How My Recent LinkedIn Post Received Over 9 Million Views, 65,000 Likes and 6,000 Comments in Less Than 5 Days

If any of you follow me (or even don’t follow me) on LinkedIn, you probably saw the absolutely CRAZY number of people who sent my recent LinkedIn post into what I like to call a “Viral Spiral”. It all started with a small rant I posted to LinkedIn and while I thought it might get some attention due to my large network of professionals, I never dreamed over 9 million would see it within a week. Within just a couple of days, even the post had over 3 million views which even then sent my jaw to the floor. I had to seriously stop and ask myself why a simple post on LinkedIn caused everyone to spin out of control. So what happened? Who was I targeting? Why did everyone get so bent out of shape? How did I react? Sit back, relax, and allow me to explain.

The What

The what is my original post. Long story short, I posted a position for a “Rock Star Admin Assistant in Dallas, Texas paying $15 - $17/hour.” I followed up with encouraging people who were interested in the learning more to message me for further details. That was it. Nothing more to say. In my mind, anyone interested in an Admin position and is comfortable with that pay will reach out. Well, some people didn’t like my original post and decided they would like to express and comment their feelings about the position. It’s social media - I get it - we ALL have something to say. But, it struck me as interesting that these people would care so much about a simple posting to comment their negative thoughts instead of doing what I do. When I see a position that I may not particularly agree with, I understand that I don’t have all of the details and couldn’t possibly comment intelligently or logically, so I scroll on. I decided to take it a step further and post a nice little rant about how I didn’t appreciate people’s (ignorant is the word I used) comments and that $15-$17/hour is between $31,000 and $35,000/year and anyone making that should be proud and not listen to people’s negative comments about salary. Anything worth doing is worth doing right….right?

The Who

The Who was who I was targeting. Knowing my client and understanding the company and the role, I knew I was looking for someone who A) was right out of high school or college and wanted an opportunity to get their foot in the door or B) someone who had experience but maybe was working on their Masters and needed flexibility, was a stay at home mom/dad looking for extra work since their kids were older, someone who just needed a “break” or someone who I wasn’t expecting but proved to be a hard worker and was a fit for the role. A “Rock Star” can be anyone really and with a position such as that one I was open to talking to all types of people with all types of backgrounds. You may have in your head the type of person you want, but end up with someone completely different which is totally fine and on occasion even better.

The Why

The Why is why did everyone get their pants all twisted about my “rant”? People either loved what I wrote or hated what I wrote. The most fascinating part to me was this: I only revealed THREE (four if you read my original post) key factors about the position, none of which you could even justify commenting on in the first place as you didn’t have a clue who the job was for, what company it was for, what the benefits looked like, if it were part time or full time, what the responsibilities were….nothing. The only things I put were:

• Rock Star
• Admin Assistant
• $15-$17/Hour
• (Dallas, Texas - only included in original post)

I want on in my post to state that I originally started my recruiting career at $12/hour to gain experience and then went on to start 2 companies of my own and it was all because I knew I was a “Rock Star” and could do anything I set my mind to. QUE THE “VIRAL SPIRAL”. In a matter of hours, my new post had over 100K views, thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. My whole point was to get my point across in hopes a lot of people saw it, but I wasn’t prepared for the monstrosity of it all. I would say about 70% of the comments were all positive ones stating that they too started their careers at a certain level and worked their way up. I appreciated all of the support and tried to comment back to people as much as I could until it became too time consuming and overwhelming and I couldn’t keep up.

The negative comments were….rough. I had a lot of people reaching out to me telling me I should block people or block the comments but for anyone who knows me, I’m a free spirit and I believe in the freedom of speech and I found it interesting (or laughable) what a lot of the negative people had to say. Some were polite yet informed me that there’s no way anyone could live on that salary and some were just downright ruthless. It made me wonder who their customers were or what their co-workers thought of them as I would hate to do business with anyone who commented the things they did. One girl named Meg, who had “Currently looking for new opportunities” written as her LinkedIn headline took a ton of time trying to dig into my history and into my Instagram (which has nothing to do with my post) and pointed out to 3 other guys how fake she thought I was, how I was a liar, blah blah blah. I tried giving her some professional recruiting advice and told her that I felt her time was best spent actually looking for a job instead of trying to discredit the one I representing. Another guy tried saying my companies don’t even equal a certain amount of money and that I suck, one guy who looked to be about in his 70’s called me a “tightass” (which if I’m mistaken and you’re referring to my bum then thank you), one guy kept commenting as many times as he could some really mean stuff as well and in his headline had the words “wannabe and amateur”, so I told him it was clear why he hasn’t advanced in his career after all of his years.

People also attacked or praised the word “Rock Star”. The people who disagreed with it said it was frivolous and stupid and no real recruiter should use it, some tried to be funny asking if I meant the Bret Michaels kind of rock star in which case they were interested, and some begged for me to stop using the word.

How Did I React

The negatives all went in one ear and out the other. I’ve been on social media long enough to know that there are thousands of haters - or “trolls” as a lot of people commented, and if you’re heavily involved in social media like I am, you have to have thick skin and let it all roll off of your shoulders and move on. My favorite quote of all time and the one that helped me launch my companies was “You are what you think about all day long”. If I stopped and actually cared about every negative comment someone had about me, I’d never move forward. Sure, you can think I’m cheap or fake or egotistical as some others commented, but the simple truth is You. Don’t. Know. Me. Period. So any negative opinions anyone has about me I could care less. My friends and I had the best laughs at some of the rude comments, but we also had some big smiles at the ones who were supportive. It was really hard for us not to comment to some of the really rude ones or stupid ones and on occasion, I put in my two cents.

My Final Thoughts

Not only was this position NOT for MY company but for a client of mine, people didn’t have all of the facts. Why I think this went so viral was our amazing ability as human beings to “fill in the gaps” when information is missing. I went on the world wide web to further research and found a psychological term called “Top-Down Processing” which is basically the brain’s ability to fill in the gaps based on one’s previous experience. For example, take a look at the image below:

What’s the first thing you see? A cube right? What’s fascinating about this image is even though we see a cube, the entire cube isn’t visibly drawn. There are large white spaces in between the circles where there isn’t anything. If you look at it differently, there really are just white lines that look like arrows or the letter Y drawn into the black circles - not a fully drawn cube.

I believe that my followers had the same reaction to my post. For all anyone knew, this position could have been with some shady company who overworked and underpaid all of their employees (although I’d never work on behalf of a company like that) or it could have been for Mark Cuban, billionaire entrepreneur here in Dallas, looking for someone part time but was willing to promote them to full time within 30 days, was willing to pay all of their benefits and just for giggles, was willing to let you fly around in his $144 million to run all of his errands across the country. I don’t know about you, but I just might have been tempted to take that job seeing as how I’m a big fan of Mark. Instead, everyone drew from his or her own personal experiences. They didn’t have all of the facts and used top-down processing to fill it in which in turn led them to whatever conclusion they needed to process the small amount of information I gave to them. Interesting, huh?