ULTIMATE LinkedIn & Threads Playbook w/ #1 Influencer Chase Dimond! 3.2 Million Followers on LinkedIn Shares his secrets! | Ep. 402

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast, and I have, like, an incredible human being guest here. Who's here? Chase Diamond. Now, if you're on social media, which is the entire planet, you know Chase. Why do you know Chase? Because the guy across all of his comment pages, just on LinkedIn alone, has over 3 million followers. On his personal pages, over 400 ,000, Shopify named him the number one e-commerce influencer on the planet, okay?

0:41The dude is a big deal. Let me tell you a little story about Chase before I even have him start talking. He doesn't know I'm going to say this. But years ago, okay, coming right out of COVID, I was like, crap, I need to grow on LinkedIn. I had no followers, like zero. And I'm on LinkedIn, and I see this dude, this random guy, Chase Diamond, okay, which is D-I-M-O-N-D, okay? And he had, at that time, like 20 ,000 followers. I'm like, wow, that's a lot. Out of nowhere, I hit up Chase. I sent him a note. He doesn't know me from a hole in the wall. I said, hey, Chase, I'm a rando. Will you take a call with me?

1:11I just want to know how you're doing it. How are you growing on social? And the guy took a call with me. He told me all the stuff he was doing. He was super transparent for no reason whatsoever. And it helped me out a ton. And since then, he's just been the guy I turn to for all things for social media growth. He's crushing it now. so chase thank you and welcome to the show dude thanks for having me can i bring you everywhere i love how i love the hype i want to bring you with me everywhere dude but it's so real because you know what you didn't have to take that call and it just speaks to kind of the guy that you are and just so you all know before chase came on i said chase what do you want me to promote what do you want me to hype up on the the episode he goes no man it's cool let's just talk i don't need to do all that i'm like who is this guy i get on a show i'm like i want to promote this I want to sell that.

1:55You're like, so chill. I love it. It's the best. Is that like your go to market just to be a good dude? Yeah, I don't know. I don't really need much. I've got everything I need and more. And I just like connecting with good people. So, you know, you gave me a good vibe and I'm happy to be here and hopefully going to be able to add a lot of value. All right. Listen, when everyone listens to the podcast, all they do is go down people's, you know, the history, how did they start all this stuff? And I'm telling you, you should go read Chase's history. It's inspirational. It's just great. But I don't want to waste the limited time that we have at Chase.

2:23I want to get right into it. So first of all, you're known as an email expert, but you're really, to me, the ultimate social media expert, especially on things like LinkedIn, threads, all of it. Let's dig into it. Is it too late to really grow on social significantly? Can you grow a following on LinkedIn? How do you do it? Because you're doing things differently than everybody else. No, I don't think it's too late. I know everyone likes to say that. But for example, I've been working with my wife over the past 12 months and she's gone from basically no personal brand She's got no following anywhere and you know, it hasn't done anything notable or outstanding Don't don't tell her that I mean obviously she's great.

2:59It's done a lot of cool stuff But you know what I mean, right? She's not like the guests you don't have on like the Gary V's of the world Right, I mean she's gone from basically zero to north of 70 ,000 followers in about 12 months and she's doing You know in the ballpark of about two to four ish million impressions a month. So by all means, I think it's very doable I think it's really about now, especially in the age of AI, but I use AI, everyone should be using AI. But I think in the AI age, it's about having some kind of personality, a stance. So for me, I just like to be helpful. I don't like to promote stuff.

3:31You know, you asked me that before. I don't really ever promote any of my businesses. No one really knows what I actually even do. I just like to share great content online. So I think if you come from that mentality of wanting to add value, but also having a stance that's interesting and the more cool stuff you do online and offline, the better, right? The more interesting and rich experience you have, the better. So there's no substitute for great content. And it's also like, what does that look like? So on LinkedIn, my two personal best formats are image plus text and carousels. I think carousels used to be like the best and easiest way to grow.

