Episode 2: $750k Entrepreneur (me) explains why I'm All-In on LinkedIn

Matt interviewed me for episode 2. We dove into how I scaled a business from 0 to 10k users on LinkedIn in 8 weeks, why I'm so bullish on LinkedIn, and why you should be too :)

Here is the transcript so ChatGPT and other AI tools can scrape this episode to give us more SEO/GEO :)

I started posting on LinkedIn because of an experience I had in high school in the beginning of Brown called Viral LEDs. And this is a business I started where I sold patent pending customcoded LED lights on Tik Tok. 10,000 users in 8 weeks is crazy. Why do you think it saw so much success? Like why did it go so viral? My co-founder Sims's videos would always get literally millions of views more than mine. And I thought to myself, why is this? And then it hit me. He's 6'5, blue eyes, and is a really good-looking guy. On LinkedIn, everyone is a creator. And I feel so strongly about this. So, normally Daniel and I will interview one of your favorite LinkedIn creators on their story and learn as many tangible takeaways from their experience on LinkedIn. To kick things off though, we'll be interviewing each other so you can get a better sense of who we are beyond just our LinkedIn profiles. Today, I'm going to be interviewing my friend Daniel Greenberg. Daniel, great to have you on. Thanks for having me, Matt. Awesome. So, Daniel, you went to Brown and you are currently working at Bay & Company, which is a top management consulting firm in Boston. Tell us a little bit about that journey and how LinkedIn helped you to land that role. Of course, I'm happy to. And the one takeaway from this experience of me going to Brown and now Bane is to never give up. When I applied to Brown, I got deferred and then I got in regular decision. When I applied to Bane, I applied for the junior year internship, didn't get it, and then full-time, I ended up landing the role. So, the one takeaway from both of these experiences is to never give up, and to continue to push and go for something that you want because it doesn't always happen on the first try. No, I absolutely love that and 100% resonate with that as well. Uh, I know you you've been on LinkedIn for a while now. How were you using it when you were at Brown during the recruiting process? So to prepare for this interview, I checked when I joined LinkedIn. And that was January 2021, which is my senior year of high school, right after I'd gotten deferred from Brown. And I don't know what got into me to get on LinkedIn, but that's kind of when my LinkedIn journey started. At Brown, I was really a LinkedIn stalker or more of a passive user, you know, maybe leaving the occasional comment on some of my friends posts. But then it really did ramp up when I started recruiting for consulting. And what I mean by ramp up is starting to use it a lot for networking. So I'm trying to find other people that are in consulting that went to Brown or in the off chance they're from Louisville, Kentucky or Kentucky in general. And I'm really using LinkedIn recruiting for this consulting process by trying to talk to as many consultants as possible because the goal of me using LinkedIn is to get someone to flag my resume because that increases your odds a lot at landing one of these roles. So, in order to actually land that uh someone to flag your resume, you typically have to talk to someone before. And to talk to someone before, the easiest way to do that is to email or LinkedIn message them. So, I don't know if I got really good, but I practice a lot of DMing a lot of people on LinkedIn so I can try to get on the phone with them to learn more about their experience, whether they went to Brown or from Kentucky, to hope that they'll flag their resume so that I can land that dream goal of being consultant. That's awesome. And I think a lot of people, myself included, when I was recruiting for investment banking and later for consulting, uh I also used LinkedIn in a very similar way and I think a lot of students use it as a tool for job and internship recruiting. You and I have kind of talked about this a lot offline, but very few people actually post on LinkedIn. There's a lot of folks that are using it kind of not passively, but like we talked about almost like lurkers online. and they don't really have too much of a footprint if you look on their LinkedIn, but that doesn't mean that they're not active. And so for you, you started really posting on LinkedIn more recently, I think in the past year. What prompted you to to start doing that? I started posting on LinkedIn because of an experience I had in high school in the beginning of Brown called Viral LEDs. And this is a business I started where I sold patent pending customcoded LED lights on TikTok. And what that meant is that these LEDs, you control a million different effects from your phone, control the color of the effect, the speed of the effect, the brightness, and more. And this is much different than the typical Amazon LEDs with a remote that you get. And this is going really well on Tik Tok. Me and my co-founder Sims are posting videos with our lights. They're going viral. And again, this is pre- Tik Tok shop, so we're new to this Tik Tok business. But my co-founder Sims's videos would always get literally millions of views more than mine. And I thought to myself, why is this? And then it hit me. He's 6'5, blue eyes, and is a really good-looking guy. And that was a big takeaway for me. And I learned a lot about posting on social media from this experience. So come February of this year, I saw the same opportunity as LinkedIn. I saw the first mover advantage that I could have by being one of the first creators in the platform. And what I also saw was my 65 and blue eyes. And what that 65 and blue eyes for me is graduating from an Ivy League school and being a consultant at Baying Company. And I think more than the 65 and blue eyes, it also gave me the confidence to post a lot. So what really got me posting on LinkedIn is that experience on viral LEDs. We were one of the first movers on the platform before Tik Tok shop even existed. And