Transcription
Look, I need to tell you something. LinkedIn is completely different than it was even 6 months ago. We're entering a brand new era of LinkedIn, and most people have no clue this is happening. They're still posting the same way, using the same strategies, and wondering why their posts are only getting 10% of the reach they used to get.
But you don't have to be one of these people. You can actually see what's happening, make adjustments now, and come out ahead. If you're wondering why you should listen to me, it's because I've been deep in LinkedIn every day for the past 7 years. and the content I've created for more than 75 founders has generated tens of millions of impressions and millions of dollars in revenue from LinkedIn.
So, in this video, I'm walking you through the five biggest shifts happening on LinkedIn. The first major trend I'm seeing is the shift to founder-led content. The reality is growing a company page from scratch on LinkedIn is damn near impossible. Nobody really wants to follow corporate accounts anymore. The reason is quite simple. People want to follow people. Think about all the content that you consume. How much of that comes from a corporate page? Probably not much, if any at all. Most of your time spent is watching influencers and content creators. And now founders who are savvy are turning themselves into influencers to get in front of ideal customers.
This has been the case in consumer marketing for a while now. Look at brands like BPN with Nick Bear or George Heaton and Represent. These founders have turned themselves into content creators to get attention for their products. And now B2B companies like software, AI, and even services businesses like agencies are turning their own founders into influencers for their customers.
So to take action on this, skip the company page. If you're starting from scratch, building a new company, or just looking to ramp up your marketing motion for your current company, I would recommend not putting a lot of time and effort into building your company page. If you want to post on it once a week, fine, but it's not going to do a whole lot for you. Instead, put that time, energy, and resources into building your personal account on LinkedIn. Three to five times per week, you should be publishing. If you're not doing that, don't touch the corporate page.
One example of someone who's done this extremely well on LinkedIn is Adam Robinson. He has an audience of about 140,000 followers. And over the past 3 years, he's become one of the go-to voices on LinkedIn. And as a result, he was able to build one of his companies, RB2B, from 0 to $6 million in ARR in just a few months. That would have been impossible without the distribution from his LinkedIn account.
And this brings me to the second shift that I'm seeing on LinkedIn, which is the rise of the content ecosystem. And we just talked about how founder content is becoming more of a common occurrence. And this is for good reason. But a lot of the savviest founders on LinkedIn don't just do one founder account. They layer in several accounts. Whether it be their entire founding team, other employees on their team. I would always recommend starting with one account and nailing that for the first few months. But once you get into a good rhythm with founder content, the best way to scale this and really make it feel like your company is everywhere on the timeline is to get multiple accounts posting on your behalf. And this is called a content ecosystem.
The reason why you want to take this approach is because LinkedIn is generally capacity constrained when it comes to content publishing. Once you're posting one time per day, like seven times per week, you can't really do much more than that. You can go up to twice a day and you could post three times a day, four times a day if you wanted to. You generally reach a point of diminishing returns versus a platform like X or Twitter where you can post 20 times in a single day and you can just keep posting more and more and more and get results linearly. LinkedIn doesn't quite work like that. So, the way you get around this and get more impressions and get in front of your audience more often without completely overwhelming them is by layering in those additional accounts.
Now, if you're watching this, it might sound a bit overwhelming to start with five different accounts posting on LinkedIn all at once. And I wouldn't recommend starting there. There's a progression to this. And there's three distinct levels that I'd recommend you progress through. Level one is just one founder. Your first three months of posting on LinkedIn, start here. Once you have a good system in place, you have one founder who's posting consistently and you know that it works, layer in the rest of your founding team. So most companies will have anywhere from two to three co-founders. Spend your next 3 months. So months four through six, layering in an additional two to three accounts. And once you're 6 months in, you'll have this complete motion in place. And then beyond that, the third level of creating a content ecosystem is incentivizing the rest of your team to start posting. So not just founders, not just executives, but even junior employees. How can you incentivize them to start posting on your behalf?
