The LinkedIn mob came for me | #23

Transcription

Matt: So Daniel, you generated 500,000 impressions this week. How on earth did you do that? Nobody has ever done a post calling out Cody Sanchez for having such a long headline. To all the people that liked, commented, reposted positive or negative things, thank you for checking out the profile. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And hopefully, you'll see a lot more of Connection Accepted, Matt and I's content, to come in your LinkedIn feed, because we're not going anywhere. And before you know it, we'll have a $10 million podcast. Daniel: So Daniel, you generated 500,000 impressions this week. How on earth did you do that? Honestly, Matt, I did this in a way which I did not expect. I was in a kava enjoying my bowl. And I thought, you know what? Like, this LinkedIn title, LinkedIn is the next TikTok, has worked wonders for me. It sparked so many conversations, gained my following so much. I'm going to write a post about it and tag a celebrity, someone with a lot more following than me, and rewrite their title for them to try to add value to their profile. And, you know, maybe they'll see it, comment on it, and increase the reach of it and, you know, maybe my page. And hopefully, other people will change the personal titles too. Well, this turned into just a total mayhem and rage bait of a series. Daniel: I first did this with you, actually, Matt, and just to, you know, poke fun at you and roast your profile a little bit and say, you know, it shouldn't be founder and CEO of Forge because a lot of your new audience probably won't know what Forge is. And then if it was, you know, some spicier take on ghostwriting or LinkedIn, then that may make people more willing to click. And that hit 190,000 impressions in three days. And as that was rising, I was like, okay, I got to start pumping more of these out. So I did one with Sean Perry, host of My First Million. That got 100,000 impressions. I did one with Sam Parr, the other host of My First Million podcast. He reposted it and it got another 50,000 impressions. Cody Sanchez. And the list goes on. Before I knew it, I'm talking to you now, Matt, with 500,000 impressions. And I've never gotten this much LinkedIn hate before. It's awesome. It's crazy. And I honestly don't know how to react to all this. It's hilarious. Matt: Yeah, I mean, it's amazing to watch. And I've been obviously following along very closely from the sidelines. And it's fascinating to see the comments in your posts. You know, LinkedIn is already a more buttoned-up platform. There tends to be less hate on LinkedIn because, again, you can't really be anonymous. Every comment you put, it's going to show up in your network. It's also tied to your profile. People are, I would say, less inclined to leave hateful comments. Matt: But let's talk a little bit about some of the comments that you've been getting, Daniel. From what I can see, there's definitely some people that are along for the joke and are just kind of here with their popcorn waiting to see what happens. And then there's people that sound legitimately upset about the stuff that you're doing. Daniel: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people were upset that I was trying to give a bigger creator content advice. And I was not trying to act like I'm better at social media than Cody Sanchez or Sam Parr or Sean or you in any of these ways. I was just trying to show a tip that I used and show them how it would work on their profile if they wanted to use the same tip to hopefully improve their LinkedIn if it's not the number one strategy for them like it is for me and they're geeking out on all this stuff. So I've gotten quite a lot of hate comments, which is fascinating because, and I just like, I'm like slapped myself in the head for this because we literally talked to Julia Alvarenga about how positive a platform LinkedIn is. And with Noah Greenberg about how people are just so supportive on LinkedIn. And none of us had really seen this sort of negativity before, but I think it just also shows you that in order for something to go viral like these posts have gone, you do need to kind of poke some emotion in people to make them want to share it or like it or comment it in a way. Matt: I mean, I feel like you are definitely poking at the boundaries of what's been done on LinkedIn before. I think it might be safe to say that nobody has ever done a post calling out Cody Sanchez for having such a long headline. And for the audience, for those who haven't seen the post, maybe we'll flash up a screenshot, but essentially Daniel called her out for having a sentence or sentences in her very long headline in LinkedIn. Daniel: Yeah, and I believe your hook was something like nobody wants to read. Actually, what was the hook? It was like, nobody wants to read the whole thing or stop putting sentences in your bio. Nobody's going to read that. And as you can tell, some people get a little bit triggered by that, especially if they only read the first two lines. They're like, what the heck? This guy's insulting Cody Sanchez, who has millions of followers, I think, on LinkedIn. So naturally, there's a little bit of emotion spiking. Matt: And it's fascinating because I think what I've learned about virality and I have a couple of YouTube videos that have gone semi-viral, I guess you could say, like 500K plus views on YouTube. And every time a video of mine gets over a hundred thousand views, I notice there's a divergence in the type of comments that I get. Daniel: There's obviously