130k YouTuber explains why LinkedIn beats YouTube

Transcription

Matt: Why are you posting on LinkedIn when you have a YouTube channel with over 100,000 subscribers? Daniel: Oh, dude, this is when I think I really turned into, not a LinkedIn power user, but like a LinkedIn lurker. The consultant in you is gonna appreciate the structure I've brought for this interview today. You've now pivoted from BCG to Google, you've landed a really hard strategy job to get, and you're posting on LinkedIn a lot more now. I have a lot of friends who are founders in the software space. A lot of them have come to me and told me that, hey, I've barely been posting on LinkedIn. I know I need to, and I think there's a lot of potential there. Can you help me with that? Matt: All right, 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 as possible. But to kick things off, we're going to be just interviewing each other, and so you can get a better sense of who we are and what perspectives we bring outside of just our LinkedIn profiles. So Daniel, take it away. Daniel: Thank you, Matt. The consultant in you is going to appreciate the structure I've brought for this interview today. We're going to start in 2017, then go through five big career infinity stones. For each stone, we're gonna not just talk about the achievement itself, but also how you've leveled up your LinkedIn at each stage. The goal is for anyone listening, whether you're a student or a CEO, to walk away with a specific action they can take away today. Sound good? Matt: Sounds amazing. Daniel: Perfect. So 2017 is when you joined LinkedIn. How old were you, and what led you to join LinkedIn? Matt: Gosh, 2017, that's a while ago. I think I was, I just graduated high school, so I was, you know, a freshman in college. And at the time, I honestly, I think I just wanted an internship, which is why I created a LinkedIn profile. I don't even think I had a profile picture at the time. It was super bare bones, probably just like my high school, the school that I was at at the time, Emory. And, you know, maybe like a little bit of detail around what I was studying, but at the time, I didn't even know what I wanted to major in. So, super bare bones, had zero internships as well. So definitely wasn't filling up the LinkedIn profile or optimizing it in the way that, you know, these days I tell students to, but yeah, super, super bare bones. And honestly, I had no idea what I was doing at the time. Daniel: That makes sense. So flash forward to Georgetown, you're now starting to be a sophomore, junior, recruiting for that big internship. How are you using LinkedIn as a student at Georgetown? Matt: Oh dude, this is when I think I really turned into, not a LinkedIn power user, but like a LinkedIn lurker because I wasn't posting anything, but I was on the website like 12 hours a day, constantly looking at people's profiles. I was like hell-bent on landing a job on Wall Street in investment banking. Matt: And so by having those experiences on my profile, it gave me a form of credibility, you know, when I reached out to these professionals. They got a snapshot of who I was and what I was aiming for, which made my outreach efforts just a bit more cohesive. I think that authenticity really played a big role because it shows that you're not just talking the talk, but you're also walking the walk in terms of aligning your activities with your career goals. This is something I think everyone should consider when building their presence on LinkedIn, especially as a student. Matt: And so there's a good likelihood that if I agree to hop on a call with him, he's going to have something good to say, or at least he'll have relevant questions to the job that I'm in. So I think the takeaway here is to put as much experience, even if it's just little club experience on your profile while you're at school as much as you can, because you can relate as much as possible to the people you're talking to and also increase your odds at landing that dream job of yours. Is that right? Daniel: A hundred percent. I think if you're a student right now and you're listening to this, and maybe you probably feel like you don't have a ton of valuable internship experience, or maybe you don't think that you have a brand name to put on your profile. That doesn't mean you shouldn't go ahead and proactively just start updating your LinkedIn profile with the experiences that you've had thus far, you know, there's no experience that's too small, I think to include on the profile. Really what it comes down to is being selective. Um, and this could be a whole nother conversation, Daniel, but like curation of your LinkedIn profile, depending on what your end goal is, is an interesting topic because depending on what your goal is, you can take the same set of experiences and put them on your LinkedIn profile. But the way that you describe what you did at each of those experiences and the way that you even write your bio when you tie those experiences together in a, almost a story that by the end of the story explains why you want to do the thing that you are pursuing is almost like an art in and of itself. Matt: Yeah, I think you're right. I remember when I was first getting on LinkedIn, I didn't know what to put on and I even just put on some minor volunteer experience I did in the community and I still have that on today. So moving on to close out the Georgetown chapter, we're using LinkedIn or a Georgetown similar alumni database to do a lot of this networking. Daniel: Yeah, so Georgetown does have an alumni database and it's a pretty robust one, especially because I was looking to go into uh investment banking in New York, which was a well-trodden path. So there were plenty of alumni, but for some reason I just didn't really leverage it that much, probably to my detriment. I just felt that LinkedIn had a sufficient amount of professionals on there already and it was easy enough for me to just go and do a filtered search and, you know, find people who had gone to Georgetown, who were currently at a set of maybe 10 to 12 different banks that I was looking at. You know, just running that quick filtered search already gave me a ton of profiles. And so I never really felt the need to go look at my alumni database. Um, I also just felt like if I was going to reach these people, it would be easier to reach them either on LinkedIn or emailing them. But sometimes with alumni databases, like you don't know if the information is even up to date. Matt: Whereas I felt like, this is anecdotal, of course. I felt like professionals in, in finance would be, would make sure that their profiles were up to date on LinkedIn. Daniel: I totally agree. And I had the same experience at Brown. Brown touted their Brown Connect, but all my friends that, you know, have jobs at places like Morgan Stanley. Air, Palantir, and Mongo, a lot of these big firms, they never really ended up using Brown Connect, and we all were just LinkedIn, and I'm sure using it the same way you did. So now closing out the Georgetown chapter, we're moving on to Infinity Stone number two of investment banking. Once you land that job and are starting it, how are you using LinkedIn then? Are you still in your lurking phase, or how are you approaching your use of the platform? Matt: Yeah, I'd say probably in my first couple months on the job, I wasn't really on