same thing, Sims also had a 65 and blue eyes advantage. So I feel like I have the same things going for me on LinkedIn right now. I'm one of the first creators and have that uh 65 blue eyes meaning Ivy League and consulting experience. Awesome. And did LinkedIn help you with the viral LEDs? I know you guys were primarily on Tik Tok, but were you guys posting at all for viral LEDs on LinkedIn? I actually don't think I made one post on LinkedIn at the time for viral LEDs and we didn't really need to cuz all of our efforts were focused on posting on Tik Tok and that was doing so well for us. Uh we didn't even think about doing anything else. That makes a lot of sense. I think the viral potential on Tik Tok for especially BTOC brands is unparalleled. Short form content has the widest potential to reach new audiences. Uh whereas LinkedIn is more of a very B2B focused platform. Um so let's talk a little bit though about your latest business place to place because I know you have made a few posts about a lot of post. So tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah. So to give the audience some context, what place to place does is it's a travel search engine that takes in all airports that are three-hour drive of both addresses that you input, adds in the ride share cost of getting there along with the flight prices to calculate the doortodoor cost. So the thought behind this, Matt, and where I even had the idea from this was when I was going home to the Kentucky Derby from Brown. And as you can imagine, going out of Brown, you can fly out of Providence, Boston, Hartford, you know, BDL, all these different places. And same with Louisville, you know, Louisville, Cincinnati, Evansville. And what it does is it calculates all those options for you to make sure you're going with the best, cheapest, or fastest door to door cost every time, whatever you want. And to marketplace to place, I posted on Instagram, Tik Tok, and LinkedIn. And LinkedIn, even though this was a BTOC business, was doing by far the best over any other platform. Through posting on LinkedIn, we hit over 10,000 users in 8 weeks. And I don't even have that big of a LinkedIn following. At the time, only had 3,000 followers. That's insane. That's That's actually nuts. 10,000 users in eight weeks is is crazy. Why do you think it saw so much success? Like why did it go so viral? Was it, you know, a certain post that you made or um you just think like more of your ideal customers are on LinkedIn? Um talk me through, you know, what you think contributed to that success. I think there's a huge opportunity on LinkedIn right now. And I see the same thing in LinkedIn that I saw in Tik Tok four years ago with fire LEDs. There are not enough people posting content on LinkedIn. Most people like myself included a few years ago are LinkedIn lurkers. But place to place growing from 0 to 10,000 users in just 8 weeks by posting on LinkedIn should show you that the power of LinkedIn is real and that you should be taking advantage of it and posting at least every week on the platform. I love that story and I think it's just one example of how founders and business owners and executives really should view LinkedIning on LinkedIn as not something that is, you know, risky from a professional standpoint because I think there's sort of this reputation that people don't want to post on LinkedIn because of the potential for for backlash from their employer or from, you know, customers. customers if they see the founder posting on the platform. But the reality is I think the a lot of the risk is overblown and the potential upside of an executive or a founder coming on the platform and building a really powerful high trust personal brand is underrated and there's still not that many people doing it. I know there's more now, but like you said, LinkedIn is, in my opinion, still a fairly untapped marketing channel for a lot of B2B businesses and not just B2B, like B TOC as well. Um, like the example of of place to place, right? So, let's transition a little bit and you know, you start posting this year very consistently. Some of these posts are promoting place to place. you're seeing all the success and so you've kind of branched out beyond just posting purely to get users onto your your product right now. What kind of content are you posting on LinkedIn? Before September, I was kind of all over the place with my LinkedIn content. I'd post about place to place. I'd post about my viral ads experience. I post about making protein bagels with my brother. I might post about some interesting news in the coffee industry. I was all over the place. I didn't think of my LinkedIn account as a channel. And I think that's how people should think about it. And I think the importance of thinking of your account as a channel is because when people go to your profile, they should know why they should follow you and know the value that you're going to bring them this month. And really why I've started this podcast with you is I pivoted my content to just posting about posting on LinkedIn, which is super meta. But I really want to try to give as many takeaways as possible that I've learned from posting on LinkedIn and also that we're learning talking to LinkedIn's top 1% of creators. I love that. And you know, one of the things that I think you and I get along so well on is just nerding out about LinkedIn analytics and what's working right now, what's not working. I mean, for for those who are watching this, Daniel and I can go on for hours about the platform. And it's funny because prior to honestly this year, I didn't really post on LinkedIn. And I even though I had a presence and I was on the platform a lot, especially for professional reasons, I never really my interest in LinkedIn didn't really take off until I started posting and I started realizing, oh wow, there's a lot to this. It's not simply throwing simple text posts onto the platform. Now, there's so many different formats of posts, types of posts, different types of media that you can attach to each post, whether it's an image or a video. and so many different ways that as a