the super supporters and the people that are getting tons of value and are saying only positive things, but then you really quickly notice there's also this other group of people that are just upset for no reason, or upset for something that feels like it's not a valid reason to be upset about. And, you know, they're the loudest voices often, so it's really fascinating to just see them come out of the woodwork once you hit a certain terminal velocity. And I think you're seeing that with your posts as well, because these are getting, you know, fifty, a hundred thousand, what, even two hundred thousand impressions on your LinkedIn posts, which for LinkedIn, is basically viral. LinkedIn, when you get over a hundred thousand impressions, that's a viral post. Another fascinating thing that I've run and I've touched on it in previous episodes, is that you just had a post, Matt, where you talked about quitting Google and now you're working for yourself, which is awesome. And that got a thousand likes with, you know, just under forty thousand impressions. And my post about your personal headline gets, you know, 190,000, 200, whatever it's at now, and has less than 200 likes. So it's crazy to see how two different emotions that you can evoke in people, you know, yours of more of a wholesome, myself more of a, you know, either frustration and anger or people really resonating with it, can drive such different engagement and impression numbers on the same platform. Matt: 100%. And I just thought about this. I think it's really interesting depending on whether you're evoking a positive or negative emotion. Again, as I've established before, but I'll say it again here, on LinkedIn, engagement is effectively a public endorsement of whatever piece of content you are engaging with because this is one of the few platforms where when you like or comment, it shows up in your network's feed and your network on LinkedIn often includes your boss, your coworkers, people that you know from school. And so people will only engage with content that I think, one, evokes a positive emotion and, two, qualifies as something that they wouldn't be afraid to show in the workplace. And so that already kind of narrows the scope of, or the universe, of content that people, the average LinkedIn user here, I'm going to be very clear, the average LinkedIn lurker person who doesn't really post that much but is very active on the platform, that really narrows the universe, right? It's got to evoke a positive emotion. In my case, it was a, wow, like Matt is taking a risk. He's leaving Google. He's trying to do his own thing. Like, go Matt, right? And then two, is it something that you'd be OK with your boss seeing? Well, in my case, yeah. Like, there's nothing. I had a picture of me standing in front of the Google sign. There was nothing crazy about what I wrote in the post. Daniel: And so a lot of people, over a thousand people in my network, were willing to endorse that, right? Impressions, on the other hand, I think, though, are driven by an entirely different thing. So if you think about positive versus negative emotion, I think you can drive impressions with positive emotion posts as well. But like, in your case, maybe there was a little bit of like a potentially negative emotion. Matt: Oh, there were there were a lot of negative emotions surrounding this post. And so negative emotion can be extremely powerful for driving impressions regardless of whether it's LinkedIn or Instagram or whatnot. I mean, this is the reason why, like, negative, bad news goes viral on like TikTok and stuff. It's like it spreads like wildfire because people just have this visceral negative reaction to it. And that, you know, the algorithms pick up on, so you get a ton of impressions. But maybe someone doesn't necessarily want to associate with that piece of content on LinkedIn because, as we've established, number one, is this, well, I guess, yes, it's evoking a negative emotion in this case, so maybe they're not as likely to want to endorse it. But two, do they want to see, do they want their boss to see, like, this post show up in their feed? Maybe not. At least that's my hypothesis. Daniel: And I honestly think whenever you're making content, I mean, this is going off a conversation we had with Kevin Sirgal Plotkin, who is Gen Z's lawyer, that you really shouldn't make content or comment or like something that you're not comfortable printing out and sharing with your boss because you should assume that that's going to happen when you're posting on social media. Matt: Absolutely. I mean, we talked to Eric Wei in LA last month. Eric's the founder of Carrot, which is a company that is essentially trying to be like the Square for creators. And he's raised over a hundred million dollars. And his advice about posting was, look, your boss is going to see it if you're an employee. So when you do post, that doesn't mean you can't post, but you should be OK with anything that you're posting potentially being shown or seen at work. Like, if this is something that, I think as Noah Greenberg said in one of his posts, like, if you can proudly say it in a meeting... Daniel: I totally agree. And to all the people that liked, commented, reposted, positive or negative things, thank you for checking out the profile. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And hopefully, you'll see a lot more of Connection Accepted, Matt and I's content to come in your LinkedIn feed because we're not going anywhere. And before you know it, we'll have a $10 million podcast. Thanks for watching.