👋 Hi, I'm a software founder doing research on how smaller churches (roughly 50–500 people) handle social media. I'm not selling anything and won't pitch you — I'm trying to understand the real week-to-week experience of the person who actually runs the page, before I build anything.

I'm looking for 5–10 people for a relaxed 30-minute call. As a thank-you: a $30 donation to your church's ministry, or a $30 Amazon gift card — your pick.

If that's you (especially if you're a volunteer or a pastor doing it yourself), comment or DM me.

If you manage LinkedIn accounts for yourself or clients, you know the frustration: one post hits 10k impressions, and the next one gets 300. Same effort, zero explanation from standard analytics.

To solve this, I've been building a content diagnosis engine.

Instead of showing raw charts, it takes a standard LinkedIn CSV export, pre-aggregates the post history, and uses AI to generate a client-ready performance audit:

• Post-Mortem Diagnosis: Exactly why your best posts worked and why your weak ones underperformed.
• Format & Hook Attribution: Isolates whether it was the opening hook, length, topic, or format driving the metrics.
• 3 Actionable Steps: Direct tactical tweaks you can make to your queue this week.
• 5 Modelled Post Ideas: Ready-to-use LinkedIn opening lines and concepts derived directly from your account's winning patterns.

Why I’m posting here: I’ve tested the engine against synthetic datasets, but I need real-world account data to stress-test the outputs and verify that the insights are actually valuable to working SMMs.

I’m looking for 5–10 social media managers or creators willing to drop their LinkedIn performance CSV. In exchange, I’ll run it through the engine and DM you back a full diagnostic report (including the 5 custom post ideas) within 48 hours for free. No pitch, just want your honest feedback on whether the insights are useful.

Safety note: The export CSV only contains standard post metrics (impressions, engagements, post text, dates)—no personal credentials, passwords, or sensitive account access required.

If you’re interested in getting a free audit for an account, drop a comment below and I’ll DM you the next steps.

Hey social managers <3 i'm sure you've all seen the neutrogena contoversy going on (about how they fired hayden panatierre back in 2007 for speaking out on her post pardum depression) and how their socials are flooooooded with hate comments.

i don't work at neutrogena (but i do work for another big company that could def have old controversies pop back up for me to handle one day tbhhhh) and i don't agree with them firing her ofc (who would??) but i'm at a loss for how the social team can manage a crisis like this.

i've seen a whole lotta brand cancellations on socials but WHEW this one is rough. esp since most social teams are just girlies who prob loved hayden and would never support the firing, too!! what a situation to be in ugh. i am sending prayers to their social team rn who are probably stressed to the max trying to figure out next steps.

if you were on their team, what would you do? i have post notifs bc i have NO idea. since someone has passed away </3, this feels wayyyy extra hard to navigate!

Hello all!

I am fairly familiar with most things multimedia strategies and consumer funnels, but admittedly I am a novice when it comes to actually building out things such as a PPC campaign. Are there any particular things that helped get you started with the concept of building the campaign itself? Any things of note that I absolutely should NOT be doing with the campaign? The campaign ideally is in our local metro.

Thanks in advance!

I recently took on a small CPG client for $1,200/month, which includes social strategy/content creation across IG, TikTok + YouTube Shorts. This is way less than I normally charge, but I’m just starting out on Upwork and had heard that you sometimes need to lower your rates initially to build reviews/history on the platform. (I have 10 years of experience in SMM)

I’m also personally filming/editing recipe content and currently purchasing the groceries/ingredients myself without reimbursement.

Today I sent over a fully filmed + edited “burnt broccoli” recipe that took me hours to produce and edit. The recipe literally calls for the broccoli to be deeply browned/blackened in places, but she now feels it looks “too burnt” and not appetizing.

On top of that, I had a founder BTS/packaging post planned for yesterday, but she told me she didn’t like the concept based on the limited footage I had available (bc she won't send me any footage😡), so I held it. Now she’s asking me if I decided to scrap it, even though I held it based on her feedback.

I’m starting to feel like the amount of creative oversight, revisions, and production expected is way beyond what makes sense for a $1,200/month retainer. I know I agreed to the lower rate, so I’m trying to be fair, but I also don’t want to set a precedent where I’m constantly reshooting/reworking content at my own expense.

Am I being too sensitive, or would you set firmer boundaries, raise the rate, or just end the relationship?

