Incorporating one tactic turned my LinkedIn post viral
Turns out there’s more to the platform than meets the eye
Having been posting on LinkedIn for a few months now, I’m no stranger to the platform. However, none of my posts have done as well as what I posted a few days ago, which spurred me to embark on a week of posting to see what could happen. I then did some looking around on the website, keeping track of tools such as LinkedIn video, people tags, and hashtags.
Below are the results and my thoughts on the platform itself.
tl;dr (and thesis of this article): LinkedIn is a platform with a lack of content that provides value. Growth marketers are jumping on this opportunity to capture a great share of the attention, with one important tool being people tags.
Analysis of my posts
Post #1: the heavy hitter
First comes the post of mine that got the most traction: a simple observation about a few active users of LinkedIn, informing readers of people to follow in the blockchain space followed by a question issued to the audience on additional people to follow. As seen above, it was very well received.
What happened?
- the tagged users liked my post → when someone gets tagged on LinkedIn, he or she receives a notification. After seeing the notification, all three of the people mentioned liked my post, which then reflected on their newsfeeds. In turn, my post appeared on the newsfeeds of the followers of whoever liked my post, leading to more views.
- additional powerusers liked my post → as my post spread, more people pressed the like button, including someone with almost 34,000 followers. Appearing in the newsfeeds of all of those followers boosted views even more.
- a good deal of engagement happened in the comments → people began responding to my question by tagging other users to follow. Some of the people who were tagged ended up commenting on the post, leading to more activity. In fact, as the screenshot above excludes replies to comments in the comment count, there was actually more activity than shown.
Post #2: contributing to a campaign
Next, comes a video that I created for the campaign #LetsGetHonest after growth marketer Daniel Wallock nominated me. Telling the story through video, I provided a short summary of the discussion topic followed by context, tagging the originators of the campaign. Lastly, I challenged more people to do it. The reception received proved great, and while I don’t know the view counts anymore as this is an older post, it was quite high.
Here the post contained a few elements:
- the #letsgethonest campaign hashtag: LinkedIn allows following of hashtags, compiling every post with the same hashtag on a page. When users click the hashtag, he or she will be brought to the page — a great way to get discovered. More importantly, this was part of a campaign that got enormous momentum, encouraging many to post on LinkedIn for the first time in sharing thoughts on struggles.
- numerous people tags: again, the users tagged “liked” my post, spreading it across their newsfeeds. In addition, my tagging of others to inform them of the challenge worked to at least get on their notifications; those interested would then be aware of the campaign.
Other posts: the not-so-viral and breaking it down
Picture post containing short text and tags of host organizations:
The goal here was to “document, don’t create”. To provide some takeaways from an event that I attended, not just for my audience but for myself (I find it helpful to keep a record of what I learned, and packaging it into a short post aided in organizing my thoughts).
All-text post discussing an interesting demo of blockchain, with the link in the comments section:
I had another takeaway from the event in the picture before this one, but it was too much information so I created this post for the following day. Writing my thoughts on the current activities, I wrote a short “story” and put the link mentioned in the comments. This serves to better keep audiences on the LinkedIn platform; those very interested would first click to view the comments to then click the link, going to another website. Quite a different result in engagement compared to another post of mine in the same format:
Most recent post: video post containing people tags, hashtags, and a summary of what’s said in the video.
13 likes, 3 comments, 803 views in one week… much less than the 10,000+ I got in 24 hours from my post that went viral.
Despite using all of the tools at my disposal, this did not take off. The question then is: should content you create be catered to the powerusers so that it can be spread around? or should the algorithm be changed to be less favorable towards virality?
LinkedIn as a platform: the tools of the trade
Enough with analyzing my posts. Here are a few tools that could be very helpful to content creators on this platform.
Video
I’m not going to post any examples here to refrain from upsetting anyone from the comparison I’m going to make:
I’m sure by now most people are familiar with the concept of a vlog (video log), of an individual talking directly into the camera to the audience. Current videos on LinkedIn, most consisting of a simple recording using the front camera of a smartphone, cannot compare to YouTube vlogs in terms of production quality. Shaky cameras, low resolutions, and little or no editing make for a raw experience; however, they garner much higher view counts.
The reason behind this seemingly strange phenomenon is the lack of content on LinkedIn. As there are so few people consistently posting, they are able to capture a great amount of attention. Evidence of this can be seen looking at the digital presence of a top LinkedIn video channel — oftentimes, the number of likes on her LinkedIn videos are comparable to the number of her YouTube video’s views. Such a discrepancy makes for a major arbitrage opportunity.
Hashtags
On LinkedIn, I don’t have to be Gary Vaynerchuk to notice trending hashtags. On LinkedIn, the top content creators work together in creating campaigns: pushes centered around storytelling of a particular topic. See my video post (screencapped earlier in this post) on #LetsGetHonest for a personal example. Furthermore, hashtags have their own pages — click on one and it will bring you to a page featuring posts containing that hashtag.
People tags
What allowed my post to capture the attention. Used for including someone in a discussion or highlighting him or her, the people tag also gives the person tagged a notification of the tagging. Hence, it’s a way of capturing the tagged person’s attention.
As a non-digital marketer and more particularly as someone working in finance, it was rare for a post of mine to get so much attention. Happening through a mixture of luck and consistency, the post spurred a week of additional content with mixed results.
There is still a lot of learning left to be done and a lot more to see in terms of other social media platforms as I seek to understand in the war for attention. And while it is a war, I’m a firm believer in providing value. Offer something of use and people will come, just as my LinkedIn journey has shown.
All of this came about since I decided to give posting on LinkedIn a try a few months ago. I got really into it, and learned so much. If you are considering posting on LinkedIn for the first time, feel free to contact me if you have any questions! It’s all about learning from doing.