LinkedIn at all. I was just so focused on getting up to speed and also just transitioning into living in the city. There was just a lot going on in my life at the time, and I wasn't actively looking to find my next job. So I didn't really go on LinkedIn much, to be honest, in the first few months. Now, there is this interesting thing that goes on in investment banking, which is for people who want to go into roles like private equity or hedge funds, there is a very accelerated recruiting process. And basically, as a first-year investment banking analyst, you start getting emails and outreach from private equity and hedge fund recruiters, like almost a couple months after you hit the desk. And these days, I think it might actually be even earlier than that, but for my case, it was very shortly after, like less than six months after we hit the desk, there were already recruiters emailing us, all of my analyst class, saying, hey, are you interested in interviewing at X firm? Like, there's a bunch of processes that are about to kick off soon. And so at that time, I was like, not really sure if I wanted to go into private equity, but figured it was worth just having some of these conversations. And, you know, a lot of my peers were doing it as well. So I got more active on LinkedIn then. And it was a lot of just researching different firms, looking at people from my bank who had gone on to be private equity professionals in other firms and reaching out to a couple of them, of course, having a few conversations, just doing my own diligence to see if this was the kind of role that I wanted to pursue next. I think the other thing that I started doing a little bit more of was just like reacting to people's job updates. So previously, I hadn't done anything active on the platform, but now I, whenever I would see someone that I knew in my professional network move on to a new job, I would like or comment on their post and just push their post a little bit further out. But that was about still the extent to my LinkedIn involvement. Daniel: That sounds to start right with the private equity timelines too. Matt: I have some friends that are even during their junior internship having calls about these private equity jobs. They keep on doing them earlier and earlier. It's crazy. So you decide to pivot, not to private equity, but to consulting. How then are you using LinkedIn to help you pivot career paths? Daniel: Yeah, I would say I was using it in the same way that I had used it to land a job in investment banking. The difference though now was I was already a working professional as opposed to a student. And so I think there's a slight nuance there because as a student, it was harder to get people on the phone because I had very little professional experience. And for them, it's like they are probably getting reached out to by, I don't know, tens of hundreds of students every couple of months versus how many people are getting outreach by someone working at an investment bank who's looking to pivot into consulting. Then the pool narrows down significantly. And so for me, I felt like I took less of a volume approach when I was trying to pivot into consulting than I had when I was trying to get into investment banking. Now, because I was taking less of a volume approach, I could afford to be more personalized with the messaging and in the outreach. I could be just a little bit more thoughtful, which I think did help out because I was able to have a number of really great conversations with people at firms like McKinsey, Bain, BCG. And these people ultimately played a key role in helping me to land my job at BCG. So I would say I used it very similarly, but focused less on a volume spray and pray approach this time and was a little bit more targeted about my messaging. Matt: So is the takeaway here that one, it's easier for you to get on the phone with recruiters and change career paths once you have a job. And also that quality over quantity works when trying to pivot careers. Daniel: 100%. I think, and I think that people underestimate the power of personalizing a message and just taking an extra 30 seconds to really think about who this person is that you're trying to reach out to. And you'd be surprised because I get a lot of LinkedIn DMs or messages from people, and it's very easy to notice if they haven't even looked at my profile or if they send a message and it's very clearly a generic message that's been sent to hundreds of people versus when someone says something like very specific to what I'm working on or asks a question that clearly demonstrates that they've taken a little bit more time and are a little bit more thoughtful about their outreach. I think it actually goes a really long way. And I also think that less people are doing that than you think. If there's one takeaway from this podcast, I think you hit it right on the head, Matt, that personalization can really unlock so many more doors for you. I see this also with messages I get. I think this can expand beyond LinkedIn to, you know, your posts across all platforms and also emails, whether cold or not. Daniel: So moving on for the consultant or banker listening to this, that's working 80 hours a week, just like you were at the time and is just trying to inch their way on LinkedIn, trying to make those high leverage moves like you did to either switch path to private equity or consulting. What's the highest leverage five minute thing they can do every day on LinkedIn to try to help them pivot careers faster? Matt: 100%. This is a great question. I think if you only had five minutes a day to be on LinkedIn, the number one thing I would do is find people that are doing the thing that you want to do, but don't just send them a connection request and leave it at that. React with their content if they're posting, even if it's just liking or commenting and send them a personalized message when they do accept the request. Tell them how much you are excited by whatever they're working on or how you'd love to learn more about, you know, this new project that they've kicked off because it's relevant to the work that you're currently doing at your current job. Small things like that, honestly don't take a ton of time. And if you do it every day, the results just compound like crazy. It's actually insane. I don't know why people just send the connection request and leave it at that because when you connect with someone, it means that there's some value that can be gained from making that connection, right? The whole point of LinkedIn is it's a networking platform for professionals. At least that's what it started out as. And what's the point if everyone's just connecting and building the network, if they're not actually going to be engaging in that social aspect of it, right? Sounds super simple, but that if I had only five minutes a day is what I would do on LinkedIn. Daniel: So the takeaway here is that you want to find someone that you really look up to in their career and you want their job. And then you react to their content and then send them a personalized message. I just saw Peter Walker, who's the head of insights at Carta and is really a blueprint for how companies will, I think will grow on LinkedIn. He was talking about this on a podcast that he reads all the comments and I'm sure your favorite person that you're trying to get a job with