The Four-Post Framework: How Less Content Delivers More Results for Your Agency

What if you could deliver better results for your clients while creating less content? What if you could transform your agency’s approach to social media management, increase client satisfaction, and reduce team burnout all at the same time?

Social Pulse: Agency Edition guest Katie Brinkley today has mastered those answers. As a social media trailblazer with over 20 years of digital marketing expertise and the founder of Next Step Social Communications, she’s developed a revolutionary approach that’s changing how agencies think about social media management.

[Listen to the full episode below, or get the highlights of the Social Pulse: Agency Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]

Host Mike Allton: With artificial intelligence, with ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, you can create content quickly and easily. When people are looking at the literal flood of content being pushed out there, podcasts, videos, blog posts, social media posts, and so on, some businesses and marketers would see that and say, “Oh, okay, the answer is more. I should use Claude and pump out five posts a day instead of two posts a day, or three posts a week.”

Why did you develop this less-is-more philosophy?

Katie Brinkley: It sounds crazy ’cause I’m a social media agency owner, but there’s so much garbage on the internet, right?

And what is it that makes you stop your scroll? It’s content that you resonate with either because you’re like, “Man, I love what that person had to say,” or “Oh, that’s so relatable.” You are resonating with the person.

And if you are creating content, I use Canva. I love Canva, but the last thing we need is another generic, happy Labor Day graphic post. That’s the last thing we need. Nobody cares.

So how can we create content that’s going to build that connection? And it’s by showing up intentionally with every single post. Who’s this post for? What’s my end-game for posting this? Like, why should they care about what I have to say?

With every single post that you’re putting out there, it’s not made to go viral. It’s built to connect with the person that needs to see your message. Like I said, as a social media agency, I know it sounds crazy, but I don’t think you need to post so much.

If you post more intentionally and with better content, you are going to get better results and you’re gonna build a community of your biggest fans.

“With every single post that you’re putting out there, it’s not made to go viral. It’s built to connect with the person that needs to see your message.”

Walk us through what the fourth post framework looks like in practice from a business perspective

Katie Brinkley: This is the great thing about the framework: The awareness-to-action framework is that you can post—if you’re crazy, if you want to post four times a day, you can. If you want to post four times a month, you can. This framework works.

Some of the clients that we’ve had have seen a 50% increase in engagement. One of our clients had an 1100% increase in impressions, all just from building their content around this framework.

First Post: Awareness

• Essentially, the awareness-to-action strategy is taking less and focusing on that audience on that platform. So, for example, Mike, I know that you kill it over on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, there’s a very different culture over on LinkedIn than it is on TikTok, which is different than Facebook. And I think that a lot of us are like we can just copy and paste.
• But what if you just tailored your message a little bit differently for each platform by knowing who it is that you’re talking to?
• On LinkedIn, for example, let’s say you want to take your social media posts and you have the end goal of getting people to sign up for a membership. Or let’s say you have an end goal of people signing up for your product, whatever it is, your end goal is something about sales. How are you going to get the right people to raise their hand from social media without you saying “new offer” or “please buy from me”? And it’s by reverse engineering what the end goal is to the right audience person.
• So we’ll just say membership sales, just to make things easy. I want people to sign up for my membership, and how am I going to get them to do that? I have to make people problem aware. What people am I trying to get in front of?
• You have to tailor your message specifically for that audience person.
• The awareness posts on LinkedIn are super simple. LinkedIn polls right now are killing it as far as reach. Remember these awareness posts are designed to get the right people aware of the problem and to reach as many people as possible. LinkedIn polls are great. Instagram Reels are great. Facebook, those bold sentences on different colored backgrounds, those work well. Those get a lot of reach.
• It doesn’t need to be overly complicated. You don’t need to worry about going live or doing a series of videos. That’s your thing, cool. But this is designed so that you can get in, make people problem-aware, get them raising their hands, and get out. So that’s the awareness post.

Second Post: Elaboration

• And then the next post is the elaboration post. So now that you’ve had the right people engaging with your content and commenting, liking, whatever the next post is that elaboration. So, on LinkedIn, it could be a LinkedIn newsletter or article where you can explain in further detail. This problem you’ve been struggling to master AI—wouldn’t it be nice if there was a solution to it? I know that XYZ is happening. These are some of my favorite tools. These are some of my favorite prompts, and you can position yourself as that thought leader in the elaboration article or elaboration post. Again, if you’re not doing LinkedIn newsletters, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Highly recommend doing LinkedIn newsletters.
• For the elaboration post on Facebook, you can grab a picture of yourself and have a long caption. I like to go live on Facebook. Not that many people do it anymore, so it works pretty well just to get some additional FaceTime and build that connection. And then over on Instagram, again, maybe it’s a carousel post where you have 10 different slides explaining the problem, and again showing yourself as that thought leader.

