What I Learned About Being Useful

What I learned about content and engagement after a month of putting it into action.

But first, some background!

Back in October, I started a new job. Up until then, I was pretty consistently posting on LinkedIn, but never really paying much attention. Just sharing random crap, job postings I found, or little tidbits here and there. But nothing about it was intentional. After I started my new job, I put the bulk of my energy into onboarding, learning everything, and trying to figure out the new flow that my days and weeks would have. I basically stopped checking my LinkedIn consistently or, some days, at all.

During the Thanksgiving holiday, I was talking to a friend who commented that he used to see my posts on his feed every day, and now they aren’t there. And that spawned a conversation about content creation, engagement, and the time it all consumes to do it consistently. And that gave me an idea.

Well, technically a few ideas

First, I wanted to see what effect it would have to post on LinkedIn every single day for an entire month. My goal was 2 posts per day, but some days I’d post significantly more, and never let it interfere with my workday. I wasn’t going to multitask during meetings or procrastinate on projects. LinkedIn would only happen during non-productivity moments.

Secondly, I wanted to create meaningful content and not just random garbage. So I divided it up into 3 topics: UX/Design Content, Leadership, and Career Growth Tips. I then came up with post topics within these 3 categories.

And, lastly, just for personal reasons, I wanted to compare my writing to ChatGPT since everyone was talking about how it’s the future at the time I started this experiment.

I’ll provide some wrap-up and action items at the end since that's why you're likely here. Feel free to skip down there if you don’t care about the fluff of insight.

Goal One: Consistency

I knew that left to my own devices, I’d get distracted and forget. I do this all the time, and my “Who Needs a Job/Who’s Hiring” posts that I slacked hard on are a great example. So I had to come up with a way to ensure consistency. That’s where Buffer came in. 

Any professional in Social Media will tell you this: scheduling is the key to success. And, when it comes to consistency, this turned out to be 100% true. By having my topics planned out, I could divide them up throughout the week, and write them all at once. 

Since I wasn’t paying for Buffer, I could only do 10 posts at a time, which just happened to correlate really well with 2 posts per day Monday - Friday. Sorry Buffer, it was an experiment and I was being cheap. That said, Buffer was amazing and definitely worth the money if this is how you always want to live your life. I may still subscribe.

Monday mornings were “content time.” I sat down with my trusty coffee, picked 10 topics from my list, and wrote/scheduled them all for the week. I then planned specific times to engage with any comments on my posts and messages in my inbox. These correlated well with bathroom breaks and snack time. As I said, I don’t want it to interfere with my workday so making space for it was helpful and immensely useful. 

The results should surprise no one:

1. Impressions on my posts were up roughly 300%
2. I grew my followers by about 20%
3. I grew my connections by about 10%

Goal Two: Quality Content

Of all the goals I learned, this one was probably the most eye-opening. By dividing my posts up into main categories, and then further dividing them into subcategories, it quickly became very obvious what kind of content performs the best.

UX Content got a lot of impressions, a handful of likes, and very few comments. Everyone seemed to look at it, but then move on. And I don’t believe it’s my niche—almost 85% of total engagement on all of my content was from UX, Product Design, and Software Development alone. That’s pretty targeted content (and is pretty in line with my connections/followers).

Topics on Leadership performed poorly all around. It got very few impressions, hardly any likes, and virtually no comments for an entire month. Which was kind of surprising, because it’s a fairly universal topic. But the reason why became apparent pretty quickly.

Career Growth Tips, in a lot of ways, performed the best. But, there’s a catch, they only performed well if they had specific, measurable, useful tips. Lists, how-tos, and other related topics performed quite well. My most “viral” post ever was about how to properly prepare for a layoff or job search while you’re still working. And that was back when I was laid off. You can read that one here.

What I learned changed my perspective on what quality content meant, and perhaps I was just naive going into it (I’m not a content creator after all). Prior to December, in my mind, “quality content” meant content that was well-written and insightful. Maybe it had profound lessons to be shared, and other times it was sharing other insights I stumbled on. But now I realize that “quality content” is something readers can take away and put to use in their own lives. They are action items with real, tangible value, readers can implement. It seems so obvious now, but prior to this experiment, it wasn’t obvious to me.

And, while topics like leadership definitely fall under that category, leadership alone is intangible. Leadership topics are about ideas and insight. Those topics performed poorly because they weren’t paired with tangible actions to put them to use. Don’t get me wrong, people liked them! They found them helpful, but not necessarily useful. And being useful was the key component.

Goal Three: Play with AI

This was more of a personal goal. But with ChatGPT coming out, it was blowing up the airwaves and everyone was saying that it’s the future of content. And, sure, maybe in the future. But it’s not now.

To test this, I divided up my posts in half. Half I let ChatGPT write for me by simply asking it to “write a post about (topic) in an informal tone” and letting it spit out something to paste in. I edited it for clarity, but that was about it. The other half I wrote myself, start-to-finish, without any help or assistance. 

The posts written by ChatGPT, even when they were useful, tangible action items, performed poorly compared to the posts I write myself. They didn’t sound human, and they certainly didn’t sound engaging, and they didn’t sound like me. Anyone looking back can probably figure out which posts were mine and which were not. 

Even when controlling for the type of content, my own personal content performed better. Most of my worst poorest-performing posts were written by ChatGPT. They weren’t bad posts by any means, they just weren’t engaging posts. If that ever improves, and I believe it will, I think we’ll really have an interesting time with content.

Take Aways and Useful Tips

If I really had to narrow this down to one big-picture observation that I learned, it’s this: regardless of content type, posts that are useful and have clear action items for the reader perform best. No matter what I was talking about, if I had tangible actions readers could implement in their day-to-day, those were the most helpful.

People love to talk about ideas. People love to talk about intangible big-picture goals. But, not when browsing social media. When they’re here, they want to know about specific things that worked for you, how you did it, and how they can do it too. 

Which led me to this bonus insight: 

My most popular posts were the ones where I just shared a job opening and a link to apply. No big conversations, no questions asking for a response. Just sharing a link. Which, when you think about useful posts, those are probably the most useful. Everyone loves to see when there’s an opportunity to find work. 

So that makes me realize that I should share more content trying to connect people searching for work to people looking to hire more often than I currently do. 

Wrap-Up

So, if you truly want to be helpful and not just noise, you need to offer specific tasks and tangible takeaways that readers can put to use immediately. Readers want tips to make them more productive, better workers, better organized, or just all-around more efficient. And that makes sense for a social media site dedicated to professionals (although I’m sure it’s true across the board).

I probably won’t keep posting daily, at least not with the intention I have been. Not because it wasn’t helpful, but because it was a lot of time and effort that could be spent elsewhere. Plus, it isn’t part of my goals. I’m not trying to grow my network and become a “thought leader” in my industry. I’m just trying to be helpful and give back. 

And, based on my results here, that seems to be what people are looking for anyway. So we all win. Now go be helpful and give back.