By Don Colliver

Summary:

Tired of wasting time on LinkedIn? I spent one year trying out diverse LinkedIn posting strategies to find out what worked best. Learn from my pain with four useless and three useful posting strategies that you can immediately put to use on your personal LinkedIn profile to expand your reach without wasting time and effort.

Introduction:

For years, I’ve dutifully posted career social media “updates” because I’d heard somewhere along the line that I had to maximize my “personal brand” online or be left woefully behind. Do you recognize this feeling? While the occasional flurry of likes or comments from acquaintances provided a transitory ego-boost, I‘ve realized that this social media activity has been doing nothing at all for me career-wise. Even worse, I’ve suspected that this kind of social media productivity was actually “faux-ductivity,” or work that feels productive but is actually worthless. My dark suspicion is that my social media posts are actually a covert method of avoiding more uncomfortable tasks, like actually connecting with humans in the real world, creating enduring works like a book or research, or contributing to a cause bigger than myself.

So, over the past year I’ve conducted a social media experiment by carefully iterating my LinkedIn posts and measuring what kind of activity actually increased views and connections from people that could actually hire me. As a corporate public speaking and innovation instructor and keynote speaker, my target audience is leadership and development managers and event planners. Although my audience is quite specific, these techniques can be utilized by any professional that wants to increase their reach among people that could actually hire them at some point.

What they say to do.

If you’re reading this article about social media strategy, you already know that there’s no shortage of hustlers, hucksters, and snake oil salesmen promising “massive” increases in your social media presence (if you just purchase their proprietary strategy). I receive multiple solicitations every week from these “LinkedIn marketing experts” disguised as connection requests. I encountered a similar subset of get-rich-quick scheme peddlers when I was writing my book, “Wink: Transforming Public Speaking with Clown Presence.”

Each brings their own version of the next new thing. Some insist that one must become a “thought leader” through years of posts (with their help of course). Others breathlessly suggest the necessity of spending hours a week adding comments on as many relevant posts as possible. Some tout longer content, some shorter content. Some tout more hashtags, some less. What to do?

Judging by the amount of these folks’ posts I see in my feed, they’re admittedly quite good at marketing to people like me. However, that skill doesn’t necessarily translate to your specific target audience.

What I did.

For one year I posted intentionally varied content twice a week on Monday/ Wednesday or Tuesday/ Thursday between the hours of 9am and 11am Pacific Time. I landed on that cadence after cross-referencing multiple articles on posting times that resulted in maximum engagement.

For two months of the year I focused on video content by uploading two thirty-second videos each week. One video was public speaking “thought leadership” including an actionable tip, and the other video was comedy.

I also turned on Linkedin creator mode because it offered some useful tracking features. While these features seem to change over time and per user, creator mode offered me more detailed analytics, including engagement (post reactions or comments), impressions (how many times the post appeared on screen), unique views (number of unique accounts that saw the post), follower demographics, etc..

What worked:
Do things in the real world.

Get out there and share your industry skills. Get off-platform, find opportunities to do things and post about them, even if it’s pro-bono. Speak at meetups, donate your industry skills to nonprofits, submit short articles for industry publications. Maximize those opportunities by posting before, during, and after each event or publication. This practice was my most productive strategy for getting high views, impressions, and engagement on my posts.

Use @ to mention related organizations and people.

In those real world activity posts, always use @ to mention the organization and the folks that were a part of the actual event, article, etc.. It seems that if a mentioned person or company comments or likes your post, that post is then sent into their connection’s feeds, thereby multiplying your impressions and views. My biggest organic follower jump happened after I posted about my favorite nonfiction books of 2023 and tagged Nicole Perlroth, the author of the nonfiction book “This is How They Tell Me The World Ends.” The author simply commented “Thank you” and immediately my views, impressions, and followers shot up more than ever before.

Send linkedin connection requests.

A free LinkedIn account is limited to around 100 connection requests per week and 1000 profile searches per month but this number seems to vary based on user. My largest connection jumps happened when I started maximizing my searches and connection invites.

I would search only for second connections using as many filters as possible: title keywords, location, language, industry, etc.. For qualified users, I would send a connection request without a message. I’ve grown suspicious of connection requests that come with a message as they usually seem to precede an eventual sales pitch, so the message seemed like a waste of time.

What didn’t work:
Trash the hashtags.

I tried different topics and numbers of hashtags and could find absolutely zero correlation to any change in impressions, views, or followers.

Don’t share links. Ever.

Including links to websites, youtube videos, or my own site within a post seemed to get severely penalized in terms of impressions. This makes sense, because clicking on the link would encourage the user to leave the LinkedIn site. However, I found that sharing a link as the first comment didn’t seem to impact impressions.

Video content? Meh.

I spent a lot of time editing short thought leadership videos on the Capcut video editor and directly uploading them to LinkedIn. I found zero measurable benefit over time of video content versus photo content. However, I definitely found that posts with a photo get far more impressions than text-only posts. I’m ashamed to say I also paid a substantial amount of money for carefully targeted LinkedIn ads featuring short videos which were a complete waste of money. I received one click through to my website and zero interaction.

Forget about thought leadership.

My “thought leadership” actionable tip videos received fewer impressions and engagements than almost any other posts. Judging from the amount of time these thought leadership posts took to produce, it was clear that these were not a productive use of my time.

Conclusion:

“If something is free, you are the product.” A basic LinkedIn account is free, but in exchange LinkedIn wants to keep users on the site for as long as possible. Hence, LinkedIn will always encourage more engagement, more longform thought leadership content, and more posts. However, for me and for the average user, I’ve found that LinkedIn is simply not effective as a platform to share content in and of itself. Bottom-line: LinkedIn functions best as an amplifier of off-platform activities and as a facilitator of off-platform connections.
I hope my year of painful experimentation and learning benefits you in your growing career. Please let me know how it goes!

Bio:

Don Colliver is a keynote speaker, best selling author, innovation instructor, and former clown based in Silicon Valley, CA. He recently released the book “Wink: Transforming Public Speaking with Clown Presence”. Reach him at www.doncolliver.com.