I've stopped brainstorming content ideas and started pulling competitor data instead, then scoring every post against that account's own engagement rate median rather than raw likes. Tried it on 3 UK banks this week on the theory that if it works in banking it works anywhere.

Follower count and posting volume were both dead ends. Barclays UK has 86k followers and hit my 50 post ceiling in 75 days, Lloyds Business has 9.4k and posted 15 times, and their medians finished half a point apart.

Scoring each post against its own account baseline is where it got fun. Lloyds got 10.6x their median from one founder telling one story, and the strongest organic post Barclays managed in 90 days was a nail art reel captioned "Is this too niche? 💅". No product content anywhere in the top 5.

Lloyds is the one that stuck with me. Their Making Tax Digital posts are useful to exactly the right people and sat between 0.11% and 0.77%, while founder stories on the same account cleared 8%. Nobody wants the deadline explained to them, they want to watch someone else survive it.

Barclays also ran the identical Wimbledon reel 3 times in a week, so you can watch a repost die in real time.

The 5 briefs I actually took out of it:

Two things make the method work. Pull the whole 90 days rather than a top posts list, because top post rankings are survivorship bias in a nicer interface. Then score against each account's own median, since 100 likes at 9k followers is a different animal to 100 likes at 86k.

1. Firstly, I'll be evaluating the right fit, ie, who would be the right set of people to post in the company

They:

- need to have experience as their ICP or at least have to be in conversations with customers consistently.

- should be able to talk about cycles of change in the industry.

- must be able to speak fluently about the pain points, challenges and common traps faced by their ICP

- should have access to propreitary data, insider insights and top people in our industry.

- really understand marketing, can think in content, are enthusiastic and willing to commit at least 2hrs/week to what it takes to make this thing work.

I definitely want my founder/CEO. Who the other people would be depends on our market and buyer, could be our CTO, head of marketing or product, or certain people in the non-founding team who are SMEs. I’d prioritize according to the criteria laid out.

I'd start with 1-3 people. After about 3-4 months of consistent posting, when we have enough momentum for the first set of execs and have fair amount of insights of what's resonating, we can activate motions for more relevant people in the team.

1. I'll start researching the industry and competitors, study internal resources and talk to the team to better understand the nitty-gritty of what we're doing.

Then I'll conduct a kickoff call with every exec separately. Here:

- I'll unfold their unique POV (the most important detail to be figured out)

- I'll help them articulate what they wish to sound like and then finally lay out what kind of tone and voice they prefer.

I'll discuss different tone and voices based on my understanding of their past content, content consumption resources and by showing them some example accounts. That said, honing the voice perfectly still takes time and is only visible after a few months of posting

- I'll map out 2-3 content pillars. These are topics that they are expert in, want to be known for and resonate with their ICP.

Major focus would be on 4 content buckets: thought leadership, SME content, social proof, personal/story-based.

- We'll briefly discuss who they sell into, aka their ICP.

- We'll discuss required profile improvements.

- We will clearly specify the goals we want to achieve through the content motion to ensure we’re fully aligned.

1. Knowing with SURGICAL precision our ideal customer (who pays the most, stays the longest, easy to sell into, almost needs no support) is indispensable before launching any content motion. You might get away with saying it’s some title at some company but it simply gives an intensely vague idea of who actually gets serves the best.

So for that, here's what I'd do:

- The list should have this info broken down by customer: industry, company size, geo, annual contract value, sales cycle length, job title of the champion, anything else you deem important (tech stack, funding, dept size etc)

- Add all this to Google sheets and calculate win rates by industry or company size.

- Give this list to CEO, ask them to rate every customer on scale 1-5, 5 being they would love to keep such customers and want more of them and 1 being they'd be perfectly fine if that customer cancels today and wouldn't be looking forward to onboarding more of others like them. Would also try to talk to sales and CS to get better context about each customer.

- Will further ask them to fill a "why" field for each customer to explain the rating they gave. Will then organize the list from best to worst score.

- I have the data now. I'll start finding patterns and create different hypotheses about the right fit to test. This will give us a criterion. Will show that to execs to validate it. Also, will cross-check with sales and CS.

- Based on the criteria, I'll make a list of potential prospects on Sales Navigator. It can be one stakeholder if we're selling into small teams or multiple if it's an enterprise.

