Reflections on using LinkedIn as a creator

I started posting to LinkedIn eight months ago. My goal is to help with recruiting for my teams at Meta. Sharing some reflections on the process and results.

Intro

I think of LinkedIn users in three simplified buckets

1. Celebrities who are famous outside of LinkedIn, like Bill Gates
2. People who build their followers on the platform, and
3. Typical users

I fit into the second category. I don't have the raw magnetic celebrity of a Bill Gates:

LinkedIn is a good medium for me because my professional qualifications lend me credibility (and I can't dance, so TikTok is out). Additionally, it's the right context for getting people to consider joining my team. It gives an opportunity to build a following, which I can leverage into more reach for potential hires.

Building a following in general

To build followers on a ranking-based platform (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok), it’s important to define a specific niche and to generate a lot of content within that niche over a period of time.

Why? The algorithm shows new content to a handful of people. Based on their reaction, it'll choose whether to show it to more people.

Imagine you generate a ton of fresh content on pizza with pineapple for an audience of pizza lovers. Every day you post about different facets of pineapple pizza. The people who see your posts first will respond (read / like / comment), which gives the posts more distribution. That builds a virtuous cycle where every post brings in a few more followers who love (or love to hate) pineapple pizza. There’s a tipping point where it grows exponentially.

However, if one day you write a brilliant post about a very different topic (say, U.S. monetary policy), most pizza lovers would be confused and wouldn't interact with the post. This means the post won't perform well. Similarly, if you stop posting about pizza or become repetitive, then people will tune out.

If you look closely at successful influencers on every platform, they all follow a similar formula. On Instagram they are good at cultivating a specific aesthetic, on TikTok they have a consistent vibe or sense of humor. Within that aesthetic / vibe, they generate a lot of content. If the niche becomes too narrow, they get stuck without new content. However, if it’s too broad, there isn’t a defined audience who’d be excited to see it.

Building a following on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has some unique dynamics.

First, there is mutual following ("connect" model), and social proof from your credentials - i.e., someone may choose to connect with you because you work in the same industry or went to the same school. Second, LinkedIn has given a lot of distribution to comments (I suspect as part of a strategy to "build conversations" - more on that later).

Thus, I'm aware of three strategies to build an audience (I'll call them the "three B's"):

1. Bootstrap: find popular accounts and comment on their posts when they’re still early
2. Befriend: send connection requests daily to people who are in your target audience
3. Brute Force: post a ton of content (every day or even multiple times per day)

My approach

I don’t have the time to lurk on LinkedIn and comment in the Bootstrap approach. Additionally, these are often low-value comments, which I don’t think are good for my personal brand ("great post! Thanks for sharing!").

Similarly, I don’t want to reach out cold. Perhaps if my livelihood depended on people seeing my content I'd be more open to this approach. However, I generally prefer for people to opt into seeing my content vs. feeling compelled to because I reached out to them.

So, I’ve focused my efforts on the third approach: Brute Force.?

I find that I can create a high-effort post roughly once a week, and then spend 5 minutes every other day on a shorter post.

Generally people seem to react more to the low-effort posts (though that may be because they’re shorter).

My results

I’ve gone from ~1.9K followers to ~3.6K followers. Since my goal is to to drive incremental hires for my teams, I've tried to track that, but it's hard. A few candidates mentioned my posts. I estimate that 8 months of effort resulted in ~50 incremental applications and 4-5 incremental hires.?That seems like decent but not great ROI.

I think that my content is good enough, but it fails the basic challenge of influencing: it’s not consistent or focused enough. I generally write about four topics: business messaging, product strategy, career choices, and leadership skills.

If I write about an early career transition, that will resonate with my followers who are early in their career. If I write about specifics of leading a large product organization, then that will resonate for a very different audience.

The best creators make it seem effortless. However, it takes a huge amount of creative discipline to come up with daily ideas that fall within a specific rubric. I have a lot of respect for influencers who can post daily in a specific aesthetic and context. Being a creator / influencer requires a set of skills that, by definition, are hard to see (similar to being an actor).

For an interesting rabbit hole, this YouTube channel analyzes why certain creators failed. There are many reasons. However, at the heart of it, it's really hard to find a format / context / repeatable process to create for a niche year after year.

Observations on what LinkedIn is optimizing for

From what I can tell, the algorithm is optimizing for something like the number and diversity of comments (i.e., number of people commenting to each other). This is evident in the content strategy, which talks about things like “lead the conversation.”

I suspect the intent is to encourage building intellectual communities around career topics. In reality, I think that this still generally privileges click-bait type posts and emotional pleas.

I'm being snarky, but honest to god I have empathy. Meta has worked to find the right balance for years. And "the right balance" changes as people adapt and business goals change. Building ranking for these types of platforms is incredibly hard and it's often more art than science.

Implications for LinkedIn

Ultimately, other than the creative value of expression, creators care about two things:

1. Building an audience, and
2. Monetizing that audience (or extracting some other type of value)

For building an audience, I would find it tremendously valuable if (a) LinkedIn gave me a lot of feedback on whether I'm building the right audience and (b) gave tools that make the non-creative parts easy.

LinkedIn is actually better at giving feedback about audience than other platforms in my opinion. For example, if I ever wanted to move into branded content, I can show the demographics of my followers to brands:

However, I bet there’s more that could be done here. Imagine a tool where you can define ~20 people who are your ideal audience and then get feedback on whether people “like” that ideal audience are reacting favorably to your posts? Imagine if LinkedIn can curate the topics that your prospective audience is reading about (so as to make it easier to know which topics to write about)?

On #2 (monetizing your audience), for me, I’m not looking to monetize directly. Rather, the value is from getting strong candidates to apply to our roles. Without attribution, that’s really hard. If LinkedIn had candidate tracking software with attribution, I think that it could be a game changer. It would “close the loop” between organic efforts and outcomes. It can create a meaningful advantage relative to job boards like Indeed, that are driven solely by SEO.

Other creators are monetizing through consultations, courses (videos), etc. These are often off-platform. Perhaps LinkedIn can create an integrated offering with LinkedIn Learning...?

Parting thoughts

While the ROI hasn't been astronomical, I've still enjoyed publishing to LinkedIn. It helps me process how I'm thinking and feeling about things. It's helped me meet new people. It's given me ideas to write about more deeply. For the time being I plan to continue doing so. As with any endeavor, having some amount of intrinsic motivation is helpful.

Also, I feel obligated to say - if you find this type of analysis interesting and would want to do it full-time, hit me up about the Product Strategy team at Meta. Always be closing, right? ??