or a job like is also doing the same. So don't just react, comment, and then send them a personalized message and you're going to exponentially increase your chances of a response. Matt: Moving on, Matt, you've now landed a job at BCG in MBB firm, which is one of the hardest jobs to get in America, earning you your career infinity stone number three. So now you're at BCG. You're also making YouTube content where you have now over a hundred thousand subscribers. What was the internal conversation you had with yourself to start making content? Daniel: That's a really good question. Matt: And I've been asked this many, many times, what compelled me to start posting videos online when I was still fully employed and honestly, in a very traditionally successful career path, you know, not just me saying this, but I think a lot of people would agree. And I feel, I just want to say I was. very grateful for the position that I found myself in before I started making content. Getting into an MBB firm, it definitely requires you to put in the work, but there's also an element of luck involved because there's just so many qualified people that could do the job, but only a select number of spots. But at the same time, I was also on the personal front, figuring out what I actually wanted to do with the rest of my life and career. And I think up until that point, I'd always focused on doing the right thing and really optimizing for, you know, the most prestigious or the most impressive accomplishment. And I hadn't really thought about what I actually enjoyed doing personally, which I was two years into the job at that point, or I was two years into my career, around two years into my career at that point. And I came to the realization that I really wanted to just be a little bit more creative. Being creative is something that, as a kid, I had done a lot of. I grew up playing lots of musical instruments, doing a lot of arts, playing lots of sports. And I feel like as I progressed into college and into my early career, I forced myself into the mold that society almost wanted me to go into. And so it was a little bit of rebelliousness of wanting to do something different, but also chasing after something that excited me, which was wanting to create something. And at the time, I had no idea what this thing was going to be, but YouTube had always been interesting to me. I love YouTube. I've grown up watching lots of YouTube videos, and I get it. Yeah, I'm sure you can relate, Daniel. And there was a moment where I weighed the risks of, you know, yeah, I might get ridiculed by people, people at work, people outside of work, but what am I going to regret more? Not trying this and always wondering what it could have turned out to be, or just continuing down this current path where I know exactly what's going to happen. It's not going to be bad. It's not going to be like, I will be unsuccessful or I'll be a failure, right? I'll still definitely have that social validation and, you know, the admiration of a lot of peers, but personally, I will always wonder what would have happened if I had tried to do the thing that I wanted to do. And so that was the conversation that I had with myself, and ultimately I decided, I'm just going to start doing this. I'm never going to feel fully ready to do it. You just have to start now. And looking back now, it's been over two years of posting consistently on the channel, and it's been incredible to grow it, obviously, to 130,000, I think we're at today. Daniel: But the biggest thing that I've learned is, one, you have to take big risks if you want to see big rewards. And two, like, no one's going to believe that you can make that thing happen more than you. So if other people are doubters or haters, like, that is actually completely rational that they would be doubting you more, because, like, nobody will ever believe that you can make it into a success more than you can. But anyways, I know this is kind of a, not as related to LinkedIn, but I will, I'll stop there. Matt: No, I think it's very important. I think the takeaways here are, one, to believe in yourself, and two, to check in with yourself. See if you're really enjoying what you're doing. And if you love something, you should make time for it and see where it goes. I'm sure as you're creating these YouTube videos, as you alluded to earlier, you're getting ridiculed. When I started posting on LinkedIn, you know, my friends would make jokes about it. And, you know, it's sometimes tough to deal with it first. And still is, even with me today, when, you know, you're talking to a screen and you don't always get to see the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that are subscribing to you. How do you deal with that, you know, fear of embarrassment or feel of failure when posting on social media? Daniel: I've been asked this question a few times before, and I don't think that you fully ever tune out the hate or the ridicule. I, you know, when I started and I had probably 200 subscribers, I remember going to dinner with a friend, a good friend of mine, but at the time I mentioned that I had this YouTube channel. I had just started and I'd posted a couple of videos already. And I just remember him sort of laughing a little bit when I mentioned it to him. And it was almost, it was not that he didn't like me as a person, but it was like a laugh of disbelief of, oh my gosh, like you would do this? Like you of all people would try to be a YouTuber? And that put a little bit of a chip on my shoulder in the early days. Over time, I grew to be less bothered by the doubts or the haters. And even today, like I will still see comments on my YouTube channel where people will say things that are completely unrelated to the videos that I make. People will say things about my appearance. People will say all sorts of things. And the important thing here is to understand that the type of person that comments negative things on the internet on a complete stranger that they don't know's pieces of content clearly has something going on in their lives that, you know, is influencing them and causing them to wanna just lash out and hurt someone. So don't take it personally, but I think as a creator, I've realized that it's just par for the course. The bigger that you get, the more viral you get, the law of large numbers just dictates that if you reach a hundred thousand people, then there's probably someone out there that just has nothing positive to contribute. Matt: So, yeah, it's just par for the course, honestly. That's really powerful. And thank you for sharing that story. I see the two takeaways here for one, to be to not take the criticism personally, and two, to check in with yourself. See if you're really enjoying what you're doing. And if you love something, you should make time for it and see where it goes. I'm sure as you're creating these YouTube videos, as you alluded to earlier, you're getting ridiculed. When I started posting on LinkedIn, you know, my friends would make jokes about it and, you know, it's sometimes tough to deal with it at first. And still is, even with me today, when, you know, you're, you're talking to a screen and you don't always get to see the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that are subscribing to you. How do you deal with that, you know, fear of embarrassment or feel of failure when