founder and business owner, you can leverage the platform, not just to get more customers, but also to just interact with the community around you and people who are doing really exciting things in your niche and in your industry. So, not only is it a great business opportunity, but also just a great community building platform. And I'm sure you've experienced very similar things, Daniel, because I know you have been able to contact and build genuine relationships with really successful and interesting people on the platform. And I'd love to transition into that because you and I actually met through just DMing each other on LinkedIn. But tell me a little bit more about the different kinds of people that you've been able to meet and what your overall approach to networking on LinkedIn is. I love networking on LinkedIn and some people are so frustrated by when you have that uh note to add a connection that is only 200 characters and I actually think that's one of the biggest advantages of the platform because it forces you to be concise. And I think that's been one of my biggest unlocks when networking on the platform because you want to be as concise and as clear as possible. even when we're getting guests for this podcast and I'm sending a connection with a note in it. You want to be as concise as possible and also clear with what you're asking. So that's one takeaway. And the second is everyone on LinkedIn is a creator. That's why I think the opportunity is so big. So if you're trying to network with someone, leave comments on their post. So then when you go to DM them, everyone that typically makes content on LinkedIn reads their comments. So when you go ahead and message them, they'll know that you've been in their comments section. and it's also clear that you've been uh interacting with their content. So, my two takeaways with networking is to one, take advantage of the 200 character limit and use that to your advantage and also make sure to engage with the content of the people you're trying to network with. Honestly, not enough people are doing that because when most people start posting on LinkedIn or when most people want to build an audience on LinkedIn, and I've had conversations with friends about this as well, the number one thing that everyone thinks is, "Oh, I need to start posting." But I actually think that engaging with people in your network and engaging with their content, building those connections is actually just as important as actually putting out content yourself. Because like you said, everyone on LinkedIn is a creator, which I think is a really interesting conversation that we should also get into. And most creators on LinkedIn, if they're not engaging with other people in their space and with their customers and with their following, then they're actually missing out on a really powerful part of what makes LinkedIn so unique. I totally agree and I think we should pivot to talk about how on LinkedIn, everyone is a creator. And I feel so strongly about this because comments are many posts. This is what I strongly believe because when you post something, it goes to your entire network. The same thing with a comment. So, people should be treating comments like mini post, especially if they're starting to inch into making content on LinkedIn. Comments are a perfect place to do this. Leave a few comments, not just thank you or great insight, but add your point of view and try to add some sort of value and continue the conversation that was started by a post. I also love comments because they're great inspiration for coming up with post ideas. But to stick the conversation to everyone on LinkedIn as a creator, what else do you have to say about that, Matt? I think it's a like the first time I heard of that concept, it was actually from you. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized you're absolutely right in that whenever you comment on LinkedIn or interact with someone's post, you don't even have to comment. Like if you like their post, everyone or a large portion of your network actually sees that you engaged with this other creator's post. And so it's interesting because, and this is a bit of a side tangent, but our good friend Edwin Edwin Yun, who's a ex-private equity vice president, made a post about this recently where he essentially posted something talking about how he actually felt right before he quit his job in private equity. And it was a very raw and authentic post. And a lot of people in the private equity industry resonated with that post. And so his DMs were absolutely flooded. However, what he noticed was that very little of these people actually liked or commented on the post. And so at face value, it kind of seemed like the post wasn't doing well. But the truth is it actually did resonate with the audience. But the way that LinkedIn works because your network sees your reactions or comments on another creator's posts in a way people have to be comfortable almost professionally endorsing whatever piece of content that they're reacting or engaging with. And so in the case of of Edwin's post, a lot of private equity professionals perhaps didn't want their colleagues to think or realize that they felt that way. And so that my hypothesis is that's why they didn't engage with it. However, privately they messaged Edwin and were telling him about how thankful they were that he made that post and how they could really relate to it. And I just find that so interesting because on LinkedIn, this is the only platform where you are probably connected with some of your co-workers. You know, you probably are not connections with your boss on Instagram or you're not following your manager on Tik Tok unless you're really good friends with them. But on LinkedIn, there's a much higher probability that people are connected with their co-workers, maybe their manager. And so I think that is one of the things that honestly makes the platform unique. But which is why sometimes you'll see interesting things happening like uh posts getting low engagement but then the creator that actually posted it getting a lot of uh private