Analysis of a LinkedIn post which got 300,000 views

On 5th August I posted here that I didn't think we should be including University degrees as mandatory for any jobs unless they carry risk people may come to harm or go to jail (engineer, doctor, lawyer).

By 20th August that post had over 300,000 views and 3,500 reactions. I've never posted anything on LinkedIn which generated this level of interest. I've analysed a number of facets to this and here are some I thought you might find useful.

1) emotive subject. Many people I know with degrees aren't completely convinced they've been useful in their careers while others have flourished without one or felt discrimination because of not having one

2) time of posting was 11pm UK time, the beginning of the working day in AsiaPacific and the end of the working day in the US (both places I have a lot of LinkedIn connections)

3) volume of views was pretty staggering early. It was at 25k views when I first revisited the post almost exactly one day later. That's more than 1k per hour.

4) 1k per hour is important if you want your post to generate massive numbers of interactions. Average hourly views right through the 15 days I monitored the post's progress was 900, all the way through the day, night and at the weekend. In a couple of periods it peaked at 2k views per hour and in others it dipped to 500 but in general hovered around 1k ph

5) reactions are massively important (bear in mind the importance of the emotive subject as per point 1 above). For every reaction generated this post had about 100 views

6) comments are also very important. For every comment, the post received around 1000 views and I can see a direct link between comments and traffic growing

7) every other post I added to LinkedIn got more views than I would normally expect. They were all text only with the exception of one which was a share of someone else's post. That one got 20x less views (not an exaggeration)

Have a look at the stats here:

My advice is:

1) don't post bland posts

2) include text only (although every post from Odro includes a video and goes gangbusters so take this advice with a pinch of salt)

3) respond to all comments because I believe LinkedIn loves back and forth conversation

Final point. Every social network's task is to get as many people as possible to be addicted to spending all their time there. When LinkedIn's decided your post's no longer what IT needs it will drop it like a stone. See here the way numbers really dropped off a cliff at day 15 for no apparent reason other than LinkedIn has chosen not to show it to as many people any more.

Hope that's been interesting.