4:03They kind of fell off the ledge for whatever reason, maybe during like the huge video kind of boom. And now they're back like carousels are just doing great. And I know there are a lot of work, but the beauty of that is you can repurpose the heck out of those. They make for really great, you know, Instagram posts. And that same kind of content could work for a Twitter thread. If you basically take that content, you can work it for a newsletter. So my whole thing is because we're all so time poor, we're all so time limited, is creating one really good piece of content for newsletter that's typically long form.

4:34And then how do you make that into digestible, interesting, shareable assets on social? So, all right, there's something that you do. First off, the secret sauce that I got out of that is you should marry Chase. and then you have a huge following. You go from zero to 70 ,000 in one year, but that's taken. So now we need to dig into the how. So something that you do that always I'm like, I don't know if I could do it is you actually post a lot, right? You post a lot. I'm like, I don't know how to have it in me to post that much. Talk to me about, first of all, we'll get into the company pages in a second, but on the Chase Diamond page, which has 400 ,000 LinkedIn followers and you've grown that massively in a shorter period of time, like what do you feel about frequency or reposting or whatever?

5:15Yeah, it's changed over the years as the algorithm changed. So really the story that I have is August of 2022, I had about 27 ,000 followers, wasn't super active. I needed LinkedIn to work for me because Twitter was about to be acquired by Elon, and I was super dependent on Twitter, I guess now called X. So I started posting three times a day, every single day for like the first 12 to 18 months. And it didn't matter how often I posted. every post would just hit. There was no real thing around like, well, why are you posting so much? It was like just quality and quantity was the name of the game.

5:51And then I felt like throughout kind of the recent years, LinkedIn made a shift where like, you know, the second post could potentially cannibalize the first post. So a lot of people cut back. A lot of the big influencers started going from maybe doing more, maybe they only ever did once, but they were just doing one time a day. And then I feel like there's kind of been this recent surgence where, you know, if you do post in the long enough gaps, you know, far enough apart gaps, it doesn't really matter like how often you post. So I try to post two, three times a day, typically early morning kind of PST.

6:24So I typically do like a, let's call it like a 5am PST type post. Depending on how that post performs, if it's doing really, really well, maybe in that given day, I'll wait on that post that I normally do in PST afternoon, typically around like two, three o 'clock PST, I might hold on that post, let the morning post run a little bit, and then I'll do an evening post. So I kind of post once, and then I have potentially another one to two posts queued up that can go live depending on how that first post performs. If the first post does underwhelming, I'll then for sure post a second time around that two or three o 'clock.

6:59And then depending on how that post does, I might post again once I put my kids to bed around let's call it eight to nine p.m. PST. So okay that's super helpful so now I'm curious about something because you're out there in west coast so 5 a.m. whatever everyone always talks about the first hour on LinkedIn of engagement you better reply to comments you better jump in there whatever do you think that matters I mean you're probably sleeping when these things post. Yeah so in the morning post I am sleeping I have a team member that does that post for me she specifically because she's overseas, she specifically does that post for me.

7:36And then the other two posts in the day, she's typically sleeping and I'm doing those posts myself. And at that point, because I've then been online, you know, in a normal time PST, I have done some of the engagement, but oftentimes like we are, you know, just engaging kind of seeing what's on the feed, kind of she's checking the news and kind of just using my account to help me kind of respond to things. So there is a little bit of that engagement. And what I think is the most important is engaging with the replies and the comments on your own post within the first hour. You know, I think it's great to warm up the algorithm and comment and engage on other people's stuff, but I think it's especially important to, you know, like and comment and respond to people that have taken the time out of their day to leave something of value on your own post.

8:20A hundred percent. All right. So let's, let's get into what I think that you really doing that most people are not doing. And I think they're sleeping on it, which is company pages. I even think the word company pages is stupid. What you've really done on LinkedIn is you've created what are company pages, but they're on topics, you know, marketer tips or AI tips or whatever, these kind of generic phrases that really resonate with people. And you've turned them into these juggernauts that then fuel your individual personal page. I mean, what is the playbook there? Yeah. So the playbook initially was, can I figure out LinkedIn, A, myself as a personal account?

