Neil Patel Gets 57x More Leads From LinkedIn Than X

0:00Eric Siu:When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for. Before the first click, before the first form fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. The part that everyone misses about the measure of an X account can be determined by what it opens for you in terms of real life, in terms of the doors that it opens, right?

0:35Eric Siu:So let me share this with you. And really, we can talk about how this applies beyond X as well. So Nikita Beer, who's the head of product at X, which ironically, you know what's funny? Elon gave him this job to be head of product at X because he's so good at X because he was so good at posting before, right? So he still is. So the value of an X account can be measured by what doors it opens for you in real life. So you look at this 3.4 million views on this one. And then Gary Tan of Y Combinators, like it's priceless strip mall guy. And you have Nicole Benham here. And then all these other people is like, Oh my God, it's changed my life.

1:06Eric Siu:Even your brother here, Dr. Parrot Patel, this guy, he's like 100 ,000%. This guy over here, your brother. Right. So, so anyway, all that to say is that I think about this, Neil, I think about, I'm going to share a couple of examples and we can kind of go beyond this, but I, Recently, a lot of engineers have taken our Beat Cloud Challenge. They've all come from X, okay? We've had an intern recently join us who's amazing, and he came from X as well, and he actually applied using X, and he wrote like a thread. And so I think about the people that I'm able to talk to through DM, whether it's like popular creators or venture capitalists or entrepreneurs, all that comes through X.

1:49Eric Siu:And it's all like because you spend the time to actually create something that actually intrigues someone else in terms of thought-provoking statements that you put out there, right? And you also get to test your thinking out there when you're on X. Like you can test whether you're thinking is right or wrong. And for me, I personally like writing a lot and I think you do as well. And so it can be X, it can be LinkedIn, it can be whatever it is that you have. It could be YouTube or whatever. But I do think for me, the way X is able to kind of expand your reach to the right people at the right time and really smart people hanging out, I think it has been immeasurable.

2:25Eric Siu:So let's talk about X and we can talk about how this kind of applies for everything in social.

2:31Neil Patel:Well, first off, did you try pushing it to LinkedIn? And is it mainly X driving the results for your Beat Cloud challenge or you just mainly pushed it on X?

2:39Eric Siu:I've pushed it to LinkedIn as well. The funny thing is LinkedIn, you have to get in the algorithm's favor. I'm not in favor with that algorithm right now. And so whatever I push to LinkedIn, it gets like five or 10 likes, but whatever I push on my X account can go up to like hundreds of thousands of views. Got it. Yeah, that makes sense on why you're getting more applicants from X. You know what's funny though? When I spoke to Alex Lieberman of Morning Brew and now he has that AI consulting firm, 10X. So he says that X is really good for engineers, hiring engineers, which is exactly what happened for me, right?

3:14Eric Siu:But LinkedIn drives a good amount of, like a lot of pipeline. I'll just leave it at that kind of broad, which makes a lot of sense but like obviously he's in favor with the LinkedIn algorithm right now so how's your LinkedIn doing right now by the way?

3:27Neil Patel:I haven't checked either but I do know LinkedIn drives because I get reports from my team every single month LinkedIn drives a lot more leads than X does by far from what we're able to track and we get a good amount of views on both do you do you have a rough idea of how much more like a multiple on LinkedIn over X? yeah it's not that much more i get a report on that on a monthly basis too it's not like 10 times more or anything like that but the lead count from x i mean from uh that's a view count right but from a lead count perspective it's more than 50x on linkedin over x wow uh-huh that's a lot i think it's actually closer to like 56 or 57x more you know what's funny because neil when you when

4:15Eric Siu:When you post to LinkedIn, I'm going to pull up your LinkedIn and let's just take a look at it. So your posts are just reposts from your other channels, aren't they? So it's the same stuff as X and all the other channels. Yeah. So I do that. I'm going to look at Neil's and I'm going to look at ours. Let me share my screen over here. So let's do a little analysis of our socials. And we can even talk about how we would improve each other. So Neil, you see yours? Yeah. Okay. So this is short form over here. Neil published this five hours ago. So just for context, Neil has 800 ,000 followers on LinkedIn.

4:49Eric Siu:So 45 likes, 20 comments, 4 reposts. And literally, it's it. I'm sorry. It's not like the caption is amazing or anything. It's just like a normal caption. His team still uses tags. You probably don't need tags anymore too. But hey, 45 and 20, not bad for five hours. This will probably get, I would say, like 150 or 200. What do you say? I have no idea. Okay, let's look at some other ones here. so 19 hours ago he published this chart 51 uh likes on it 22 comments and then let's go down a little more 57 23 okay but i would say that i think neil is um because he's reposting it's almost like a slot machine okay this kind of looks like a slot machine too but like this one will get

5:28Neil Patel:216 and 72 it's not even that if you look at the topics the topics are very specific to our ideal customer profile so like if you look at the charts those few examples they won't get tons of likes because they're tailored around local businesses and ideally ones that are franchises because that's what we're trying to get for leads.

5:49Eric Siu:Right? Yeah. Well, what I'm calling out, Neil, is that... Yeah. So check this out. You see 57 over here, but you have 200. You have 4x more. This is what I'm calling out. So I'm calling out like there's a luck component to the post. You just never know what's going to do well.

