Inside LinkedIn’s "Creator Accelerator" program | #40

Transcription

LinkedIn, fun fact, they had a creator accelerator program. The CEO of LinkedIn, Ryan Roslansky, personally invited Liam Darmody to join this creator accelerator program. In this episode, we get into how Liam can leave 400 comments per week, how we detect bots on LinkedIn, and why he has hot sauce aficionado in his personal title. This is an episode you won't want to miss. Let's get into it. Welcome to Connection Accepted. We have Liam Darmody on the podcast today. Welcome, Liam. Hey, Daniel. How's it going, man? Great to be here. Thanks for coming on the show, Liam. And first, for some of the audience that doesn't know you yet, can you give us a quick background on who you are and where you're from? Sure. So my name is Liam. I born and raised in Canada, have lived in Los Angeles, Boston, D.C., and now currently reside in just outside of Raleigh, North Carolina with my wife and two kids. I went to university in Washington, D.C., thought I wanted to be in politics. I got there, changed my mind pretty quickly thereafter and ended up studying international business relations. And I joined a recruiting firm out of college. So recruiting was my first job. And then I eventually joined a startup company that stopped hiring about three months after I got there. And so I was like, well, listen, I'm probably just the bushiest tailed guy in the door. Throw me at whatever problem you need to fix and I'll just go fix it and figure it out. And somehow I created a career out of just kind of being a Swiss army knife at tech startups. That's literally what I did from startup to startup that I worked at. Eventually sort of found my way into revenue operations and sales operations, but not in like a traditional sense where it's like all finance and forecasting. It was more so just sales enablement, sales operations and really kind of getting the foundational systems set up. And then in 2019, I started taking LinkedIn really seriously. I had posted some articles on LinkedIn in 2015, 2016 timeframe. And that was the first time that I started to like, kind of realize that people are actually paying attention to what you're putting out on the platform. But I didn't really start to be intentional about it until 2019 when my daughter was born. I was on paternity leave and I said, you know what, I don't really have a place online where I create content. I had Instagram and Facebook where I would just put clips out there every once in a while and leave pictures of my family for my family to see. But I didn't have a place where I was like starting conversation online. And I decided that LinkedIn was going to be that place for me. So I started to create content then, didn't have an ulterior motive or agenda. I was really just there because I enjoyed having conversation with other people about business and topics that are a little bit more sort of focused than just social media consumption in general. And that's how I got started. That was six years ago now. And it's led to four pivots in my career and my life since essentially. I credit LinkedIn with pivoting out of operations and into marketing, turning into an entrepreneur, buying my house sight unseen in North Carolina. And most recently, I just started to take on a new role in an AI discoverability and visibility platform. And so all sorts of opportunity has just kind of fallen in my lap since I started creating content on LinkedIn. And that's why I'm so passionate about it. Well, congrats on all the success, Liam. You have me so excited and bullish on LinkedIn. I feel like we've got to go through all four of these big opportunities we've gotten from LinkedIn and changes in detail. So starting with the first one, can you kind of... Well, I guess before we dive into the first one, why did you choose LinkedIn over the other social media platforms to post on? I think the ultimate reason, I mean, I was spending time consuming content there and then I had that same feeling that most people have, which is, well, I can't create content on LinkedIn. Like I can consume it, but creating it is a whole different step. Right. But I really enjoyed it. I liked the fact that everybody had their real names. I like the fact that there's a bit of a self-policing mechanism built into the platform. So you have a lot less vitriol and a lot less, you know, just people that are trying to be trolls. And, you know, I mean, you've experienced this. It still exists on LinkedIn. But because their real name and identity is tied to it, and because it's a platform where there are clients, there are peers, future employers might see what they say, it's usually toned down a little bit. So even if somebody is being a little bit trolly on LinkedIn, it's still moderately acceptable socially, whereas, you know, in other places, it can be a lot more unhinged. And so for me, that was kind of the thing that I liked about it. It was real people having real conversation about business or what they know, what they're passionate about. I also think that generally speaking, a lot of people post on LinkedIn because they want to share what they know with other people and help people figure stuff out. And that's naturally kind of how I am as a person. So it, it sort of fit really well for me. Um, and then the pandemic hit and, like, I was, you know, in a small house with an infant and a toddler and my wife, who I love dearly, but, like, I missed water cooler conversation. And LinkedIn was kind of the best place to replace that. I totally agree with what you said about LinkedIn being a positive community. And I do think what you said about the name is really why, like, even the trolls that all get on my content is nothing compared to what you see on Instagram or especially Twitter too. That's where I think it's the worst. And you just don't see as much of that on LinkedIn. It's a much more positive community, especially when you see, like, all the fundraising announcements and jobs and all that stuff. 100%. When you were first posting on LinkedIn, did you still have a job at this point as well? Yep. Yeah, I was working as a director of revenue operations at Homestap at the time, which has since been acquired by CoStar Group. Um, and I was very much, like, nervous about it at the time. I was, I was, you know, I said to my boss, I was like, you know, this is something that I like doing and it's a place where I spend a lot of time. Do you guys have any problems with me, you know, sharing my thoughts on LinkedIn? Because I was, I didn't want to run into a situation where they saw what I was doing and they were like, are you looking for work or, you know, we would rather you not do this. Like, I just kind of wanted to head it off at the pass. And they were like, yeah, we don't care. We're cool. So I'm very lucky because I spent my entire career in startups for the most part. And a lot of those startups are more chill in terms of that stuff than some of the bigger companies tend to be. I think it's so nice that your employer was so chill. And I think it honestly was a benefit for the company because now we're talking about the company and I'm sure maybe indirectly, you posting so much content probably got your company some leads from it, potentially. Yeah, I don't think it, I don't think it hurts. I believe that in the future, I think that all things being equal, if two candidates apply for the same position and both of them have the same skill set and it comes down to and culture matches there, I think that the person that has the ability to create content online and show up online in a way that companies are happy to see will win out that job. So I think that that's actually going to be a really important part of people's brand presence in the future and ability to lock down opportunities. So I agree with you. You made a great point because I think some people just see content on the surface, like, oh, they have this many amount of followers, whatever. But in reality, what you've been doing is you've been showing up consistently to something. It's a true portfolio, not just like the best work you've ever done. And it shows you the work you're actually going to do because I think a lot of employers are sometimes scared, like, is this person just good in the interview or whatnot? And with content, you can see that this person's really been showing up for a while, even if they don't have a million followers, they've still been showing up and improving consistently over time. So you were doing this at, or, so you were showing up during your job consistently posting and what was it like to reach that first big milestone for you of LinkedIn? When you say milestone, what do you mean? Like, what are you referencing? Um, the four things at the start, it was, um, your, your. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so in 2021, uh, I was accepted as a member of the Creator Accelerator Program. Um, and that was something that was really special for me. There were only 100 people that were initially invited to do it. Most of them were content creators from other platforms that had big, big presence on TikTok or Instagram or elsewhere. I did not have that. Um, but I applied anyways and I basically just said, um, I did an application video where I was like, I don't have anything fancy to say. I don't have anything, you know, to, to put together like a highlight reel or any. saying, I just really love LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time on this platform. I love building relationships with strangers on this platform, and they turn into friendships. And I would really love to be part of your Creator Accelerator program. I had, I didn't think that was going to happen, uh, that it was gonna get picked. I just threw it out there because I was like, might as well. And I actually got a message from Ryan Roslanski, the CEO of LinkedIn, uh, announcing, sharing with me that I had been accepted. And in that message, he even said, I, I'm not, um, sharing this with anybody else. It's just, I just want to let you know. And I was like, wow, that's really, that's really cool. So that was the biggest milestone for me. I would say that my first sort of career altering experience on LinkedIn was a CMO at a tech consultancy reached out to me, and he wanted to interview me for a revenue operations position because of the content that he saw me posting on LinkedIn. And when we get to the interview process, I go through the interview process, and he goes, you know, I think, I think you could do this job, but I have this other thing that I've been trying to put my head around, and it's an employer branding and talent marketing role. And I think you could be the perfect fit for it. And I said, well, I'm, I'm flattered by that, but I don't have the words brand or marketing anywhere on my resume. Like, why are you, why do you think that? And he said, oh, well, I've been following you on LinkedIn for six months, and I've kind of seen all I need to see on that front. Like, you know how to tell stories and you know how to market and you know how to brand. Um, he said, if, if you have the sales operations chops that I think you do, then that combination is really what I'm looking for. Uh, I need an operator who can come in and help us stand up an outbound recruiting engine, um, but also do it through the lens of a marketer who has storytelling and things like that. I said, wow, that sounds pretty cool. I'm, I'm, I'm totally down. So that was a pivot for me into employer branding and talent marketing and tied back to, you know, some of my roots in recruiting and the operations stuff. But like, All of that was just basically this amalgamation of all of my experience rolled into one. And the only reason that he thought to reach out to me about this was because I talked about all this stuff online so much. And that I think is really powerful because resumes are very much just sort of, you know, one dimensional words on a piece of paper. They don't really talk about why you do what you do or how you do what you do. And LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to do that. So in doing that, he was able to see that I had skills that probably wouldn't have been able to identify on my resume as a potential fit for that role. And that's where I kind of thought, wow, like there's opportunity here beyond what I really understood. The beauty of LinkedIn and posting content, and it's crazy hearing it from all these guests, is someone like Jason Saltzman too, who literally has gotten all of his jobs from LinkedIn, just from posting content that came to him and that was opposed to him having to apply, which is like a cheat code almost. It's it's crazy. I want to ask first, though, about this LinkedIn creator accelerator, because I don't think they're doing this anymore. And what was that experience like? I mean, it's so cool to get a DM from the CEO of LinkedIn. That's that's awesome. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I mean, I think, you know, LinkedIn has for a pretty long time wanted this to become a creator's platform. They wanted to have creators on LinkedIn creating content, and it has been a very long and hard campaign for them because I just think that most professionals don't feel like creators and most professionals don't necessarily want to be creators. Um, but at the same time, LinkedIn has to think about generations to follow, who are video native, who are used to consuming content in video format. And so for them, it's like, we have to figure out a way to get people talking and creating video on the platform. How are we doing this? And so Creator Accelerator program was their first sort of crack at bat for that. I actually think that there was a prior initiative in like 2017 where they had like a handful of maybe a few dozen creators that they were really sort of pushing on the platform, were getting a ton of attention, like, you know, Morgan Jay Ingram was one of them. He's a fantastic guy. I'm sure you know. And then in twenty twenty one, like they did it again and it was a little bit more formal and it was, you know, a bigger program. It was one hundred people. They would assign each person into a cohort of about 10 or 12, and each person, each group of 10 or 12 had their own creator manager that was assigned to them. And then you'd meet once a week and you'd talk about different things and different strategies and the goal was basically to start building kind of more of awareness of LinkedIn as a user generated content platform. And it was good. It was, it was, it was a really useful and fun experience for me. The thing that was interesting. thing for me was to see that... There were a lot of people who worked at LinkedIn who talked about how to do things on LinkedIn that didn't really seem to jive with the people who actually were doing it on LinkedIn and posting on a regular basis. So like, they might say, we should do this or this. And I'd be like, well, technically, if you repost with your thoughts, you get one-tenth the distribution of a repost anyway. So like, so like we were kind of telling them how the algorithm was working a little bit. It was, it was a bit awkward, but it was also really interesting for me because it showed just how early it is as a user-generated content platform. Like, I don't think they've really figured it out yet. That's hilarious. And I think there's still some parts of that of LinkedIn that are there today. I know there's a lot of push for video. And I don't know if you've noticed this, Liam, but Matt and I and a lot of other previous guests have noticed that videos don't do as well as our text plus photo or text plus written content, with the exception of, you know, the uh, corporate Natalie and some of those raw and funny videos. Have you noticed that with your video? Video is definitely not a short-term sort of uh vanity metric boosting content medium on LinkedIn. Uh, I think that video has its place because it's very much... I think video is more of like a middle of the funnel content medium on LinkedIn. And I think you actually talked about this on one of your prior episodes. But to me, LinkedIn posts with texts and content are your top of your funnel. You want to have video content out there because there are people who are going to move further down the funnel on LinkedIn as they get to know you more, right? So like my activity section on LinkedIn defaults to video so that anybody who goes into my profile, they've already taken that step to say, okay, I'm not just going to hang out and consume Liam's content in the feed. I'm going to go to Liam's profile, and then I'm going to go to his activity section, and I'm going to start watching videos of him talking and being interviewed