LinkedIn has suddenly become a leader in organic content growth ...

LinkedIn has always had an at best healthy tension filled relationship with the recruiting industry. It has been the tool that many recruiters love to hate. 'Glorified job board.' 'Too expensive.' 'Fake profiles.' ' InMauling.' But as the haters have piled on--LinkedIn has continued to grow. LinkedIn now has more than 650-million+ profiles. Every organization uses the tool to recruit as a baseline standard. So despite all the naysayers LinkedIn has always been pretty effective. But something has recently changed on LinkedIn that I wasn't expecting.

LinkedIn has suddenly been seeing unusually high engagement on posted content. I'm talking crazy high numbers. I'm going to use my personal profile as an example--not to brag, rather, my internet brand is actually very small. I'm a recruiting leader in Oklahoma& Texas, with no recent speaking engagements. The average LinkedIn user has roughly 1,000 connections, and I have about 14,500. Which for my role is probably about average. So Midwest rural America. Not a huge internet celebrity by any means at all. But some recent examples:

• Lyft post:  110k views, 1,400 likes
• Post about some buffalo being released: 2,500+ likes
• Post about a LinkedIn Talent Connect speech, 4000 views and many comments
• Post on multiple jobs I’ve shared (each more than 1,000+ views BTW and many shares)
• Heck, for an experiment I posted a picture of a pug with sun glasses.  600 views and 20 likes.  That same pug photo I shared on my Facebook and 4 likes (I’m connected to 1,200 on Facebook) No comments even.

So just about every one of my posts gets a minimum of 1,000 views and some pop the 100k mark (posted one above) on LinkedIn.    Keep in mind this reach is all free.  It costs nothing.   What does that mean to us as recruiting practitioners?   

I’ll wait ….

That means we need to be posting our jobs and talking about our companies!!   Because people are listening and people are watching!  I think everyone in recruiting needs to embrace LinkedIn as a content platform in employment branding like we never have before.   

Don’t believe me?  Listen to Gary Vaynerchuk.  Gary is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker and internet personality. Vaynerchuk is best known for his work in digital marketing and social media as the chairman of New York-based communications company, VaynerX, and as CEO of VaynerX subsidiary, VaynerMedia. This week’s topic on his podcast: 

Where Is Social Media's Prime Real Estate?

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-is-social-medias-prime-real-estate/id928159684?i=1000454654471

Guess what: The platform to be on is LinkedIn.   He suggested 30-50 posts per day across multiple platforms for optimum branding.   I guess that means we recruiters better get posting.     Have a Happy Thanksgiving!