I help you craft your social media strategies | Social Media Strategist & Consultant

I help you:

1. Get attention from your ideal clients
2. Clarity and direction - Have a clear plan to follow rather than feeling uncertain or overwhelmed
3. Consistency - Easy-to-follow plan that helps you without the struggle
4. Go after the quick wins

If this sounds good to you, send me a DM

Frank Velasquez

The ghostwriting agencies I've watched fail all had one thing in common. Their content was actually performing.

Their clients still left. Usually around month three or four.

Every workflow these agencies built was optimized for internal efficiency, not for making the client feel heard. It was all about getting new clients and plugging them into the system. And clients don't usually say that out loud when they decide to leave. They just don't renew.

Most of them blamed the writing anyway. Better hooks, more templates, more syncs, more efficiency. They were spending 90% of their energy acquiring new clients and 10% on the ones they already had.

No wonder they kept leaving.

3 places where I see this break down:

1. Onboarding that collects information but never asks what the client wants to be known for, for example.

2. Content calls that feel like data collection instead of actual conversations that might spark good, insightful ideas.

3. Reporting that tracks metrics but never checks for recognition, whether the relationship is healthy, or whether the content actually sounds like them.

The agencies keeping clients long-term are not just focused on adding efficiency. They're focused on retention too.

Consultant and Ghostwriter | Scale LinkedIn presence with strategy & systems. Helping other ghostwriters do the same.

Is a post less valuable if it was written by AI?

I've been watching 2 camps on LinkedIn: 

The first is AI-generated content. LinkedIn broetry style, 5th-grade level, hitting hundreds of likes, teaching something useful. 

The second is the warriors. People calling it out, listing all the AI-isms, counting the em dashes, the "it's not X, it's Y". That content is also getting numbers.

Here's the part that gets me. Most of the people sharing the warrior posts are probably liking AI posts without realizing it. The content probably helped them. They may have saved it, or even shared it. Then two posts later, they're nodding along to someone explaining how to spot the soulless AI content destroying LinkedIn.

So I genuinely want to know: If the content teaches you something real, does it matter how it got made?

Curious where people actually stand on this one.

In the last 12 months, our clients crossed 5M+ organic impressions on LinkedIn. Now we are giving you an insight into how we are doing it 👇

At the start of 2025, Hivemind Marketing had 2 clients and a few consulting gigs. At the same time this year, we are at 8 clients with expanded SOW, 2 new incoming, and several consulting partners.

Our clients are:

1. Walking into events and getting recognized for their content. 

2. They're having their own posts referred back to them mid-conversation. 

3. They're closing clients who came in already convinced.

For 3 days, Harry Phokou will be giving you an insight into how we've managed it all. Especially the content part, we believe there is a big gap to fill when it comes to sharing more stories, more wins, more insights on this platform.

If you or someone on your team wants to learn how we are helping our clients make the most of LinkedIn, join his free live event.

📅 March 6th, 7th & 8th
⏰ 5 PM CET
📍 Live on Zoom
🧑‍🎨 6 guest speakers
🔗 https://lnkd.in/evpgeQX5

Repost and help spread the word 🙏

I stopped writing value-add posts for my clients. Value-add content is almost always written for peers, not the people actually paying.

Adding value isn't bad. Big disclaimer lol

But often, the people you are targeting either already know it or are not the ones executing on it.

I had a conversation this week about a client in the event industry. The first instinct was to pack the posts with value - How to do venue selection, coordinating logistics, managing budgets, etc. 

Real, useful stuff. But the people reading those posts run events for a living. They've already dealt with venues that charge absurd amounts of fees and catering that costs more than the room. 

Writing a tutorial for them isn't valuable. It's noise. They are not starting an event business from scratch.

What actually gets a CEO/Exec to reach out is reading something and thinking:

- Wait, is he right about that?
- I've never heard it framed that way
- You articulated so well something I did not know how to put into words

Curiosity. Mild disagreement. Recognition of something they've felt but never said out loud.

