A case study of 2 LinkedIn posts

Social Studies is a weekly-ish newsletter that helps you become a better social media pro in 5 min/week.

At least that was the plan. shrugs and sighs dramatically

I’ve been having the time of my life at Benzinga leading the best social media team in the world.

So much fun in fact that I haven’t had time to send out a newsletter in quite some time.

So…

My bad.

I had two LinkedIn posts pop off over the last month and wanted to share my learnings in case it’s helpful.

The first one:

The second one:

LinkedIn reach for me (and others that I’ve talked to) has been dramatically down recently.

My best guess is that there is more and more quality content on the platform and the competition for attention is only getting better.

Long gone are the days of 2022 where posting a mediocre meme guaranteed virality in the sea of B2B corporate jargon.

So when a piece of content pops off, it’s always worth taking the time to evaluate and see what you can learn to replicate.

The hook the hook the hook:

If you can’t get people to click the see more tab, than it’s a moo point. (IYKYK)

I’m preaching to myself more than anyone. I write so many posts where the first sentence is average at best and then I wonder why I get no reach.

Spend 80% of the time on the first 20% of the post.

Adding value is still the formula.

Every post that I have that is kind of successful either educates or entertains and every post that is very successful, entertaing-ly educates.

I had an 8th grade history teacher named Art Smith. He was incredible because he taught us so much, but we never felt like we were learning. We just felt like we were having fun. That’s what good social content does.

Shareable content allows your audience to be your greatest distribution engine.

I don’t have the hard data to support this, but I would venture to say that shares is the number one most correlated metric with my impressions.

When a post resonates enough with someone that they’re willing to share it to their feed (with or without their own thoughts), you become less and less reliant on the algorithm and more and more reliant on a community.

Hope that was entertaining-ly educational!