The actual best way* to use LinkedIn

Season 11, Issue 3: *Cringe included, no opt out possible 😭

📬In this issue:

• LinkedIn for career upgrades

• LinkedIn for revenue

• LinkedIn for brand building (personal or business)

• My current hypothesis on what helps posts “do well” on LinkedIn

We’ve got a BUNCH of LinkedIn weirdos (said lovingly) in today’s issue, so let’s dive into it.

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Howdy doody, Mehketeer,

There’s going to be a lot of Aussies and Aussie references in today’s Mehdeeka, so you’re welcome to the non-AU Mehketeers.

The first reference is how often the r/auscorp sub gets “LinkedIn is so stupid” posts from people who are thinking inside the box. It kind of riles me up because yeah, if you’re not using it like a tool, it looks ridiculous. But for those of us using it as a means to an end, there’s actually a huge opportunity on it.

Let’s go through what those ends might be:

1. You want a promotion, you’re potentially quite ambitious, or you want to get a new job at a new company

2. You are curious about starting your own business, but you’re not ready to leave full time employment

3. You work in sales or run a business, and your company or product is well suited to social selling, content selling, or some other kind of sales style that performs well on the internet in general

So really, as I always say, you need to start with knowing the outcome you want to achieve. What is the finish line you’re trying to cross?

A close friend of mine works in media buying at a large international agency, and she’s won “faces to watch” competitions and basically got to this point where she’s being put forward by the agency because her work is genuinely A+, but there’s an issue converting that into speaking opportunities, follow up awards, and invitations to industry lunches and things like that. Her mentor (within the business) straight up told her she needed to be more visible and called out that she never posts on LinkedIn.

You need to very clearly identify the things you want (invites to lunches count) and start viewing LinkedIn as one pathway to get there. It is by no means the only way, and it is also not the only channel you should be using at the same time. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, but definitely put an egg in your LinkedIn basket.

LinkedIn is not the destination. It’s also not the be-all-end-all for building your audience. If you can convert people into email addresses, do it. LinkedIn is borrowed land and it will change and turn on you at any moment, so build that into your plan.

Yeah but LinkedIn is so cringe

Look.

I agree.

It is a capitalist hell hole with cringe oozing out of every post. The algorithm sucks ass. However, we really want to get invited to that lunch. So we suck it up, we press post, and we don’t overthink it.

Trust me, it gets easier with time. I’ve been posting regularly on LinkedIn since 2017-18 (I was even doing daily videos in 2018 at one point) and I have cared less and less with every post.

“I don’t know what lunch I want to be invited to”

That’s ok. What I’ll say to anyone in this position is, it’s better to build an audience around yourself and not know what to do with it, than find yourself in a position where you need an audience and don’t have one.

The best time to build an audience would have been five years ago, the second best time is today.

And any audience you build in your current employment situation becomes an asset for your next role.

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🥇LinkedIn pros

I don’t practice what I preach all the time, and LinkedIn is kind of one of those things. I’ve written about it quite a lot, but I do just kind of vibe post most of the time. I have only recently started actually creating a funnel in my LinkedIn content with calls to action and so on.

When I first started, I just wanted to make online friends. Then I started this newsletter and I wanted to promote it but I hate self promotion so I didn’t push it that hard, and now I actually have a product I’m selling (I don’t really need to “sell” my services, my entire fractional business runs through my network and referrals, but now I’m doing workshops and my book which are very different business models) and I really need to be strategic about my LinkedIn.

So yeah, instead of a half-assed marketer telling you what to do, I wanted to include a few people who actually are walking the walk every post. Each of them has a different lunch they want to be invited to, so I am fingies crossed (🤞) that you resonate with at least one of them.

LinkedIn for revenue

Sean Grealy, LinkedIn selfie pro and co-founder of Sell Anything, is an internet-friend-turned-real-friend turned I’m now a customer of his. I’m currently taking his Sell Anything course (which is accepting for their March cohort now!) I am only half way through but highly recommend it.

Sean’s built Sell Anything (and two other businesses) with LinkedIn as a primary attribution channel. He is (as the kids say) built different simply for the pure amount of time he spends on LinkedIn without becoming incredibly cynical and bitter about the platform.

Kayla: Can you tell me a bit about how you view LinkedIn? What is the lunch you’re trying to be invited to, and how does LinkedIn act as a step towards that for you?

Sean: As a big fan of social selling, the key understanding that needs to shift is that LinkedIn is where you pre-load trust and familiarity with people you are trying to speak with or get as customers (Mitch Harmer’s definition.) 45% of users log in every month, its one of the safest bets you can make for engaging with your potential customers.

Often overlooked is your audience becomes a community when a shared interest is at play. That interest doesnt just have to be AI or B2B SaaS it can be cycling, martial arts or some good latte art... we are humans, people want you to be human, lean it to that.

Linkedin helps us (Sell Anything) firstly support ANZ founders who often leave sales as an after thought by giving them free resources, tools and support to take the next step as well as communicate with them when they are ready to join our Sales Accelerator or get us to join their business as Fractional Sales Leaders.

This is the 3rd business I’ve built off the back of LinkedIn! It works.

K: How much effort and time do you put into your posts? Do you follow a schedule or format?

S: I have pillars and types of posts I make. I catalogue ideas and then use my post writer to make sure I hit key points in each post. I do a mix of high value structured and well thoughtout posts as well as on the go content which is more real-time. I'd average 5-6 hours per week on content.

K: How confident are you that posting on LinkedIn directly leads to revenue?

S: I booked 15 sales call this month inbound via LinkedIn. Leads is the short game long game — I’ve seen it nurture $50k-$150k deals by the potential customers consistently consuming the content until its the right time to talk.