Third Post: Community Post

• The third post is gonna be your favorite post for the entire week or month because it’s where you get to bring it into social media. So, if you think about it, we made people problem aware. We educated them and gave value first. We taught them something in that, in an elaboration post. And then the third post is a community post. How did you overcome this problem? How did you help a client solve this problem?
• You’ve been where your customer has been before—you’re relatable. You never know what it is that’s going to resonate with someone. For example, I could say maybe my community post is how using this one prompt saved me five hours every week. I could have a picture of me and my daughter there and say, “Oh, I was super tired at the end of every Thursday and I wanted to be my daughter’s softball coach.
• And I found that I was still spending so much time doing podcast show notes and I figured out this one prompt and it saves me five hours every week. Now I jet out of the office on Thursdays at noon, go home, have a Starbucks recoup, and then I’m my daughter’s softball coach.”
• I shared how I overcame that problem, put myself in their shoes, and then I also opened up a little bit about me. “Oh, Katie has a daughter. She plays softball. That’s cool that she’s the coach.” I allowed my audience to connect with me and, if you notice, that’s three posts for the week. We never asked anybody to sign up for a membership to buy from us to do anything. It was all content to build a connection with the right audience.

Fourth Post: Action

• And then obviously the last post is the action post asking people to leave social media to go one step further with you and buy from you. There’s a podcast episode all about this. “I’m opening up four more spots for my membership. Grab one now if you’re interested. Comment ‘membership’ below or whatever.”
• But this is where you can ask people to leave social media. And again, this is the time when you can not worry about, “Oh, I only had four people comment.” You have four of the right people comment. You had the right people that said, “I’m interested in your offer. I’m interested to go one step further with you.
  I am willing to leave social media and hear more about what it is that you have to say.”
• That’s the awareness-to-action strategy. It’s very intentional and honestly the elaboration post is the most time-consuming, but you can have a very successful social media strategy using this strategy. And it’ll take you maybe an hour a week.

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Is there a sweet spot in terms of frequency?

Katie Brinkley: For me and my audience which is different like everyone has a different audience.

Mike Allton: Great caveat. Absolutely. Test this for yourselves, folks.

Katie Brinkley: Test this for yourself. Full transparency, like one of our clients, we do five posts a week, but we still do this framework with five posts a week.

• I follow a consistent posting schedule three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, then repeat the cycle.
• By analyzing the data, I’ve found that Mondays are perfect for awareness posts. Agorapulse provides valuable insights to help fine-tune your strategy, so make the most of it.
• Look to see when your audience is on, and the number one day is Wednesday for me. My number one day is Wednesday, so I want to make sure that I have my best content going out on Wednesday, but shouldn’t I put my awareness posts on Wednesday? No, because remember, we’re trying to get seen by new people.
• My second best day is Monday. That’s when I have my awareness post go out, so I can get that traction with the right people, so that on Wednesday when I send my content out, it’s being seen by the most people as possible and those new people who have come in and engaged with my post.

Mike Allton: That makes complete sense.

I love that you mentioned Agorapulse ’cause you’re right. We’ve got data in the reports that every agency or customer using Agorapulse can see what their best times to post are, when they historically have received the most engagement or click-throughs, and so on. It’s based on your personal historical data, so you have to have that posting frequency. You get to test different days and different times of day so that the data will then reflect. Okay, based on the last six months, it turns out Friday afternoons are the best or Sunday mornings. We will have a feature coming very soon that we’ll use AI and aggregated data. To give you recommendations without any historical data—or maybe despite your historical data—you might want to try Thursday early evenings. Because that looks like when your audience might actually be most receptive to your kind of content.

And then the other thing I wanted to share—even folks who’ve been using Agorapulse for years know that this is a feature. We have an option. If you go into the library, in the content library section within Agorapulse, it’s one of the buttons on the left-hand side, there is a Category Q option. So you can set up buckets for different kinds of content and have different time slots for each one. So, step one, you go into your reports. You find out when your best times to post are. And like you were saying, Katie, pick your best time for a certain kind of post, maybe a second or third best time for your awareness, and so on. Then you can create a bucket. For each one of these, a bucket for awareness, elaborate, community, and action, and a specific time slot per day or per week for each one of those. And then you can create the content in bulk and you just add it to those queues and the next time each one of those time slots comes out, boom, it’ll post that content for you. So, folks, check that feature out.

If you’ve had clients who pushed back, how do you work with them?

Katie Brinkley: I’ve learned that those aren’t my clients.

That’s one of the things I talk about is that we have a very different approach to social media.

We’re not gonna post a ton. Everything that we do is very intentional. It’s designed to have what it is that you need. We’re not gonna be on all the social media apps, we’re not gonna do this. But what we are gonna do is build an audience of the right people that when you say, “Hey, I decided to write a book,” they say, “I want to buy it.” Or “Hey, I’m launching a membership.” You already have this network built in that you don’t even need to worry about doing ads for or anything like that. Like I said, I’ve ended contracts because we aren’t a fit for everybody. And that was something that was hard to learn. It took me longer to learn that than I’d like to admit.