messages from that. But curious if you have any thoughts there too. I think the example you just described with Edwin shows the opportunity that are available in comment. Because most people aren't commenting. There's an even bigger opportunity for people like us to comment on post and get more engagement because of that. I've had comments get 20,000 impressions that I commented on a viral post that went even more viral. Comments really can be a great growth lever and also way to support people in your network. Now, in some cases, you might not want to be associated with a post like, you know, whether it's Edwins and you're still working in private equity and don't want your boss to see that. And I think when comments are public like that and associated with your profile, you should know that going in. But after knowing that, you should also know that there's a big opportunity if you want to grow your presence on LinkedIn through commenting on a lot of posts. Yeah, 100%. I think it's an untapped opportunity for people who are looking to actively engage and aren't afraid to, you know, have those professional endorsements of other creators content. I think 100% you should be doing it because it's almost if not just as impactful as creating a standalone post. Like you said, Daniel, you've gotten thousands of impressions on comments. And I personally have also seen this. Uh, interestingly, LinkedIn does show you the impressions that you get on comments. I don't know if this is the case with other social media platforms. On YouTube, for example, it does not show you how many impressions your comment is getting. Although people can still engage and like with and and although people can still engage and like your comments, but LinkedIn is one of the few platforms where you actually see the number of people that have seen your your comments. So, I've also had some comments where I I commented a really interesting question or a insightful takeaway on a big creator's viral post and that comment alone got me like 5 to 10,000 impressions, which is crazy if you think about it. Um, but Daniel, one of the other things I wanted to talk to you about and just pick your brain on is you have posted many, many times over the last summer and you've generated over 3.3 million impressions in just a few months, which is absolutely insane. For those who are maybe listening and haven't posted on LinkedIn before, that is extremely impressive. my own personal account, I'm about to break a million impressions and I've been posting uh fairly consistently for the last I want to say two plus months, but 3.3 million in literally 3 to four months, Daniel, is extremely impressive. And um maybe at some point we can flash up the analytics as well on the screen here, but you can see that a lot of Daniel's posts have really gone viral. And Daniel, I just want to dig into that a little bit more. What have you learned from getting 3.3 million impressions so far? This is my favorite conversation to have. I love geeking out on this with my friends, with you, and I want to first talk about the learnings and then after get into actually showing you my impressions and show you how viral some of my posts have gotten because it's pretty interesting for me to see my viral post actually follow a different uh pattern as yours, Matt, and don't follow as much of the power rule. But let's get into my takeaways first from generating 3.3 million impressions, which is honestly crazy for me to even say because I'm about to hit only 6,000 followers on the platform. So, the first one is that followers don't matter. There are content creators or top voices or, you know, people with hundreds of thousands of followers that I'm actually getting more impressions than, which is kind of crazy. So, it really matters more, especially in this feedbased uh social media economy, whether it's Instagram or Tik Tok. It's all about the feed. Followers don't matter. It matters about the quality of your content. That's one. So, that should really inspire anyone who's just starting out that, you know, there's a real opportunity for you to make good content and get it seen by a lot of people. So, now that you know that followers don't matter, the second thing that is almost like a myth that I busted, too, is that post cadence doesn't matter or timing. I've posted at 2 a.m. and gotten hundreds of thousands of impressions. I've posted at 5:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m. All the times you could imagine, I've done it and gotten impressions. So, it doesn't matter what time you post. It matters how good the post is. Third, it doesn't matter how many times you post. I posted literally four times a day for the past 3 months to generate these 3.3 million impressions. Most people thought I was crazy, and I agree, I am a little crazy, but posting four times didn't impact my views at all or tank it. I really just saw a huge meteoric rise. That is absolutely incredible. And it is so interesting to me because I have had a lot of questions and you know as you know I run a LinkedIn marketing agency and we do a lot of ghostwriting for clients and I do get a lot of questions about post frequency and you know what's the most optimal number of times to post per week? Is it three times a week? Is it five times a week? Is it every day? Is it multiple times per day? Now, personally, I've only posted daily and I've never actually posted multiple times a day, but you have. And so, it's interesting that you continue to get crazy amounts of impressions despite the fact that you are posting multiple times a day. And it seems like the algorithm doesn't actually penalize you for posting so frequently. I think that post fatigue from the viewer base is a completely different matter. But like if we're talking purely about just the LinkedIn algorithm, it doesn't seem to be deterring people from posting multiple times per day. And I think what really matters here, and we kind of talked about this before with content in general, is the quality of the posts that you're putting out. And sometimes the only way to get to the quality of post that