Most people forget the key part of social selling which is conversation and conversion. Content gets you going but conversation gets you conversion.

K: What’s your hot LinkedIn tip?

S: 🥪The TOFU ➡️ BOFU Sanga🥪

(Important to note, Sean put these emojis in himself)

I’ve been testing what I call the ‘ToFu BoFu sandwich’ for the last 3 months.
The context is, instead of following a plan, the moment I have a higher performing post I always follow it with a BoFu (bottom of funnel) post.

Linkedin is serving your high performing content to 2nd and 3rd degree connections to test ongoing engagement with your posts. Therefore, from a lead gen respect the best way to use your high performing posts is to follow with a bottom of funnel post. This approach yielded 5 inbound bookings at the start of the month.

Thank you from the TOFU MOFO!

LinkedIn for company brand building, from an employee

I genuinely had a hard time picking one post to screenshot lol

Renée Shaw from tl;dv made quite a splash on LinkedIn after she started posting unhinged content. Everything from workplace skits to posts that commonly attract comments that are along the lines of “are you ok?” are fair game for her. You’ll get a sense for this from her answers below.

This style of post could come across as offputting, but she’s so committed to the bit it’s more like watching a comedian workshop their special in front of a live crowd.

K: What’s the lunch you’re trying to be invited to with your LinkedIn content?

Renee: The lunch I want to be invited to is the one I go to with a court appointed lawyer after I get sued by OpenAI. (We’d probably grab a sushi roll standing in the street).

The honest answer is there is no firm goal in mind. Being commissioned by an indie production company to make a web series is the furthest I’ve allowed myself to dream.

K: You really came out of the (proverbial LinkedIn) gate swinging, with what seemed like a very strategic approach. How much of your LinkedIn presence was planned vs just having fun?

R: Not a lot is planned at all. In August 2024 I made it my mission to "get attention on LinkedIn" to spite my techbro ex (who has just raised a series D). My motivations have since changed (Im in therapy, lol) but that was the original catalyst.

K: Did you have to convince tl;dv about your posting strategy or were they on board from the beginning?

R: tl;dv and my boss (the CEO) hired me based on my LinkedIn posting and the relationship we'd built over the platform so he needed 0 convincing thankfully

K: How do you evaluate whether LinkedIn is getting the results you want or not?

R: Impressions aren't my main thing since more granular analytics have been introduced. I look at "sends on LinkedIn" and custom button clicks. I also keep an eye on saves. Also this is a weird one but I can tell I'm hitting my goals if competitors are in my dms trying to poach me. (How flattering!)

K: What’s your hot LinkedIn take?

R: I don't think I have one that hasn't already been said! I treat the whole thing like an experiment.

LinkedIn for a coordinated social selling and brand building exercise

Kinso, a Sydney-based startup, has a unique approach. They’ve gotten a bunch of gen z interns (one of whom called this his “dream internship”) and tasked them with just going wild on social media by the looks of it. Each intern has their own personality, so they’ll each appeal to a different audience segment, and they’re all building simultaneously and collaboratively. It gives you this sense of curiosity and wanting to see them succeed.

Do I think this strategy is for everyone? No, and to be honest if you try to copy them it might not be repeatable — they’ve already established themselves a bit and have momentum, but what gave them the initial momentum and worked a couple months ago might not work today.

The lunch they want to be invited to is “I keep seeing these kids everywhere, what do they actually do?” and then you check out where they work, and if the product is for you then great. It does kind of remind me of a spray and pray approach, as people interacting with the content might not actually be in their customer profile.

Side note:

Designing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Here’s the interns’ LinkedIn posts, and here’s their Tiktok account.

Braith Leung is the head of GTM at Kinso, and originally started out building their content by holding the founders accountable in terms of getting them front and centre in content. This has now expanded to the intern experiment (?) which Braith describes in a LinkedIn post (apologies in advance for the broetry):

at Kinso, we always ask ourselves, “if we were Netflix, how would we be sharing our brand?”

we break everything into categories like they do, and each type of content hits different audiences.

then in each category, you just keep testing new formats until you find something that actually works

(then you just go all in on that and run it… like a series)
and we're not just building the founders’ personal brands either.

each team member builds their own audience. we’re basically characters - like in a Netflix show or whatever.

each person pulls a completely different crowd (with my ratio i may as well start every video off with ‘hey boys’ 😩)

and we're always cooking up new stunts for people to follow.

right now we have five kinterns in the office, and we're running the whole internship like a reality tv show.

He also said they made $42M in one year. What do you think?

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Posting ideas to get started

The biggest LinkedIn sin is posting “I’m thrilled to announce” and then it’s a really factual “this thing has occured” announcement that’s boring to read and you post only once a year.

Here’s some ideas for posts that are easy to get started:

• Your opinion on industry trends (will it/won’t it happen or continue) to show you have an opinion

• Examples of work you like (from anyone) and why you like it — show your thinking and your taste

• If you’re going to make an announcement, include a learning from whatever the thing is, whether it’s completing a project, getting a promotion, or starting a new job

• Build in public for personal profiles works really well too! Are you doing a course? Self-learning counts, just do a little “here’s what I’m learning” sharing

My current hypothesis on what makes posts “do well”

Ok I think if you can get people to click your profile, it boosts your post. I have a hunch and vibes, based on the notification that says “your post got x views and y profile clicks” and also that when I look at my top posts, they all have high profile views.

I am yet to follow through on this idea, but I am building out some A+ top tier resources (designed and everything) to post, and then mark those posts as “featured” in my profile. I’ll then test CTAs on all my posts that are like “get the free resource via the featured post in my profile”.

If you test this before me and it works please come back and confirm it for me!

That’s it for this week! I’ll see you again next week!

Bye bye,

Kayla