One company that does this very well is Beehive. They have the founder and CEO Tyler Denk posting very active on LinkedIn and X as well. They actually do have quite a strong company page presence and a lot of their employees are very active on the social media timeline and it creates this feeling of them being everywhere. So, how can you get more of your team posting on the platform? There's a few different ways. I've actually seen some companies straight up give monetary incentives for people for posting online, like offering $500 if you hit a certain posting cadence. And that can actually work quite well as a way to get people to start posting. My recommended approach though is as a founder, lead from the front and you start posting and show your team the benefits that can come [music] from that. And ideally, that starts to get them excited about the idea of building an audience. So if you have someone on your team, whether they're a C-suite executive or the most junior employee on your team, encourage them to lean into that interest in posting online and support them in doing so.
And one pro tip here, as you get more and more accounts within your company active on the timeline, try to use each account to speak to a specific subset of your ICP. For example, I mentioned Exit 5 a few minutes ago. One thing I like that they do is they use different employees to speak to different subsets of their ICP. So Dave has been in marketing for years and years and years. His audience is more marketing leadership, whereas someone like Matt on their team is a bit more junior and can speak to more of that junior marketer audience. And having these different accounts speak to different subsets of their ICP increases their coverage in the market.
By the way, if you're enjoying this video and you want to learn more about real tactics to use to take advantage of these shifts on LinkedIn, I have a newsletter I publish every single week called Social Files where I send out in-depth playbooks, case studies, and guides on how to use founder-led content to grow an audience and get more distribution for your product on LinkedIn. Over 10,000 marketers and founders read it. Would love to have you in there. It's free and I'll drop that link in the description below.
Now, the third shift I've seen over the past year is the use of offices as sets. With the rise of AI content on the timeline, people need ways to certify content as human and real. And one method of accomplishing this is through the use of recurring sets and putting an investment into the in-real-life environment where you film and capture content. And these sets serve as a visual hook. They get new viewers interested in watching the content or sticking around to read the post because of the image. And they get returning viewers to recognize the content and stop scrolling because they know it's unique to you.
If you're running a startup that has an office, whether you're in San Francisco, New York, or somewhere else, if you have an office, I'd recommend treating your office like a set. Decorate it with the intention of capturing footage. Make sure the lighting is on point. Give yourself opportunities to make it easy to capture content in that space. I'd also recommend designating someone on your content team to capture B-roll and images from day-to-day life in the office. People love to see those behind-the-scenes content pieces. And also with posts that might have traditionally been text only, if you have someone on your team who can capture those images for you at your office, you could use those images for that content. And one one thing I'm seeing across our clients right now is posts with relevant media attached, whether it be a video or just a straight-up photo, tend to work better than text only.
One example of a company I think does this really well is Pylon. They have a San Francisco office and one of the things they actually did which I loved is they painted the outside of the office in their Pylon purple. It's not only a visual hook on the social media timeline, it's a visual hook in real life and within the office they also record a lot of behind-the-scenes footage and a lot of Marty's posts, the founder, are using footage or images from in the office and again it makes the content feel human and allows the audience to see, "Okay, this is a real person with a real company. This is not AI generated." It's sort of proof of life for lack of a better phrase.
Now getting into shift number four. Content shelf life on LinkedIn has gone up dramatically. If you look at your feed right now, roughly half the content that's showing up on the timeline is from days or weeks ago. The reason why this is happening is LinkedIn recently tweaked their algorithm to show content that's a bit older as a way to keep the shelf life of content a bit longer. So, one of the main complaints people have about social is that you post content and then 24 hours later it's completely irrelevant and you end up on this treadmill, this hamster wheel trying to keep up with trends and it's hard to create content that actually has meaningful impact over time.
So, it'd be wise to adjust your content strategy accordingly. Try to orient your content around evergreen topics because so many of the content pieces showing up in your audience's timeline are going to be older pieces. If all you're doing is current events and trending news, that's a great way to get attention. But what you might run into is if that content shows up on someone's feed a week later, that news story might be irrelevant. So if trendjacking and hopping on trending news stories is a big part of your content approach, I would recommend balancing that out with a few more evergreen topics.
