by Caroline Leach | Jun 11, 2017 | Social Media
Three is a magic number. In a whimsical, 3-minute video, Schoolhouse Rock explains why.
Maybe that’s why it took 3 separate LinkedIn messages from connections for me to notice a trend.
What were they? Friendly invitations to check out their latest LinkedIn articles.
They were from a diverse group, with no overlaps in our networks.
One was a work colleague I met first through LinkedIn, Anthony Robbins. (Opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
One was someone who connected with me through the MAKERS conference, Kari Warberg Block.
And another was the CEO of a partner company with a previous employer, Terry Traut.
They each sent a personal message to me through LinkedIn highlighting a recent article and inviting me to read it and engage with it.
And in doing so with me and likely many others, they generated not only a high number of likes, but also a great dialogue of comments.
This is a powerful proactive strategy in sharing your own articles with key people in your network. It’s something I’ll be experimenting with – and writing about – in the coming weeks.
There’s also a reactive play. Here are 6 aspects to consider (and that’s 3 times 2, for anyone following the theme of 3).
Engage with articles that align with your social media goals. How does an article relate to your social media savvy strategy?
Look for something in it that connects with your professional interests and goals. That will both highlight your personal brand and help provide the basis for your comment.
Scan other comments to put yours in context. See what other people have posted and how that has extended and amplified the author’s point of view.
If any of the commenters are in your network, like their comment, remembering to look before you like. Consider posting a comment to further your relationship and the dialogue.
If any of the comments are of particular interest to you, visit the commenter’s profile to learn more about them. Like or comment on the comment. Maybe that commenter is even someone you’d like to get to know and invite to your network.
Post comments that add something to the dialogue. Consider your comment as additive content to the original article, beyond simply a “great post!” statement that affirms the author but doesn’t add anything new.
What resonated with you the most and why? How has your experience been similar or different and why? What additional ideas, links and people can you add to the conversation? Ask yourself these questions and more as you write your comment.
Mention the author in your comment. To keep it informal and eliminate extra words, delete the author’s last name when LinkedIn auto-populates it and use the first name only.
By mentioning the author, they’ll be notified of your comment. And they may choose to like or respond to your comment.
Stick with the rule of 3. Keep your comment to 3 sentences, max. Write it and then edit out extra words and thoughts. Ask yourself how you can make your point in fewer words.
Proofread, proofread, proofread. Make sure your comment is free of spelling and grammatical errors.
I learned this the hard way with a comment today. I proofread it, fixing a spelling error that had been auto-corrected incorrectly (it was a Colin Powell quote using the word “simplifiers,” which auto-corrected to “simplifies” without the “r.” Oops.
But after I posted the comment, I realized that one sentence didn’t have the right subject-verb agreement. As of now, you can only delete a LinkedIn comment and repost it; unfortunately it’s not possible to edit it.
Not many people might have recognized the error, because the subject and the verb were separated by intervening words. But content can live on the internet forever. So I deleted the comment and re-posted it with the correct wording. Next time, I’ll proofread 3 times before posting.
Speaking of grammar and subject-verb agreement, it’s encouraging to see the 2017 AP Stylebook will “include guidance on the limited use of ‘they’ as a singular pronoun.” This a positive step forward for gender equality. And that’s why I use “they” as a singular pronoun.
Back to boosting engagement with LinkedIn articles, what strategies are you using?
by Caroline Leach | Jun 5, 2017 | Social Media
What happens when you post daily to LinkedIn?
In the month of May, I found out. I did an experiment. I posted every weekday to see what I would learn.
Why every weekday?
It takes about “20 LinkedIn posts every month to reach 60 percent of your audience,” according to a data point that Carly Okyle cited in an Entrepreneur article about LinkedIn profiles.
And because LinkedIn is a social media platform for professionals, most content views are during the work week.
To make it (relatively) easy to post daily, I set up a weekly calendar:
Mondays – a Social Circle employer advocacy program post (note: opinions I share in social media and in this blog are my own)
Tuesdays – content from one of my favorite business publications, like Harvard Business Review, The Economist, or Inc.
Wednesdays – an article, based on a previous post from this blog
Thursdays – a Social Circle employer advocacy program post
Fridays – sharing a post from a colleague, an alma mater, a professional association, a favorite publication or new content based on a holiday or other milestone.
With this content calendar framework in mind, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought to post every weekday. During early morning hours, it took about 10 minutes for most posts and 30 minutes for articles.
So, what did I learn?
Engagement increased each week. How did I measure engagement? By the number of total views each week.
By week 2, views were up 25%. By week 3, up 166% over the previous week. By week 4, up 88% over the previous week.
At the end of week 4, I also noticed my profile views were up by 45% over the previous week.
Week 5 was an anomaly. Views and profile views went down. However, I posted only 4 days that week because I skipped Memorial Day. And views may have been down because some people were on vacation after the long weekend.
Content re-shared by others got more engagement. When my 1st degree connections re-shared my content with their networks, I got the highest engagement as measured by views and likes.
Analytics came in handy, as I could see whether a post got more engagement from my 1st or 2nd degree network. What was harder to know was when my content was re-shared and who shared it.
Views are measured differently for posts and articles. Articles got fewer views than posts, but generated more likes. A view of a post means that “someone saw your post in their LinkedIn homepage feed.”
The bar is higher for a view of an article. Here it means “someone has clicked into and opened your article in their browser or on the LinkedIn mobile app.”
Understanding this, it now makes sense that while views to my articles were lower than for posts, articles generated more likes. People had actually opened the link for articles.