on podcasts and working with clients, et cetera. That takes them further down the funnel. They get to see more about what it's like to actually converse with me as opposed to just read my text. So I think that video is absolutely a useful medium. It's not useful for short-term distribution, and you're not gonna go viral typically with with video on LinkedIn, but it is a valuable content medium to put out there every once in a while. So I'll usually post a video once or twice a week if I'm like on top of it, which I usually am not. So it usually ends up being more like once or twice a month. But for a while there, I was doing it almost every day, and I was just testing it. I wanted to see, like, what is the distribution like looking like? What's the engagement rate on these videos? How long do people watch videos on average? Which for me was like an average of 12 seconds, which is not great, right? Like, you kind of want to get people watching a lot longer. So I use them, but they're not for top of funnel promotion. That's pretty much the same way Matt and I use them now. And, but some of the stuff, Liam, your videos are so unforgettable. Like your video in the gym, it was just hilarious watching. I know it was a little embarrassing, but, and um your protein drink review, I also feel like I was with there in the room, and I was like, I want to try that too. Where can I get one of these things? Yeah. I mean, I think that, look, video is how humans consume content now. Um I think that because LinkedIn is the professional environment, you know, people aren't necessarily stopping to watch video in the middle of their workday necessarily. Like it just depends. It's just not, it's always been five or six years behind the curve on every other social platform. But eventually, it catches up because, you know, people will start to migrate over here more and there will be more video on the platform. I just think it's undeniable. It's just not as popular right now as it is on other platforms. So, you know, we have to kind of wait for it to catch up. I totally agree. I wanna shift back to your career path on LinkedIn. When you got this job in, you know, branding and marketing, how many followers did you have? Because I think a lot of people that are creating on LinkedIn and that are sometimes scared think that you need like a hundred thousand followers in order to get some of these job opportunities that you got or get sponsorships when that's really not the case. So I'm curious, you know, how big your audience was at the time you get that new job and made the leap. Uh, that's a great question. I think I prob Probably had somewhere in the area of 15 to 20,000 followers. But I want to touch on this because it is a very important point to make. Creating content and waiting for follower growth on LinkedIn is not a good strategy. A good strategy on LinkedIn is to go and find people who you think would be interested in the content that you're creating or people who you want to be on the radar of and connect with them, right? That here is this platform that literally is the largest CRM in the world and the leads are all built into it. Now, I'm talking about this through the lens of sales, but if you're a job seeker, if you're a W2 employee, it all applies. It's the same logic, right? You have this massive opportunity to find anyone in the world who can potentially help you open doors or vice versa, and connect with them on a platform so that they can start seeing your content. That is incredible. It's not that easy to do on other platforms, right? You can search for people by title, by where they live, by company they work for, by school they went to. Like, all of these different first-party signals exist on LinkedIn, so you can go and find those people. And so, when I started building on LinkedIn, the highest ROI thing I did was I added 100 people per week to my network. Most of them at the time were VPs and above in operations at technology companies because that's what I was doing for a living at the time. And so I was putting that content out there. And then over time, that sort of audience shifted a little bit and now it's more brand marketing, etc. So I've had a lot of turnover, I think, in followers. But to this day, that is the biggest opportunity, is I would take 4,000 highly, highly targeted connections as followers than having 40,000 any day because I think that that is all you need. You need to just be very selective about who you engage with. You need to find people that you think would be interested in your content and who are actively showing up on the platform. And if you have a couple thousand people who are following you who meet those criteria, you will start to grow and opportunity will find you on the platform. But most people don't approach it that way. Most people just kind of post content and hope that followers will come. And you're going to be waiting a while. It takes a long time on LinkedIn. How long did it take you, Liam, to realize that strategy of quality over quantity and really influence over vanity metrics on LinkedIn? I would say it probably took me two or three years. It took me starting my own business, honestly, to really understand it. I remember when I first started creating content on LinkedIn, a lot of people that were here were small business owners who were promoting their services and they were getting tons and tons of distribution, tons of leads. It was a very different time. And they used to say to me, like, what are you doing here? You're not selling anything. You're not promoting anything. And I used to say to them, what? You just like get on calls and network with people randomly like you have random conversations with strangers. Like, to me, it was so foreign because I wasn't in that entrepreneurial mindset yet. Once I started my own business, I started to realize that the conversations that you had on the platform really had the potential to impact you in a positive way. And it was sort of like a flywheel effect. Every single person that you connect with, you're kind of unlocking a little bit of their network as you go. And, and so if you start to think about it, like just compounding interest, right? Every action you take with every person that you communicate with on the platform has a potential to compound and build your brand, which then attracts opportunity and can turn into something incredible. And it was probably 2022, 2023, where I really started to latch onto that concept rather than focusing more on, you know, posting content and letting that do the work for me. Matt and I have come to very similar realizations. And I think Matt more so because he just made the leap and went all in on his business as opposed to working at Google. Liam, what made, yeah, I think it worked pretty well for him. What made you take the leap, Liam, to go all in on your business? And give the audience a background of your business, too. Yeah, yeah. So Liam's brand stand is the company that I started in August of 2023. It's a personal brand and strategy firm. I basically help founders, entrepreneurs and executives. To build thought leadership brands, as well as using AI to build smarter operating systems. It's kind of a hybrid of my brand marketing and my operations work combined. I launched the business because the company that I had started to work with, the pivot into marketing that we talked about earlier on the call, was acquired for a little over a billion dollars two years after I joined. Not bad. And yeah, take total credit. It's all me. Just kidding. And six months after that, I was let go, which I was fully expecting, right? You get acquired by a massive conglomerate. Like marketing and recruiting are usually the first areas to go. I was in recruitment marketing, so it made perfect sense to me. But the company did right by me on both the acquisition and the separation, the layoff. And so I had some runway. I was thinking to myself, I could go back into operations at startups, kind of assume the position of the Swiss Army knife and keep doing what I was doing in the sales ops realm. I could go work in the Fortune 500 as like an employer branding, employee advocacy person. Or I could go out on my own and I could just start teaching people how to leverage the platform to find opportunity. I call it manifesting serendipity, which is cheesy, but the shoe fits. And my