with.

So what I'd love to talk about is I think people know that LinkedIn is like a great platform to be posting on. It's an important social network. Their buyers are there. But then you get to the part about actually creating content. Like, what do you create? Right? So I'm sure you see this? A lot of times you work with a bunch of founders who maybe haven't, haven't had all the reps that you have, don't know exactly what to start writing. So when you're meeting with someone, whether it's a founder, they've got a business they're looking up to, like really get started on LinkedIn. Like, where do you start with them? How do you put together a content strategy? And what do those first pieces of content look like?

That's a great question. First, you need to answer the question, why should someone in your ICP follow you? Your ideal customer profile? So why should someone follow you in the first place? It seems super simple, but you'd be shocked by how many founders and marketers. Whoever's posting on LinkedIn just doesn't really think about that and they start throwing stuff at the wall. And yet, testing is important, but you need to have a general direction of, hey, this is what I'm building, my personal brand or my audience around. Like for me, I'm really focused on b two b content and b two b social. I talk a little bit about like running and fitness and some personal stuff, and you can layer some of that stuff in, but I'm not jumping around from topic to topic. I know that, hey, I'm not really trying to be a celebrity or an influencer, whatever you want to call it. I'm trying to build my agency.

So what type of content is going to lead to that? For me, that's a content centered around the niche of b two b content. If you're a founder, it's like what type of content do you want to be known for? And then once you have that idea figured out, then what I like to do is break it up into what I call a content funnel. So top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel content. It's a good way to organize the way you think about the types of posts that you're making. On a week to week basis, your top of funnel content is going to be broader business stories, like entrepreneurship life, like founder Life. Almost like building in public style of content where you're sharing like what you're learning as a founder and sharing milestones from your company and all that stuff that LinkedIn loves. But it also is a bit more broad. So you're casting a wider net and what'll happen is you'll get a lot of engagement and the impressions numbers will look good and on platform metrics will look good.

But if you over index them that direction you're going to build a pretty broad audience and not a super targeted one that's going to actually buy your stuff. So that's one type of content that you wanna include in your mix, but you don't wanna over index. Then there's middle of funnel content, which is your more industry specific thought leadership. So again, going back to the example of like b, two b content and the stuff that I post about, um, whereas Tabafunnel might be announcing a new hire we made for the agency, middle of funnel might be a listicle. About five mistakes that SaaS companies make with their content marketing, which is like the post I made this morning. Um, it's more industry specific. It's not a hard sales pitch. You're still not being super salesy in this content.

Um, and it will build an audience, but it's speaking specifically to that ICP that you're trying to attract. And then you have your bottom up on all content. This is pretty straightforward. It's like your product updates, feature highlights, case studies. This is more of your sales pitch type of stuff. And I think a lot of people think that you should never post that type of stuff. I used to fall into this trap early on, even when I was at triple whale. Like if you, if you go back far enough on my LinkedIn, you'll see some pretty atrocious takes where it's like, oh, you should never talk about your product and no one wants to hear about that.

Yes and no. Like you don't want to just be shilling it all the time because then you're not going to build an audience. But the goal, again, is to get customers not to become a celebrity. So you want to make sure that you're plugging it pretty regularly in a way that makes sense for the platform. So that'd be like case study post, feature highlights, again, like stuff that will still perform well, but it doesn't have as large of a potential audience. So you want to make sure your content balance is pretty, not even, but like well distributed across the three. Typically what I would recommend is like ten to 20% top of funnel stuff, ten to 20% bottom of funnel stuff, and then like 60% to 70% middle of funnel. Like the majority of your mix should be in middle of funnel because it's, it's going to build you up as a thought leader and like a go to resource for your target customer.

But it's also not super sales pitchy. Um, and it's like pretty targeted versus the top of funnel stuff being super broad. So that was a lot uh, feel free to unpack or dive deeper on any of those individual pieces. But does that overall, like, thought process make sense?

