My big LinkedIn experiment - and results!
Season 7, Issue 10: My love/hate relationship with the worst platform
📬 In this issue:
My LinkedIn posts tanked a couple weeks ago, so I did a deep dive into what works and what doesn’t
Tips on growing personal brand and posting on LinkedIn
How to use these tips in a B2B sense and the link to share of voice (SoV)
To engagement pod, or not to engagement pod?
📏warning: long post ahead, maybe save for later or get a snack!
Hi Mehketeers,
About a month ago, I made this post complaining about my LinkedIn impressions dropping significantly. Some posts I was making were struggling to get past 200-300 views! For someone trying to grow an newsletter *cough* this one *cough* and with a B2B audience, I was not happy about this.
So here’s the story of how I analysed my top 50 posts of the past year, what I learned from it, and how my LinkedIn posts are doing now!
If you want to grow your personal brand, this post will be for you. It’s solely about personal pages, not company pages, which perform and behave differently on LinkedIn (but don’t worry, I’m experimenting with that right now, too!) BUT as always, Mehdeeka doesn’t get published unless it has an actionable takeaway, so I’ve linked it back to how you can use this info to help at work too.
A quick timeline
Looking at my LinkedIn activity over the last 365 days:
I wasn’t really posting with any particular intent until I announced I was going freelance (1)
Posted regularly but with no particular strategy, up until (2) which is when I just got too busy with work and LinkedIn needed to take a back seat
At (3), I started posting again, still with no particular strategy. I just wanted people to remember I existed in case they had a need that fit the services I was offering as a freelancer
(4) is late December 2023, which I took a break during and didn’t post at all until mid-Jan, which is around the time my impressions were struggling to get past 200-300
(5) is an announcement post that I was hiring for someone to take over the management of the Mehdeeka LinkedIn company page (not my personal page), and around the same time as my complaint post, after which I started taking posting seriously - and you can see the improvement!
Past 365 days of impressions on LinkedIn
I analysed my top 50 posts of the past 365 days
The big things I learned were:
A post that gets high engagement doesn’t necessarily get high reach (and vice versa)
Long (structured) text posts and posts with a single image worked best (for me, other people have told me video works really well for them but I don’t have a video strategy so that could be why it doesn’t work for me)
Links still kill posts, but it is possible to break through that if the post is really good
If you’re going to tag a person, company, or use hashtags, the more the better, even if it’s tagging the same person/company multiple times within the post
So with those findings, I went about researching what other people were saying, and applied it all to my posts. Since then, I’ve made 21 posts, and all of them are now on par for my top 50 posts that I analysed.
Basically, I’ve been able to get every post to perform like a top post, rather than some doing well and some failing.
Here’s my top 6 posts of the past 365, taken this week. You’ll see 4 out of 6 are from after I started posting with a strategy!
My top 6 posts from the past 365 days, by impressions
The major changes I made
I stopped posting daily - instead, I look at my content performance graph (try this link to see if it’ll take you to yours, you might need creator tools turned on) and when it starts to go down, I make a post. If a post is performing well and you make a new post because it’s part of your schedule, it’ll kill the momentum of the post in favour of pushing your new one.
I picked my topics a little more strictly. I was always posting about work, but now I try and pick topics I know both users and the LinkedIn algorithm will like. LinkedIn has made public announcements that they want informative, educational posts, so I try to make my posts educational - in the above screenshot you can see advice on improving job listings to get better candidates, build in public, International Womens Day, and my freelancing announcement. People like to cheer for you and learn from you, and LinkedIn likes career milestones and advice.
I started using #leadership on every post. I don’t know if this works, but my posts are doing well so I’m keeping it. I also use around 5 hashtags, and if I’m going to tag a person or company I try and shove as many in there as possible.
I stick to text posts and single image posts as much as possible, but have done some video posts to promote my YouTube guide on website projects.
I try and put a bit more effort into the copywriting, but otherwise I haven’t changed my structuring, tone, or anything else like that. I also don’t have a top voice badge or premium or anything like that so I don’t know if that boosts your reach.
