4P's social media marketing: the leverage filter

<p>You’ve been told to launch your startup’s social media. The advice is always the same: Be authentic. Post consistently. Engage the community. It sounds like a full-time job for a content creator, not a founder trying to get to product-market fit. You built a product that works. Now you have to worry about trending audio.</p> <p>The conventional wisdom—often based on the traditional 4Ps of marketing (Product, Price, Place, Promotion)—is a relic. It assumes you have a finished product and a giant budget to push it out into the world. On social media, this model is fundamentally broken. You are not selling a box of cereal. You are selling a future.</p> <p>For builders, social media isn't a "promotion" channel; it's a feedback loop. It is where your market tells you exactly what they value and what they fear. The old 4Ps framework encourages you to broadcast. The new reality demands you listen and refine.</p> <p>We need a model that treats social media as a deterministic system, not a popularity contest. We are swapping the old 4Ps for the <strong>Leverage Filter</strong>: a way to force every piece of social content to contribute to real business momentum.</p> <p><em>Short on time? Scroll to The Social Media Momentum Generator section for an immediate action item.</em></p> <h2>Apply the Leverage Filter to 4Ps social media marketing</h2> <p>Social media marketing should prioritize maximum founder leverage and audience alignment using the four dimensions of Product-Market Alignment, Channel Utility, Content Currency, and Engagement Depth.</p> <p>The old 4Ps were about the marketer’s power over the market. The new game is about the market's power over the marketer. Social media is a relentless truth-teller. If your product is confusing, it will be ignored. If your content is noise, it will be scrolled past. We use the Leverage Filter to ensure every post is a calculated move.</p> <p>This is your permission to ignore any advice that tells you to chase trends you don’t understand. Your goal is signal, not volume.</p> <p><strong>Actionable Win:</strong> Look at your last three social posts. Assign each a score from 1 (Pure Noise) to 10 (Direct Value). If the average is below 5, stop posting and re-read this guide.</p> <p>Here is how the four dimensions of the Leverage Filter turn social media from a chore into a system:</p> <hr> <h2>Product-Market Alignment (PMA): Stop Selling Features, Start Exposing Gaps</h2> <p>The original ‘Product’ P is too simple. It treats the product as static. For early-stage companies, the product is in flux; it is a hypothesis. Social media’s job is to stress-test that hypothesis.</p> <h3>Focus on the gap, not the glory.</h3> <p>Your target audience doesn't care about your feature list. They care about the pain they are currently tolerating. Use social media to articulate the gap between their current bad solution and your proposed future. This is the only "product" content that matters.</p> <p>If you build an AI tool that organizes meeting transcripts, do not just post a screenshot of the dashboard. That’s product-as-glory. Instead, post a 15-second video highlighting the universal experience of manually sifting through notes after a meeting, followed by the gap: "The real cost of that 30 minutes isn't time, it's the frustration debt you accrue."</p> <p><strong>Reframing:</strong> You are not a marketer; you are a cartographer, mapping the terrain of your customer's frustration. This is work you are uniquely qualified for.</p> <p><strong>Founder Action:</strong> Write three tweets today exposing a common pain point in your industry. Tag them internally as "PMA Tests." Don't link to your product. Just articulate the pain better than anyone else. (<a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-define-your-target-audience">How to Define Your Target Audience: The Signal/Noise Filter Method</a> can help you locate this pain.)</p> <hr> <h2>Channel Utility (CU): Your Social Media is Not a Billboard; It’s a Tool</h2> <p>The traditional ‘Place’ P meant where you sold the product. In social media, ‘Place’ means the utility the channel provides to the user *before* they even consider your product.</p> <h3>Post content that helps them today, not just content that promises help tomorrow.</h3> <p>Every platform has a native utility. LinkedIn is for professional validation. Twitter (X) is for high-density information exchange. TikTok is for contextual entertainment. Your content must respect this utility or you are spam.</p> <p>A SaaS company selling developer tools shouldn’t just post company news on Twitter. That’s low utility. High utility is posting a single image showing an efficient 5-line code snippet that solves a common problem—then adding a thread that briefly mentions their tool automates that solution. The content is valuable even if the user never converts.</p> <p>You must earn the right to exist in their feed by being useful, fast. This is the difference between a broadcast and a service.