Yeah, that makes a bunch of sense. And the first thing I wanted to dive into was the why. Right. Um, how do you help someone figure out their why? Is it just about saying, oh, your business is in such industry, therefore your why is going to be catering to those clients? Or is there actually something deeper that you unpack when you're working with clients about, like, oh, wait a minute. Sure, your business is in this, but, like, we've also want to. We also want to be creating content because of XYZ route.

Yeah. Um, I think this question is more of, like, a company level question than like, a LinkedIn strategy question. Like, you need to figure out your positioning as a company before you think about, like, oh, what's. What am I going to post on LinkedIn? Um, usually what I would recommend here is, like, ask yourself why you started the company in the first place. Like, what problem was painful enough for you to start a company around, whether it was to solve it for yourself, or if you just saw it in a bunch of people that are in your target demographic now. Like, what problem was so painful that you needed to create a company around it? And usually, like, that will give you some good insight into what you should be posting it. So, for me, I noticed in my story that, hey, content literally changed my life. It got me a dream job.

It allowed me to start a company. It allowed me to make some amazing connections. So I think that every founder should be creating content, whether it be on LinkedIn or another platform. Um, but I think that every founder should be creating social content. And the social content is, like, one of the most powerful things that you could do as a business. So I talk about that in my content. Um, another way to think about it, too, is if you can create some sort of enemy, like, what are you fighting against? This could be a company. It's like, one example of this, and I think you're familiar with, like, Jimmy Kim and Zenway, and this is the example I cite all the time for.

This is like, they're going pretty hard directly at Klavia, which is, like, the industry incumbent in the e commerce ESP space for anyone listening, and it's working really well for them. You don't have to go specifically at a direct company, but you can also go at or position an idea as an enemy. So at WHWH, for us, it was like iOS 14 and attribution got really difficult. So leaning into that pain point and creating content around that was helpful for us on the content strategy standpoint. That's just a few of the ways that I think about how to ideate, what to actually post about or what that answer is to why are we actually, or why should someone bowl you? Yeah.

And I think that's so good because so many people might be like, oh, what is my why? How do I even figure that out? And if that's the thing that your content revolves around, you need to be able to have a couple ideas to really dig deeper on that. So I think that's really solid in terms of thinking about why you created it.

Ideally, it should be something that, like, fires you up or something that you want to rant. Rant about, or like that you can't stop talking about. Um, usually, again, if you're starting a company, there was some problem that drove you nuts, whether it be in a previous role that you had or, or something that you saw other, that drove other people nuts. But, like, it should be something that is a bit polarizing or that you want to, like, argue with someone about. I'm not that you should go start beef on the timeline, but, like, it should be an idea that really gets you going. If it's not, it's probably a bit too sterile. And this is why you see a lot of b, two b companies just kind of blend in and be kind of boring.

Yeah, 100%. And I think that polarization is, like, something that's so interesting. I think it's something that in the commerce space, you see it all the time in, like, fashion, right? Like, if you're in fashion and you're not polarizing, it's like, what are you doing? And I remember on our podcast, we interviewed this guy, Jay Carls from midday squares, and they're like a chocolate brand. And they, like, their enemy is like, Hershey's, right? They're a startup chocolate brand. They're trying to get into all these stores and scale up their revenue and do all this. And then they get slapped with the lawsuit by Hershey's. And they're like, wait a minute. We're the little guys.

They're the big guys, and their whole narrative is all around that they've got an enemy. They're doubling down on content. So it's really cool to just see that this doesn't have to just apply to you as a founder if you're in the b two B space, but also if you're a founder and, you know, some of your buyers are on LinkedIn and you want to be creating content, you got a why. You can craft that. You can figure out, like, who you are, what your company stands for, what gets you really fired up the post and then start ranting. So I love that. And let's move on now to the other stages of the funnel. So top of funnel, right? I think a couple of the content types that you mentioned were things that are a little bit more broad, like, you know, build in public, day in the life, like all that sort of stuff.

Are there any sort of other, like, how do you, is that what you start with? Like, you just, you know, someone who hasn't been posting. You just start one day being like, hey, guys, like, here I am and here's what I do. Or like, how do you think about starting to, like, post in the first place?