Hashtags are important to make content discoverable. In my zeal to post frequently, I often forgot to include hashtags. That limited broader discovery of my content.
Posts on Tuesdays and Wednesdays got the most engagement. This is consistent with data showing it’s best to post in the middle of the week.
An exception to the learning above? If a post reached my 2nd degree network, then the day of the week didn’t matter. And that’s the most important thing I learned – the power of content that is re-shared.
If content is engaging enough for connections to share it with their networks, it reaches a much broader audience. It exposes your ideas to more people. And it creates opportunities to connect with more people who share common interests.
Most engagement was for posts about how to be a better leader and professional. This is consistent with LinkedIn being a social media platform for professionals in business. These posts were more likely to be positive and upbeat in nature.
And that’s consistent with a study by 2 professors whose research supported the finding that, “Content is more likely to become viral the more positive it is.”
The least engagement was for topics that could be viewed as bad news. This aligns with the analysis I did of my least engaging posts.
They had to do with what could be perceived as bad news – dealing with the death of a family member, thinking about dramatic change, and being reminded of goals we haven’t achieved.
The big question this leaves me with? How to make my content more compelling and more likely to be shared by my connections? Here’s how I’ll approach that.
- Like, comment and share others’ content. I’ll move content sharing to two days a week instead of one, and I’ll mention the person who initially posted it.
- Use hashtags so people can more easily discover content of interest. In my haste to post daily, I often forgot this important action.
- Mention people in posts and figure out if the mention feature works when sharing an article.
- Share every article to Twitter and Facebook using the convenient LinkedIn feature that pops up in the posting and sharing process.
- Study and practice how to write more compelling headlines and summaries. Experiment with what grabs people’s attention.
As I take these actions in the weeks and months ahead, I’ll keep tracking engagement with my content.
In particular, I’ll look at ways to better track when my posts and articles are shared, and by whom.
If the sharer mentioned me, that shows up in my LinkedIn notifications. Sometimes LinkedIn sends an analytics summary. But shares do not (yet) appear in the LinkedIn analytics for posts and articles.
Better capturing these analytics will help me understand which content is shared the most, so I can create a hypothesis about why.
In the meantime, what motivates you to re-share a post or article with your network?
by Caroline Leach | May 29, 2017 | Marketing & Analytics, Social Media
It’s almost the end of my month-long experiment of posting an update every weekday on LinkedIn.
There’s a growing spreadsheet of data ready to analyze for conclusions and implications. I’ll share them in an upcoming blog post.
In the meantime, I found an interesting data point in a book released this month.
It’s Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
Seth got his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, worked as a data scientist at Google, and writes for the New York Times.
He makes the case that “we no longer need to rely on what people tell us” in things like surveys or social media or casual conversations.
He provides compelling data telling the story that big datasets of how people search for information online reveals what’s really on their minds.
Seth writes about “text as data” and how sentiment analysis can identify how happy or sad a piece of content is.
He shared the most positive 3 words in the English language: happy, love and awesome. The 3 most negative? Sad, death and depression.
And what content gets shared more often? Positive or negative stories?
If you agree that “news is about conflict” – summed up by the journalistic sentiment “if it bleeds, it leads” – you might conclude that negative content gets shared more often.
But it’s actually the reverse, according to a study by professors at the Wharton School, Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman. They looked at the most shared articles for the New York Times.
And what was shared the most?
Positive stories.
As the professors said, “Content is more likely to become viral the more positive it is.”
My first reaction was happiness that my “positive comments only” philosophy for social media savvy had some data supporting it.
The second reaction was to turn to my own data from this month’s LinkedIn experiment to see if it held true.
Here I’m measuring engagement by the number of views, rather than by the number of shares.
Why?
I’m fairly new to this daily posting routine, so the first change I’ve seen over the past 4 weeks is an increase in views of my content, rather than any significant shares. And I’m finding shares more challenging to measure so far.
What were my most-viewed posts?
The first 2 posts make sense to me as highly positive content. The third made me pause. On the face of it, it seems like a negative that our brains are limited in the amount of focus they can handle.
But as I thought about it and revisited the comments on the post, I realized that many people might have found this information to be happy news. In other words, it’s okay and even desirable to NOT focus your brain all the time.
How about the least-viewed posts?
The first has to do with a fabulous new book by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant on what the research and practice say about bouncing back from adversity.
But since it began from Sandberg’s husband’s death, one of the saddest words in the English language, that puts the topic in the negative zone. (I still recommend reading the book, because it’s full of uplifting advice about grit and resilience.)
The second was a special report in The Economist about how “data are to this century what oil was to the last one: a driver of growth and change.” Because “change” is not something many people eagerly embrace, perhaps this story was seen as more negative than positive.
The third was a Harvard Business Review article about what distinguishes goals we achieve from those we don’t. My takeaway here? Maybe thinking about goals we haven’t achieved brings up negative thoughts.
Could other factors have impacted which posts were the most and least viewed? Perhaps. Day of the week would have been the most likely. However, the top and bottom views were each for the most part posted on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Another factor could have been posts during the beginning of my daily posting experiment vs. those closer to the end. This certainly could be a factor. Posts later in the month are getting more views in general. From the first week of May to the last, views of my posts have increased more than 6 times.
One conclusion could be that the consistency of posting daily is increasing engagement with my content. Of course, it’s still a small dataset at this point. In the months to come, I’ll continue tracking it and adjusting my strategy. (Opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
How are people engaging with your LinkedIn content? What’s attracting the most interaction?
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