posting on social media? Daniel: I've been asked this question a few times before, and I don't think that you fully ever tune out the hate or the ridicule. I, you know, when I started and I had probably 200 subscribers, I remember going to dinner with a friend, a good friend of mine, but at the time I mentioned that I had this YouTube channel. I had just started and I'd posted a couple of videos already. And I just remember him sort of laughing a little bit when I mentioned it to him. And it was almost, it was not that he didn't like me as a person, but it was like a laugh of disbelief of, oh my gosh, like you would do this? Like you of all people would try to be a YouTuber. And that put a little bit of a chip on my shoulder in the early days. Over time, I grew to be less bothered by the doubts or the haters. And, and even today, like I will still see, see comments on my YouTube channel where people will say things that are completely unrelated to the, the videos that I make. People will say things about my appearance. People will say all sorts of things. And the important thing here is to understand that the type of person that comments negative things on the internet on a complete stranger that they don't know's pieces of content clearly has something going on in their lives that, you know, is influencing them and causing them to, to wanna just lash out and, and hurt someone. So don't take it personally, but I think as a creator, I've realized that it's just par for the course. The bigger that you get, the more viral you get, the law of large numbers just dictates that if you reach a hundred thousand people, then there's probably someone out there that just has nothing positive to contribute. Matt: So yeah, it's just par for the course, honestly. That's really powerful. And thank you for sharing that story. I see the two takeaways here for one, to be to not take the criticism personally and two, to check in with yourself. See if you're really enjoying what you're doing. And if you love something, you should make time for it and see where it goes. Daniel: I'm sure as you're creating these YouTube videos, as you alluded to earlier, you're getting ridiculed. When I started posting on LinkedIn, you know, my friends would make jokes about it and, you know, it's, it's sometimes tough to deal with it first. And still is even with me today, when, you know, you're, you're talking to a screen and you don't always get to see the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that are subscribing to you. How do you deal with that? You know, fear of embarrassment or feel of failure when posting on social media. Matt: I've been asked this question a few times before, and I don't think that you fully ever tune out the hate or the ridicule. I, you know, when I started and I had probably 200 subscribers, I remember going to dinner. Yeah, I've gotten this question quite a bit in the last few months, especially as I've been posting more actively on LinkedIn. The short answer is I still plan to continue posting on my YouTube channel. However, I want to keep it separate from my LinkedIn presence because the LinkedIn is really a marketing channel for my new marketing agency, which I've spun up in the last couple of months, focused on B2B founders and execs. And what I've realized from my personal and professional experience is that LinkedIn is a very untapped goldmine for a lot of B2B businesses. A lot of people are not using it at its full potential. And I also think that the platform hasn't reached its full potential either, which I'm happy to elaborate on in detail as well. For example, video, they recently introduced to the platform, I think it was maybe last year, don't quote me on that, but it still hasn't really taken off. And I honestly can't count even on one hand, the number of people that I've talked to who've said that they consistently use the LinkedIn video feed feature. And I've also posted video myself with some of my posts and tried to see if there's a significant difference between the performance of posts that have pictures versus video. And I honestly haven't seen a noticeable difference at all. It may be that my sample size is small, but I think there's a ton of potential in long form video, which is something that I learned from building my own YouTube channel because it builds a insane amount of trust with the audience. There is no better way to build trust with your audience or your customer base than long form video. Sure, you might not have the reach of, say, a TikTok or a Instagram, but people will buy from you if you're a business because they've seen you, they've heard you, they actually can like understand how you think. And so that's why I also launched my B2B marketing agency Forge, because I have a lot of friends who are founders in the software space, friends building agencies in B2B, and a lot of them have come to me and told me that, hey, I've barely been posting on LinkedIn and I know I need to, and I think there's a lot of potential there. Daniel: Can you help me with that? LinkedIn really excites me right now because I think it's a platform that has a ton of potential for B2B and people aren't really using it to its full potential yet. So there's two things, right? There's the people that are on it aren't using it to its full potential, but also the company itself hasn't yet figured out the best way to promote things like video. And so I think once, if you're able to get both of these to the optimal state and really maximize the potential, there's just going to be so much value that businesses and founders can get out of it. Matt: I couldn't agree more with what you're saying. To me, the main takeaway here is that LinkedIn is a large and growing market and that you want to help people take advantage and grow in this large and growing market. So a few more things I want to take away from this, then add to, is that I think long form views are much different than short form. Colin and Samir talk about this all the time, that the quality of the view of a long form is so much different than a TikTok. And I think LinkedIn is more that long form audience. You're writing longer, more coherent thoughts as opposed to just a TikTok that you're on for 10 seconds. A LinkedIn post, you typically, you might spend a minute on and leave a comment on. Daniel: Moving on, why are you so convinced that LinkedIn is this big and growing market? Matt: Yeah, so I think that if we zoom out, B2B marketing has always been sort of siloed relative to, you know, its counterpart B2C marketing, right? Marketing to consumers is historically has been viewed as very different than marketing to businesses. You know, B2B is seen as more boring, a little bit more logical, whereas B2C is like, let's appeal to the emotions and, you know, let's be very flashy. Let's get as much attention as possible. And these days, especially if you're tapped into the Silicon Valley, you know, narrative, you'll understand companies like Cluely, for example, that are known for going viral using like rage bait tactics, for example, saying things that make people stop and think, what the heck? Like, what the heck did I just see? And those are very effective tactics for engagement farming. But on B2B, I think a lot of B2B owners, business owners are hesitant to adopt those kind of tactics for good reason, because in B2B, you're usually