What I would do is just acknowledge that you're going to start posting. Typically if there's a client that we work with that has been totally dark on LinkedIn, or maybe they've posted like twice in the past two years, but they're going to start posting again because they've seen this podcast or they've seen someone else's content around how hosting as a founder is super beneficial. What I would do is just make an intro post, like a quick context, or give some quick context on your backstory. Say why you're going to start posting, and then give your audience an idea of what to expect. Think of it like starting a series. And that type of post, one will give people a heads up so you don't just start posting out of nowhere. That's One really common fear that a surprising amount of founders have when it comes to posting on LinkedIn, they're like, 'Oh, what if I start posting five days a week and then my audience or my network just starts cringing and hates me?' It's like, one, it's not going to happen, but two, one way to just make sure that doesn't happen, even though it's probably not going to, is just give them a heads up that you're going to be posting more often.

And this is a new challenge you're going to be undertaking and why you're doing it, what to expect. And that type of post actually tends to do pretty well. Um, so we'll usually see a pretty big spike in that first post, and then the engagement will sort of name will sort of normalize after that. Um, another post that I would recommend making in the first week or so of posting. Um, that just tends to over perform pretty much every time we do it is an origin story post. So you might mention some of this in the like, hey, I'm posting, um, piece of content, but a dedicated post on why you started your company. What that story was almost always tends to crush. And what I would pair with that is, if you have some sort of picture or image from the early days of your company, it's a great media asset to go with that type of post.

And those two are two quick, easy wins that you could post to LinkedIn. And I'd be shocked if they didn't perform well.

I love that. The next thing I want to talk about that's in that vein is content formats. You just mentioned, for example, making sure you've got a picture to post with your text. Like, how do you think about content formats when it comes to LinkedIn? It seems like the big three are probably what you've got, pure text. You've got text with an image, and then you've got text with a video, like a sort of social clip that you attach, and then maybe you've got those kind of PDF swipe throughs. I'm not sure what LinkedIn's doing with those at the moment. Are there any content types I'm missing, or are those the main, main formats?

For now, no, I think that covers it. Yeah, those carousels were definitely sort of a cheat code about a year or so back. I haven't been seeing them do as well. I don't think they're dead. I just think it's kind of like how Twitter threads were back in 2021, where if you posted Twitter threads, you would just pop off. Now, they still work, but it's not this super easy growth hack like they were before. Same thing with carousels, so they're helpful, but I wouldn't over index on them right now. What I'm noticing as far as content formats is that posts with relevant media tend to overperform.

So we post about 200 pieces of content per week across our clients. And the through line is the through line, and the ones that perform the best are they usually have some sort of relevant image or video, and usually the image or video is a bit scrappier. So one thing I wouldn't do is like overly branded, like quote cards, like that type of stuff, it almost looks like an ad, and people's like ad senses just like start going off and they just ignore it. Whereas if it's like a, like I mentioned with the origin story, like a post from your picture from your early days, or a picture from an event or something that's more of just a real life photo. It tends to do better. Video is also doing quite well. I know most people are aware that LinkedIn is rolling out short form video. I don't know how I feel about that, but it's a thing.

So if you're good on video, it is worth testing. One thing we'll do with our clients, if we record a content session with them is we'll produce the copy for the post, but we'll also pair it with a clip, um, from using footage from that interview so it kind of looks like they're on a podcast. And that's a good way to just add, um, some media with a post. So to answer your original question, posts with media tend to be performing better. Text only can work, but if there's a relevant piece of media that you can include, I'd recommend it. Um, carousel is doing okay. I wouldn't over index on them, but they're definitely not dead. And I think that's a good overview of like, the formats that are working on, on LinkedIn right now.

Yeah.

And video has been super interesting. That's something that we're starting to, you know, double down on a bit. It's not for us. It's not as much as just like, you know, typical podcast clips, um, because. But it's more like organic, social, like TikTok style content. I just did a post the other day, uh, and it did like already 55,000 impressions, and I don't even like, have that big of a lengthy audience. So it was just crazy to see that spike because normally impressions will be like 3000 or something like that. So that's definitely a strategy we're going to be doubling down on.