wife, who's always been incredibly supportive of me and really understands my passions, she said, look, this is, this is too coincidental, right? To ignore. She's like, you're sitting in a position where you've got runway, I'm employed, you've got this passion that you can go and pursue without really running any risk to our family. It seems like you should go do that. And so I did. And it's the most terrifyingly exciting thing I've ever done, but the excitement outweighs the terror most days. And I haven't missed a mortgage payment, so I'm going to continue doing it. And as I continue, it's just more and more experience of like, I'm doing what I love. Like I'm, I'm passionate about it. And that's a really good feeling, you know, like if somebody, I had somebody ask me, they said, if you were to win a billion dollars, but in order to earn that billion dollars, you had to work every single day, you know, nine hours a day or whatever, what would you do? And I said, I would do exactly what I'm doing now, which is the first time in my life, I'm 42 years old. It's the first time in my life that I wouldn't have said something other than what I was doing. And so that feels really good. So, you know, I feel like I'm kind of on the line. Congratulations, and that's so exciting to be at a place in life where everything seems to just be going so well. When you first took that leap though, I'm sure there have been times where there has been a little bit more stress involved. How did you get those first clients of your business? Yeah, I mean, I was, I was fortunate because I had been building a pretty engaged following for some time on the platform. And one of the signals that I was paying attention to when I was thinking about whether I should go out on my own or not, is the, you know, the fact that there were people in my network who were like, why aren't you just doing this? Why aren't you doing, why aren't you going out and teaching people how to build a personal brand? And it just, it seems like your passion, so why aren't you doing it? And that's happened to me a couple times in my life and, you know, in the last three years in particular. I had another client who basically said, why aren't you ever talking about your operations experience? And I was like, well, what does that have to do with branding? And they're like, the fact that you can help founders with branding and operations is a pretty rare differentiating factor that most people in personal branding don't have. And so you just have to listen to what people are talking about, people that you trust, and people who maybe sometimes know you better than yourself. And they were all kind of nudging me and saying, you know, this is a really interesting opportunity for you and it's an interesting time. You should, you should just take the leap if you can swing it. And so that's why I did it. The first clients were those people, right? Those, those people who had been sort of hoping that I was going to get into this in some capacity. And they became my first clients. And then they started referring people and then those people started referring people. And that's how you sort of realize that word of mouth is a very powerful engine. I don't think I really understood the power of word of mouth until I started my business. I always knew it was important, but I didn't realize that it was that powerful. What you just described is one, very similar to Matt's business. You know, we talk about a lot in how he's growing Forge, but also how you're growing a LinkedIn following. Like in a way, that is another business. Like you're making I think you touched on two things that I think are really important about LinkedIn. The first one is the piece of emotion. And although AI is pretty good right now, it hasn't totally gotten there. And I'm sure you're a lot better at using AI to write stuff and make content than I am. But I just haven't seen it been able to draw that reaction always out of people that a post that yours can. And the second piece is, I think people, you know, really underestimate how positive a platform LinkedIn is because they're very scared to post at the start, but all the positive benefits you've had, like, I'm sure a lot of your friends are a lot more supportive than you would have thought, or at least I would have thought at the start. Like you thought you would be much more embarrassed. But people are much more supportive of making content than you think. And that's why I think a lot more people should start because it really is, LinkedIn is a much more supportive place than you would think making content. Yeah, I could rant about this stuff forever. Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. I think that there's this stigma around LinkedIn that people have where they're like, oh, nobody cares what I have to say, or I'm not, you know, a PhD, so what gives me the right to talk about this? And at the end of the day, everybody has a perspective on things and that perspective is uniquely theirs. And it's valuable to someone. If somebody doesn't like what you put out on the platform, A, they're not going to necessarily, they're never going to tell you like, they're just going to scroll past it. So you don't even know what they thought about the content that you created. So why sweat it? More often than not, you will probably be pleasantly surprised that if you put something out there, like a win or an observation that you had or something you learned through an exchange that you had in your role or just something you're observing about the platform or the evolution of AI, whatever it is. We have 60,000 thoughts a day in our head. One of them is bound to be worth sharing on social, right? And on LinkedIn, you don't have to be as performative and you don't have to put as much sort of editing. effort into it as you might on another platform. So there's even less risk here. And I just think you'll be pleasantly surprised, right, that people will see what you're doing and they'll say, Oh, that's interesting. You're there. And they're not necessarily engaging. They're not necessarily reacting to it, but they're reading it. And I've had people who I've never seen before come across my DMs and say, Hey, I have been following you for seven months and I really love the content that you're putting out, and I want to work with you. I'm like, boom. Like, think about the power of that. I've never seen that person's face before. They've never engaged with my content, but they're reading it and they're consuming it and they're building trust in you as you put out that content. And then one day they might turn into a client. And I'm not saying that that is the only reason that I'm here. It's actually the opposite. I'm mostly here for vibes. Like if you look at my content, I am far less effective at self-promotion as I am just showing up and sharing my opinions. And I think that's because I got here primarily because I like the vibes of the platform. I wasn't using it as a marketing channel. I'm now using it as a marketing channel, and I'm kind of like trying to figure that out. But really, it is about putting yourself out there and sharing your knowledge with the world and seeing what happens. And, you know, I think there was a point in time where I shifted my perspective, and that was what truly made it possible for me to start creating intentionally. And that perspective shift was, instead of worrying about my personality being a liability, I should think about my personality as an asset. And if I put things out in the world, instead of worrying about the people who don't or might not like what I have to say, instead, think about the people who actually may really enjoy it and appreciate it. Those are the people you want to pay attention to, right? So that's why personal branding is something that is so important to me, is that if you can attract the right audience and detract the wrong audience with your personal brand, then you're doing branding really, really effectively. And that, I think, is the future of it, is less about pushing, it's more about pulling people your way and investing in the people that actually do like what you have to say. Stop worrying about what people who don't, right? We have a tendency to overthink as humans and we're often very self-conscious and without good reason. Nobody's told us that we should be, right? We're