trying to market to an executive or a decision maker who controls the budget at a large Fortune 500 company, for example. But that said, I think there is a shift that's happening to B2B marketing and people are slowly realizing that the decision makers are people too. And so the same, some of the same things that work in B2C, like being really authentic, authenticity also works in B2B marketing. And this is why, on the consumer side, UGC, user generated content, works so well because it's like very authentic. It's someone making content about a product that the consumer can watch that video and think, oh, this person is just like me. Daniel: And on the B2B side, I think the equivalent of UGC is something like founder led content where founders are now coming out into the public and posting about things that they're struggling with, the challenges that they face, not just the highlights or, you know, product updates, for example. I think that's a really important trend that is only just starting and people are more and more founders are realizing how powerful it is to build a personal brand on LinkedIn, especially if they're a B2B founder. And so that's why I'm so excited about where the platform is headed. I also think, you know, a very small percentage of the user base of LinkedIn historically has been active. There's some stat that's been thrown around. I think this is a little bit out of date, but it was like less than 1% or less than 5% of the entire monthly active user base on LinkedIn actually has ever posted consistently. I think that number has probably grown a little bit now, and I'd be curious what it is today, but I think it's also indicative of this trend that people, more and more people are realizing just, hey, how much of an opportunity LinkedIn is. Matt: First about, about the stat. I think I've seen that stat too. And I think it is somewhat accurate because if you think about how many impressions you're getting versus likes on a photo, you know, it'll typically be like a thousand X of number of engagements between likes, comments, reposts versus, uh, you know, uh, an impression, which is such a big difference versus a platform like TikTok or Instagram. And I also think you also brought up a really cool point to me, and that's that B2B marketing, I think has been seen as marketing to robots. And the way you're approaching marketing is more as marketing to humans. And these humans that you're trying to market to in B2B, they aren't on TikTok. They aren't on Instagram, but they're on LinkedIn and trying to make an authentic human connection with them is what's working for you and Forge. And you want to help a lot of other companies do the same. I want to now get into some tactical advice and get super nerdy about the best tips for LinkedIn. So what is your workflow of when you're writing a LinkedIn post for your personal account? We're going to get into how you write it for others after. Daniel: Yeah, so typically I try to start with the idea. Now I get ideas from all sorts of places. A great source of inspiration is just my own LinkedIn feed. So if I'm scrolling LinkedIn and I see something that makes me stop, makes me think, and I like that post made by some person, I will think about, okay, is there a way for me to add my own spin to this? Alternatively, I also spend a lot of time on other social media platforms. So X, for example, is a really great platform if you want to get the very latest in the tech startup scene. Daniel: And sometimes it is helpful to see what people are talking about on other platforms because it may not have made its way to LinkedIn yet if it's very fresh on X, for example. Another way is just through conversations with people in my daily life. I'm friends with a lot of creators and founders, and I have regular check-ins with my founder friends where we just chat about different things that are keeping them up at night. And a lot of those conversations actually inform a lot of the content that I post, not just on LinkedIn, but even with YouTube, for example, where a lot of my YouTube video ideas come from conversations with people in my audience. And I think this is a very useful way to validate certain ideas and also just like get your creative juices flowing, is just have a lot of conversations with interesting people, because through those conversations, you'll realize there are different threads and different ideas that can turn into posts. And so that's kind of the ideation process for me. Now, once I decide I want to write about a certain idea, then I'll go into a running Google doc that I have for all my LinkedIn drafts. And typically, there's, I want to say, a three to four-step structure that I like to follow. One is, obviously, you need to come up with a good hook. And two is, you need to flesh that hook out a little bit more and then somehow transition it into the third part, which is the conclusion, which is usually some kind of takeaway or value-driven piece of advice, or you might have like a call to action in there as well. But yeah, as long as you have those three components, that's how I think through the writing of the actual post. And I spend the most time probably on the hook. And the reason for this is because the hook, I believe, contributes to 80% of the outcome of the post. Because most people, candidly, they're only going to spend a few seconds, you know, they're scrolling really quickly through their feed, maybe they're like on the subway, it's busy, whatever. Or maybe they're in the office and they're just scrolling on their laptop, but they're not actually, it's very fast. And so if the hook doesn't immediately cause them to stop and at least think, then they're just going to miss the post. And LinkedIn only shows the first three lines. So, you know, you need to, you need to, they need to click show more to see the rest of the post. So my hypothesis is that for most long-form written posts on LinkedIn, by the time you get to the very bottom of the post, probably like there's only 10% of people actually reading it of all the impressions that you're getting. So that's why it's so important to, to nail the hook so that people keep reading. But yeah, that's my general workflow. You know, when it comes to like using AI as a assistant, I do find it helpful sometimes to run a post through AI and be very targeted about the kind of feedback that you're looking for. Matt: I think there's a lot of pushback against fully AI written content, but I think there's actually a happy middle ground between relying on AI to help you think through ideas and to, you know, write in a more clear way without completely losing your voice or having to write it 100% without the help of that. Daniel: That's awesome. And I want to talk about AI last, but first, my key takeaways of what you said earlier is that 80% of the outcome of a post is the hook. And that makes sense. Like if you don't click on more to read the whole post, no one's going to read it. So you need to have a good hook to make sure people are going to read it. And also another interesting takeaway for me is that for a lot of people, they have trouble coming up with ideas. And the best way to have ideas is to be doing stuff, whether it's talking to your audience, talking to your users, if you're a founder, talking to your colleagues, or even talking to your friends and family, all that