The surprising differences in winning on LinkedIn

I said I’d dig in on LinkedIn–here’s what I found. Hopefully you are crushing LinkedIn and getting a lot out of it. If not, or if you’re still ambivalent, perhaps this post has some utility. If I missed anything, or you have comments–which I expect many will, as many of you have 10k+ followings–please reply! Would love to hear about it, and I’m sure many would appreciate a follow up post.

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You spend how much on LinkedIn content?!

You don’t give 2 shits about impressions?

You only spend an hour or two a week and get 1mm impressions?

I was shocked when I reached out to people in my network about LinkedIn. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn, and I doubt I’m the only one.

I came back from vacation this summer to crickets–posts with 200 views where I had been getting tens of thousands. Having invested time and energy over the last 12-18 months, I had questions. Was this a good use of my time? Am I doing it wrong?

So I started asking around. Of course, when I posed this question as a post–and it didn’t get any reach. But I reached out in DMs and email and got some very interesting replies. The friends who responded have a combined ~400k followers, which I only mention because it’s a great vanity metric 😎.

I asked just three simple questions:

• what metrics you measure and what are they (ballpark is fine); eg impressions per post or week, followers, follower growth, meetings booked etc.

• how much effort you honestly put in, measured however you want (time, money, team, both)–again ballpark is fine;

• what if anything has changed from a performance standpoint and/or what changed in the past and how did you adapt. 

There are many paths to success on LinkedIn, and it surprised me to hear how vastly different approaches led to the same place. The other surprise was that when I subconsciously did some of the things these conversations led me to, I had some success with this post.

This is not a deep dive on how to excel on LinkedIn. If you want that, Kyle Poyar wrote a great Guide to mastering LinkedIn. His input is in this article. Highly recommend.

This not a deep data piece in which I crunched a ton of data on millions of posts or whatever. I’ll leave that to James He, whose company Artificial Societies aims to simulate and improve LinkedIn engagement. His input is also included.

Instead I’m just looking to give you an idea of what great looks like, how to measure it, and how to figure out if you’re on the way. Or to give you permission to throw in the towel, and spend your time on something else.

The metrics that matter on LinkedIn

Everyone pointed to similar metrics. The most commonly tracked are:

• Impressions

• Engagement (comments, reactions)

• Reposts

• DMs

• Meetings booked

Impressions are extremely noisy, and almost nobody cares about them as a primary metric–but most keep an eye on them, and know them off the top of their head. Adam Robinson recently posted that he gets ~1 million impressions a month on LinkedIn. But he also gets insane engagement, which is more important.

Engagement–likes, reposts, comments–is a far better measure of whether a post was well received. It also can give you something to follow up on. Unfortunately, some of this can happen off platform–but it’s still great. For example, a former FTC commissioner sent me a text about this post. His current employer forbids commenting on LinkedIn.

Engagement is not highly correlated with impressions. For example I was talking with someone who had a post that had 100+ likes but 15,000 impressions, where the recent, successful post I mentioned above had 50 likes and 44,000 impressions.

Engagement is also better because it is actionable. You can see who is engaging with which posts. Tools like syftdata.com automate reaching out to people who engage with your posts and are in your target ICP. An impression gives you nothing to work with (except, the numbers are usually in the thousands, which is cooler).

Some engagement is better than others. Reposts will expand your reach more than comments, but comments will expand it more than reactions. Lots of reposts usually signal that that post hit. (In the parlance of our times.)

To get better engagement, everyone said the same thing: focus on excellent content that generates reaction or conversations. Obviously, but also – not obviously. Because we all post things that don’t get reactions or generate conversations, but (if you’re me) you keep posting stuff like it.

Just. Stop.

Nobody I talked to uses AI on its own to generate posts (though James, obviously, uses AI to refine what he posts, and he’s not the only one). Instead they are writing posts that are insightful, contrarian, or draw on data. Most use AI in the either the drafting or editing process, but nobody has gone fully AGI on their LinkedIn post generation.

Great posts don’t have to be original or original research. For example, that 9-9-6 post originated from something Peter Walker posted, which originated with a graphic someone else posted first. But it hit a nerve.

Community driven distribution

Artificial Societies has a great feature where it tells you who your post resonated with and why. On one post I ran through it, it concluded that founders would engage but VC’s wouldn’t because something it said was too honest and even though they likely shared the sentiment, their LPs might get concerned 🙂. Considering how your audience will react–and whether they can react, without repercussions–is important.

Writing for a specific audience on specific topics is the best way to resonate. There are things I write that I’m sure no 9-to-5 employee at a major corporation would click “like” on. But founders, VCs, other startup world people do.

Contrarian posts do well. This is a fact. They can still do poorly, but I think the reason why they are more likely to do well is because they are controversial and start a conversation. If you know your community and can write controversial things that maintain your reputation in a positive way, that can be a great way to generate more engagement.

