What I Learned From Posting Everyday on LinkedIn

In B2B, LinkedIn is one of the most influential channels that exist, which makes it an important distribution source.

Therefore, I ran an experiment going from 0 to 100 on the platform to observe the effects.

Given my professional experience you might be surprised to know that I am not a natural sharer, so like some of you, I’m constantly fighting with myself to post content.

I aimed to go from seldom posting to posting 100 consecutive days, then settle on 30, which I nearly hit (in case anyone is keeping score).

Regardless, I got to a point where I could derive some meaningful takeaways.

What did I learn? Let’s dive in!

You Get Noticed More

What almost happened immediately is (a lot) more people began viewing my profile just because I was appearing in their feed.

I even got a few additional LinkedIn messages (but nothing to write home about).

As you can derive from this graph, I started posting in early March.

Simply by being present, you get noticed and pique people’s curiosity.

The takeaway here is you can stay top of mind by just showing up.

You can’t score if you don’t put yourself in the game.

There’s More Than the Data Shows

And actually, people are noticing you more than what’s in the data.

Although there was no data trail in the form of a profile view or post engagement, several people talked to me directly about how they noticed my uptick in LinkedIn activity.

This shouldn’t be surprising when we think about our habits. How often do you scroll through LinkedIn (or any other social platform) and not interact with any content?

Data is important, but it’s not the single source of truth. When it comes to content, a lot is happening that we cannot measure quantitatively.

Go By What People Do, Not What They Say

You’re probably wondering what caused that spike in the graph I showed. You’ll notice a similar trend with impressions.

It was a result of this post.

This post accounted for nearly 7,000 of my 16,000+ impressions from the last 90 days (40+% of all impressions), greatly outpacing any of my more “work-related” content.

What’s funny about this is that for all the bemoaning people do about personal content being posted on LinkedIn, the data shows the opposite sentiment.

It seems that displaying yourself as a human rather than a lifeless corporate robot, makes people want to engage with you! Who would have thought?

What shouldn’t be forgotten is that business is built on relationships, so don’t be afraid to be relatable.

You shouldn’t be posting your breakfast daily on LinkedIn, but sprinkling in some content about what makes you uniquely you is more than okay.

Maybe you’ve heard the phrase before, you are your own niche. Therefore, own it!

The Algo Didn’t Reward Me

Let me preface this by saying take this with a grain of salt. This observation is solely based on my experience and is not meant to be a baseline.

I tried a variety of different posts both in content and format and found no direct correlation.

I also thought (read: hoped) the LinkedIn algorithm would reward me by being more active on the platform.

Unfortunately, I had the opposite result. My latest posts have been throttled.

Of course, there are several variables at play here.

It could be that my content simply wasn’t engaging. I guess it’s time to fire up more personal content 😛 

The important thing to realize is that content is a long game and we learn through trial and error. One person’s path to success will likely differ from the next person’s.

You Never Know When Content Pays Dividends

With that being said, I’ll leave you with a bit of a bonus takeaway that goes beyond LinkedIn.

It’s so important to publish content from a documentation standpoint.

You never know when a thought you had will come in handy in a future discussion or when someone will come across something you published and resonate with it.

This happened to me recently during a business development discussion. An article I wrote nearly 5 years ago became a point of mutual understanding.

So much so that we’re working together on updating it and republishing it as a guest blog post. Stay tuned!

Maybe writing an entire article is a massive undertaking at this stage in your content journey, but what isn’t is sharing some of your thoughts via a short LinkedIn post 😉