Growth Hacking Your Presence On Linkedin And Making An Impact

By Yaagneshwaran Ganesh

If you’ve landed on this chapter, you undoubtedly understand the importance of your LinkedIn profile and the need to make it impactful on your target audience.

First things first: everyone has a unique purpose for using LinkedIn. For some, it can be getting recruited (94% of recruiters use LinkedIn to search for job candidates), building your personal brand, social selling of your products and services and much more. With over 470 million LinkedIn users, how do you stand out and make an impact? This is exactly what I’m going to be sharing with you throughout this chapter.

To set some ground rules: I really respect your time and I won’t be discussing very basic information such as the need to have a professional profile picture, a clear headline that defines you, a fully updated profile and recommendations. If you’re looking to make an impact with your profile, you’ve probably already covered these basics. Let’s dive into the information and actionable points that will help you growth hack your brand on LinkedIn.

What I’ve learned in 10 Years on LinkedIn:

The purpose of using LinkedIn has vastly changed over the years from being focused on professional networking to building personal brands. Though a lot of people want to drive sales conversions from LinkedIn as a channel, you need to realize that LinkedIn is more of a “ me channel”. People don’t want to follow companies, people want to establish their own profiles, connect with other people and promote themselves.

One of the simplest strategies to accomplish this is the transition from LinkedIn’s group based engagement to post engagement. The fact that LinkedIn moved away from being primarily desktop focused to mobile focused has contributed to this change as 59% of people access LinkedIn from their smartphones. Instead of getting into groups and waiting for posts to be moderated, more and more people prefer to share their content and post as they go.

Why do People Log onto LinkedIn?

Most of the people who use LinkedIn aren’t logging in thinking they’re going to solve the challenges inside their companies. Most of them log in for personal reasons, including job searches, checking who viewed their profile, establishing a presence for themselves and so on.

Your message on LinkedIn has no choice but to be focused on people and not companies. Your messaging needs to align with the interests of your target audience so you’ll have opportunities to establish meaningful relationships.

Now that we’ve established the premise, let’s discuss how to growth hack your presence on LinkedIn, to be more impactful.

Hacking Your Way to Improving Your Brand Presence

You might’ve heard a lot of people say, “ Produce and share great content”. Almost everyone in the content marketing world says this, but is it true?

• It’s partly true. Producing quality content consistently and sharing it in a focused environment like LinkedIn offers great potential for you to be perceived as an expert. This is because a good majority of LinkedIn users aren’t producers of content; they are consumers of content. The point here is — almost everyone has the ability to produce content. Some produce mediocre content, while others produce brilliant content.

The problem isn’t just content production. The actual problem is consumption of content. Do people see your content? If so, do they consume your content and react to it?

To improve your brand presence and to establish yourself as an expert on LinkedIn, you need to make sure that your target audience consumes your content.

Here Are a Few LinkedIn Stats:

• LinkedIn Slideshare alone has 18 million pieces of content.
• There are 9 billion content impressions every week.
• 3 million users share content on LinkedIn on a weekly basis.

Why Are There a Lot of Posts on LinkedIn That Have Zero Engagement? Here Are Some Fundamental Reasons:

• They don’t post quality content.
• They aren’t consistent.
• More importantly, they don’t ask questions.
• They don’t explicitly invite their audience for a discussion.
• And in most cases, they haven’t clearly identified their target audience.

That’s not all. Even if you have done the above things right, there is still a lot of ground to cover.

Cracking the Content Consumption Game on LinkedIn:

One of the most important things to ask yourself when you want to drive content consumption on LinkedIn is, “ How long will your post be shown on the content feed,” and “ What drives that”?

Based on my own personal experiments, I’ve observed that the engagement of your content in the first hour after you post is super critical. The more people like, share and comment, the longer your posts will stay alive on the feed. What drives engagement? Engagement is solely dependent on the type of content you share and the kind of people that react first.

If you want your posts to be seen by 5,000 people, use this approach:

• Focus on getting five people to react on your post. Make sure those five people have influence over the 5,000 people you are targeting.
• Don’t blindly tag those five people, invest in building a relationship with them before involving them on your posts, or you’ll end up spamming them.
• Once you get those five people to interact, the target audience you end up reaching will definitely be way north of what you actually targeted.
• Have a group of a few friends from your website who will interact with you as soon as you post your content. This first group is referred to as LinkedIn pods. They’re the ones that help give the initial momentum for the visibility of your posts.

Here’s Our First Content Experiment

My colleague Manish and I started #coffeeconversations, a video series on LinkedIn about four months ago. It’s a series where we discuss various topics in marketing, especially the topics that interest startups. We wanted to reach an audience who were primarily startup marketers and sales professionals.