But once I learned that not every client is a fit and that there are a lot of people out there who do believe in this intentional posting and have seen the results that it gets, those are my people. And I’m sorry. I wish that I could give you a better answer for that, but it’s definitely a kind of screening of “Am I a fit for you? Are you a fit for me?” when we have our onboarding calls.

I’d love your take on how this framework helped your agency and how it might help other agencies.

Katie Brinkley: I think that if this isn’t an approach for every business, so if you are an agency that’s looking to work with clients that want to build a community, this is a perfect approach. Or if you are working with podcasters, authors, YouTubers, or anyone who is building a personal brand, this approach knocks it out of the park.

It helps build a community around you. I think for SaaS companies or for e-commerce, anything like that, it is gonna be different. It’s gonna be difficult to do this approach, but with the awareness-to-action strategy, it is designed to, again, build the right audience coming in that says, “I can’t wait to see what Mike says next. It’s been a while since Mike has posted. Where is he? What’s he been up to? I haven’t seen anything.”

Don’t miss other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Retail Edition, Hospitality Edition, and B2B Edition.

You are building an audience that can’t wait to see your content in the feed, so that when you go to events, you go on podcasts you do anything. You have your own little mini fan base that’s willing to stand up and support you and shout about your business to the rooftops and tell all their friends about you.

How are you measuring the impact of this framework?

Katie Brinkley: By talking to your audience.

The biggest thing with this framework, as you said, is UTM links, that’s huge. We’ve done a lot of AB testing with where links should go in the captions or if it should go in the comments. So we test a lot of that, and it is different for every client as to where links should go.

I know that was not your question, but I think that the biggest thing you have to walk away with is that you have to look at the data for all of this. And if you’re looking at your data, UTM links, podcast downloads, and people that show up for your in-person event, you’re looking to see, “Hey, actually now I’ve recorded this amount of podcast episodes and I know who actually on social media is listening to my podcast because they comment all the time.”

This is the measurable data that you can really take back to your bosses and to your team and say, look, I know that this was our goal, and sure enough, we filled out that webinar, and if we’re looking just at clicks, we can see 1,500 people clicked on it and then this amount of people converted, but let’s see how many of those people would wanna come back again? How many are on your email list, and how many are engaging every single time that you post on social media?

These tools are there, and they give you the data, and it’s extremely important to look at the data because there’s so much more than just likes.

There’s so much more other than followers. And if that’s the only data that you’re tracking, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to really understand who your biggest fans are.

Mike Allton: That really is a huge point and it’s something that we take very seriously at Agorapulse, so we’re constantly building in features and options to support that kind of thing.

As we talked about UTM links, you can include a UTM link in a scheduled post, or you could also schedule it to go out in the first comment on, say, LinkedIn or Facebook. If you know because you’ve tested it or you’ve been advised by someone fantastic like Katie, that’s the best way to share the link on LinkedIn.

Or you can do things like have people leave a comment if they want to learn more, and then you reply to those comments or even send them direct messages with the link. All of them are gonna be tracked with the Agorapulse. All of them are going to automatically have UTM parameters attached to them, which are the little tags that go on that tell your reporting system, this is the platform, this is the social network, and we even add a hidden tag that identifies the actual link individually that’s being shared so that it’s that reply to John on that post at this time that Mike shared. Now you get trackable results where that ties into Google Analytics and we bring that back in.

So we can see then what happens. Did somebody sign up and actually count that revenue? I love that you brought that up ’cause it is so important, particularly if you’re not just spamming links all the time. You’re really counting on that, one out of four posts to drive results. You wanna make sure it’s all tracked.

What other resources do you recommend for agencies?

Katie Brinkley: I think that one of the biggest things to do other than listen to this podcast is look at your social media through a microscope because you can learn so much about your audience.

When you look at the data, there’s so much more to social media than just pretty graphics and going viral. And this is when you look at it through that lens, you’re going to see ways to grow your business. You really didn’t even think of it as possible.

Look at the data. That’s the very first piece of advice I would give.

The second piece of advice I absolutely love is the event, CEX. It’s in Cleveland this year, and it’s in August. This will be the fourth time I’ve gone to it and I’m actually speaking this year. But it’s an incredible event where you can learn all about different strategies, how to grow as a creator, and have your business flourish as a creator in this digital world. So that’s CEX. And then I have a podcast. You should listen to mine if you like this one. Mike was on my show called Rocky Mountain Marketing.

But if you want to learn more about the four-post strategy, I did write a book all about it.

Thanks for reading the highlights from this episode with Katie Brinkley. Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: Agency Edition on Apple, and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think. Don’t miss other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Retail Edition, Hospitality Edition, and B2B Edition.