My next question is around text, right. I think text on LinkedIn is super fascinating because the hook is so important because a lot of people in their timeline, it only shows the first two lines and it's like you could write a really dope post, and then it's like, if no one clicked to expand, no one's reading that. So how do you guys think about getting these hooks right for LinkedIn?

What performs?

How long does your post need to be like, how do you think about, uh, text when. When it comes to LinkedIn?

Yeah. Hooks are so important, I think a lot of people, even myself at times, underestimate it or spend too little time on them. Usually if your posts are underperforming, it's because the hook or the packaging just wasn't as good a good analogy to think about. It is like think about how a youtuber views thumbnails and their title. A lot of the best youtubers put a disproportionate amount of time into finding a good title. And the thumbnail, it's the packaging. It's the same thing with your LinkedIn hooks. So as far as how you can make them better, there are a few specific levers that you can.

There's two trends that I've been seeing in the best performing content for our clients lately, one of which is story based hooks. So making them into a story, humans love story. It's one of the best ways to package information, and it almost immediately hooks people in two is just polarizing opinions or hot takes. Like we mentioned earlier, with your overall positioning or why someone should follow you, you need to be able to, or be willing to take a stance and maybe share something that not everyone's going to agree with. When you're too safe with your hook, it's going to fall flat. And there's a balance here. Like, I would do it like, a spectrum on one end is totally unhinged, just going insane, saying whatever. Like, think about the current state of politics like that.

That's one end of the spectrum. The other end is just super safe, bland, sterile. You're just posting white papers that nobody cares about and just hoping for the best, but no one's ever seeing your stuff. You want to find somewhere in the middle of that spectrum that you're comfortable with. Some people are going to skew a bit more towards the polarizing side. One example of this is Adam Robinson from retention.com and RB. Two B. Like, he is definitely a bit more polarizing.

It's working really well for him, but not everyone wants to go that far in that direction. Um, so you might be a little bit on the safer side and just really stick to educational stuff and not really poke the bear much. I think there's a sweet spot there for every founder. I would encourage most founders to be a bit more polarizing than they think they can be, because that's what's going to give your hook that extra. That extra umph. Um, a few other, like, sort of high level tactics for hooks, use specific numbers. For some reason, it's just a copywriting thing. Specific numbers tend to work better, especially if they're monetary.

So, like, saying how we scale to 1 million in ARR or something very specific tends to do quite well. Let's see, like, I'm missing another one. Hmm. Oh, social proof. Really important. So if you can immediately answer the question, like, why should I trust you on this? It'll be more likely that someone stops scrolling. So, again, using that example that I just said of, like, hey, here's the seven step playbook we use to scale the 1 million in ARR. By inferring that, hey, we scaled to 1 million in ARR, like, someone who wants to achieve that outcome immediately is going to trust you because they're like, oh, this person's done the thing that I'm trying to do, so I might as well listen to them and be willing to open.

Um, whereas if you were just saying, hey, here's how you can scale to 1 million in ARR, but it's not clear if you've done it or not, if you know what you're talking about, if there's a reason for someone to listen to you, still an okay hook. But by adding that degree of social proof and showing people that, hey, I've done this before, I'm an expert in this, or I have a legitimate reason to be talking about this, it's going to add just some power to that hook. And then last thing I'll mention on hooks, I. This is kind of hooks 101, but create an open loop at the end of it. So, one classic example of this is, like, using a colon instead of a period. Like, by using a period, you're just completing the sentence. It doesn't mean that someone's not going to keep reading, but by using a colon, you almost, like, force someone to have to keep reading. So if you do the other things we mentioned, and then you create that open loop at the end, you're going to give yourself a pretty good chance of getting someone to stop scrolling.

Uh, but, yeah, hooks can be a bit complex, and there's, like, a lot that goes into them. Like, you think about it, it's only two to three lines max, but you can stuff, like, seven or eight different strategies into one hook to make it as compelling as possible. So if you think you've got your hook dialed in, just keep trying. And. And there's probably something else you could do to make it even. To make it work even better.

