2,000,000 impressions on LinkedIn
And why everyone should have distribution through their personal brand
This is the follow up to my post from July.
In the spirit of openness I wanted to share some of my observations since I started regularly posting on LinkedIn in February 2024.
I just recently hit 2M impressions on LinkedIn. Not sure if that is a particularly impressive milestone but wanted to share some learnings.
3 learnings
1. There is a method to the madness
Early on it seems like complete randomness whether or not your content takes off in the LinkedIn algorithm. It took me +6 Months but now I have found a scalable method that would be able to get significant traction on most of my posts. I feel pretty comfortable around creating content that gets at least +50K views per post and often +100K.
What are the core ingredients?
They don’t all have to be present but some of them should at least be:
You need to evoke some sort of feeling: Make people laugh, make them smile or make them cry (don’t do that too often!)
Insightful to a large audience: Share something which a large number of users will find interesting and useful in their own lives
Visually appealing: Often underestimated but creating images or graphs to go with the written text is important and can often make or break your post
2. What you write matters
Common advice to people is: Just start writing… Which I sort of agree with but also not. You need to be very intentional with what you are writing to not devaluate your brand. This is my own primary concern.
A lot more people are looking at your post than you think. Between 1% - 5% of users actually interacts with it - the majority of people don’t but that doesn’t mean they are not watching. You would be surprised how quickly other people are to judge what you write.
Watch out not to fall into the “engagement trap” where you are solely aiming for the highest number of likes. I think what matters a lot more is the quality of the people that like and engage with your content. Every like is definitely not born equal.
I cant count the number of profiles with +30K follower and many 1000s likes per post but when you dig down its mostly engagement from irrelevant people and bots. Don’t get fooled into believing you are doing well unless you have people you respect and admire engage with your content.
I try to keep a high bar for anything and often ask myself: If I was in a public setting would I be comfortable sharing the same thing?
3. Create content that matters for the audience not you
So many people create content focused solely around their core business. That is not how you should leverage LinkedIn. Think about the value you create for the audience.
The classic example is a B2B SaaS company that sells a product. The founder start posting something like this:
Do you have x problem? Then we have y solution.
These kind of posts never work. Make sure you are creating content that the user actually cares about. Then you can always convert later down the road.
What did I get out of it so far?
I have not really capitalized on the opportunities yet but below are a number of the opportunities I have been given:
Advisory: At least +10 pricing consulting roles for early stage startups
Ghostwriting: A large number of individuals, startups and VC firms asked me to write for them.
Investment opportunities: Endless number of startups looking for investments
What is the end goal?
I don’t have a specific short term goal in mind.
I have always loved to share best practice and was curious to see how I could do that on LinkedIn and via my Substack newsletter. I mostly try to share useful stuff from my experience within Pricing, Packaging, Operational Excellence, Startups and Venture. I still experiment a lot and will continue to do so.
I still think there is a lack of content from world class operators who have both the operational experience but also are able to share learnings and frameworks in an easy to digest way.
One thing that is clear: With an ever increasing amount of new companies and technologies being brought to market the ability to stand out from the noise is critical. Having personal distribution is an unfair advantage almost no matter what field you are in.
I do have an ambition to start my own company one day and I will be leveraging my own distribution for that purpose.