really resonates with the audience and really takes off with the algorithm is to just post many many times because you're getting me many many data points that inform your next post. And you know you've posted many many times Daniel so I'm sure you've picked up on certain patterns and different types of posts that have resonated with your audience and and gone really viral. I know you had a post recently about Texas Roadhouse that I think got over 800 uh reactions, but curious if you can just talk through your thinking behind that post, what went into it, and maybe even show the audience some of the analytics behind that post just so we can see how many impressions it's driving. I'm going to pull up my impressions right now for you. So, let's start with this Texas Roadhouse post and then we can go to uh my other feed more broadly. So, this one has 191,000 impressions, which is a lot for a LinkedIn post. And I think this is either my highest, no, this is my second highest one to date. Um, in the most two important things for me in a LinkedIn post are one, the cover image. I actually haven't had much success with videos at all. And I've done some other posts about this where I've even looked at some of the people I really look up to like David Sen. They haven't had success with videos either. So, I'm really sticking to just text plus image. So, you know, I'm trying to get a a well-lit image with some nice text on there that tries to hook the audience in. I almost call this hook number one. So, you have hook number one, their GMs pay to work there. Like, that's kind of interesting. The GM pays to work there. And then for, you know, hook number two, it's how Texas Redhouse turns managers into owners and why it fuels profit and loyalty. And this also gives them this, you know, third line, which you can see the top three on on desktop, LinkedIn, what how much they have to pay. and it kind of is like, oh, why they can earn 45K? I don't know. That's kind of interesting. And then I, you know, tell the story and add some some bold text. But I think the main reason this post went so viral is because hook one and hook two because if because we're all scrolling on our on our feeds and unless we see something really interesting that catches our eye, we're not going to click on it. So that's a majority of the battle. So after they click on it, um it's pretty smooth sailing from there in in my opinion. But yeah, see interesting to see only gained 79 followers. And I think part of this too, only gaining 79 followers is at this time I was really looking for a niche or a channel focus. And I'm posting a lot of random stuff, not necessarily dialed in on one niche. I had to critique myself of why this didn't drive more uh growth to my profile. Really, really interesting. And let's talk a little bit about the hook because I know you mentioned it drives a disproportionate impact on the outcome of the post. And I personally agree with this. I've seen this on many of my posts as well, especially the top performing ones where I honestly don't think that most people are making it to the bottom of a post, especially if it's a fairly lengthy written post. Just given the way that people's attention spans are these days, they typically read the hook, which is like the first three lines, and then as you scroll down, make it to the bottom of the post, I would expect the retention graph to very sharply drop off, where by the end of a post, you probably only have like 10 to 20%, maybe that's generous, maybe more like 10, 15% of the original uh people reading the post making it to the bottom, which is why there's such a huge impact and emphasis placed on the hook. Are there any principles or things that you try to follow when crafting the hooks to your posts? Well, I think we should honestly show the audience a little example here. Like when I'm scrolling LinkedIn, this is what we're seeing. We're just seeing all of the the hooks here. So, you know, maybe I'm curious. What is AEO? And then it tells me a lot more and is formatted nicely. And I think most of the times people won't read the entire post. Like we didn't read this entire one here. Anyone can quit their job if they did these six things. I don't know. I'm kind of curious. Maybe I want to quit my job. I I don't at all, but um if I did, you know, I may be interested in those six things. This is kind of a a nice format a lot of people use. And you know, I'll never forget this piece of advice from Barack Obama. Barack Obama's a big name. Interesting. But for a lot of other ones, it's like, okay, I'm just scrolling like I don't know these people. I'm just going to keep scrolling. Um you know, like so I don't know if sometimes if you think about like how you use LinkedIn and how you scroll, that kind of helps better inform. Now, I kind of want to hit my overall impressions, too, just to show you that uh I'm not lying and I actually do have this many impressions. So, I'm just going to show you real quick so you can see some of my other viral post and my viral hooks. I just had this Chipotle one which went super viral. If I was you Chipotle, this is what I do. I think it's almost like, you know, that Barack Obama quote like, you know, a lot of people know Chipotle and a lot of people obviously have their thoughts on Chipotle. Um, Starbucks has been a big topic of conversation, especially on LinkedIn, um, with, you know, the new CEO and, um, that I think that's kind of why this one did so well. Um, but one thing I do want to point out that's different for me than you is how many impressions drove most of them. So, you know, these top post, if I've posted 600 times, my top 10 are, you know, maybe less than 500,000 to be generous. And if I have three million impressions, that's less than like 30%. So the power rule hasn't really applied to my content, which been pretty interesting. And that might be because the volume. Yeah, that's an interesting one. Honestly, I'm not sure because in most cases and I I've done a lot of content and for those listening, I I also have a YouTube channel where I've been posting for the last 2 years, generated