just kind of naturally that way. And that's where I think most people make a mistake of just spending too much time. In psychology, what we've learned a lot is that the fear of failure is often worse than the fear itself. And I'm sure you've heard this a million times, Liam, and I think it really holds true in LinkedIn content, because what really is the worst that can happen if you post on LinkedIn? I mean, if you think about it for a few seconds, like it's really just in your head trying to not get you to post when in reality, it's not like, you know, you're going to get a divorce because you started posting on LinkedIn. Like that just, I've never heard of that happening, you know? Like no one, your family isn't going to stop loving you. That's right. And it's, it's literally, uh, to me, it is just such a uniquely LinkedIn thing too, because on Instagram, on Facebook, you might share things because you've created this closed little network that's following you on Instagram and Facebook. So you're not as worried about it being broadcast to the entire world. On LinkedIn, anybody can see you, technically, right? So there's a little bit more of an intimidation factor there. But also remember that it's rumored that 25% of LinkedIn members are active on a monthly basis. Like I would venture to bet that, I mean, I'm very lucky because I've built a very intentional connection base. So 57% of my connections are active within 30 days, which is still lower than I would like it to be. But that's because I've spent time very intentionally connecting with people who actually show up on the platform, right? I use Sales Navigator to determine that. Um, but on average, I mean, if 25% of people are using the platform on a monthly basis and you put out a post, you're instantly only potentially reaching one quarter of your audience. And that's assuming that they log in that day that you post, right? So like for the first two or three months that you're posting on LinkedIn, most people probably aren't gonna see your content, which is a great time to just kind of get the cobwebs out and try your best and try different things and not have to worry about who's going to see it. And then if they do see it, like, they're not going to spend the day being like, Hey, did you see Daniel's post earlier today? Man, that was terrible. Or, Hey, Liam's posted on LinkedIn really sucked. Nobody's talking about it. They're too busy. People are thinking about themselves. You have a split second to it actually take up to a minute of somebody's time to provide them with something from your perspective. They're either going to take that or they're not. And if you just look at it that way, instead of being like, oh, it's acceptance or rejection, then you'll feel more comfortable doing it on repeat. Absolutely. And before we get into some of the more technical stuff, like commenting, which I know you're a beast at, and liking, I want to first hear about this new AI that you're involved in because AI is all the rage right now. And I'm sure I can be using it better to write my LinkedIn posts. So I'm curious how you got involved, what this product is, and what you're doing for them. Yeah, so the product is called Brandee. It's mybrandee.ai. And it is a platform that helps brands figure out how they're showing up in large language model results. So AEO, GEO, et cetera. And right now, right? I think the thing that's so interesting about artificial intelligence and where we are in technology is traditional SEO is no longer really as effective as it once was, right? You know, large language models search for information and retrieve information and signal very differently than traditional search engine optimization and search engine marketing did. So now you've got all these brands thinking, okay, well, if everyone's going to LLMs and they're asking the questions that they used to Google, and they're basically getting three or four answers and they're trusting those answers because ChatGPT is providing them, how do we become one of those top three or four results? And what do we need to do to impact how we're showing up in large language models? And that is what the platform does. And the reason that that opportunity made its way to me, I guess, is I had worked with one of the founders at a company that I was at in 2015 to 2017. And we built a relationship together. And he was an engineering, I was in customer success. So like, we didn't really interact all that much, but we were in the same meetings once a week. And, you know, so we knew of each other and we had a relatively good rapport. And so he started this company and he said, hey, I'm looking for somebody who can help us on a fractional basis with customer experience and sales operations. We're growing pretty quickly. We're seeing a lot of momentum already. And I was wondering if you were interested in taking on something like that. And I couldn't resist. It was a tremendous opportunity. I mean, I am one of those people who I believe in following your fascination and feeding your curiosity. Like, if you can do that, if you can somehow find a way to make enough money so that you can constantly be learning new things that you're curious about, that's how you find real success. And I think a lot of people, you know, they get down into their heads and their careers and they're like, well, that ship has sailed. You know, I'm, it happened to me, right? I was in operations for so long, I got to the vice president level and I was like, well, I guess that transition into marketing is no longer because like I'd have to start at the bottom. That's, that's the, that's the mindset that I used to have. And that's no longer real, right? You can, you can just show that you know something online and people will start to pay attention to it and be inspired by it. And I think that's a really, really powerful thing. So I kind of rambled there, but I hope I got what you're looking for. That was a hundred percent what I'm looking for. And I think the pivoting can also apply to LinkedIn content. Like this summer, I was mainly posting travel hacks, promoting place to place. And now I'm posting content exclusively about posting on LinkedIn. So you're allowed to pivot in what you post content about as well. You don't just have to stick with everything a hundred percent. And I'm sure this business now that you're part of, is also going to pivot in the way that they help you understand ChatGPT results is going to change because that's inherently going to change. Does LinkedIn play a role within ChatGPT searches? Like, are they being any sort of source of truth? Have you learned from this? And I'm just curious. Yeah. I mean, LinkedIn as a part of Microsoft and just more broadly, they generally have a pretty strong reputation. So, you know, whether it's traditional search results or showing up in large language model results, LinkedIn definitely is a place where you want to be investing time creating content. The platform that I'm working with, Brandi, actually. Has a section dedicated to LinkedIn posts and LinkedIn articles. None of the other social channels are within our dataset. So, you know, LinkedIn is definitely a place to invest time building your thought leadership, building your presence, optimizing the way that you write things so that LLMs can understand, right? I mean, you know, there's this new 360 brew AI classification system that LinkedIn just rolled out that is far less rudimentary than it used to be. It's now thinking about all the different words that are associated to you based on the actions that you take on the platform and the content that you create. And then it's showing people that content relative to how it thinks they will engage with it. So it's a lot more advanced and a lot more mature. And I think, you know, LinkedIn is definitely that place. I've read some statistics somewhere that said that LinkedIn was something like five times or ten times better in terms of search results or showing up in search results than Substack is. And so, like, you know, that's a powerful thing. And that makes a big difference too. I now need to ask about the 360 brew though, because I remember seeing this post of yours, and it was fascinating learning about this new system. How did you come across it? What is it? And how have you changed your content now as a result of this? Yeah, so 360 brew is essentially