Social media strategy for dev tools

On social media, you’re not competing with other products. You’re competing for attention.

You're competing against cat GIFs and ragebaits.

Don’t stop the scroll

People are not going to stop doomscrolling and randomly sign up for a product trial. At best, you’re merely pausing the scrolling, not stopping it.

So before marketing your product, you want to start a conversation. You build brand awareness by creating multiple touchpoints with your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). Somewhere down the line, one of these posts will spark enough curiosity for readers to want to know more and visit your website.

In a way, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn have become more like Reddit and Hackernews. Your followers matter less. Your content now needs to pass a “relevance test” before others can see it. So your best bet is creating content that matches the users’ expectations and adheres to the platform’s best practices — its “meta”.

To grow your website traffic, simply posting links to your blog won't do it. Especially now that the algorithms downrank posts with external links.

Create engaging content

If you want to grow your website traffic, the time of simply posting links to your blog is over. To reach your audience, you need to create content that’s relevant to the audience on the platform. Most often, we want to aim for content that provides value on its own.

Examples

Past successes I had at Meilisearch came from building a narrative around product updates.

These posts highlight indexing speed improvements:

• Engineering angle Twitter thread: shouting out the internal contributors and explaining how the team achieved it; this is relevant to the ICP because they are engineers; they care about how things are engineered. It also demonstrated the company's subject matter expertise. 10x average post reach
• Product angle LinkedIn post: explaining what these improvements mean from a user’s perspective, and how this can affect their business. This is relevant to the ICP because they are builders; they want to draw lines between tech and business impact. 4-6x average post reach

These posts worked because they addresssed both a core user pain point and a community perception that the search engine was slow.

These posts performed best and were notably coming from my personal account instead of the company’s. So did other viral-ish tweets that came from the CTO’s account. People prefer the authenticity of “real people” compared to the streamlined tone of brands.

Moreover, these posts created a “buildup effect” that led to the upcoming release notes becoming the best-performing release announcement of the past 2 years.

By doing so, you build awareness of your product and brand. Eventually, a part of this audience will start converting to your website and product.

Track your success

If raw website traffic isn't the primary goal, what should you measure? Success should be tracked on two levels: business impact and initiative success.

By focusing on the metrics below, you can build a social media strategy that serves your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and contributes to long-term growth.

Business impact

What to measure: Conversion on key pages from social traffic. Instead of tracking raw clicks, measure how many visitors from social media navigate to crucial pages like documentation, pricing, or a sign-up form.

Why it matters: This tells you if you are attracting an audience that understands your product's value (i.e., they know why they clicked).

Initiative success

What to measure: Views, comments, and especially shares. As noted in PostHog’s content marketing strategy, a "share" is the strongest engagement signal.

Why it matters: Shares indicate your content is resonating enough that people are willing to broadcast it to their own networks, extending your reach beyond your current followers.

Conclusion

Here are the key takeaways:

• Focus on brand awareness: Build brand recognition with your ICP, rather than driving immediate clicks
• Create engaging content: (duh) Move beyond simply posting links. Tell a story, give insights, and offer value directly on the platform
• Leverage personal accounts: Encourage team members to share from their personal profiles
• Track success: Track business impact (to assess relevance) and posts performance (to optimize operations)