over 130,000 subscribers, 50 plus million impressions, and even on my content on that platform, it follows a power rule. And I think generally most content creators would agree that content does tend to follow a power rule where maybe 10% of your content is driving 90% of the results. And Daniel, in your case, I don't know. That's an interesting anomaly. I'd be curious. We should continue monitoring your analytics as you continue posting. My prediction is that it will eventually shape out to be more of a power rule. But if there is some reason that you think the power rule isn't really applying as much or in your case it seems like a lot of the per performance is actually spread out across um more than just a small sliver of the posts then it could be that you've tracked the code to LinkedIn and there's something that uh you know we should have a discussion about that can help me with my profile as well. But that is a really interesting topic and I was curious if any of the listeners have thoughts on on that as well if especially if you're a creator who has posted on LinkedIn and seen uh a lot of success not just from a few posts but from more of a even distribution across your profile. Um this is really interesting Daniel. I also want to dig in because I think people will find this interesting. How on earth do you have so many ideas for your posts? You are one of the few people I know and I know a lot of creators who is seemingly an unlimited source of content ideas. Tell me a little bit more about how you come up with your ideas. What is your process? And when it comes to actually writing a post, how are you doing that from ideiation all the way to hitting posts on LinkedIn? You're right, Matt. I have a million different post ideas. When I was first talking to Matt, you know, I showed him my doc of 20, you know, just 20 pages of Google Docs of, you know, hooks and post ideas I had. And little does he know, that was actually one of three, Matt. So, I've got a lot of I I have so many different post ideas every day. As soon as I have something, I'll just write it down. either send myself a text or a notes app and once I get home that day, I'm just writing everything down. If I can post 10 times a day and had enough time for that, I would. And I think the key to having a bunch of post ideas is to be doing a bunch of things. So, when someone uh messages me on LinkedIn and is like, "Oh, let's chat." It's like, "All right, I'll do it." You know, maybe I get a post idea out of this. Or if someone asks me to just get coffee, it's like, "Okay, I'll I'll think about it." Um or, you know, just to be doing a bunch of things. And one of those great things is also commenting on posts because it gets you thinking you know what what can be my angle on this or you know a bunch of other stuff. So the key to having a lot of posting ideas for me is to be doing a lot of things whether it's commenting, walking, whatever. But also I think it's to also be practicing writing content because you know just like anything else just like going to the gym which I should be doing more of. The more you do the better you get at it. And I think the same does go with ideiating. So that's kind of how I come up with a bunch of my post ideas. I just am doing a bunch of stuff and I'm fortunate that like I just have a bunch of random ideas. Here's how I write the LinkedIn post. First, I'll take one of the hooks and I have to be super passionate about it because if I'm not, you know, I have a million different other ideas I can choose from. So, I'll take one of those hook ideas and then uh I'll put it into typgrow.com/create so I can see how it would look as if I were reading it on LinkedIn because LinkedIn's native post editor isn't that good. So, I'll take that hook, write out the rest of what I think should be the post and also put at the bottom my main takeaway from this post. So, what I want the audience to know after reading this because when they're done reading it, you don't want the audience to just think, oh, I wasted 30 seconds of my life. What am I supposed to do with this information? Like, Texas Roads is a cool company. Like, what what should I do with it? So, you know, come up with the takeaway, come away with the body, and then I'll typically try use AI in this step, whether it's Catchy BT or Stanley, which I've been uh loving using, and using that to trim the posts. And by trimming, I mean to try to like reduce some of the the fluff and try to make it as concise as possible because any word that you can remove from your post that you don't need, you're actually doing your audience a favor because you really want to value their time. Um, so you know, you really want to make sure the post is is clean and trim. So now that I've come up with the hook idea, flushed it out, trimmed it with AI, that's when I really dial in the last amount of time for the hook because if they don't click, they don't do it. So whether I'm making sure the Figma's looking good, that's actually where I do all the um, you know, hook ones, I call them, and then I'm also editing hook two in that typo to make sure it looks good. So, my total workflow is take a hook that I'm really passionate about, flush out the post idea with a takeaway, trim it using AI, typically Stanley and ChachiBT, and then really editing both of those hooks to make sure they're pristine. And I forgot my last hack, and that's to look at it with a fresh pair of eyes because when you're spending an hour on something, you miss things that you didn't see when you come back 3 hours or the next day. So, after I've uh done the hook, written it out with the takeaway, trimmed it using AI, really edited with the hooks, and then looked at it with a fresh pair of eyes, then it's ready to hit post, and passes the Danny G, let's call it sixstep checklist of approval. So, that's how I write LinkedIn post. Matt, love it. We got to coin that term, the Danny G., you know, that could honestly be like a guide, one of those. Although, sorry. And what I mean by comment is like, you know, you've been seeing so many of these comment for this IB guide or consulting guide or whatever it is, but I actually have been seeing LinkedIn nuke that meta randomly. Like I saw Brooks, who's the CEO of Recruit You, post something with one of those like investment banking guides. It actually had a lot less likes than comments that had like 2,000 likes and 200 comments. I'm going to have to put it on on the screen here for those watching on video, but it was crazy. I think LinkedIn's nuking it. And maybe if we ever have Brooks in the show, he'll be able to tell us how many impressions that photo had. Yeah, if I had to coin that checklist, I probably wouldn't do a comment for the for the guide. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think the comment word for whatever guide or PDF or uh freebie that the creator is giving away. I wonder if we're sort of approaching the tail end of that tactic as being effective because now audiences one is like LinkedIn could be nuking it. Two is audiences are probably getting used to seeing things like that. And so, uh, I do still think those posts will be successful if they are written in the right way and if the resource is actually high value and something that the audience actually wants. However, it's I I think like all things when it comes to growth marketing, uh growth hacks, whatever. Typically, in the beginning, there's a very effective tactic and then a bunch of people come in and do the same thing. There's a bunch of copycats and it kind of floods the market and then the tactic itself becomes a little bit less effective. And it'll be interesting to see, especially over the next couple months, if we'll continue to see these types of comment word and I'll give you this guide posts continuing to go viral or if they will be nuked by the algorithm or people will just engage less. Um, so really really interesting thought there. You also mentioned you do use a little bit of chat GBT, a little bit of Stanley um on your posts as sort of a secondary step after you've written out most of the post. As you know, a lot of people are seemingly averse to AI written content and LinkedIn is no exception. I think there's definitely a lot of AI generated content on the platform in the native LinkedIn posting functionality. I think there's actually a button in there where you can literally rewrite with AI. And Daniel, I don't know if you've played around with that. I tried it maybe once or twice, wasn't really too happy with it. So, I continue to just write most of the posts myself and then use chat GBT to help me refine the language. But what are your general thoughts on AI written content uh especially on LinkedIn? So to uh first talk about the LinkedIn AI editor, I've tried that before and don't think it it was good at all for me honestly. I love LinkedIn, but I think the editor really isn't great. And I think it's interesting to think about LinkedIn editing their own content. Uh like an interesting just thought in general. It didn't really work as well for me as as other tools. And I think that's probably a good thing to be honest. I don't want LinkedIn to have a super good AI editor that's like has the algorithm in mind. And I don't know if that's originally what they did, but not a huge fan of that. Anyways, I actually think AI content can be good for a lot of people because it teaches them what good content is. So, if you use Chat GBT and write a LinkedIn post and it flops and gets zero views, then it's like, okay, this is what not to do. I think the way AI content gets bad is if you're not learning from it. Like everyone's going to write a post using chat GBT, post it on LinkedIn and see what happens. Then you know the person reading it is going to be like, "Oh, this sounds AI generated. I'm just going to scroll past it." And that's a good learning for you. I think we should be using AI as kind of like, you know, our just like Google Docs or Spellcheck or whatever. I like to use it just as a as a lawn mower, as a trimmer. Trim it and then, you know, put it out there. So, I think AI are going to make post better in the long run because for some of the people that abuse it, it will tank their audience, but those creators will also be able to learn why AI generated content 100% of the way at least isn't going to do well. So, overall, I like to see the positive and the optimistic side of things. And I think there is an optimistic side of using AI to write content on LinkedIn. 100%. I agree with you. I think the whole AI written content is horrible and you should never use AI to help you with content creation. I think that perspective is a little bit constrained and I think it's not so black and white as people make it seem. As with most things in life, it's nuanced and I think there is a good way there is a there's a good and a bad way to use AI in your content creation process. If you're using it to help you improve the structure of your post or even help you with some of the ideation, I think that that makes a lot of sense and we shouldn't just intentionally handicap ourselves by not using it. On the other hand, I think it's important to still continue to write in your voice and to humanize the content in a way that is unique to you, right? Because at the end of the day, building a personal brand on LinkedIn means that when your audience sees your content, they can instantly recognize that, oh, this is Daniel or hey, this is Matt. And if everyone just uses AI and relies on it solely, then everyone starts to sound the same. And I think this is kind of where a lot of the AI doomers uh are coming from, where they think, you know, it's just going to be the, you know, dead internet theory AI just interacting with AI, right? like AI written comments on AI written posts like are there actual humans anymore? But I think the smart people, the smart creators, what they're going to do is they're going to leverage AI to improve their productivity and to help them to ideulate faster and to get more data more quickly on what works and they're still going to inject a human element into the content because at the end of the day, that human element is what is going to resonate the most with the audience. But