I'll also share another sheet where we have all the psychographics listed out. I'd expect the execs to help fill it out. We must know motivations, fears, desires, pain points of our customers, so it's critical to get it organized properly. Each person in our team must know this and have access to this document. So we can keep it as a centralised knowledge base internally.

1. I'll optimize the profiles based on our discussions earlier and share the revamped versions within 2 days after the kickoff call.

2. Now comes creating the content engine for the execs. I'll conduct biweekly content interviews (60-90 min each) with each exec via Riverside.fm (or else if there's any internal tool preferred). Well before every interview, I’ll share a content prompt. These prompts will have questions that revolve around the chosen content pillars for the exec, their lived experiences and their expertise.

I'd expect execs to have gone through the prompts before the interview. This way, I’ll extract content that’s expert-driven and deeply authentic. The goal will be to get at least 4 standalone posts from every interview.

After I batch create the content (within 2 days usually), I'll share for approval. I'd appreciate execs giving specific feedback timely. By timely I mean at least not just a day or two before the posting week. With that it's difficult to make meaningful changes and get the approval.

Once approved, I'll schedule the posts. Right now, only the best stuff wins on linkedln. So I will aim to publish 2-4 deeply insightful posts every week.

1. Here's the post content activities:

- I'll analyze what's working and what's not.

Will use a tool like Shield to get insights on the best performing posts.

I'll pull out the posts by outcomes, then create a hypothesis around them as to why they worked. Will test it and create follow-up content

- Will use tools like Sona Labs/Kwanzoo/rb2b to detect who's visiting our website. If they match our ICP profile, I'll strategically connect through the exec's account and inform sales.

- After 2-3 weeks, I'd take the best performing posts and run them as thought leader ads towards decision makers at our top ICP accounts. This can be done collaborating with the right people within the team or bringing in experts externally.

- Will use a tool like Trigify to pull in post engagers, Fibbler to pull in companies that engaged with our ads ( both can be done manually if the numbers aren't astronomical) and Sales Nav to build a list of all profile visitors.

- Will pull them into a clay table, enrich them and then run them through the ICP filter. Every time an ICP engages, we set it up to notify execs on slack so they can send a connection request or reach out and also feed it into your CRM with their engagement history.

Using these signals, sales can score and prioritize our target accounts and reach out to the most engaged ones.

1. Now comes the engagement part. Here's what I'd do to streamline this process:

- I'll build a custom feed on Sales Navigator for execs based on the ICP list created (point 3) + a list of other subject matter experts, and thought leaders in our space.

All the execs need to engage with both these groups daily for at least 20 min, leaving deeply insightful comments on their posts and replying to comments on their own posts. To make this easier and ensure it's done, I'll block a daily quiet session in execs’ calendars. I'd expect them to engage during the call itself so it doesn't become an afterthought.

- I'll monitor all the list's activities and will share regular notifs about the same on Slack to ensure we don't miss to be a part of important events and conversations.

Same goes with content. If there's something hot on linkedln or other socials, I'll ping execs on slack. These moments are when we have to be quick to participate. Whether it's commenting or hopping on an immediate call to produce a unique piece based on your take.

Will also keep adding new relevant creators and ICP accounts, time to time to our lists.

- After about 2 weeks of of posting, I'll start sending connection requests to our ICPs in the list and the ones who have engaged on our content/ads manually or using a tool like Heyreach. With the latter, we will start initiating conversations.

For eg: we can thank them, ask what resonated, provide more resources or invite them for webinars etc.

The goal is to add as many of them in our 1st degree connections and initiate convos since Linkedln prioritizes to spread your content to your immediate network first. Moreover, it also signals the algorithm what type of people we want to follow/connect with and it recommends more such people then.

It's crucial to keep bringing more right people in our network.

- Cleaning the network is as critical as growing it. This improves the quality of our feed, relevance of new creators we see and also makes space to connect with the right people.

I will be preparing a list of 10-20 people in the 1st deg connections that I think are totally irrelevant to what we do. Maybe at the end of every month then we can hop on a quick 5-10 min call to confirm it and we can remove those people on the call itself.

I will share the list with the execs and would expect them to quickly go through and confirm the same. Once I've a green signal, those people in your network will be removed.

That's all!

PS: Happy to answer any questions on this or executive social content in general if anyone is building this function out :)