Impressions v. Likes: What's better on LinkedIn?

Transcription

Matt: So, what are we talking about today? Should we talk about your 1,000 impression post, leaving Google? Daniel: Yeah, let's talk about it. So, I made a post on Wednesday basically just revealing that I left Google last Friday, and it got over a thousand likes. My most liked post by far. I think my second most liked post, Daniel, is the one where I talk about my museum of failures. So, it was a very different topic. This was more of a, I guess you could say it was a job slash career update, but the engagement on that post was crazy. I was actually surprised. I didn't expect it to get that many likes, but now I'm like, oh shoot, I can't make another post like that. It's like a once in a blue moon type of situation. Matt: What, okay, so you say the engagement is crazy. How many impressions to how many likes are we talking here? Daniel: Let me check the impressions really quick. So, because I just had a post, so my post about you that has like 190,000 impressions, I think has like less than 100 likes. Okay, you know what? You're going to be shocked. There's only 37,000 impressions on this and it has 1100 likes. So the impressions to like ratio is really, really high. And this is not my most, this is not the most successful post that I've made by impressions by far. I think my most impressions on a post actually came from, let's see. Matt: This honestly reminds me of what we were talking about with Jason Saltzman, or maybe it was Jason who said this. It was, I'm forgetting the name, but the person said you can either make content. It was Danielle. It was Danielle. Cause when I talked to her, I was in Ireland. You can either make content that is going to get impressions or content that's going to make you money. And this is one of the, actually, I don't know what, what this one would be, but it's very two different types of making content. Daniel: Yeah. I think the way I think about impressions versus engagement is engagement is a public endorsement of a piece of content, especially on LinkedIn, where we know when you like a post or when you comment on a post, it shows up in your network's feed, which is very different from something like Instagram. I think because of this, there's some content that will get tons of impressions, but will get very low engagement if, for example, it's very controversial. Say somebody posts something about like Donald Trump or some like highly political post on LinkedIn. Nobody wants their boss to see that show up in their feed, especially to see that they liked that post. But is it going to get tons of impressions? Absolutely, because the algorithm is only looking at how long are people dwelling on this post. Are they clicking see more? Are they, are they staying on it and reading the actual content all the way to the bottom? If the answer is yes, then it's going to push it out and it's going to get more impressions. Matt: And so I think this is also why Daniel, your rage bait-esque posts where your rage bait posts where you essentially roast someone's profile in public get so many impressions. But I would say maybe the impressions to engagement ratio is lower than what you might expect if you were to make, say, a personal post that got the same amount of impressions because people are more willing to publicly endorse like a personal story post or like a job change, for example, like my Google post, than maybe something that is a little bit more spicy. Daniel: You make a great point, and I think this proves to us also the LinkedIn algorithm has changed a lot and isn't totally what a lot of us think. I used to be under the impression that in order to get on the LinkedIn feed to get seen by a lot of people, you need other people to like your content. But I think what your post proves is if you can have a post with under 40,000 impressions and a thousand likes, you'd think that's being spread to so many people. But I have been having these, you know, like you call them at rage bait posts, which really weren't intended to be rage bait, but ended up as rage bait that are like 190,000 impressions for less than 200 likes. Matt: And I think the takeaway for the audience, or at least one of the takeaways from this, is that the algorithm doesn't just reward how many people like your stuff on your profile. 100%. I think that's a really important realization for a lot of people to have because when you look at someone's profile, you can't tell how many impressions they're getting on their posts. So naturally, what do we look at? We look at engagement. But the interesting thing that we've learned is that high engagement doesn't always necessarily mean a lot of reach and vice versa, right? Like someone could be getting less likes and comments on their content, but maybe they're just very good at getting, at creating content that is very, very wide ranging and gets tons of impressions. Daniel: Now, I don't think one or the other is necessarily bad, Daniel. I think there are pros and cons of each. I think if you're able to get high engagement, then that's excellent because it indicates that you know what kind of resonates strongly with an audience and you kind of know how to create content that they're willing to publicly endorse, which is also like a very valuable skill to have. And it could also suggest that your audience is very supportive of what you do. Matt: On the other hand, being able to get lots of impressions is also really, really valuable because top of funnel brand awareness is something that every brand wants and every company wants. And we've seen guys like Cluly, who are really, really good at this. I would say they probably have their fair share of haters in addition to supporters, but it's undisputed the fact that they are very good at getting attention and you could argue that that's maybe more valuable in this attention economy that we live in. Yeah. Matt: And I think too, for the audience listening, they might be thinking, I need to go extreme one way or the other. I need to go put so much emotion on my post that everyone's going to hit like or that everyone's just going to, you know, rage bait into sending this to a friend. And I think the reality is you can have a mix of the two. Like I had a post right before I started my job this summer, a more emotional post like you did that had a lot more engagement per impressions. And I think that's key to longevity and making content and also building an audience or business that's long lasting and not so, you know, spiky and unpredictable. Daniel: Yeah, I agree. I think having a mix is probably the best place to be. I think that it really depends on your goal. If you're like, first of all, why are you posting on LinkedIn? For different people, there's different reasons. For a business owner or a founder, maybe you're posting on LinkedIn because you just want to get more customers, in which case your LinkedIn strategy would probably be a combination of top of funnel brand awareness, trying to get as many impressions as possible, but also posting stuff where you get a lot of more engagement, building trust in you as a founder in your personal brand. And you'd also be posting some stuff that's probably somewhere in between those two extremes where you want to build authority and you want to appeal to customers, but you know, that's not going to appeal to as wide of an audience as like a very viral, spicy take. Matt: On the other hand, if you are maybe someone who is just posting on LinkedIn because you just want to grow an audience, you're purely there to be a creator and to just max out the algorithm or try to crack the crack the code to building the biggest audience on LinkedIn. I don't know. Let's say you want to beat Mark Cuban one day in terms of followers. Then your strategy is probably going to be slightly different. You're probably going to be focused more on trying to get as much reach as possible because I don't think Mark Cuban gets, he gets some engagement, but I don't Daniel, quote me, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think he gets crazy engagement. Daniel: Mark doesn't at all. We're about to have someone on the pod in a few weeks, Jake Carl's, who's the CEO of Midday Squares, and he gets more engagement than Mark Cuban and he literally has 60,000 followers. He's crushing it on LinkedIn right now and I can't wait for that episode. Matt: Excited for that one too. That may be a good place to end it. What are, what are some of the other takeaways from this? Daniel: I think it's, you know, moderation, impressions don't mean engagement and engagements don't mean impressions. I guess one thing that one, this is just an observation and something that I think about is, yes, we've established that engagements does not equal impressions. Someone can have very high engagement, but not a lot of impressions. Matt: So what does this mean though? If you're like someone posting on LinkedIn that wants to get sponsorships or work with brands, the thing is that the brands won't know your impression numbers unless obviously you show them the analytics. But if someone's like trying to get sponsorships on LinkedIn and some brand manager, like the head of influencer marketing at Notion or some other company looks at your profile, like, let's be real. They're going to look at the engagement and probably make some kind of a rudimentary judgment about your strength as a creator based on that. Daniel: And to me, that kind of makes me wonder if it probably still is important to try to get engagement. But yeah, that was another random thought that just came to mind because people that don't know who you are, they still judge you based on the engagement that they see because they can't see your impressions. 100%. That's why you got to post your impressions from time to time.