For the first few posts, we were getting around 300-500 views per post. Then we posted this:

You can see that this post literally had 49 comments, close to 200 likes and a whopping 10,797 people watching the video, all this within 24 hours.

What actually happened was that I tagged, Scott Brinker, Hala Taha, Tom Fishburne, Kotryna Kurt, and Mark Metry and they commented on the post. I didn’t just randomly tag them; I had an existing relationship with them. Each of these people has a huge following and more importantly, followers who are marketers, sellers and startup founders.

The reason it worked is because marketers and sales pros who look up to these brilliant folks, took our content more seriously because their heroes did.

Why do more and more influencers take our content seriously? Our #coffeeconversations is not at all trying to sell anything to organizations. These are topics directed at marketers and we often discuss problems they face on a daily basis.

More importantly the content is conversational, which means our audience can share their approach as to how they made something work. In other words, there’s a place for them to comment and showcase themselves, rather than being treated as leads who are sold to.

The Moral of the Story

Identify five key influencers for every piece of content you post on LinkedIn and find a way to get them to interact with you.

Do not tag and SPAM the life out of these people on a regular basis. If you do so, you’ll lose their trust and exposure to their audience. If these influencers are important to you, earning and retaining their trust should be even more important.

“Identify five key influencers for every piece of content you post on LinkedIn and find a way to get them to interact with you.” #TheGrowthHackingBook #GrowthHackingMovement #GrowthHackingDay

While this information will help you, here’s a couple of points to remember:

Engage with every comment you receive, within a certain time frame . Every time there’s a comment, your post becomes visible to the connections of the one who commented. Respond to them but comment on only a few posts at a time so that you can reply to other posts when the engagement starts to dip. This will keep your post on top at all times.

Tag relevant people when you respond. Tag people who are relevant to your content while responding to those who commented on your post, but only when you think the tagged person would add value to the conversation. Otherwise, it becomes a spammy act.

Don’t Stick to Only One Type of Content

You’ve probably heard from peers in the marketing community that native videos really work on LinkedIn. This is so NOT TRUE .

There was a time when the LinkedIn algorithm promoted native videos but not anymore. Again, personal experiments show that the more you stick to content in a single format, your visibility comes down.

My Second Content Experiment

After initially discovering that videos were working for me, I only created video content. The first few video posts were getting an average of 4,000+ views by my target audience, but two weeks later it spiraled down.

Then I posted this:

Again, the engagement and the number of views went up. I tried posting more text-only content and again, the engagement started to decline. Finally, after a few more rounds of experimentation, I realized that the more varied forms of content I posted, the more visibility and engagement posts earned.

What I Learned:

Text-only content does well when longer. In terms of videos, the visibility and engagement increases when they are shorter.

Your 1st Degree Contacts Matter

I don’t believe that you should connect only the people you know on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a place to network with peers in the industry. With that being said, be selective when accepting connection requests.

This has a direct impact on how your LinkedIn profile is perceived. The more credible people in your first-degree connections are, the easier it becomes to establish your credibility. This works on the psychology that you are the average of the type of people you hang out with. In other words, your network is your net worth.

LinkedIn makes it easier for you to evaluate your connections. LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you an SSI score (Social Selling Index score), which works more like your financial credit score. The higher the SSI score of an individual the higher their credibility.

Here’s What a Typical SSI Score Looks Like

The SSI score is based on a professional individual brand. It takes a look at how social a brand is, their engagement on LinkedIn and so on. To improve your credibility, it makes sense to connect with people having an SSI score of 54 and above. Think of this like a movie, which has an IMDB score of more than six.

Also self-evaluation of your SSI score will tell you exactly where you need to improve to increase your impact on LinkedIn.

The above SSI image tells you that there’s room for improvement in the following areas:

Engagement: Engaging with content posted by others, sharing valuable content, etc.

Finding the Right People: Making more targeted connections.

Brand Establishment: Opportunity to make your profile more relevant and meaningful to your target audience and more.

Hacks are Temporary, Commitment is Permanent

Every time there’s a hack found, it comes with an expiration date. Social platforms keep changing their algorithms. We’re in the times of AI where you can expect the algorithms of social platforms to change and be tweaked every hour. Don’t just commit to the tactics, commit to the principles of hacking your way to creating an impactful presence.

My guiding principle is, “ make a difference in the lives of the people you want to impact in a positive way”. LinkedIn may throw a wrench into the hacks once in a while but it will never damage your plan if you have a clear goal.

Circumstances may slow things down occasionally, but there’s no stopping.