</p> <p><strong>Permission Granted:</strong> You do not need to be everywhere. Most startups fail by spreading themselves thin across channels that don’t align with their core service. Focus on the one platform where your audience seeks the highest utility from content like yours. This is a core part of <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-choose-marketing-channels">How to Choose Marketing Channels: The Constraint Filter.</a></p> <p><strong>Founder Action:</strong> Choose one social channel. For your next five posts, ensure the content provides a tangible mini-win the user can execute within the next hour, even if it requires zero knowledge of your product.</p> <hr> <h2>Content Currency (CC): Exchange Value, Not Just Information</h2> <p>The ‘Price’ P traditionally dictates value exchange in monetary terms. On social media, ‘Price’ is the social or mental cost to the user: their time, their attention, and the risk of looking foolish by sharing your content.</p> <h3>Your content must be worth more than a single scroll.</h3> <p>We are trading in Content Currency. What social capital does the reader gain by consuming or sharing your post? Do they look smarter? More insightful? Do they feel relieved? Currency is the unit of exchange for attention.</p> <p>For a B2B startup, your best Content Currency is the "Uncommon Insight." This is a truth about the industry that is widely felt but rarely stated. When the reader sees it, they think, "Finally, someone said it." They share it to signal they are also in the know.</p> <p>Example: A project management tool posts, “Most meetings are just poor documentation happening live.” That’s currency. It validates their frustration. They hit share. They look smart. This is the opposite of posting, "Our new v3.0 features better integrations!"</p> <p><strong>Small Win:</strong> You can achieve a small win today by translating a dense technical insight into a single, emotionally resonant sentence. This is the headline of your Content Currency.</p> <p><strong>Founder Action:</strong> Write five alternative headlines for your primary landing page. The one that feels slightly uncomfortable because it’s so honest about the market’s problem is usually the one with the highest Content Currency. Then, use it as a social post.</p> <hr> <h2>Engagement Depth (ED): Measure Momentum, Not Vanity</h2> <p>The traditional ‘Promotion’ P is about reach and frequency. On social media, this often translates to chasing vanity metrics: likes, comments, and follower count. These metrics are a sugar high. They deliver zero momentum.</p> <h3>Measure Engagement Depth: the distance a user is willing to travel for you.</h3> <p>Engagement Depth asks: How much effort did the user invest? A ‘like’ is shallow. A bookmark is deep. A DM asking for a beta key is profound. A public critique that you respond to is gold.</p> <p>For early founders, your highest-leverage metric is the number of DMs or direct email replies you receive asking for clarification or access. This indicates that your message cut through the noise and initiated a high-friction, high-intent conversation. This is true conversion. (<a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/marketing-funnels-explained">Marketing Funnels Explained: The 3-Layer System for Builders</a> reminds us that conversion is about systemizing high-intent moments, not just optimizing forms.)</p> <p>If you post a link and get 50 clicks but zero DMs, the content was noise. If you get 5 clicks and 3 DMs, you are building a system. You have permission to ignore the likes.</p> <p><strong>Reframe:</strong> Social media is not a broadcast platform; it’s a high-friction qualification tool. You are not trying to entertain everyone; you are trying to find the five people who truly need your product today.</p> <p><strong>Founder Action:</strong> Set up a simple system to track high-effort engagement (DMs, email replies, shares with comments). Review your weekly metrics based on this depth, ignoring follower count entirely.</p> <hr> <h2>The Social Media Momentum Generator</h2> <p>The traditional 4Ps of social media marketing lead to vague, high-effort content. The Leverage Filter demands high-leverage content designed to generate measurable product momentum. Use this prompt to bypass the endless creative brainstorming and focus on systemic utility.</p> <p><strong>Social Media Momentum Generator</strong></p> <pre> <code> Generate three high-leverage social media posts for [YOUR PRIMARY CHANNEL] based on The Leverage Filter (PMA, CU, CC, ED). Focus Keyword/Topic: [4ps social media marketing] My Product: [Brief description of your product and its core value, e.g., "AI scheduling assistant for remote teams that cuts meeting prep time by 80%."] My Target Customer: [Specific audience segment, e.g., "Fractional CMOs managing 5-10 clients simultaneously."] Current Pain Point: [The main frustration your product solves, e.g., "Constant context-switching and over-reliance on email threads for status updates."] Generate three posts (one for PMA, one for CU, one for CC) that are designed for high Engagement Depth (DM or email inquiry). Output:1. PMA Test (Exposes the gap, minimal product mention): 2. CU Post (High native utility/mini-win): 3. CC Post (Uncommon industry insight/truth): </code> </pre><p><strong>Example Output (PMA Test):</strong></p> <p>The biggest lie in remote work is "I'll do that later." It’s not a time problem. It’s a cognitive debt problem. Every unfinished task is a tax on your focus. Founders often tolerate this until burnout. We don't need better to-do lists, we need fewer open loops.