So I shifted the question. 

Instead of "what can we teach the audience," it became "what would make someone in their world stop and feel something." 

That's a different brief. And it's produced a different kind of post.

The goal of executive content, imo, isn't always to be the most educational voice in the feed. It's to be the one that earns a second thought.

Three months into ghostwriting, I stopped building content plans around client personas and problem-solving topics. 

The logic made sense at the time. Upload the client's profile, find the problems their audience has, write posts about how to solve them. 

That's what you learn. Lead with the pain, deliver the solution. 

The issue is that most of our clients aren't in the business of teaching people how to do what they do. They're in the business of getting hired to do it themselves. Their audience isn't looking to execute, they're looking for someone they trust enough to hand it to.

The content that actually gets clients hired doesn't explain how to solve a problem. It says something their audience has felt but never put into words. An insight that makes someone stop and think "I've never heard it framed that way." 

That's what prompts a DM. Not a tutorial.

Once we understood that, the whole content process changed. We stopped looking for topics and started looking for the way our clients think.

The best content advice I give doesn't work on me.

I tell clients to build a story bank. Keep a running list. Mine your past, your decisions, your patterns. And it works - I've watched it work for people I coach and people I work with every day.

But sitting down to do that for myself, after a full day of delivery, is a different thing. My brain isn't there. I know the stories. But finding them on demand takes energy I usually don't have left.

So I stopped trying to mine stories reactively. 

Everything I know - the context, the examples, the patterns I've noticed - it all goes into a project. When I sit down to write, I just point at what's already there and can build from there.

It's made consistency feel like a different thing.

Most agency owners spend 90% of their time on content and 10% on their clients. Then wonder why clients leave after 3-4 months.

I've watched this play out enough times to know it's not a coincidence. Somewhere in the process, the client stops feeling like the priority.

The 10% looks like this in practice: bare minimum delivery, no check-ins, delegating the exact stuff clients hired you for. 

What people miss is that clients don't buy an agency. 

They buy the person whose name is on it. 

You don't have to be in every call. But you have to be present enough that they feel it. That's not a systems issue. That's a priorities issue.

The part that gets me is that most people think they're growing during this period. Sometimes they're not. They're replacing. Every new client covers someone who quietly left. At some point, the math stops working, and there's nowhere left to grow into.

Keeping a current client happy takes a fraction of what signing a new one costs. A check-in. Sitting in on a content call. Actually solving something when they bring it up. That's it.

Most agencies figure this out too late.

We spent 90 minutes extracting a founder's story. Then an hour realizing we hadn't actually written one.

We were reviewing a post a while ago, and it went through his life year by year. Dates, milestones, company names, funding rounds. 

All accurate. But completely boring...

There were no stakes. No problem that we were trying to solve. There was no journey. It was just facts. This happened, then this happened, and then this happened.  

It was basically a Wikipedia entry.

Here's what the draft said: "In 2003, my dad took out a $70,000 loan to fund my company."

Here's what it should have said: "In 2003, my parents put their house up as security. We went all in as a family."

Same fact. One reports it. The other makes you feel it.

Reporting answered: what happened?

Storytelling answered: what was at stake?

Reporting becomes the default because it's safe and fast. You're not inventing anything, you're just organizing what the client told you. But organized facts aren't stories. They're timelines.

The client's life has real stakes with real consequences and real moments where things could have gone wrong. Your job isn't to compress their career into bullet points; it's to find the part where the reader holds their breath.

That's the difference between a post someone skims and one they send to a friend.

The first few months I was ghostwriting, I was basically writing as myself with different topics.

I didn't notice it for a while. The posts were performing fine. Clients weren't complaining. But looking back at the drafts, everything had the same rhythm, the same sentence length, the same way of ending a thought. 

That was me, not them. 

I'd taken what they gave me and run it through my own filter so many times that nothing original was left.

