The taste of lemon

I must start this article with an apology.

According to Linkedin, the majority of members that read my posts and articles are not native English speakers.

Nevertheless, I still expect most of the Spanish and Portuguese users of Linkedin to be able to read in English, so I took my chances (see also "why 3 multi-lingual profiles?":?here).

Every piece of advice about writing on Linkedin starts with heartful sentences such as:

...."Think about what do you want to accomplish before you post something".

In my case, I simply want to

thank you all for reading me and being in touch on Linkedin, you are making me professionally more effective.

I am thrilled to see that every day I have more people watching my posts.

When I started to use regularly Linkedin, I still remember how I cheered out loud when Linkedin sent me messages "Congrats your post has reached 50 views". Today my lowest posts get a minimum of +100 views and regularly I reach more than 1.000 people per post.

This is not to brag about myself. I have no intention whatsoever to become a Linkedin sought-after expert such as a few colleagues like?César Chiva,?Nohelis Ruiz Arvelo?o?Vera Borges?who offer regular courses about how to improve your profiling. Nohelis has written a book that I strongly recommend to Spanish readers. This book presents an English definition of 'Networking' that I would like to use here:

The process of developing or using your contacts to increase your business, enhance your knowledge, expand your sphere of influence or serve your community.

Big Influencers like the ones I also follow attract crowds. I have seen posts with +200.000 likes, my most popular post gets 20. Yet, my use of Linkedin is quite naive and mostly instrumental.

Like sax player?Anna Kirby, I am using Linkedin to play some tunes in the form of blog posts and articles that I hope can be ear-catching and attract an audience that likes to read what I am sharing.

Not everyone will like this metaphor of playing tunes as posts on Linkedin, but in the end, there is always a 'hidden music' inside each of us. We all have a number of perceived traits that identify us, like a personal brand that is attached to our walk of life.

Any social network can only reflect the exact person you are in the real world. With some tricks, of course, you can learn to fine tune LinkedIn profiling to maximise your personal brand or help you to accomplish your professional purposes more effectively. No wonder that courses and resources about how to improve your LinkedIn presence are quite popular these days.

Hey, and what about 'the lemon taste' in the title?

Yes, that's another of the frequent advice on Linkedin:

'You should try to catch attention by using a title that is intriguing and not usual'.

I will explain in a moment why I chose this title. Let me first make a brief analysis of my previous articles and share with you an important conclusion about this rule of thumb.

You have to remember that if getting +50 views on a Linkedin post's view is hard, having that same amount of views in an article is even more difficult. Of course, well-known authors and big influencers can reach easily millions of article views. That said, I have tried several titles for my previous articles.

Here are the ones that got +200 views:

• The Verge's verdict: the Jamboard's price is likely prohibitive
• Group discussion support systems
• Conversations, Meetings, and Workshops: what's the difference.
• The collaborative leadership credo
• Una golondrina no hace primavera

And my top sellers with +500 views are:

• The University of the future
• Cultural stereotypes: an evolutionary advantage
• Be prepared for the unexpected

Finally, my least read articles are:

• The world I aspire to live
• Connect in the classroom
• How to run virtual workshops
• Fresh ideas about meetings
• Silent brainstorming
• ?Ya está ahí la primavera!

Needless to say, the number of likes I have are a correlate to the article's exposure. Linkedin experts claim that the?Holy Grail?- the famous LinkedIn algorithm - considers the number of likes you receive as a way to further expand your reach, but I have reasons to believe this is not what happens. In fact, I would say it is just the opposite.

From this sample of articles, we can conclude that titles do not make your article more or less popular. I have pretty regular titles hitting lots of readers and many catchy ones being left in the oblivion.

Catchy titles do not make your article more or less popular.

A Linkedin rough typology

Yes, Linkedin is a crowded space. Bill Gates is followed by more than 11 million Linkedin members. Sir Richard Branson has 13 million followers and?Arianna Huffington?more than 6 million. All their followers have access to the reflections of what they are accomplishing in life published as posts and articles on Linkedin.

On other occasions, it is quite the opposite. We also know about a lot of other successful people like?Cher Wang?the co-founder of?HTC Corporation?with a net worth of $1,6 Billion and appears on Linkedin with 0 followers. Likewise, Denise Coates the founder of?Bett365?(net worth $2,2 Billion) has a foundation with her name on Linkedin with 18 followers.

A well-managed life reflection on Linkedin is normally assisted by professional digital Public Relations experts like the ones I have mentioned above, that apply their knowledge to amplify anyone's personal brand value.