8:55And once I started doing that and started growing, I think around the time that I had maybe like a 100 150 000 followers or so i started my very first page and you're right they're technically on linkedin a company page i refer to them as a theme page so they're topical pages around i've got everything from marketing to sales to business to email marketing to ai to you know you name it something around a business sales marketing copywriting type audience i have so we have at this point now about 24 accounts a few of them are personal the rest are these steam pages i have about 3.2 million followers.

9:29So the first account I ever started was this one called marketing tips or marketer tips, I guess is a specific name. It actually has now more followers than me. And I was the one that grew it, right? Like I use my account and kind of some of the taxes I did to grow that one that has like 450, 460 ,000 followers. And basically what we're doing is we're doing a couple of things. We're a, um, we're, we're exceptional curators of content. We're taking already viral content on the web and just repurposing it and giving people the, credit for it, right? So what we basically do for LinkedIn is we're looking for content on LinkedIn, we're looking for content on Twitter for LinkedIn, we're looking on content on Reddit for LinkedIn, right?

10:07So we're basically taking content that has already done well on platform on LinkedIn, as well as content that has done well off platform that maybe could be relevant, bite-sized and interesting for LinkedIn, right? There's so much great gold and information within in Reddit, right? You see LLMs looking at Reddit for their whole SEO. Reddit, I feel like it's so early to the conversation and Reddit's like this really foreign thing that we're just studying what does well there. And then also Twitter or X, things move really quickly there. You'll know pretty quickly if something is viral or not over there.

10:40So we use it also too as like a testing ground. Does something pop over here? Not always does content on X or Twitter translate to LinkedIn, but the way in which we're looking at content and the way in which we study it, more often than not it does so the same playbook applies to all the other pages that we run ai type stuff we're looking at the types of things that are already popular we are curating content giving people credit that's one two is because we've been doing some of these pages and we have so much history um we're a just basically looking at my own posts what are the most viral posts i've ever posted on social media on marketing great those go marketer tips what's the most viral copywriting pages posts i've ever made that goes on our copywriting page right so we're basically looking at others mine and then the third bucket is we're kind of creating based off of like oh this meme did really really well what are the seven other memes that are more like this that we can do so it's just like trying to find things that work and then trying to create so many different types of things for those and also there it's a volume game we're posting on every single page two times a day you see it's such a great playbook and i think people are sleeping on and let's say you're out there and you know uh you don't have a huge volume you know you're 500 people whatever it is i can't do this, I don't know, 400 ,000, 500 ,000, whatever, whatever industry you're in, you're in the construction industry, set up these theme pages or these company pages.

11:55It costs you no money. It takes five seconds. Go out there and see what's resonating. You start posting it, and then you can use that page to add fuel to your personal page. I mean, you don't have to be a monster to do this, right? How long does it take to set up a company page to do what you're doing? The setup itself is minutes, right? It's basically like you need a logo, Some profile or banner image and then you need a couple few cute details So the setup is minutes and then the researching of the content, you know That takes a little bit longer but like I live on social media. My team lives on social media We're always just bookmarking things that like came onto our feet in our viral So a lot of the work is just already done in our day-to-day practice It's so true And you know, it's funny about what you all doing because I do the same thing on mine And what I look for is stuff that like let's say an X has over like a hundred thousand likes or whatever and half the time I'm let's say it's something funny let's only a post humor I don't even know if I find it funny but I'm like I guess everybody else does yeah and I'm like screw it I know it's gonna rip I only want stuff that's gonna rip I don't care if it's like I personally think it's the funniest thing I've ever seen this is weird yeah there's some memes on my team's created where I'm like I don't know if I'm getting older I just don't understand it and they're like no no like it makes sense I'm like all right well let's see if it makes sense or not we post I'm like oh my gosh like I didn't get it they got it thankfully they're younger and they're with it And it works.

13:11So you just never know. And it's just a game of repetition. And I think the same playbook I'm talking about on LinkedIn can work on most platforms. I know for sure it works on threads, right? The platform owned by Meta. I started kind of taking threads seriously about six to 12 months ago. I now have four accounts there. My personal account plus these three pages. One's an email page. One's a general marketing page. And then one's a copywriting page. I mean, we've grown to something like, I don't know, 150 or 250 ,000 followers doing about five to seven-ish million impressions a month there. By the way, the LinkedIn theme network has the 3.2 million followers.

