The Case of the Linkup

It has been six months since I started posting daily on LinkedIn, except for the weekends. It started out as fun, became a bit stressful along the way, and has become a habit of late. So, what have I learnt till now on this journey?

It started on a lark. I was reading a lot of eclectic, sporadic and random content on the net. Some of it was deeply engaging, much of it moderately interesting, and most of it imminently forgettable. This got me thinking. How about sharing what I found interesting with my LinkedIn friends?

Why should I share?

In retrospect, it was my little crusade against bad content on the platform. If I could share what I thought was engaging, it would hopefully improve some moments of what my friends invest on LinkedIn.

See it as a match between exciting, stimulating, thought-provoking, engaging, intriguing, challenging content versus boring, tedious, monotonous, uninteresting, wasteful, mindless, idiotic content that feels like a waste of time.

If all my acquaintances decide to post one interesting piece of content, either self-generated or just curated from some corner of the internet, wouldn’t all our lives become infinitely better? In fact, individually, all of us should sign a covenant with LinkedIn and between ourselves to be held liable for the content we post on the platform.

How many people can I influence?

Next up, I learnt that the best of posts managed only 1500 odd impressions and an engagement rate of around 1.5 to 2.0%. Most of this engagement was in the form of likes. This left around 10 odd people (on a good day!) genuinely engaging with the content, adding their perspective, and enhancing the debate.?

The way I look at it, these few people took the trouble of interacting with a post. And these interactions are the most valuable to me as a content curator.?It enhances my professional network qualitatively and makes the world a little richer, one interaction at a time.

When should I post?

I post every day, except for the weekends (because even I deserve a break!). And I post around 10 am in the morning. I observed a pattern for the impressions and engagements on the posts. Mondays and Fridays are bad. For some unfathomable reason, Thursdays are the best. And this was a pattern week after week.

What did I do with this information? I started posting lighter content (comics, anyone?) on Fridays. And some motivational stuff on Mondays. In many ways, this ensured that the weakness of Monday and Friday were further re-enforced. Heard of self-fulfilling prophecies? This was one of them.

What content should I focus on?

I have often wondered, what makes me choose one kind of content over another? What is my method? Where is my signature? Is there a greater purpose that strings it all together? The answer, in a single word, no, zilch, nada, naught, nothing (isn’t that one too many words that mean the same thing?)

Mostly, I am a flirter of content. I read anything and everything that catches my fancy. In the last two weeks, I have posted stuff on naming your child, playing games, training an elephant, evolutionary innovation, the Munchhausen Trilemma, and reducing your personal carbon footprint. Good luck finding a pattern within all of them.

In the immediate afterglow of the article (or podcast, or video), much of it feels like a waste of time. But then, the factoid of content pops up as an anecdote in some other conversation days, weeks or even months later, making it worth its while.

Beyond all the flirting, there are some subjects where I drill deep.

These are around brands, marketing, growth, and disruption. All of this obliquely culminates around helping challengers grow. I attempt to write original content around these topics. I share hacks and cheats to make them easier to consume. I distribute templates to fill. And I also post some leading edge thinking on these themes. But what I try my best NOT to do is to share pedestrian, theoretical, bookish, abstruse humdrum on these subjects. There is enough of it being peddled by the ‘influencers’, now churning even more forgettable content through ChatGPT.??

In sum, I look for ‘interestingness’. Things that tickle my own curiosity, provoke a chuckle in me, jog the recesses of my experience in communications, make me learn something new, and encourage me to shed my cynicism (even if it is for only a minute).

Are there are preferred formats over others?

I mostly post articles, either authored by me or released elsewhere in some publication of repute. Next to articles, I post cartoons and infographics. I have not yet dabbled in video or audio content, since that does not come naturally to me. I detest polls and other fake engagement pranks. So, those remain a no-go for me, even when the pundits say that such antics drive up engagement and followers.

The golden question – what goes viral?

I have no experience on this subject. Only one of my nearly 150+ posts has gone viral. It has got nearly 500K impressions with 0.08% engagement. (This is viral by my own benchmarks! Kim Kardashian’s cat manages to get much better numbers than this on any average post). I have not found any outlier reason why it zoomed on impressions, except for the fact that it was posted on Thursday late morning, and it picked up momentum over the weekend. So, if I were you, I would be wary of all the viral guarantors and their magic guides.

How can I increase my business over LinkedIn?

In this avatar of mine, I would prefer to be called a ‘Fractional LinkedIn Curator’. To me, it sounds way cooler than ‘LinkedIn Creator’ or ‘LinkedIn Influencer’.?

This works only because I do it for the love of it. ?There are many other admirable goals. For example, if one seeks to make a money out of it, get gigs or part-time work, network with potential prospects, become a marketable influencer etc.

But the truth is that I have not yet figured how to do this and do this well. ?Do I wish to figure this out? Well, to be honest, not particularly.

The long and the short of it.

Because I will be seen as what I publish, I have published this article to hold myself to the standards I have learnt so far. I hope to keep improving on my LinkedIn journey, making the platform ever so slightly more engaging to people who choose to follow me.

Is that a goal worth spending some time over? You tell me.