The fix was just learning to be uncomfortable leaving sentences that felt slightly off to me but were exactly how the client spoke.

Big impressions are easy to get excited about. 

They're also easy to hide behind. 

A post that gets 50,000 views and zero DMs is not a good post for a service seller. It's just a popular one. Top-of-funnel content attracts top-of-funnel audiences, people who found the post interesting but have no reason to reach out. 

What we track when we get a viral post are things that could lead to results. Resume submission, meeting requests, DMs, conversations, etc.

The agencies I've seen struggle with this aren't producing bad content. They're optimizing for the wrong metric and calling it growth.

Someone builds a following on LinkedIn → People start asking for help. → They think, "Let me do this for clients." → They start ghostwriting. 

If this is you, here are 4 things worth knowing before you take on your first client:

1. Your voice is a liability here. Everything that made your content work was built around how you think and speak. The instinct to write that way doesn't disappear when you're writing for someone else. You have to actively fight it.

2. Your templates won't transfer. What worked on your account was built for your audience, your service, and your positioning. A different client means a different buyer with different reasons to reach out. The format might look the same. The results won't.

3. Scaling before you have a repeatable process just means making the same mistakes faster. Most people hire a writer before they've documented what good actually looks like for each client.

4. Viral posts and conversion posts are not the same thing. Your audience grew because of one. Your clients need the other.

I've worked through most of these in consulting calls, these are always easier to sort out and learn before you make mistakes and damage your reputation. 

My advice: get in touch with people already killing it on different aspects of your service. Content, outbound, DMs, AI, etc. Then offer it to others for an entry price before scaling. I don't believe you should do it for free, but also not at full price before you know you can do this.

We've written this hook for five different clients in five different industries. It works every time. The formula: 

Past struggle + present contrast. 

Take a founder's real low point. Put it next to where they are now. Two sentences. The reader fills in the entire journey between them.

My first job was cleaning locker rooms with a finance degree. Now I run content operations for a ghostwriting agency across three time zones. That took one sentence to set up. And maaaybe you want to know what happened in between.

Nothing about this is manipulative. The failure is real. The recovery is real. We just put them in the right order.

However, there are instances where these were performed, but we felt they could have done better. The issue was giving too much away in the hook. So the reader is left like, "Well, why do I have to click 'see more '?" 

Hard for me to say when I'm doing it, it's usually something I see after the post has gone live.

One of the easiest wins I've gotten from AI for content: a project that turns one winning post into 10 content angles. Here's what I mean:

I take a client's top posts from the last 9 months, sort by impressions, and drop them into a project I built. It identifies what type each post is, then generates follow-up questions covering angles we haven't touched yet.

The next time we have an interview, we explore those other angles.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝘆𝗽𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗽𝘀 𝘁𝗼:

 1. Actionable 
 2. Emotional 
 3. Reflection  
 4. X vs Y 
 5. Contrarian
 6. Vulnerable
 7. Deep dive
 8. Educational
 9. Observational
10. Edutainment
11. Listicle

For example, if the post was 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 (a specific guide on how to do something), we can ask follow-up questions to make it a 𝗥𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 (lessons learned or mistakes made), or 𝗫 𝘃𝘀 𝗬 (we compare the first time they followed the guide vs what it looks like now).

A post that already performed proved the theme works with that audience. What we see now is how many ways we haven't told that story yet.

Most of the time, we're not running out of content. 

We're running out of angles on what already worked.

I spend more time on the hook than the entire post. If I nail it, the rest flows. If I don't, nothing else matters. Sometimes I realize it's already written.

After a post is done, I scan it again. 

I look for a line the client said, buried in the middle or at the end. It's usually the punchline, closing statement, or point of the post.

That's what I want to use as the hook, if possible.

Most people decide whether to keep reading in the first two lines. We used to save the strongest line for the end as a payoff for readers who finished the post. But if it's already specific, creates tension, and sounds like them, it does more work at the top.