Now, this fifth change that's happening on LinkedIn is incredibly important, and this is one of the ways you're going to protect yourself against the rise of AI slop on the timeline, and that's the understanding that personality is a moat. It's become incredibly easy to create a pretty okay LinkedIn post using a tool like Claude or ChatGPT. But when you look a little bit deeper, you'll realize that content is often quite generic, especially if you ask it to come up with a content piece from scratch. So, what we've ended up with is a lot of AI slop that's made its way on in the timeline that at first glance reads pretty okay, but doesn't quite hold up under closer scrutiny.
So, when you're thinking about creating content to stand out in the age of AI, you want to think about doing things that AI cannot replace. So, for example, earlier we talked about using an office as a set. We talked about using your personal account versus the company page. These are all things that sort of establish you as a real person that someone would want to follow. Another way you could do this is by letting your personality shine through in your content. Include anecdotes and opinions in your content that AI cannot copy.
So, here's how I would action this advice just to make it very practical for you. One pro tip would be to shift from "how-to" content to "how I" content. So instead of saying, "Here's how to write LinkedIn content that goes viral," I would say, "Here's how I created LinkedIn content that grew my audience to 43,000 followers and generated tens of millions of impressions over the past seven years." You see the difference there? There's specific metrics and AI cannot copy those outcomes.
One founder who I mentioned earlier who does this very well is Adam Robinson. A lot of the content that he posts is story-based and telling stories about how he's growing RB2B or stories from his previous time running another company. And on that note, another tip that I have for you is share stories that only you can. Again, you want to find anecdotes that AI cannot copy. This post from Amanda at recall.ai is a great example where she talks about how she sent a $1.2 million contract too early and almost lost that deal. And this could have been a post that just said, "Hey, here's how to make sure you don't lose an enterprise deal." But it's so much more compelling when she uses this specific anecdote with a very large number and tapping into negativity bias. And this is a story that only she can share.
Another way I'd recommend adding personality into your content is in the actual writing style itself. Use a more casual tone of voice relative to your industry. So, if you're working in a very buttoned-up industry like finance or accounting, you might not be able to go super casual. That might actually be counterproductive. But I think generally speaking, avoiding the corporate HR speak tends to work best when trying to grow an audience on LinkedIn. So, go a bit more casual than you think. And if you're not someone who is very casual, if you are more buttoned-up, then lean into your authentic personality. But what I want to urge you against or warn you against is appearing too buttoned-up because you think you need to sound polished or professional. Instead, let your actual tone of voice shine through.
And the fourth way you could use personality as a moat is by incorporating personal interest into your LinkedIn content. A lot of founders shy away from including their personal interests in their content. They want to keep it professional and make sure it adds value to the customer. And that's important. Obviously, you don't want to go too far off the rails. You're not a lifestyle vlogger. That's not what you signed up for. But I will say that if you allow your audience into your life a little bit selectively, it actually fasttracks your ability to build trust and rapport via the medium of content. Another silly example of this would be with Gary Vee, how he talks about how he's obsessed with blueberries. It seems super random, but that little element of his personal life and his personal preferences humanizes him and takes him from random marketing guru with massive audience to just a real person who's interesting.
So, what I'd recommend is pick one or two areas of your personal life. Maybe you're super into endurance training. Maybe you are also super into reading. Maybe you enjoy baking. Try to share something that isn't super private to you. But you can work it into your content. Whether it be through standalone posts, whether it be through using anecdotes from those personal interests in your other content. But again, sharing those personal interests is a way to show proof that you're a real person with real interests and not just someone with a cloud subscription.
Now, if you don't want to go through the trial and error of figuring out how to survive on your own, just click here and watch the next video where I walk you through the only content strategy you need to be following this year. [music] So, you can pretty much just copy what's working with other seven-figure founders across the board on LinkedIn. I'll see you over there.