will start to engage your content muscle that helps you come up with content ideas. If I had to have two takeaways from what you just said, the first one is spend 80% of your time on your hook, because if they don't click, they don't view the post. And two is to constantly be doing stuff to think of as many hook ideas as possible. Matt: A hundred percent. I think if there's any takeaway from this whole question and this discussion is like in order to create good content, it requires you to go out there and live your life and to do stuff, to take action, to put things into motion, and then to honestly just reflect on everything that's happening and what you've learned. Because the best content that I've found typically comes from people that have done the thing that they're maybe writing about and have taken the time to really reflect, you know, take a step back, identify any trends or themes within the results, and to be really genuine and honest when they describe, you know, what they learned from the experience. I think that is just a huge thing because making content just for the sake of making content doesn't really work well in the long run. It has to be content that's based on something that is, that you've lived through because people can really sense it when it's fake versus something that you've actually, you know, done. And I think those real genuine and authentic stories that we see founders tell on LinkedIn do so well because people recognize that, yeah, this person's lived through that. They have struggled through it and they're giving us a really valuable perspective that we couldn't get elsewhere. So a hundred percent agree with you. You just got to go out there, you know, do interesting stuff and then write about it. Daniel: One of these big takeaways and interesting things you've posted recently just went really viral. Matt: Could you break us through how you wrote that post, how you came up with the idea, and also maybe share your screen if you want to, to show us how many impressions this post has. Daniel: Now I'm assuming you're talking about this post. Yes. Correct. Which got 800 reactions, almost 200,000 impressions. So I'll just dive into the analytics here because I think this will be interesting for the audience. Um, this post, which I posted a week ago, has reached over a hundred thousand people on LinkedIn. I have, oh, interesting. They have analytics around the followers that I've gained from it, but I want to show you the post itself and talk through my thought process when I crafted this one. So this post performed really well, I think for a few reasons. The main reason is that it's just something that most people would not post. And for good reason, right? Because it's a post about a number of things that I've failed at. But second, I think a lot of people resonate with it. And thirdly, it's on a platform like LinkedIn, which is especially buttoned up. So there's that combination of like low competition because less people will be posting things that they've failed at to really resonating with the audience because the examples that are listed here, many people have probably gone through similar experiences. And then three, this is a very anti LinkedIn type of post in a way, because it's going against the meta of people, you know, posting about their new job updates or the promotion that they got and all these positive things. And so I think those three factors have really contributed to this being a post that really stands out in someone's feed. If you think about, you know, 90% of the content that you see on your LinkedIn feed, I'm willing to bet money that if we scroll through 10 posts, 9 out of 10 of them are probably going to be something about someone's job updates or the successes and how much money their company has made or how many new customers they've gained. And only maybe one of them is going to be one or two will be a authentic, genuine post about something that's a little bit less glamorous. So I think a lot of people resonated with this and I truly believe that those three factors that I discussed contributed to this post getting almost $200,000 impressions in a week. And that post alone has driven so much growth to my entire profile. Okay. So as you can see, over the last less than 90 days, I've been posting for a little over two months. I've gained almost a million impressions at this point. And the most recent post actually just hit a record of 70,000 impressions on a single day. Matt: So yeah, it's crazy. The impressions, also the engagement on this post. That's fascinating. And the key takeaway for me is to write something people will resonate with. You want to make sure that it sounds human generated and written so people can resonate with it. Matt: Because the reality is all those nearly 200,000 people that viewed your post and the thousand people that engaged with it, those are real humans on the other side of the screen. I think people think too much of LinkedIn as a game, especially with impressions. But the reality is that those are individual people viewing your stuff. And I think that helps you write better content when you think about it. Daniel: 100%. So when you're writing this content, can you run us through your process of using AI if you use it at all? Matt: 100%. And the last thing I want to touch on about what you just said is that post, I did use AI to help me write it, but I used very minimal AI as well. And I've had a lot of conversations with founders. Actually, the other day I was talking with a founder who had just gone through YC and he was asking me, oh, what are the most effective growth tactics on LinkedIn? And I think the word tactics or growth tactics kind of suggests the idea that posting on LinkedIn is a game. And while there are gamification aspects of it, and I think that's an interesting conversation that we can have separately, it's easy to forget that those people, those impressions, every single one of those is a real person. So I love that you brought that up. Daniel: But to answer your question of how did I write that post and did I use AI in it, it basically started with an idea that I had thought of through a conversation with a friend where we were talking about how the most successful people that we've ever met have actually simply failed more times than everyone else. So on LinkedIn, your profile only shows your successes, but we were just having a funny thought experiment of what if it also showed your failures and you would actually see that people who have really impressive backgrounds have actually also messed up 10 times as much as everyone else. And so that got me thinking, okay, this could be an interesting post idea of talking about the things that I've failed at that you haven't seen on my resume. Matt: I think I may have seen previous posts. I don't know if they were on LinkedIn or somewhere else that had gone viral that had a similar energy to it of like, these are the things that are, these are the unsexy reality, the things I've failed at that no one will talk about. And so very raw, very authentic. And it felt like something that my audience would really resonate with. So I started drafting it up. I honestly just spent, I think, an hour or two thinking about the different failures that I wanted to list. And then I had AI help me to just sort of tighten up the language around each of the