A Very Costly LinkedIn Lesson

Today, you are going to learn 3 things here…

1: A very costly lesson to avoid

2: Something new about comments

3: More results on location experiments

Let’s get into it.

A Very Costly Lesson to Avoid

Why are you on LinkedIn?

This is a very important question that you must answer. If you don’t give a precise answer to this, it might be the core reason you are not getting the kind of results you want.

Let me explain…

I am on LinkedIn to build my professional brand. The reason is to unlock opportunities. And I expect those opportunities to make me money, and give me a platform to make impact.

This is very clear to me. So, I cannot disregard this mission because I want to be more famous or gain followers. The essence of going viral would be to match my professional brand with that mission.

So, if I am posting something irrelevant to my niche and I go viral, it wouldn’t be coherent with the results I want.

This is why I strongly recommend you to always stay in your niche. Even if other people are posting stupid things and going viral for it, don’t join them. Remember that you are doing this for business.

You may think you have less than 1,000 followers and no one cares about your profile. But you never know who might stop by.

Your goal is NOT to be fancy. It is NOT to look attractive to everybody. It is to look attractive to those who are seeking your professional expertise.

When you make a post, do it to be relevant and speak to the people you want to reach. Know the core people you want to speak to and design your posts to help them.

You must already know about reach posts and conversion posts. But I will take it a bit further here.

At least once a week (if you post at least 5 times per week), make an intentional flop. Make a post that has every reason to flop. Break all the rules. But make it something that really, really, really helps the kinds of people you want to reach.

“Intentional flop” posts will probably flop on reach. They will likely get low impression count. But they are the kinds of posts that change a person’s life, business, etc.

Break all the rules and make an intentional flop post once in a while. The post will probably not perform well. But there is one person who sees that and will never forget it.

Now, this kind of post is not a quote or something fancy like that. Make it experience-based life-changing tip that is actionable and useful to people in your niche. Better if it is a true story or cautionary tale.

Don’t be like all those people who learned a very costly lesson by going viral on LinkedIn for something that has no bearing or connection to their career or business.

I saw someone this past week who made a food post (with a picture). It was a diabolical and controversial food - raw fish wrapped around banana with something sprinkled on it. Some people loved it. Others found it a travesty. I belonged to the second camp though.

The point here is that the post had nothing to do with the author’s niche, and it went super viral. Trust me, that is not the kind of viral you want on LinkedIn. Post that on Instagram or Twitter (now, X) - not LinkedIn.

The more reason to avoid these types of posts is that they will skew the algorithm for you. That person’s posts on business will probably be distributed to people who show a reaction to food (over the next few days and weeks).

Those are the kinds of people that go, “Oh, I am in LinkedIn jail”. You are not. You just screwed up the algorithm for your post distribution. Now that you made a food post, the algorithm will be expecting you to make more of it.

It’s not a good place to be.

Something New About Comments

LinkedIn is trying to encourage comments more. First, they started showing impression count on comments on the desktop webpage.

But now, they have brought the mobile apps into the trend. They send you a notification with an impression count of your comments.

I have been getting some of that. And while it was wild at first (they made the mistake of sending notifications that said “your comment has 0 impressions”), it has now been stabilized a bit.

Here is what I mean…

Can you see why I keep saying comments are super important?

That random comments reached more people than my main post. And I made both at around the same time.

When a post is going viral in your niche, jump on it. Make a thoughtful comment on it. This is the way to win.

Another incredible benefit of that is you will find people who aligned with your niche through that. And they will follow you or connect with you.

In fact, most of my best aligned connections on LinkedIn have found me in the comment section of a post by someone they respect.

Don’t forget to always make comments in your niche. Stick with your tribe.

More Results on Location Experiments

In the last few weeks, I have tried accessing LinkedIn through 3 different locations (with VPN) - the USA, the UK/Europe, West Africa.

I still cannot say I have conclusive evidence on this. And that is because so many other factors are influencing my LinkedIn account. There is virtually no way to test it in isolation. But I do know that LinkedIn uses your location to curate your feed and distribute your posts.

However, here are a few things I have noticed…

First, my feed became instantly better when I switched away from the USA. For some reason, there is just a lot of noise and fluff from there, mainly because a lot of active users on LinkedIn are American.

However, my posts have not gone as viral as they used to after making this switch from the USA. For example, a kind of post that used to go over 100k impressions just barely gets to 35k impressions.

Now, I am not sure this is majorly due to this location switch. The time I made the switch was also around the same time a lot of people on LinkedIn started complaining about their LinkedIn reach, and LinkedIn was showing posts that were 2 weeks old and 3 weeks old more frequently.

I am assuming that is a glitch the platform is fixing. But the fact remains that I haven’t had anything over 40k impressions since switching from the USA. Even though I have had posts that got 100+ comments (which generally generates over 100k impressions prior).

There is also a rumor that LinkedIn is decreasing organic reach so that more people can promote their posts like an ad. I don’t know about that though. Anyway.

Second thing is that my reach and feed feels more curated based on my niche when I just allow LinkedIn to determine my location and not use VPN to game it. Also, VPN sometimes makes the connection slower.

My major concern with this used to be that I may be in West Africa or Asia and my audience are mostly in the USA. But I found out while your current location may work against you in that context, it is not so significant if you are engaging a lot and cleaning up your feed regularly.

Thanks for reading. Share with a friend or colleague.