Consistency in – but not consistency out

Everyone I talked to posts regularly. Some post 2-3x a week, some post every day.

Nobody I talked to gets consistent results.

Even people at the top of their game have dud posts. Their dud posts might do better than my best posts, but they are still relative duds. There is not much correlation between time invested in a post and how well it does on the metrics. For me, my best performing posts are almost always hot takes that I wrote and sent in <10 minutes, before I gave it much thought (if I had, maybe I wouldn’t have posted!).

It seemed like the people who had a team or were part of a team experienced more consistent results. Two had similar processes. They set aside half a day per week to iterate on post ideas and draft posts with his team. One would then engage with others on the platform a little each day, but the drafting and posts was a contained exercise (with a team).

That is not to say the solo creators were less successful–they were among the strongest performers overall. Perhaps they had more self discipline, or perhaps they had their own process but didn’t have to document it or think about it, because they were just doing it. I got the sense that the solo creators all really enjoyed LinkedIn so it didn’t feel as much like work as it might if you were, say, a founder/CEO with a bunch of other stuff on your to-do list. People with a team seemed to be doing it for business purposes and were intentionally efficient.

Effort varies widely

Everyone I spoke with had well over 10k followers–some had 100k or more. But how they got there and what they do now that they’ve got a significant audience were very different.

There were three categories of effort:

1. Just post stuff that seems interesting to me, 3-20 hrs/wk

2. Do deep research (possibly with a team) and post the analysis (10-20+ hrs/wk)

3. Hire a team (in one case, $25k/mo) to do the stuff

You do you, I guess? I really don’t know what to make of this. Obviously if you’re paying for a team–you should expect results, and they should expect to have to deliver. There are teams out there who can do this for you successfully.

But if you don’t have $5-25k/mo to spend on professionals, what you invest in time is not necessarily correlated to success. I’ve seen this myself, with some of my best posts being short, quick, not terribly well considered. Some very thoughtful posts also did well, but there’s little correlation between effort and results.

Some people just like spending time on the platform, and in doing so improve their reach. Commenting and reacting to other posts draws people to their profile, including their own network. That leads to better performing posts, especially if you engage after you do a post (people will find it).

Results

I’ll use impressions for comparison because most people referred to their impressions when talking of overall results–ironic because everyone said engagement is more important! I’ll break it into large followings and smaller followings.

• Large followings (>50k)

  • ~1mm impressions a week.

  • Growing ~1-4k followers per month

• Midsize Followings (10k-50k)

  • 50-100k impressions/wk

  • 5-10% monthly follower growth = 500-1k/mo

Yes, I should add, people do track follower growth. But it doesn’t seem to be a big focus for anyone, just something to keep an eye on.

Even people with midsize followings could get 300-500 engagements. That’s a lot of possible leads to sort through! Maybe use AI?

Many people I spoke with track meetings booked or new customers or newsletter subscribers. It’s become very hard to track website source traffic accurately; nobody mentioned it. But one person with ~10k followers was booking several meetings a week, even without viral posts, using the “book a meeting” call to action that LinkedIn enables in premium profiles. He was simply reaching his target audience consistently.

Before you go set your profile to the “book a meeting” call to action, realize that this can also go badly. We posted a job at Skyp and I had half a dozen meetings a week on my calendar that were recruiters trying to get my attention.

The term “social selling” refers to not only posting to LinkedIn (or other social networks) but also following up on that platform. If you’re getting 300 engagements a week, you (or someone on your team) need to look at all 300 people, find your ICPs, and message or interact with them in some way. Possibly, off-platform (using an enrichment tool like Apollo to get their email address and email them, for example). You will get more meetings this way than if you just hope people click a meeting link.

The playbook

Here’s what worked across everyone I talked to. No huge secrets in here, but it’s useful to hear the same things repeated by several people who are succeeding.

• Prioritize engagement-driving content → Ask provocative questions, share tactical frameworks relevant to your audience, maybe post Looms/videos for depth.

• Anchor in community → Content should feel like it’s written for insiders.

• Consistency → Maintain a reliable cadence of posts and engage regularly with others on the platform.

• Engage also → Just posting and walking away is not the way. Engage with commenters on your posts, and engage with other influencers posts who have audiences that are the audience you want.

• Boost → Most people are using boosts to get more out-of-network reach for posts that were already successful. LinkedIn just made this easier.

• Hire experts if this is mission critical → If succeeding on LinkedIn is crucial to you, and you have the scratch, why not? If I had to work with someone, it would probably be Finn McKenty. If I were bringing on a content team, I’d talk to Adam at KnownFor.

Is this your experience?

I chatted with Finn recently about my frustration and how I felt about wasting time. He gave me permission to just stop doing LinkedIn, and that felt great. I also recently added a “how did you find us?” to the questions asked when a person books a meeting with me in Calendly. Guess what the last meeting said?

“LinkedIn”

So maybe I can’t quit yet?

I’m curious if this reflects your experience. Just reply!