We're now trying to lead with the point of the post. 

The hook needs to give people enough information to decide whether to keep reading. If they don't get that in the first two lines, nothing else matters.

We had this whole thing set up. Send the client a list of questions; they record voice notes on their own time, we get the material, and we write. It felt efficient and considerate of their schedule.

What we kept getting back was that because we were structuring the questions around specific posts we wanted to write, we were basically scripting their answers before they gave them. 

The content was basically written before they even answered.

We scrapped async entirely and moved to live interviews. No questions sent in advance. Just a call, us asking things we were genuinely curious about, and them just talking.

The difference was that in a real conversation, people stop performing. They stop trying to give the right answer and start just explaining what they think. They use their actual vocabulary. They go on tangents that end up being the best material. You can't manufacture that with a voice note prompt.

What we pull from those transcripts sounds like someone who just happened to sit down and write what they were thinking.

Now, by the time we open Notion, the hard part is already done.

Storyteller, wordsmith, pleasant chap

I write about writing—specifically fiction, craft, and the inner life of writers who think differently.

I’m a lifelong storyteller, a technical writer by trade, a fiction writer by calling. 

For more than 25 years I’ve worked at the intersection of clarity and complexity, translating dense, technical systems into language normal humans can actually understand.

These days, I apply that same skill to fiction. I write about story structure, narrative craft, and the why beneath the work, often through the lens of ADHD. 

Not as a productivity hack. Not as a brand angle. But as a lived experience that shapes how writers perceive tension, pattern, meaning, and momentum.

I’m especially interested in helping writers:
– understand how stories actually work
– finish what they start
– trust structure without killing their voice
– and stop mistaking struggle for failure

I’ll tell you a mystery – I’m not here to sell you a system.

(Not yet, anyway, heh.)

I’m here to think out loud about craft, wrestle with the work, and share what I’m learning as I write fiction seriously and deliberately.

If you’re a writer—especially one with ADHD—who cares about story, not shortcuts, you’re in the right place. 

You are my tribe, and I’ll be grateful if you go on this journey with me!

John Cook

I don't write like AI. AI writes like me.
 
Here's what makes me angry...
 
There's a whole industry built on the anxiety around AI-generated writing, and it's a scam. AI detection tools flag your writing as machine-generated, then conveniently offer a paid "humanizer" to fix it. 

Create the problem. Sell the solution. 

That's not a service. That's a shakedown.

And for neurodivergent writers like me, it's even worse. Em-dashes, structured thinking, precise language — the patterns that come naturally to ADHD brains — are the same patterns these tools flag as "AI tells." 

So we get hit twice: 
once for how our brains work, 
and again when someone tries to charge us to 'fix' it.
 
Neurodivergent designer Elise Gomes sounds the alarm:
 
"Many of these AI detection tools don't just misidentify human writing — they do it intentionally to push a paid service... This is nothing short of a predatory business model, profiting off an artificial problem they themselves create. And for neurodivergent people like me, whose writing is naturally different from neurotypical norms, it becomes an additional tax on simply being ourselves."
 
Did you catch that last line?

Those tools are 𝙖𝙣 𝙖𝙙𝙙𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙩𝙖𝙭 𝙤𝙣 𝙨𝙞𝙢𝙥𝙡𝙮 𝙗𝙚𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙫𝙚𝙨.
 
I'm not going to apologize for finding a better way to write. And I'm definitely not going to pay someone to make my voice sound more 'human' when the only people who think it doesn't are the ones selling the fix.

I have one test for my writing:

𝘐𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥?

Everything else is just someone trying to sell something.

taplio

The Battle

Frank Velasquez

John Cook

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Performance ScoreFrank Velasquez's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreJohn Cook's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Frank Velasquez

John Cook

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Frank Velasquez's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreJohn Cook's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreFrank Velasquez's LinkedIn Performance