this new AI classification engine that's LinkedIn has rolled out. It is probably the most robust system that they've ever put in place for content analysis. And it basically makes it a lot harder to game the system. And it means that it's going to be looking more holistically at all of the things that you're doing on the LinkedIn platform. Not just who you're engaging with, but what you're engaging with, the exact language that you're using when you engage, right? The comments that you leave. Like, what are you saying in those comments? So it used to sort of be very rudimentary. You would have a post that goes live. The amount of engagement that you got in the first hour or two would typically determine how much distribution you would get. Dwell time was a big factor as well. And that's when you started to see like engagement pods kind of popping up on the platform and boosting each other's content and all that. This is basically the antithesis of that. So, you know, and I think I saw you post something a couple of weeks ago that said engagement and distribution are not one-to-one. It used to be, if you had a ton of engagement, you would get a ton of distribution. Now, it's actually the inverse is potentially true. You could have posts that have hundreds of engagements that get one third of the distribution of something with dozens of engagements. And I have no idea how that's happening, but it's the first time in five years that I've ever seen LinkedIn do something like that, right? Where you actually have it looking at something very, very differently than just how much engagement does that post get. And I think that actually levels the playing field, which is great because it means that smaller creators can get distribution that is more broad than just the, you know, people who have bigger networks and have built larger audiences. So I love that fact about it and how I learned about it. I mean, I hang out in a bunch of, you know, circles with LinkedIn nerds. The LinkedIn engineering blog is a great place to sort of spend time reading because they're always announcing a lot of this stuff on the engineering blog. And that's where they explain how it works too. So you can kind of start to put two and two together and get some sense for what's happening around here. So the, I'm going to have to check out this LinkedIn engineering blog. I'll check the LinkedIn like corporate news a decent amount. They have some cool stats about like, you know, how many people are on LinkedIn, sales nav, stuff like that. But they posted this new algorithm update on the LinkedIn engineering blog. Yeah. They basically talk about new systems that they're deploying and how they work. And most people don't even realize there is an engineering blog. So all you have to do is go find it and hang out, pay attention, and you'll learn a thing or two. I didn't know this existed. We're going to put the link in the description for anybody else like me who is curious and really wants to check this out. Liam, I want to transition to more LinkedIn tactics, specifically LinkedIn specific tactics before we get a good idea, bad idea. And I used to think that I was a serial commenter for doing 300 comments a week until I started seeing your comments. How are you leaving so many comments per week and why do you do it? So I think that I think commenting is actually the highest value activity that you can take on LinkedIn outside of adding a hundred connections to your network every week, because it's the only thing that you have absolute control over, right? If you think about it, the content that you post on LinkedIn, you're subject to the algorithm and determining how much distribution you get. You can't really dictate who's going to respond to your content, so you kind of are out of control there too. You can comment on content strategically, and you can build your own micro feed within Sales Navigator that lets you basically create your own custom feed of people whose content you always want to be commenting on, and that will then give you more control over how you show up. Also, as we've talked about before, LinkedIn is now showing impression counts on comments, which is very interesting. I don't necessarily know if it's that you're just getting those impressions because you're showing up on a post that has a ton of impressions or if it's that actual comment that's getting the impressions, but the fact that they're showing that tells me that LinkedIn wants people spending time commenting. And my hypothesis is that somebody basically was banging their head against the wall in the product group and said, we keep trying to get people to post, we keep getting resistance, not enough people are posting as much as we want them to be posting, so how do we do this differently? And somebody probably was like, well, why don't we just show them what their comments are getting from an impression standpoint and see if that can act as like the floodgate to them creating content? It's like the gateway drug, right? That's what I think happened. If I, like, I could envision that happening in a meeting at LinkedIn where people are like, I have an idea, why don't we just show them how many impressions their comments are getting? And then they're just going to start leaving more comments. It makes perfect sense, right? You know, so that's one of the reasons that I do it a lot. How I do it that quickly, so first, I mean, I'm going to be a lot busier now than I was prior to taking on this new fractional role, so I won't be commenting quite as much volume, but I use Whisperflow, which is literally the best tool I've discovered in 2026. You just dictate into any text field online, and it's natural language. It's really effective at capturing, even if you mumble or you talk really fast. And that helps me leave really thoughtful comments without using my thumbs, and it's increased my efficiency by at least two or three times. So that's, that's one reason and one way to do it. I also use Buffer, which is a scheduling tool that has a community feature, and it aggregates all of your comments from all of your social channels into one single feed, and then you can just respond to comments that way. So, you know, I might be sitting at, you know, my kids' practice of some sort and just rifling through comments with WhisperFlow on my phone through Buffer. So it's, again, all about sort of creating systems for yourself that scale. And that's something that, you know, the ops guy in me was able to do. That's an elite combo between Buffer and WhisperFlow. How are you writing your post now in the age of AI from idea all the way to hitting post? Like, are you coming up with the idea at the soccer practice, writing yourself a note, coming back later, or run us through the exact process you use? This is actually where one of, this is actually where it's probably surprising. I don't have super well-defined processes for my content creation. So on any given day, like, I might have a couple of ideas. If I feel like writing a post out about it, I'll just dictate it into my phone. So I'll dictate my thoughts, like random stream of consciousness. I have a Claude project and a ChatGPT project that have been trained on 4,600 LinkedIn posts and 200,000 comments that I've left on LinkedIn. So how did you feed it that data? How did you, like, get all that data? You can export it from LinkedIn's data privacy settings. So if you go into your profile, you go to data privacy, you can export a copy of your data, and it'll give you all of the posts you've ever shared and all of the comments you've ever left and all of the DMs you've ever sent. So I basically extracted all of that, uploaded it into projects in Claude and ChatGPT, and then now, you know, I basically get, you know, if I, if I, especially if I dictate, if I dictate my thoughts into Claude or ChatGPT, it'll just take my random stream of consciousness and turn it into something that sounds exactly like me, more or less. Like I might tweak things here and there, but it's, it's that. So that's when I'm like sort of on the, on the fly. Like if I'm walking my dog, I'll just dictate what I'm thinking and then it'll spit something out. Sometimes I'll just write it on the fly if I'm like inspired. I love to write. I really don't love using AI to write posts. I love writing or dictating my posts and then having AI help me sort