I watched a bunch of videos, listened to podcasts, and looked into what “experts” were saying, but it was all just either way too much effort or came across as AI-bro-y.
Some people swear by commenting on large accounts being a quick way to grow your own account, but to be honest I only comment when it’s genuine. Some strategies say 10-30 comments per day and that’s just not within my capacity, so I don’t bother. In reality, I’m on LinkedIn for about an hour a day (cut up into a couple of check ins over the day) and doing even more activity is just not in my time budget.
I still stand by all content strategies needing to stem from actually having something to say first. Using keywords or an AI generated list of topics to create a content strategy just leads to low quality, uninteresting content in my opinion. If you don’t have an opinion, you’re adding nothing to the conversation.
Here’s the Mehdeeka guide to building a content strategy:
Since making these changes, my worst performing post got 751 impressions, but it didn’t follow any of my rules, i.e. it had no hashtags, was a short caption, written without any intent really, and tagged no one.
I don’t know if this spreadsheet is going to make sense to anyone outside of my brain, but if you’re keen to see the stats on my top 50 posts, and then all my posts since making this strategy, click the button above.
How do I link this to B2B?
I recently had a friend say “I’ve never seen anyone post as much as you do on LinkedIn”. I’ve also had someone say “do you actually do any work or do you just post on LinkedIn?”
My first thought was, my share of voice must be excellent.
It’s kind of cringey to me to link back to really old Mehdeeka issues, but this one is about share of voice:
Share of voice, if you haven’t heard of it, can literally be described as “who’s the loudest”.
For every LinkedIn post you (or your company) makes, how many do your competitors make? Who’s getting the biggest reach? Who’s getting the most PR coverage? Even if you’re smaller, if you’re louder then you are more likely to grow.
So, if you have an employee advocacy program, teaching your team how to build their personal brand on LinkedIn can augment your company page’s performance.
Social selling was a huge trend a few years ago, I would say best done by Drift, which I think they’ve backed off on since then. I think their strategy changed because they got acquired, but they still do a lot of employee-first posting.
One strategy is getting your employees to post announcements, and then share those employee posts from the company page, like these:
If these employees had used more aggressive tactics (like tagging their peers and the company multiple times, or even partner company pages) and structured the content as more of an inside look rather than just an announcement, I think these posts would have done even better.
Some suggestions, and also sorry to these employees I picked them out randomly, I don’t know them and I’m not criticising them:
Who worked on the billboard campaign? Tag them
How did you place #3 on G2’s ranking? Was it part of a campaign to get more reviews? Share some tips!
Share more information on what types of intent triggers to look out for
Use more generic, LinkedIn favoured hashtags, rather than hyper specific hashtags
Engagement pods - not just for Instagram!
For the record, I am not in any engagement pods, but I can see how someone might accuse me of it.
The reality is, I’ve made some genuine friends through this LinkedIn journey, and since we know how hard it is, we support each other as friends and comment on and like each others’ posts.
If you tell your friends or colleagues that you’re going to make a concerted effort to improve your posting, it’s likely they will “support” you by interacting with your post more, simply because they want to see you succeed.
I once worked with a guy who had super jokey, borderline sarcastic friends who had this in-joke where they’d really enthusiastically comment on each other’s LinkedIn posts. It was amazing. Be that friend group.
My one hypothesis about supporting other people’s posts is to comment first, then like the post. The first action you take on a post is what matters most (I think) and the comments are weighted more heavily (I think).
Some light links
TOLL group rebranded to Team Global Express, here’s the case study from the agency that did it
Temu spent $2 billion on advertising with Meta in 2023
LinkedIn is testing a TikTok-like video feed
This Fender ad featuring a bunch of famous guitarists (the irony that this is a TikTok link)
Some housekeeping: Only 2 issues left in Season 7! After that I’ll be taking my between-seasons-no-set-timeline break.
However, I do already have an idea for a theme for Season 8: How marketing changes at each funding milestone from bootstrapped to pre-seed, seed, and Series A. Click this link to tell me you like this idea.
Ciao,
Kayla
"I don't want to grow my personal brand, this post is not for me"
*misses out on extremely well researched and thought through analysis*