I love the part about that distinction that you made about social proof, I think is so, so important because people don't want to be told like, hey, here's how you do something. It's like, why should I listen to you? Especially if you're saying, this is top of funnel content. They've never seen your content before. So figuring out different, you know, ways to include that social proof inside the hook where it's implied and not, you just, it's not like you just forgot it. Uh, I think that's, that's so important. That's actually got me thinking. I think I did a post a couple weeks, a couple weeks ago about like, you know, here's one SEO strategy thing that we use that worked or whatever, but now even thinking back to that, I could have even done better by like saying specifically with a number what the outcome was where I say it in the long form content piece.

But maybe I missed it in the hook.

So, you know, sure it did okay, but it didn't blow up the way it could have if you've got that social proof in a numerical sense or whatever, in the hook. So I think that's really actionable and solid advice. The next thing I want to talk about, and you hinted out this earlier in the conversation, is just the social network on LinkedIn who is seeing your content. And it's always something that I'm trying to figure out how exactly it works, because you're like, yeah, there's certain people who post and then their content like socks, and they keep posting it and it just gets worse and worse. And then it's like the same people are like liking it and it's just.

Less and less and less.

And then they're, they're going to be discouraged and they're just going to like, stop posting. So I guess my question is kind of two part. It's like a, how does the LinkedIn algorithm, like, work to surface and show content to, like, other people that might maybe like, outside of your network in terms of like, second and third degree connections? And then b, how do you, how do you make sure that you're improving with your content and you're not? Just like, he told me that I should just be posting a bunch. I posted a bunch, and now I just absolutely burn my heck out to the ground.

Yeah. So as far as how the algorithm works, I mean, there's a lot of speculation on this, and I've seen a lot of reports come out. Here's how the LinkedIn algorithm works. The truth is, nobody actually knows. But one thing I can say about it is usually what happens when a post gains traction is when someone likes your post or leaves a comment on it, it's going to amplify your post to that person's audience. So you make a post, someone, someone with a big audience likes the post, that post is likely going to get amplified to a few more people in that person's audience, and then more people see it, more people like it. It gets amplified and amplified. So that's generally how it works.

That's why you see a lot of these like engagement pod style of things where like, you'll essentially pay people to just like your post because they think it's going to boost them more. I have some thoughts on that. I don't know if you want to get into that whole thing, but, um, that's essentially how like your post will get in front of more people. Um, as far as how to like refine your posts and see what's working and what's not, you want to make sure you're looking at the data consistently. What I would do is once a week, sit down and look at the five, six posts you made that week. And this is why consistency is actually really important. Or one of the reasons why. Because if you're only posting twice a month, you have two data points to go off of, not really telling you much.

If both of those flop, you're out of luck. But if you're posting, say, five times a week, which is usually the cadence I would recommend, by the end of the month you have 20 data points to look back at and that's ten times the amount of data. So at the weekly level, look back at the five posts you made. See if there were any posts that really overperformed. Like earlier in the conversation you mentioned that there was a post you made that had like 55,000 impressions compared to your baseline of 3000. What was it about that post that made it overperform? Was it the topic? Was it the hook? Was it the format? So maybe you tried short form video and you saw that that did really well. Whatever it was, try to piece together why it overperformed. There's not always a rhyme or reason for it, but if something did really well to where it's like, whoa, that was kind of niche viral, or even just viral in a general sense.

There's usually a reason for it. Either the topic, the hook, the format. Maybe you hit on a trending topic or something, see why that happened and try it again in the next week or the next two weeks. And if you notice a pattern of, hey, short form video is doing really well for me right now, do more of that. Or if you notice that, hey, whenever I talk about my origin story or why I started the company, that tends to hit really well. So talk about that pretty often what you want to do is essentially, and it sounds crazy simple, but do more of what works, less of what doesn't. If you see that a certain content format just flops every time, or that nobody cares when you talk about a certain super technical topic, don't do that as much. Now, I'm not saying never do it.