of put it into words that are more coherent than how I usually talk. So, but so if I am feeling inspired, I will just start writing a post. So like the other day, I woke up and I just saw something when I was scrolling LinkedIn and I was like, oh, I'm going to write a post about this. And I just wrote a post about it and then put it out there. Um, I've not been, I've never been a batch content creator. I've always said I should. I know I should quote unquote, but I just, it's never been, it's never really worked for me. I didn't know about that export feature. I'm going to have to try that out. You have a newsletter on LinkedIn and non LinkedIn on on Substack. Why do you publish your newsletter on LinkedIn and all these platforms? And yeah, I'm just curious, your general newsletter experience on LinkedIn and comparing that to Substack. Yeah. So Substack, I built, I basically moved my newsletter to Substack this year. I created my Substack in 2017 and then I ignored it until February of 25. When I logged back in in February of 2025, I was like, wow, this place is a lot different than it used to be. It's not just a newsletter platform anymore. They're actually building a social platform. They have a social media platform there, you know, notes kind of function a little bit like tweets. It does give me very similar vibes to X a little bit, but much more positive and much more cerebral. And so that's one of the reasons that I'm hanging out there. I want to build a more direct relationship with my subscriber base, the fact that LinkedIn doesn't give you email addresses and doesn't deliver your newsletter to 100% of your subscriber base, to me defeats the purpose of having a newsletter. But the reason that I send to both is because I have 11,000 subscribers on my newsletter on LinkedIn. And so I want to make sure that I'm distributing my newsletter to that audience in case they aren't on Substack, which they aren't, right? I have like 720 subscribers on Substack. So I'm trying to bridge the gap between the two. I promote that my Substack is now hosted on Substack in my newsletter so people can go over there and follow if they want to. But that's really the reason that I do both. I also like to test things against one another. So I had a post earlier this week that was underwhelming from a distribution standpoint. So I put it as a newsletter on LinkedIn and I want to compare the performance and it actually did 3X on the newsletter as it did on the post. So a lot of what I do on LinkedIn is tinkering and experimenting and seeing how different mediums work. And that's one of the reasons that I still send it out as a newsletter on LinkedIn. Yeah, a lot of previous guests have been kind of disappointed that there's no email capture of the LinkedIn newsfeed. And I remember seeing your post where I compared the regular post versus the newsletter. And I was so shocked to see that the newsletter had more. Yep, me too. It's very interesting. Are there any other LinkedIn hacks that you swear by or things that you do that maybe are not intuitive that the audience should start doing? So the first thing I'll say is that I can't use the word hack with LinkedIn. It's like, it's virtually impossible. You know, you can try hacks. There's hacks that work for six weeks or six months at a time, but eventually it just, it doesn't, it doesn't work. There's no hacking into perpetuity. And so I don't usually have a bunch of hacks. What I will say is the strategies that you should be using to grow on LinkedIn are not the same strategies that you would use on other platforms. A lot of it is about taking control of your own list building, your own connection building, your own opportunities, your own conversations, and sort of seeing the forest for the trees, right? Like there's every single professional in the world, for the most part, has a LinkedIn profile, right? And so whether they're active on it or not, you know, like you can get on their radar and start to be in the position where they're seeing the content that you're putting out there so that, you know, if and when they are interested in hiring you or partnering with you or collaborating with you in some capacity, like you're top of mind. That's an incredibly powerful opportunity that I think a lot of people are sleeping on. So to me, it's add as many people per week as you can to your network. Who are active, who are building networks themselves, who are in industries that you're passionate about and creating content that you find interesting, that is the highest value thing you can do every week. And then commenting and putting yourselves on people's radar throughout other people's posts. That's the hack. And you can't put it on automate. Like, you kind of just have to kind of just have to just dig in and make it happen. Liam, that was a perfect response. And the only thing I'll add is that those people that you can connect with that are on LinkedIn, they want to receive messages. Like, every time I check the mail, I'm excited. Like, there might be, you know, a Christmas present, a holiday card, or even if it's just toilet paper, I'm excited to get a package. And people get that same emotion from LinkedIn DMs. You never know what you're going to get, especially in connection requests. And people love to be glazed. And that's why I think it can be so positive for you to reach out to so many people. So, Liam, I think you're a little bit familiar with good idea, bad idea. So I'm going to throw some ideas here that I thought out with you. And you're going to give me your honest thoughts if they're good, bad, and ideally some color into why. And the first one is creating your own hot sauce brand. I know you're a hot sauce aficionado, so I'm curious if you ever thought about creating your own brand and why. I have thought about that. The logistics of it are what have prevented me from doing so and the fact that I don't actually create good hot sauce. I'm very good at buying hot sauce. I'm not very good at making it. It always ends up being too vegetal. But I love the idea of it. And maybe someday I will enter those waters. But for now, I'm going to say bad idea for me. What's your favorite hot sauce? My favorite daily hot sauce is Tabasco Habanero, which I was not expecting because I don't actually like regular Tabasco very much. But their Habanero is really, really delicious. And then I also like Marie Sharp's Belizean Heat. It's another habanero hot sauce from Belize. And it's pretty fantastic. There's one hot sauce that I'm going to need you to try that I don't think you've tried. And I'm going to send this to you after this. And it's called Kentuxican. And I just think it's a great name. It's a Mexican man who's from Kentucky. Or maybe he was born in Kentucky, but his family is from Mexico. Whatever it is, I just think it's such a great name, Kentuxican. And you're going to have to give me your honest review about it. That is a great name. I love it. The next idea is a LinkedIn hot sauce review. What are your thoughts on that? That I think is a good idea, actually. And I have thought about doing it before. I don't know why I haven't. I've actually done a few of them, just one-offs, but not consistently. And that, I think, actually is a good nudge for me because I've had people say it to me before. And I just kind of, like I said, the consistency of a single franchise, content franchise, I'm not very good at that. Like a follow-up. I'll be like, every Friday, I'm going to do a hot sauce review. And I do it for two Fridays, and then I just stop. So maybe that's the nudge I need. I'll say that's a good idea. I'll put one out dedicated to you. I would love to see it. And I will send you one, hopefully, that makes it into the series. Yeah, I'll do that one. I'll do the kentuxican. The next one is more in your personal branding business side. And that's cohorts versus one-on-one coaching. And this isn't really a clear good idea, bad idea. But what are your thoughts on cohorts versus individual personal branding coaching? I like both. I love the cohort because I love a group dynamic. I love, you know, having people learn from each other as well as learn from me directly. Usually when you have a group of people, you're going to get different questions from different people that others are thinking but not asking. And so I think it's actually a good experience for the learners