failures. But beyond that, very minimal AI usage. I didn't use it to help me come up with the idea. I genuinely do not think that if I asked ChatGPT, help me write an authentic post, I don't think it would have told me to create a post talking about the things I've failed at that you won't see on my resume. So that was 100% written by me. Daniel: No AI needed. I've had the same experience. Matt: So I think the takeaway here is once you have the idea, you spend the most time on the hook and seeing what you want to talk about. You write the post. If you want to use AI, you use it to tighten up the language, make it shorter, which I think AI is great at. And then you go ahead and post it. What's fascinating me about that viral post too is the power rule of content. So that one post for you has around 200,000 impressions. And over the past 60 days, you have 900,000 impressions total. So if you've posted for 60 days straight, that one post did 20% of your total impressions. And I know it's a similar percentage for me too. So I think also a takeaway for the audience is that you want to try to think about each post almost like a VC bet or trying to write it for the biggest possible audience so as many people can relate to because the reality is this is probably how your content is going to be. And I bet this is how your YouTube works too, right? Daniel: A hundred percent. And I love that analogy about VC investing and content. A lot of people don't realize that the power rule applies to all content. And it doesn't matter if you are like a very experienced creator who's been doing it for a long time. Even for me now on my YouTube channel where I've been posting for over two years, 90% of the views on my channel come from probably less than five videos. I would have to double check the actual metrics, but from conversations with other creators as well with very large followings, this is also the case. And on LinkedIn, you're absolutely right. That one post that I made that generated close to 200,000 impressions is basically 20% of all the impressions I've generated over the last 90 days. And I think the implication here, if you're watching this and you are either a founder or a professional on LinkedIn who is currently posting or wants to start posting, is you should just try to get as many pieces of content out there as possible and really view it as data because every post that you put out there tells you a little bit more information around what might resonate with your audience. Now, you'll never be able to 100% predict with certainty how viral a post is going to be, but you can certainly increase your chances that you hit a home run. And so adopting that VC approach of, yes, we've got to invest in, say, 100 companies, but we know realistically like only one or two of them is actually going to turn into a unicorn. That's the same mentality that you need to have when you're posting content on LinkedIn. And for a lot of people, it's challenging to do this because of perfectionism and, you know, the fear of being judged. But a helpful rule that I've learned and that I try to live by when I make content is, look, you're never going to feel like it's 100% ready. So, like, posting 100% ready content, 100% perfect content zero percent of the time is always going to be worse than posting 80% perfect content 100% of the time. Daniel: So always just have a founder's mindset when you post content and really recognize that every flopped post, every post that doesn't do well is still inherently valuable because it's giving you data on what might work next time. So I think the two takeaways from that is one to think of content is the power rule and two is to treat your failed posts or really not failed posts, but posts that didn't go as viral as learnings to improve yourself. Matt: Moving on, you've started to ghostwrite a lot for other people. What is that process like? Not only writing for people, but also trying to explain to them the power rule and when it doesn't go viral away. Like, can you run us through what that process is like? Daniel: Yeah, that's a really great question. And I have been starting to ghostwrite for quite a few founders who are looking to build their their presence on LinkedIn. And the interesting thing is, one, I think it's important to be upfront about expectations and explain to them how content works because some people think that if they hire a professional ghostwriter or someone to help them manage their social media, immediately they're going to start seeing results when that's just not the case. Second is really being thoughtful about how you write in someone else's voice. And this requires you to really put yourself in their shoes and to have a level of empathy and understanding about a founder or your client that I think takes a lot of practice. But I've been fortunate through some of my professional experiences working in consulting, having worked with many different clients to really, uh, understand how different people think and to be able to put myself in their shoes. Matt: But talking a little bit about that first point, which is setting the expectations properly. I think if you're in the ghostwriting business or if you're in the content creation business or growth business for other people, it's really important to explain to them the power law of content and to explain to them that yes, there will be posts that do not perform. That is not a potentiality. It is a guaranteed, it is a certainty that there will be certain posts that just simply do not perform. But we still put them out there and we still post them and we still leave them up because they give us valuable information and valuable data about what might work the next time. And it also requires a certain level of trust because they have to trust you enough to know that you're not lying to them and that you're not just telling them something so that they don't fire you when a post doesn't do well. Daniel: Um, but moving to that second point, which is really being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. This is something that I actually enjoy a lot about uh ghostwriting for other founders on LinkedIn is because I actually get to have really interesting conversations with people. Matt: And these are really smart, really hardworking, super talented people that I meet on LinkedIn building incredible products that are influencing hundreds of thousands of people. And I get to really dive into their mind and ask them all sorts of questions, not just about their business, but also about them personally, their values, what they believe in, how they were brought up, the different stories that they have. And just having these conversations is so interesting. It's so eye-opening. I feel super lucky to have the chance to do that for, for them. And then obviously using those findings, we then craft content that actually sounds like them and portrays them in a way that they want to be portrayed in. And so that's kind of how I think about the whole ghostwriting model. There's a whole nother episode we could probably film on this, but hopefully that chat. That's just a lot of light. I think the takeaways of what a ghostwriter does and how to be a successful one is to one, educate, almost like a therapist role. Like, I didn't really get a lot of traction on my LinkedIn until I was about three months in, and I think