13:45We're probably doing, I'd have to find the exact number, something north of like 20 or 30 million impressions a month. And my background, as you mentioned initially, is an email guy. So the way in which I see this is like, how do I use social media for strong top of funnel? So how do I get eyeballs, impressions, views, followers, those types of things to then be able to funnel to my email newsletter, then be able to funnel to virtual webinars or virtual summits. And I know that's a lot of your game too. You're doing the whole virtual event type thing. For example, the other day, I'd done like a simple LinkedIn post for an event I'm speaking at in October.

14:19By the way, I don't even know what I'm going to speak on. I don't know what's happening in October. I don't even remember what I had for breakfast. I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I did a post and there was like 300 or 400 people that responded and had signed up, right? And again, like that was just one simple quick post for something that's not even top of mind for people. A lot of the times the last few days of the event, like that same post could have done maybe double, five or 600 signups, right? And think about if you go do now 24 posts across the 24 accounts and each one does anywhere from, let's call it 10 to 400 signups.

14:51Now you have thousands and thousands of people that are specifically focused and interested in which are going to attend your virtual summit. You have their email. You have oftentimes information about them. They're filling out their job titles, what they're interested in, right? So using social and doing this is so important to drive back that first party zero party day that you can then have on your email and SMS list Which i'm obviously preaching to choir with you. You know how important that is Dude, I I totally agree and and you know, you bring up threads Let's just talk about that for a second because I think people I know they're sleeping on it It now has 400 million monthly active users and I saw a stat this week that literally I almost fell over It said less than 50 of those 400 million people are, they have a different account on Instagram, meaning it's not just the Instagram people that are on threads, which is, I thought everybody was basically just taking their Instagram account and running a threads account because they were like married together because that's how meta kicked it off.

15:46But now it's really its own platform. So are you finding like, because you're doubling down on threads, you have this, you're growing your following and doing whatever, are you getting people to actually interact with your content there and then actually go in your funnel, get on your email list? Is it actually, is it a real functional network that we should all be involved with? Yeah, that's a great question. It's, it's early. Um, I have a link in my bio. I don't actually have any attribution set up or I haven't ever run this segment to see how many have been there. I mean, we're doing, you know, millions of impressions a month and we're growing.

16:17So I would be surprised if people, you know, to some degree weren't clicking. I imagine we're driving maybe hundreds, maybe low thousands of subs potentially a month. I don't have this specific number um but at the end of the day like my focus there is like it's just a testing ground uh to your point it's growing so fast like at one point like they're adding like a million plus users a day they're investing a lot into it they recently started rolling out dms that's like one of the newest feature so i feel like now like once dms kind of are there right they're gonna probably be rolling out ads if they haven't already if they start adding stories now it's basically like i am taking advantage of threads being early where i was later to Instagram.

16:56I wish I went harder on Instagram sooner. And I think that's the takeaway for everything, you know, wishing you had started sooner and done it better. Um, so my whole thing right now is like, I'm more focused on thread because it's a newer platform because I don't need to monetize it on just getting mass amount of views and eyeballs and following. And then as it becomes more mature and adds, you know, story views and adds, adds and adds, you know, mass DMS or whatever, then I'll think about monetizing, but it's probably contributing, you know, a little it because now is the time to get on threads and do all that.

17:29I mean, other platforms, I hope blue skies like dying a quick death and you know, clubhouse died. I mean, there's, you know, you have to pick the right platform, but if anything that that met is doing is going to exist, I mean, that's really the secret sauce, right? Like if met is involved, it's going to get to a billion users. And by the time it does, you're going to be a beast there and then you'll figure out what to do with it. I guess that's the play. Yeah. And everything too, from like securing the right handles, like even if you could just get on platforms early to secure handles, like I should have done this myself.

17:52Like, could you imagine if I got just chase at everything chase banks going to come knocking my door and I'm going to make seven figures from just having my own name. Right. Right. Just capitalizing on that real estate. Like think about like, I think Instagram is probably the most prevalent where like I've seen friends buy and sell just handles themselves, irrespective of the actual audience and traffic for five, six figures. I don't know if there's any seven, but I know friends that have made 10 50, 250 grand, just selling, you know, few it's like.com domains. It's like just selling those to big brands because you were early.