as well. But one-to-one is also really, really wonderful because you can give somebody undivided customized attention. And, you know, I think a lot of times if you have a group dynamic, people are still holding back a little bit. You know, they're like, these are all strangers. I don't really know them. How much should I open up to them, etc. Whereas when you're one-on-one, somebody's really kind of opening up. I mean, being somebody's partner in personal brand strategy is not totally like therapy, but a little bit. Because they open up to you in a way and tell you things that they're nervous about and things they're worried about. And then they tell you their story. And like... you encourage them to share the things that maybe they don't feel comfortable sharing, but because it's part of their journey, it's worth it. So the one-to-one for me is where I love to spend time. I think going forward, my plan is to build a community that will sort of focus on the community group learning dynamic, and then one-on-one will still be a thing for me. Cohorts, I'm a little bit less focused on because I think there's too many variables there, right? You have a cohort, you have to promote it like crazy. People are like, oh, I don't, I'm not, I can't commit to eight weeks, or I can't commit to six weeks, or I'm going to miss two of the six sessions. Like, there's too much working against you there. So for me, I think if I'm going to go lower ticket item, it's going to be community, and then it's going to be one-to-one coaching, for the most part. If I were you, I'd do the same thing. I've talked to Matt, and even from my experience over the summer ghostwriting, half of it's the actual writing and like putting the founders or whoever's thoughts into the format of LinkedIn, and the other half is, like you said, like you said, almost like a therapy session trying to get them okay posting on social media and like trying to talk them through a lot of the fears that we have when on social media. The next idea is you have a signature way that you, and a lot of your LinkedIn posts with the high five and the LD with the hot sauce emoji or the pepper. Have you thought about putting that emoji in your personal name on LinkedIn, and would that be a good idea or a bad idea? So I used to have the emoji in the beginning of my name, because automated systems don't know to differentiate between the emoji and the name. So if somebody would send me an automated DM, it would just show up as a chili pepper. So it'd say, hi, chili pepper, and then I would know that those people are using automation to reach out to me. But LinkedIn is supposedly going to be getting rid of emojis in names going forward, so I don't know that that's going to happen. That's also why my name is capitalized now. So I removed the emoji, but my name is Liam in capital letters because I'm guessing most people who are writing a DM are not going to capitalize my name. So that's how I know if there's automation happening. But I like using the emoji as an icebreaker. So I have it in my headline, I don't have it in my name. And I will tell you, on a weekly basis, at least two or three people message me to ask, what's your favorite hot sauce? It's how they start the conversation. And that's why I think having an icebreaker like that in your headline makes sense. I really like that. And it, I was following, I just started following Bill Yost like a couple months ago or a couple weeks ago. And his pirate emoji for me is just really stuck out. And I feel like he just like owns this emoji now. And that's what made me think of this idea because to me, through seeing all your posts, you pretty much own the chili pepper emoji. And Noah Jacobs is a similar thing, having the bird and the dog emoji. And it's interesting they might get rid of it in the names. I can see why that might be the case though. My final idea is a digital LinkedIn starter kit. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on things like plug and play post templates, hook formulas, outreach scripts, and content calendars. What are your thoughts on those? I think that there is value in having those things on offer if it's something that you have found to be successful for your content journey. I personally think that the days of like perfect templating and things like that are gone on LinkedIn. I think with 360Brew, that, those are, those are sort of formatting and styling things that are personal preference, not necessarily a guaranteed success. Right. And I think we, we had this whole era on LinkedIn where all these gurus were like, oh, you have to format your post this way and broetry this and spacing and, you know, you want your, your lines of your posts to look like a Christmas tree and like all sorts of stuff that like visually made it appealing. And I think that there is definitely something to having visually appealing content. I don't necessarily think it impacts the performance of your post that much. It's the content itself that matters the most. But I will say, I think that if people struggle with getting and having a content calendar makes sense for them, great. If it's an intimidating thing for them and they're like, oh, that's daunting to create a calendar, then they should shy away from it. I think hooks are things that people need to get good at writing. I mean, you know, I heard you say this and it's very true. Like you have a split second to capture somebody's attention in a very busy feed and your hooks should be the one that does it for you. So I think having something that people can learn how to write good hooks is very valuable. But again, like AI exists and if people learn how to use Claude and GPT and program a project that will just do really strong hooks, right, based on what you're writing, you know, you can set that up pretty quickly. So I would almost say you could have your own version of things that you're selling there or you can teach people how to do it in AI. That's a great answer. And part of the reason Matt and I have this podcast is because we'll think things to ourselves, like, you know, you shouldn't really be using a content calendar. You should do it yourself, but it might be good as a crutch to start and try to get you into that content muscle. But eventually, like, you know, you don't want to just be posting templates. They want to hear you, not the template. And I'd love to hear other creators like yourself who are way more successful than Matt and I on LinkedIn just confirming a lot of the things we have and also challenging other things. But it's been great to learn from you, Liam. And before we end it, is there anything else that I didn't ask you that you wanted to tell the audience about? No, I think you had a really robust set of questions lined up and I really appreciate it. I think, you know, I just wanted to end by saying I really appreciate you having me on the podcast. I think it's really cool how you guys are approaching this. You know, your approach to LinkedIn is very different than I think a lot of people's approach to LinkedIn is and it's refreshing to see it. And it's a very interesting way to think, you know, like you can tell that you guys are weaving through things and you're identifying key people on the platform. And I just really enjoy following both of you and I think your podcast is definitely going to be successful. I hope you hit $10 million. But long story short, I think everybody needs to be considering showing up on LinkedIn, building their presence on LinkedIn. You know, stop viewing your personality as a liability. It is an asset. It is your moat in a future where AI is creating so much fake noise. You know, you showing up in a place where somebody can trust that you are who you say you are and you're sharing your genuine thoughts is a really valuable and very big opportunity. So I hope that everybody listening here, whether you're already creating content on LinkedIn or you're considering it, take the plunge and double down on it because this is not just any social media platform. I mean, this is your personal brand which lives as long as you do and then beyond. So, you know, think of it as building a legacy for yourself and get to it. And if you need any help with it, you know where to find me. I'm Liam Darmody on LinkedIn. Preach, Liam. Thanks for coming on. You got it, brother. Anytime. Thanks for having me.