I think that's going to be a challenge that going into the next five years, uh, people are going to have to figure out, right? Because more and more content is going to be AI generated. So, how do you actually humanize that content consistently and at scale is going to be an interesting question that I'm honestly fascinated to see how things are going to play out. But that kind of leads me to my my next question, Daniel, which is just generally, where do you think LinkedIn is headed as a platform? We've kind of discussed this offline about how, you know, there's a lot changing and video hasn't yet taken off and I'm just curious and I think the audience will find it interesting as well. Where do you think LinkedIn is headed? I'm trying to think of how big I want to I want to make a claim here. I I I really think LinkedIn is going to be the fastest growing social network, at least by a percentage of their total base in the next decade. Like I think Tik Tok's seen almost like a lot of plateau of growth. Same with Instagram. Same with the Blue app. Um, and really LinkedIn is going to be where a lot of this growth is driving because more and more people are being entrepreneurs. More and more people want to work for themselves and more and more people are going professional and going for more professional jobs and for all that you need LinkedIn. Like my grandparents weren't on LinkedIn when they had a job and he had, you know, he was the vice president of a hospital, whatever he was. Now, uh, my dad is on LinkedIn and those future grandparents are going to be on LinkedIn. That's almost like more generations that are being on LinkedIn. I see now middle schoolers and high schoolers that are on LinkedIn. Like, I I just think the base of LinkedIn is going to grow more and more to the point where it's not just a place to find jobs and create a network. It's a place to build a brand just like Instagram or just like Facebook. And for the actual medium or whatever, I'm not sure what that'll be. Um, I'm curious to see if video will take off or not. I know right now, at least from my content and the people I've been seeing and talking to. Video hasn't been working that well for them. And I think the UI of of video definitely can improve. When you look at something like reals or Tik Tok, they're light years behind that or even shorts. But I if really if I had to bet on a social media platform for the next decade, I'm betting on LinkedIn. Love that. I'm also 100% all in on LinkedIn. I think this platform has a ton of potential and obviously we're totally not biased because we have a podcast about LinkedIn, but I'm very bullish on the platform. I think it has a ton of value that people haven't really tapped into yet. Uh especially as we talked about B2B owners and founders and business owners and execs, there's just a lot more that you can do with the platform than just finding a job, right? That's a very limited slice of the pie. And I'm really excited to see how things shake up, especially with video because as a YouTube creator, first and foremost, I think that if they can figure out video and if they can get more people to engage with the video feed on LinkedIn and also to get more creators to post more video content on LinkedIn, there's so much potential there because video is the number one format, especially long form video for building trust with your audience and your customer base. And as awesome as written content and written posts are, I think that the execs and the founders that can effectively leverage LinkedIn's full spectrum of media, whether it's like text, image, and long form and short form video, those guys are going to absolutely kill it in the next couple years. But final question just to wrap things up then Daniel for today's conversation. What's a LinkedIn conspiracy you believe in even though there's no data to back it up? Before I give you my long- aaited conspiracy, I got to talk up the LinkedIn platform some more. When I was on Tik Tok in 2021, I was getting clowned for being on Tik Tok. Rightfully so. And at the time, it was mainly a time for, you know, Tik Tockers to do some dances to some songs. But then, you know, entrepreneurs started building their businesses on Tik Tok and building personal brands. Now, you can watch the news on Tik Tok or watch a 10-minute video on Tik Tok. And my grandpa is now on Tik Tok. My grandpa right now is not on LinkedIn. LinkedIn started as this B2B networking platform. Now, it's a place to find a job or whatever it is. And the use cases are going to slowly be expanding and expanding and expanding. Right now, it's mainly just text or text plus image. they're starting to roll out video. Maybe they'll start to roll out longer form videos and then eventually my grandpa will be on LinkedIn before he knows it. So, I think just like we saw the rise of Tik Tok, we're still going to see the same rise of LinkedIn and we're going to get the same first movers advantage that at least I got on Tik Tok uh four years ago. Now, we're get the same thing on LinkedIn. So, to anyone listening to this, I really believe that posting on LinkedIn can be the highest leverage thing over other social media platforms. Now, moving on to my LinkedIn conspiracy. My LinkedIn conspiracy is that links tank your views. Now, I have no data backing this up except for some of my personal post that I believe links don't do as well. And I believe this because LinkedIn wants you to stay on their platform as much as possible. So, that's why I think that LinkedIn would tank uh post with links as opposed to post with not links because then you'll keep scrolling as opposed to clicking and leaving the page. Um, but that's my LinkedIn conspiracy. Yeah, that's a really interesting one. If anyone listening in the audience has any data around that or has experimented with posts that have links and notice certain patterns, please drop a comment and let us know. We're always looking to nerd out about LinkedIn and what's working, what's not. But that wraps up today's episode of the connection accepted pod. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.