</p> <p>This is one of countless interconnected prompts in the LiftKit system, helping you operationalize marketing strategy instantly.</p> <hr> <h2>FAQ</h2> <h2>Can a small team actually implement a deterministic 4Ps social media marketing approach?</h2> <h3>Q: The Leverage Filter sounds like more work than just posting memes. How is this sustainable for a two-person founding team?</h3> <p>A: The goal is not more volume; it is more signal. Most small teams post 5-10 times a week and get 2-3 interested DMs a month. By focusing on high-utility Content Currency and Product-Market Alignment, you post less (maybe 3-5 times) but generate 5-10 high-intent conversations. This approach is designed for constraint. Quality, not quantity. If you apply the Constraint Filter from <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-choose-marketing-channels">How to Choose Marketing Channels</a>, you can ensure your limited resources are only spent on the highest-leverage activities.</p> <h3>Q: If I ignore likes and follower count, how do I know if the social channel is working?</h3> <p>A: You measure success by the conversion of social currency into business momentum. If you are getting a high volume of DMs, meeting sign-ups, or direct replies to your email list, it is working. If you are getting high likes but zero downstream momentum, you are running an entertainment company, not a marketing system. The real metric is time-to-value, which is explored in <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-measure-marketing-performance">How to Measure Marketing Performance: The Time-to-Value Matrix</a>. Always bias toward action, not admiration.</p> <h3>Q: How is the Leverage Filter different from the 4Ps of SaaS?</h3> <p>A: The traditional 4Ps are a static checklist. The Leverage Filter is a decision-making framework specifically for social channels, recognizing that the ‘product’ is often the content itself, and ‘price’ is attention. While the <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks/4ps-saas">4Ps for SaaS</a> deals with pricing models and placement channels, the Leverage Filter isolates the unique challenges of social media: high noise, low barrier to entry, and the need for instant utility. It's about optimizing the signal on the wire.</p> <hr> <h2>Start running operator-grade marketing in under an hour.</h2> <p>LiftKit is the only strategy-first AI marketing system built for founders. It distills the same Fortune-500 frameworks used at Apple, Stripe, and McKinsey into a simple, actionable playbook you can run in under an hour.</p> <p>Stop tinkering with tactics. Start operating with strategy.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://getliftkit.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Get LiftKit</a></strong></p> <h2>Keep learning</h2> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Frameworks</strong></a>: Learn proven mental models to diagnose, prioritise, and scale marketing outcomes.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/channels" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Channels</strong></a>: Understand which acquisition paths actually work and how to deploy them strategically.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/messaging" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Messaging</strong></a>: Build positioning, angle, and copy that converts without guesswork.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/strategy" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Strategy</strong></a>: Make smarter decisions using operator-grade prompts and structured thinking.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/tools" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Tools</strong></a>: Use AI, automation, and practical templates to move faster.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/research" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Research</strong></a>: Tap into market insights, psychology, and patterns that drive effective marketing.</p> <script type='application/ld+json'> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "4ps social media marketing: the leverage filter", "description": "Apply the Leverage Filter to 4Ps social media marketing", "articleSection": "frameworks", "keywords": "4ps social media marketing, 4ps,social media,marketing mix", "author": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "LiftKit" }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "LiftKit" }, "url": "https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks/4ps-social-media-marketing", "mainEntityOfPage": "https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks/4ps-social-media-marketing" } </script>