I’ve been boasting to my friends for the past few days that I’m blowing up on LinkedIn and the response has been:
LinkedIn?
Huh?!
I’ll admit I’ve turned into a bit of a fan of LinkedIn in the past while. It’s come a long way from posts like ‘I’m delighted to announce that I am starting a position at [Company]’ or ‘At [Company], we believe in [some tripe about values]’. It’s actually getting a lot more creative and even entertaining?! Also, it’s really nice to have a space to learn and talk about work things. Except, I’ve only started ‘talking’ about work things on there recently.
Three o’clock, roadblock
Like the cobbler who can’t mend his own shoes, I’ve been a bit of a fraud. There I am, telling people how to do content when I don’t do any content for myself.
We all have our blocks but here are my top favourites:
Let me just build out a plan
Let me just jot down some ideas
Let me just save some posts for inspo
Let me just decide on a topic and then keep adding to it
Let me just keep everything at the draft stage
Let me just do anything except put a real piece of content together
Ooh, perfectionism, you’re so sneaky! You have me so busy working away on ideas and plans and drafts while all creativity wants to do is get out there and share something, anything!
Getting over myself
I’ve been doing my best to get over myself and start posting a bit more; a somewhat monthly Substack, the odd story over on Instagram, a timid re-share on LinkedIn. Of all the platforms, LinkedIn is the one I’m most familiar with content creation-wise since I do work for clients over there. So, that’s where I started posting more regularly.
Here’s the approach I took:
Just post something
Aim for one post a week
Like/comment/re-share immediately
Put the focus on others’ work
Back to my ‘viral’ LinkedIn post. I’m a fan of Lucy Werner’s newsletter and she’d mentioned the book Do/Open: how a simple email newsletter can transform your business a couple of times and since I was on the struggle bus with Substack, and newsletter writing in general, I ordered it. I enjoyed it and found it useful. I took a pic of it one lunchtime, and when I finished reading it, took 10 minutes to write a caption and posted it. I tagged the author and Lucy not expecting anything and this is what happened:
Lucy commented and tagged the author, David Hieatt
Then David Hieatt commented
Then someone I don’t know tagged the book cover designer, James Victor, and he commented
Then a whole bunch of other people I don’t know liked, commented, or started following me
The post has gotten more impressions than anything I’ve ever done either for myself or a client on LinkedIn. And all this fun stuff happened because I read a book and posted about it.
Velocity over perfection
Let’s just say that this Instagram post by OG newsletter writer, Laura Belgray, resonates. She’s talking here about business ideas but it could be any idea.
I’m putting the word ‘velocity’ up in big letters somewhere. It’s the only remedy for this perfection-leaning Virgo with too-many-ideas-itis.
Some LinkedIn shout outs
Off the top of my head and in no particular order:
Courtney Johnson - Admittedly, I didn’t start out being a fan as she was on my TikTok for you page the whole time and I used to find her problematic cheat codes . . . problematic but now that I’ve implemented some of her advice, all I can say is: she’s right.
Louis Grenier- I always enjoy his posts, and especially this one from last week on the cheese-y Canva presentation that everyone was up in arms about but I really liked. He also has a brilliantly-named podcast: Everyone Hates Marketers
Kelly Dunning - Each post is a lesson in engaging caption writing. I used one of her posts to help me structure the ‘viral’ one.
Jess Cook - I’ve copied and pasted her content advice many times.
PS: This is part of a series about me overcoming my own cringe and posting the thing. I wasn’t going to post this because I was still tinkering with the first ‘explainer’ post about the project and then I had wanted to map out the entire series so that I could see how it all beautifully fits in together. Here’s to making a mess instead.
PPS: Follow me on LinkedIn, lol.
I love LinkedIn. I follow you there. :)