7 Reasons Why Your LinkedIn Posts Will Fail

So you call yourself a writer? Think you are full of great ideas and unique insights which no one has ever thought of? Is that why you started posting articles on LinkedIn hoping you will become the next big thing? Unfortunately, I have to bring you the bad news. Your LinkedIn posts are a failure! Despite multiple tries you still haven’t managed to get more than a few hundred people to read your posts and no one’s ever contacted you for a job, to get help with an important project or for speaking at an event. Don’t despair though as there are multiple reasons for why your writing is a failure and ways for you to become more successful. Let’s first take a look at why you keep failing. 

1. You’re not an influencer so naturally your posts get less attention and you don’t get any official stamp of approval that your thoughts are worth listening to.
2. You don’t get featured on Pulse so you have to fight for every single view, like and comment you get. Posts on Pulse get many more views than none Pulse posts and I don’t think any post, not on Pulse, has ever truly gone viral
3. You’re just one of thousand people posting every day so your posts always get caught in the clutter
4. You write the same no-good content as everyone else as in how many posts have been written with a heading like “5 Tips On How To Be A Great Manager” or “5 Things I Like About LinkedIn Acquiring Lynda”
5. You write without controversy so while people might agree with you essentially you come across as quite boring and no one gets through the first paragraph of your posts
6. Your audience is too narrow which might work well on an industry-specific site but on LinkedIn you have to write about what speaks to more people than just your mom or your best friend
7. Actually you might just be unlucky as when you finally get picked up by Pulse you are featured on a wrong channel and your 15 seconds of fame occur when no one is watching

Going viral on LinkedIn and getting some return on investment for all the hard work you have put into your writing is very difficult to say the least. However, there are obviously a lot of things you can do to become more successful or find comfort in despite having been a failure up until now. 

Here’s how you become more successful 

At the beginning of LinkedIn publishing, all the glory and fame went to the influencers however nowadays many of the top viewed posts actually come from non-influencers. Therefore, despite being an influencer certainly making life easier it doesn’t mean that your non-influencer contributions can’t make it into the big league either. The first step to getting there is certainly to be featured on Pulse. There are many channels so find the one that speaks to you and gear the content towards that channel. It is not that difficult anymore to be featured on Pulse however that also means that each channel features a much higher amount of posts. To pass the first test on Pulse you need to hit the first home run when you get your first feature i.e., you show up in the newsfeed of the people following that channel. You need to have enough people reading, liking, commenting and sharing your post to become featured again. Keep repeating this over and over again and your view count will go up faster than you have ever seen before. One way to increase your chances of getting multiple features is to write something controversial that people will disagree with. The more controversy you put into your posts the higher the likelihood they will cause a stir and go viral. To top it all off, you need to write with an edge in addition to generally writing quality content. That will make you stand out somewhat despite many people posting similar content. 

Been there, done that 

This is my 50th-anniversary post and I have written a lot of posts, if not most of my posts, that have failed on most of the above criteria. I am certainly not an influencer and it took me more than 20 posts just to get featured on Pulse. Despite then hitting Pulse with almost all my posts, most of them didn’t really hit any astonishing numbers. A few have hit above 1000 views and one above 2000 views however far from any virality of significance. I’ve said it before and will state it again. There is no magic formula for this and perhaps the only thing that’s missing is a bit of luck, however, to be lucky a lot of hard work comes first. So does it for your writing if you want to stop being a failure. Give some good thought to the content you put out there and think about the ingredients of what makes up a great post. Then take a good look at what you have written so far, look yourself in the mirror and then tell me if you believe you have written any successful content at all? 

Writing on LinkedIn is filled with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but it can also be gratifying at times. Having written posts for a year now I have certainly learned a lot and I hope you have too! Let me know what you think by liking, sharing or leaving a comment. I love a good discussion or helping people become better at what they do. Also feel very welcome to check out some of my previous social media posts or other posts about writing. 

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Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Regional Finance Business Partner for Maersk Line North Europe and is working with the transformation of Finance and business on a daily basis. Anders has participated in several transformation processes amongst others helping Maersk Drilling to go Beyond Budgeting and transformed a finance team from Bean-counters to Business Partners. He would love the chance to collaborate with you on your own transformation processes to help you stay out of disruption.