Hey!

Welcome to Social Files — think of this kinda like the engineer in your ear giving you the strategy as you drive a Formula 1 car (your social media strategy).

The 2023 F1 season kicked off yesterday. And in preparation, I spent some time digging around the social media accounts of the teams on the grid (as one does).

And I found quite a few strategies worth studying (and stealing).

Let’s discuss.

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DEEP DIVE

Steal these for your own brand

I dig some digging through the timeline over the course of the race weekend — and I found some great strategies and tactics we can steal from some of these F1 teams.

🏎 Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant F1 Team 

🔍 Strategy to steal: Personal branding masterclass.

Earlier in February, Aston Martin driver and F1 legend, Fernando Alonso, launched his TikTok account.

Since then — in just 6 videos — he’s generated:

→ 22.2M views

→ Average of 3.2M views per video

→ 3.1M likes

Crazy numbers. This is a perfect example of one of the foundational principles of social media:

People want to follow people, not brands.

The Aston Martin social team posts phenomenal content on their TikTok account, but they also had the awareness to tap into Alonso’s personal brand as a channel.

You don’t need to have an F1 legend on your roster to take advantage of personal branding.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional sports team, a health and wellness brand, or a B2B SaaS — personal branding within your organization is a strategy to take advantage of.

A few examples of brand’s that do this well:

→ Represent Clothing founder, George Heaton on Instagram

→ Retention.com founder, Adam Robinson, on LinkedIn

→ Minted New York founder, Marcus Milione, on TikTok

Start to look at how you can enable your team to build their personal brands. It works.

(Also… how sick was Alonso in yesterday’s race… what a legend 🔥*)*

🏎 Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team

🔍 Strategy to steal: Let the assets do the talking.

Rookie social media managers love to overcomplicate copywriting for social posts.

Truth is, the assets — images or videos — should do most of the leg work on your posts. Your copy’s job is simply to support the assets.

This is especially true when you have a product, and talent, that people are obsessed with. Don’t overcomplicate it.

Mercedes does a masterful job of copywriting on social media. Here’s an example of a tweet of theirs that I love:

→ Stand-out graphic that stops the scroll.

→ Simple, concise copy that supports the asset.

Clean. Simple. And clearly… effective (look at the numbers).

Remember, less is more in social media copywriting.

Strategy to steal #2: Cash in on major moments

The best brands on social know how to cash in on attention.

The social team at Mercedes found a simple way to do this on Instagram during race weekend. All they did was pin the post promoting the Mercedes-AMG merch store to the top of their profile.

Again. It’s not complex.

Race weekend → more traffic to the profile to check results and team content → more eyes on the merch store → % of that traffic converts into merch sales

🤌🏻🤌🏻🤌🏻

🏎 MoneyGram Haas F1 Team 

🔍 Strategy to steal: Lean into the meme.

If we’re being honest, Haas’ most popular character isn’t even a driver of theirs — it’s team principal, Guenther Steiner.

Steiner has become one of F1’s most lovable characters over the years and has given us plenty of meme-able moments in F1: Drive to Survive.

(This one was my favorite 🤣🤣)

The F1 audience loves him — and the data on Haas’ social media content seems to confirm that.

All of their recent most-liked content on Instagram involves Guenther — usually leaning into some sort of humor.

🔍 Strategy to steal: pull from the best content that already exists

Where did Haas pull the best Guenther content from?

Yup. Straight from Drive to Survive.

Here’s an example of a clip from the show featuring Guenther and former Ferrari team principal, Mattia Binotto.

It crushed on Instagram for Haas — without them needing to come up with some crazy content idea from scratch.

And look…

You might not have access to a world-famous, multi-million dollar documentary… but, does your company have a YouTube video, newsletter, podcast, etc. that your audience loves??

Then you’ve got content to pull from.

The best social media teams have the ability to:

1. Craft social-native content ideas from scratch
2. Curate the best content from other pieces in the brand’s marketing ecosystem

Make sense?

Cool.

That’s all I’ve got for you today 🏁 🏁 🏁

CAN’T MISS SOCIAL MEDIA RESOURCES

How Mini Katana generated $1.5M in 90 days using organic video by Alex Garcia

Mini Katana is putting on a short-form video masterclass, and Alex did a great deep dive into why it works so well.

Worth the read if your brand is trying to grow on YouTube, IG Reels, and TikTok.

SPONSORED BY MENTION

What’s the difference between Insta posts that hang out at the top of the feed and ones that…flop? 🙃

Mention and Hubspot analyzed over 37,000,000 Insta posts from 2022 to find out. 

And they aren’t gatekeeping…

All of their results are in their world-famous Instagram Engagement Report. 

You gotta check out the analysis of Nike’s account on pg 12, it’s crazy interesting!

Download the free report now.

WHAT I'M UP TO 

📺 What I’m watching: No surprise — but spent my Sunday morning writing this newsletter and watching the Bahrain Grand Prix 🏎 

BEFORE YOU GO 👇

If you read this all the way to the end, I have one question for you before you can leave:

Who’s your favorite team on the F1 grid?

Mine is Mercedes-AMG (big Toto fan … dude’s a machine).

Who’s yours? Reply and LMK.

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark

PS - forward this email to your marketing team if it was helpful 🤝

Written by me, Tommy Clark.

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