I have a confession to make.
I used to be one of those annoying people who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on creating ads which followed you around online.
You’re welcome!
The only reason I was good at it was because I hated ads more than you do, and it gave me an outlet to practice neuroscience marketing, which I loved.
Well, until I was fired…
And with no budget.
I had to quickly learn the art of earned media to spread the word about my business.
By sharing my story, I hope that I’ll be able to save you from making the same mistakes I did.
My goal for your content on LinkedIn is to get it to stick out like an eyesore when compared to any of those intrusive ads.
Just trust me on this one. 😉
First, before you can even attempt to become a power user on LinkedIn, you need to understand who spends the most time on the site.
If your content is going to catch fire you need to know who the majority of your 2nd degree connections are, as they are the gatekeepers to the rest of the LinkedIn network.
If you haven’t noticed already, the majority of LinkedIn’s power users fall into these four buckets:
So essentially, this is why your timeline is pretty boring:
Obviously, these are generalizations, but it goes to show that a lot of the content has a motive or is generic.
This, as you’ll learn, is a good thing.
First, you need to change your perspective on LinkedIn.
It’s not a social media platform, it’s a community.
As a community, people want to relate and identify with others like them.
This means you need to share what you feel about a topic and do what you PR pros are brilliant at (aka storytelling).
I know for myself when I first told my LinkedIn audience that I was scared of leaving the comfort of a job to focus on something I believed in, I received a landslide of support from other entrepreneurs and marketing leaders.
My one status update resulted in over 43,000 impressions, 642 profile views, 153 connection requests, 108 website hits, 33 people wanting to use my product, and several people asking me for a job.
That’s something ads don’t do.
So like any kid who discovers a cool bug, I started poking it.
Which basically means I tried doing the same thing over and over to see if I could replicate the outcome.
And I just kept hitting a wall.
Luckily, I found a study by The New York Times Customer Insight Group on the top five motives why people decide to share content.
This study helped me identify what I should and shouldn’t be posting.
It’s an interesting but long read, and boils down to these top five motives:
What’s tricky about dissecting the motives behind sharing content is that there’s often a lot of overlap.
Also, I’m stubborn and refuse to believe most things until I try them out myself.
So I published over 100 posts in 2016 to test out the five-motive theory.
After reviewing the 100 posts, here’s what really worked for each motive on LinkedIn:
If you haven’t already noticed, my take on increasing your LinkedIn engagement isn’t revolutionary.
When I tried to ‘hack’ LinkedIn engagement, I was unpleasantly reminded there is no way to hack relationships.
If it isn’t genuine, it isn’t going to make the cut.
However, if you focus on sharing your opinion and views on topics, you’re going to see your engagement spike.
The reason most people don’t do this is fear that people will judge them.
This will never change.
But for you, this is an opportunity to own LinkedIn’s algorithm.
It’s built for people who are bold.
Ads don’t stand a chance against you if you do this.
I challenge you to share what you really think when posting your next update.
P.S. I’d love to hear more about some of the success you’ve seen on LinkedIn so please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, and leave a comment below. 🙂
Wes Bush is the Chief Everything Officer at Traffic Is Currency, one of Canada’s fastest growing search engine optimization (SEO) companies. When not working, you can find him running a slow marathon or jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. But, if we’re being completely honest, he’ll most likely be found eating snacks or cooking Mexican food.