There might be, again, it might be a more bottom up funnel piece of content that isn't meant to get a ton of impressions, but just be intentional about that. And this is one of the ways that content compounds. Because when you start to see what works and what doesn't and you just keep doing more of the stuff that you know is going to over perform, you start getting more impressions, you start getting more followers at a faster rate, and things really start to pick up. Where you can sort of get into a rut is like you were saying, you just keep posting and you're like, hey, I'm posting five times a week, why am I not blowing up? Well, do you know, like, is there intention behind your hooks? Are you picking topics with the intention of it performing well? There's just a level of detail that you need to get into if you really want to win on LinkedIn. So that's how I would think about that. And one more thing I'll add to the like how to make sure you're not just kind of running in circles. Start commenting and engaging as well. A lot of people talk about this, but it's true.

But you want to find either accounts that are in your ICP or are other influencers and thought leaders that your ICP is following and just leave thoughtful comments on their posts. Again, it seems simple and it almost seems like a waste of time to spend a 1520 minutes of your day just commenting on people's stuff on LinkedIn. But it does go a long way. You're going to get more profile views, you're just going to build relationships with those people who you engage with. And a lot of times what you'll see is when you genuinely engage with people, they're going to start engaging with your stuff. And that's how you start to see your content perform better. Because like we talked about earlier, one of the ways that your content gets in front of more people is when someone comments on your post, or if someone likes your post, it's going to boost it to their audience. So if you can go and engage with others, they're going to engage with you and that will speed up the process of getting your stuff in front of more people.

Then last thing I'll say on that is one other way you can sort of manually add people to your audience is just sending connection requests. So find people that are in your ICP, even if they're not super active posting, there's a lot of people that lurk on LinkedIn. So you can find people in your Icpenna, um, ideally with mutual connections. Because if there's a lot of mutual connections, this goes back to the idea of social proof. They're like, they're going to at least trust that you're somewhat competent because a lot of people in their network are connected with you as well. Um, but send them a connection request. Don't add a note to it, like, no, no is fine. I've seen it actually perform better.

Um, and what that'll do is it'll manually add people to your audience and when someone connect. So when someone accepts a connection request, what's going to happen is that next post that you publish, they're probably going to see it. And if you've put the time and effort into making sure your hook is on point to making sure the topic is compelling, they're probably going to engage and comment or like, and now they're in your content flywheel and they're seeing your stuff over and over again. They're seeing the comments you're leaving, they're seeing your posts, and that's how you sort of get someone familiar with you and build that trust over social. So to wrap that up, look at your analytics pretty regularly. Make sure you're engaging with other people, not just posting into the void. And then also make sure you're sending connection requests to relevant people to add them to your audience. And it's pretty hard not to see momentum if you're doing that after a few weeks and especially a few months.

Yeah, and one thing I like there is the fact that you've got the idea of consistency, but you're also, you've got the idea of iteration right. You're seeing what works, you're testing if it doesn't work, you can kill it. And then it's just a constant iterative cycle. And then once you found what works, you said, double down on that stuff. One thing that I've seen work really well on accounts is once people find out what their content pillars are, the types of formats, the types of books that work well for them, the types of post structures that work well with them, then it's just kind of, okay, I know it works. I've got my content formats and I can really start to scale up this operation. Um, Tommy, I just want to thank you for coming on today. You shared so much actionable stuff for LinkedIn for content creation, personal brand B two B.

Um, this was really awesome for people who are listening that want to connect with you. Where do we find out about more about you and compound?

Yeah, no, I appreciate you having me on. This is a lot of fun. And if y'all want to learn more about what we do, I think the best place to keep up with me, uh, pretty on brand, but LinkedIn, uh, just look up Tommy Clark and you can find me there. I'm posting pretty much every day, and then I have a newsletter called Social Files, which is where I share a lot more, like deep dives and very tactical stuff. So that's at readsocialfiles.com dot. I'm sure the link will be in the show notes below, but I post every week there and then. My agency is compound content studio. Like I mentioned earlier, we do LinkedIn content for b two b SaaS founders.

So if you're interested in that, you can apply for a waitlist and would love to chat. But Blaine, I really, really appreciate the time. Sweet.

Thanks for coming on, Tommy.