Based on my sheer intuitive observations, we can find 4 type of profiles on Linkedin, roughly:

• The large influencers with + 1 million followers?whose profiles are typically managed by professional social network experts (personal brand managers).
• Very active profiles with between 5k and 500k followers?(where I aim to be) that have a renowned specialized expertise in the most diversified fields such as event management, the dozens of sub-worlds of Information Technology, Management, Finance, Healthcare or Politics. As an exercise, try to identify in your domain of activity the most relevant thought leaders to be connected with or simply to follow.
• The profiles with +500 connections?(where I am now). These are typically executive or sales managers, consultants or teachers whose professions expose them, by default, to lots of meeting events such as trade shows, business, and academic conferences, etc. where they have extensive opportunities to connect with others. Linkedin is an excellent repository of professional contacts and Microsoft is just planning to further integrate Linkedin databases with?Office 365 and Outlook.com.
• The rest of the world?(Linkedin members with less than 500 connections and where I started), as we all know the majority of human beings do not personally know and connect with more than a few hundred people in the course of their professional lives for most of the non-commercial professions.

In spite of useful to follow big influencers, the 'rest of the world' profiles should matter to you most as a Linkedin member. Your core connections are the persons you personally know and are the ones that you want to hear from and also be in touch with.

At some point in time, you will also want to reach out to people on Linkedin that you do not personally know but might potentially be interesting for you to be in touch with. That is certainly the case if you happen to find people with similar interests in all parts of the world. This is the beauty of social networking. You can instantly reach your colleagues regardless of their geographical location.

Welcome to a new social life in this global village, it is great to feel connected to humankind.

Whenever you seek and connect with persons you do not personally know, your potential audience grows. That's when the 'Saxophone player' metaphor comes alive. I am pleased to have more and more people following me and I try to post relevant content for all of them. What have I learned so far? I will share that next.

Lemon juice every day

When you start to post on Linkedin it is a bit like the taste of lemon. But if you taste lemons every day, as I do (a glass of lemon juice at every day start) then you start to appreciate subtleties in the acid taste of each type of lemon. You start to be sensitive and to appreciate how lemons taste.

I once saw a post that featured a picture where 'success' was reached after several successive try-and-error steps.

Yet, I argue that this is not a good representation of what success is all about.

If Linkedin is merely a reflection of what you are in the real life. You must start to appreciate yourself and every step of your life as an astonishing success.

Because it is.

Being alive is in itself something so unique in the whole universe. Being able to appreciate the beauty of the sunrise and the sun's energy waves touching your face on a cold morning. That moment is, by itself, a success. Everything else that happens to you in the course of the day should be building from that felt perception.

According to?Michael Puett?and?Christine Gross-Loh, this is what the Chinese philosophers termed by?the Way. This is how we can shape things on a small scale, and it can also be how one affects changes that are transformative of oneself and subsequently of those that are close to us, and eventually, that transform the entire world.

The kind of success you experience is unique to your circumstances but the feeling of it is universal for everyone regardless of richness or fame. Your first accomplishments in your startup or after each challenging endeavor are the same kind of success that?Elon Musk?experiences when building a new Space X or Tesla factory. The enjoyment of success is the same and universal for everyone.

The Way constantly does nothing, yet nothing is not done.

Linkedin loves everytime you share success

I have made an analysis of the results measured in terms of posts that got +500 visualizations and discovered a few principles that I can share here.

Please do not consider them as exact truths, just as provisional learning I have acquired from my experience so far.

• Linkedin members like to hear about success stories. This makes me believe that the vast majority of us on Linkedin are hard-working people that besides a heavy work schedule, still find time to invest in social networking. Perhaps that's why there is nothing more motivating than seeing others experiencing success, it is like all of us did it. An original picture also made a difference, I suppose.

• Linkedin members like watching unusual videos. If you share a video that is somewhat unexpected the post views increase. If the video tells a story, you will likely be more exposed. If the video tags a person that has a large number of followers the better.

• Linkedin members are proud of the community?and like to hear about people being connected.

• Linkedin members are attracted to a good copy?that is informative and by unusual pictures. But not necessarily so. Sometimes just a plain sentence can attract +500 views

To conclude

I hope this shared learning was useful to you. I experienced an increase in my posts' exposure from less than 50 to more than 1.000 views when I routinely started to check the news feed on Linkedin every day. It seems that the 'engine' behind rewards people that visit more often. So if you want to increase your reach on Linkedin, perhaps you should use it more often. I use it on a daily basis for short periods of time when I have an idle time in public transportation or in the airports and, of course, during the weekends writing articles such as this one.

In the end, those of us that play the game of 'organic reach' (this means non-paid exposure) on Linkedin and trying to increase our network presence we become a much-appreciated asset for?Microsoft, their new owners. The more time we spent on Linkedin the better. But contrary to?Google, Microsoft's core business is not online publicity. They are a software company and do not have internet advertising in their DNA. So, I imagine that the goal is that we all start to think about LinkedIn news feed and contacts database as an extension of the Office tools we use every day in our daily work lives (and yes, Microsoft is planning to further integrate Linkedin databases with?Office 365 and Outlook.com)

This is also not imposing anything on anyone, something close to the Way.

One sentence from the Puett and Gross-Loh book 'The Path' (2016, Simon & Schuster, NY) nicely resumes this:

When his achievements are completed and tasks finished. The people say that "we are like this naturally".