that's very similar for most people starting on the platform. And the second part, in addition to education, is also that ghostwriting, making sure you're saying it in the right voice and understanding the voice of the person you're writing for. Daniel: I think one debate right now, if I were putting myself in the shoes of a founder or a CEO, is why would I want to ghost write over just paying for ads? What is your pitch to ghost write over just buying ads on LinkedIn? Matt: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think the short answer is that building your personal brand online is a long-term play, whereas ads, yes, you can continue running them indefinitely as long as you have the money to, but you're never really building that compounding brand equity that you get from posting online. And ads is like, you have to put in a certain amount of money in order to get a certain financial ROI. And if you're not putting money into ads, then all of a sudden you're not going to get those customers. Whereas if you're putting time and effort into building that online presence and living in the minds of your ideal customers and building that trust, what actually happens over time is even after, say, like, you don't even need to run ads. Say you like stopped running ads, you would still have people coming to you because they know who you are and they know that you are the person that provides this service that solves this problem, and they know that you're all about doing a good job and you really care about your customers because they've seen your content where you talk about how much you go the extra mile to make sure that customers are set up for success. And so it's a long-term play. Content is like high effort, but long-term results is exponential. Matt: And immediate short-term result is probably lower because you don't see an immediate outcome, but it's the long-term play. Whereas ads is like, put in money today, get a result out tomorrow. So it's a short-term, like, yes, you see there's an immediate ROI there, but you have to continue putting money into it and you're not building that brand equity. Daniel: I think you touched on a point that I believe is the main reason not more people have a ghostwriter, and that's trackable metrics. With ads, there's a clear spend between cost per click. I mean, that's the whole Facebook and meta business model. With ghostwriting, there isn't that tangible cost per click. You can't put a cost on being relevant, or you can't put a cost on having a thousand fans that are using your stuff. What Peter Walker has done with Carta, it's hard to measure the impact he's had on the business. But he has a hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn and he's definitely exponentially grown the business well more than he's getting paid for by the firm. And I hope that more people that are listening to this are willing to get a ghostwriter to really increase their brand and increase the success of their company. Matt: So if someone's watching this and is like, okay, I'm sold on a ghostwriter. I want to improve my brand and grow my business. What's the next step I should take? Daniel: Yeah. I think if you want to build your brand and you understand that your time is valuable and so you're willing to invest in having someone help you with this endeavor, and to be clear, this is a long-term partnership. It should be a long-term thing, because if you hire a ghostwriter for, say, a month and then you fire them, you're not actually going to see the real results. It takes a long time with content. And this is something that I also tell my current clients. We need to work together for at least 90 days because content, like I said, is not like ads. You do not just see a result in day two after you put money in in day one. You need to be putting time, effort, energy for like 60 days straight before you're really going to start seeing some of the compounding happen. And so you have to have faith that it's going to happen. And again, that's why the trust with whoever you're hiring is so important as well, because you need to know that they have your best interests at heart and that they are going to help you to grow that brand, even when you're not seeing the results immediately. Matt: So I would be thoughtful about who I choose to help me with it. I would be careful because there's a lot of those quote unquote growth gurus out there these days. And I would just take my time with selecting the right person, make sure that they're the right fit and that they really understand the voice that I'm trying to portray to my audience. Daniel: I agree and think that checking the LinkedIn profile of someone that you want to write for you would be a great first step. Matt: Absolutely. 100%. Check out their LinkedIn profile. Matt: If their LinkedIn profile doesn't look like something that you would want your LinkedIn profile to look like, then I would say probably take it with a grain of salt because the content that a ghostwriter is putting out on their own account is probably a good indication or representation of the quality that they'll be able to put out on your account. And so I think it's really important to do that diligence and just check to see if they're actively posting on their personal account. If you're currently a business owner or founder or even a professional on LinkedIn and you're not posting yet, I would say a hundred percent. Strongly consider starting to build your brand today because the results will only compound over time. Daniel: I totally agree. Even starting like you did when you were in consulting, just leaving a few comments would make a huge impact on your eventual content journey. So my final question for you, Matt, is there any LinkedIn conspiracy that you believe in, even though there's no data backing it up? Matt: Yeah. So something that I've been thinking about for a long time is the anonymous profile viewers on your account. Now, what's so interesting about this is if you think about what other social media platforms show you who views your profile, you'll realize that not many of them do. LinkedIn is one of the few, I think maybe TikTok has recently started doing this as well, but LinkedIn is one of the few social media platforms where they tell you, or they try to tease a little bit of who looked at your profile. And it's a way for them to increase engagement because you are curious, right? You see that someone viewed your profile and so you open up the app and you check. But there's also these anonymous profile viewers, which I know some people turn their privacy settings off, but I have this conspiracy theory that some of those are probably fake and maybe LinkedIn is just doing this to get more engagement from the user base and get people to be on the platform more. But I have no data to back that up, so who knows? I could be completely wrong here. If anybody in the audience has any information whether LinkedIn views are anonymous or not, please flood our LinkedIn DMs. We'd love to hear from you. Daniel: So that concludes the first episode of the Connection Accepted pod. Hope you guys enjoyed the conversation. In the next episode, I will be interviewing Daniel on how he generated over 3 million impressions in just a summer. If that sounds interesting to you, make sure you subscribe. Stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.