18:23Like you could make a lot of money and obviously it's harder now. Right. Yeah, no, I love it. I love your whole playbook. So listen, everybody out there, I want you to find Chase. First of all, on LinkedIn, it's Chase and then it's Diamond, D-I, no A, D-I-M-O-N-D on LinkedIn. I am telling you, he's not only a great follow, but you got to hit him up and ask him how the hell you can work with him because he's done a lot for my business in a lot of different ways. He's an excellent, great dude. chase how else should people find you and get connected with you what should they do yeah i'm on most platforms chase no a and diamond um just reach out to me um if i could share my email uh an hour in the future which is chase at chasediamond.com again no a in diamond and then i guess the last thing i want to leave because this actually went by really quick i want to make sure i'm adding enough value um i think like the the biggest thing i would recommend to people is like find three different groups of creators on any platform that you want to dominate let's talk about linkedin just for there so say you're starting out like what are other people starting out posting right that's one place to look it may or may not be helpful because a lot of people are just kind of trying to get in the reps the next level up it's trying to find like the the micro influencers don't don't look at me just yet um don't look at jay just yet look at people that maybe have let's call it three to ten thousand followers you know what are they posting what's working i go through the last four weeks of their post and try to pick out the posts that are kind of more viral than other kind of the outliers.

19:48And then go look at kind of more of the polished people like myself and Jay that have been doing this for a few years or whoever is the respective person in your space and look at like what's working for them. You know, the reason I say don't look at us first is because, because we have so many followers, things will probably go viral in a different way. Although if you look at my stuff, like there's huge variances. Some of my stuff gets 150 likes, some of my stuff gets 20 ,000 likes, right? So there is some variance there. And LinkedIn is so hot and cold every single day on LinkedIn. I don't know what ride I'm getting on.

20:18You know, it's really the highs and the lows and across, you know, 24 accounts we have and a given week we go from like the record breaking week. We had 5 million impressions on a given account. So like the next week we're like a million or like, oh man, we were on top of the world last week and man, we suck. Do we, do we know what we're doing? So just study different types of content and figure out like what works and then, you know, think about your own style and find ways to not copy, but find ways to make it your own. I think that's like the biggest thing I was doing is like when I first got into LinkedIn, I started reverse engineering what the big people and the medium people were doing.

20:51And I started figuring out, okay, this makes sense. You know, they're posting a lot of content. They're posting really good content. And it seems like they're getting their friends to engage with their post early on. Those were the three things. And like, those are the three things that still work today. It's like, you have to post really good content. You have to post consistently good content and be very consistent. I think a lot of people miss out on that part And then lastly is you have to get people to engage friends family Co-workers maybe a few peers. I know people are like Oh, it's an engagement pod and weird and that's like you asking two or three other creators that your friend to support you to support them Like screw it if people are gonna get mad about that being an engagement pod It's like They have no business telling you that you need to find people that you can support and people that can support you and people that you can come up with.

21:36It's the best way for you to A, stay accountable and B, get a little bit of action on your content other than like your mom or your grandma posting if they're even on LinkedIn, right? So I think that's kind of what I want to leave with. It's just like, those are the three things, content, consistency, and finding like your tribe of people to just engage with you early in the post life. Dude, that is so valuable. It's so many good takeaways and it's true. That is what you need. And I love the fact that you call out, yeah, let people help you out. and then help them. We're all in it together. This has been fantastic, Chase.

22:08You're a legend. Everybody consume all this stuff. Follow them everywhere. Hit them up. Do work with them. You're the best. Thanks, Chase. Appreciate you being here, man. Thanks for having me. You did it. You made it to the end. But wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast. And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review. Why not? But you know what? I want to do even more with you. Go to gurumediahub.com and we can partner there. You could find out about all of our free events, all of our stuff. And if you're epically bored, go to jschwedelson.com and we could stay connected.

22:44You could find my newsletter and everything else I got going on. Thanks for being here and hope you subscribe.