6:02Neil Patel:No, but that video is more generic than the ones that are charts. Like specifically, that video was more general for anyone. yeah so this i know those charts that are very specific that are industry related drive more revenue than the stuff that gets like five ten times more likes oh this is a youtube video that's why correct it's it's more generic the charts are for a webinar that is specifically around franchises yep okay so let's continue i want to look at more over here so this is more

6:39Eric Siu:about ai overviews right how to show up more okay and that's commercial terms that's not just and

6:44Neil Patel:the reason i'm i'm cutting you off here is i want everyone to understand i'm like if you look at that how often are ads showing up in air or views for commercial terms right this would be e-com people selling services so i'm trying to target people who are specifically my ideal customer this is more e-com than the um than general and what we found is when we get very specific like the other ones were like franchises and multi-unit location uh local businesses we generate way less likes but we generate substantially more revenue than something

7:21Eric Siu:like it's a thousand likes yeah so let me just simplify this for for everyone so really what what neil is saying is okay some of the content might be wider tam okay you have sam altman in there you have Elon Musk in there and some of it might be a smaller TAM but they have more money and it's in his ICP that's what he's targeting and so the engagement might be lower for like commercial terms or things like that we're talking about small business franchises right so by the way like I'm looking through this I'm sure you have one I'm gonna look for one that just really took off 184 75 179 or so I think if there's anything to call out it doesn't hurt you to repost these things and i think you're posting what like three times a day

8:04Neil Patel:or something like that no two times well we're about to kick it up to three times

8:09Eric Siu:this is a youtube video that neil published this one got 500 likes on it okay so he tracked which brands show up in chat gpt obviously is a wider audience um and this is like a breakdown of how chat gpt is showing up in in search i think or citations so anyway all that to say let's just I'm just going to look at today and the last 24 hours. So five hours ago, you posted one. Okay. 19 hours ago, you posted one. 22. So in a 24-hour period, you posted three. That's what it is.

8:34Neil Patel:Yeah. But if you just break it down, we just post two times a day. We post morning and afternoon.

8:41Eric Siu:And by the way, like I wouldn't even, when people say, oh, like you should make sure that maybe you're only posting three times a week for the LinkedIn algorithm because they don't like you posting that much. I don't know, man, because you're posting twice a day.

8:52Neil Patel:But what we found is if I post more wide audience stuff, and I know Eric uses TAM. TAM stands for total adjustable market, but it can be interpreted in a few different ways. There's TAM like more population. We don't focus on what appeals to a bigger number of people. We focus on TAM that is more dollar oriented. So we optimize for what will drive the most revenue. because if you look at, let's say, franchise businesses that need marketing, there's not as many businesses out there that are actually franchises. I'm not talking about a Domino's, like one actual Domino's. I'm talking about Domino's, the parent company, right?

9:31Neil Patel:That's who we would be targeting. Or Everbowl, the acai bowl company that our mutual friend owns. And when you post content like that, we do not get the amount of views compared to the more generic stuff that's quote unquote more beginnerish marketing. but what we find is it drives a lot more revenue. Yeah, this is funny

9:51Eric Siu:because we do get leads from LinkedIn but you look at what we're posting here. It's like, it's a lot of the shorts, right? That are kind of repurposed from this podcast. You might get six likes on this one, 76 impressions, six likes on this one over here, four likes, 300 impressions or so, 182 impressions. But then when you click over to my X account, which is over here, it's like 22 ,000 views, okay? you know this one we're live right now and then some stuff you know whatever but like 1500 views here nine nine thousand views on this one five thousand views on this one eight hundred so i have an easier time on an x and some of the stuff will get like a hundred thousand plus views or so but i just keep going right ten thousand over here but look at the titles of this stuff that's getting the views what are the titles i can't read on this it's not specific it's not specific to my audience right so this what this was like more general population anybody that's using ai right This is how I saved money on my token optimization.

10:47Eric Siu:This one over here is smaller TAM over here, 3 ,400 traditional SEO is dying. And I just kind of quote tweeted this. But I would just say Neil's right. I think we're getting at here, maybe what you're getting at is more so you don't want to publish stuff just for the views because if you get too focused on fixated on the views, it ends up becoming an audience capture thing where you want to focus more on that audience and trying to please everyone. But if you try to please everyone, it doesn't help you grow your business the best. Correct.

11:15Neil Patel:And that's what I found because I used to optimize for the views and we used to get way more views. I get algorithms also changed. So some of it could be that, but deliberately we started getting more specific with our content and our webinars. We used to have webinars where 15 ,000 people would show up live, literally 15 ,000 people live. I'm not talking about registered. I'm talking about actually showing up during the hour we're doing the webinar. And what we found is when we had topics that were really broad like that, we generated very little qualified leads and that turned into very little customers.

11:48Neil Patel:When we started doing webinars that had half, one third of the people show up, but it was more specific or even sometimes one fifth of the people show up, solely a few thousand. What we found was we generated less leads. They were much more qualified and we generated more customers and the customers actually spent more money with us, per customer, right? The average order value or whatever you want to call it versus going very broad with our messaging.

12:17Eric Siu:And how, so what data are you, I'm assuming, because this took you some time to switch. I don't know necessarily when you made a switch, maybe like what, three, four years ago, you made the switch. Like what was the methodology just so people can kind of copy what you did there?

12:33Neil Patel:So when you get the views, what people don't talk about and it's hard to measure is there's some sort of brand value component to it. The more people see your face, your logo, your business, or hear about it, there is some value. Even if they're not your ideal customer right now, they may be your ideal customer later on. It could be that their business grows or it could be that they move jobs or they get rich somehow or whatever it may be. So we weren't sure if going broad or going narrow would generate us more revenue in the long run right so what we decided to do was we were posting once a day on social media we decided to post one more time a day that was more specific and as we started seeing that real revenue benefits from it and the brand benefits from it we started then posting both more focused content around our ideal customer profile and not every single day, but for the majority of our content.

13:35Neil Patel:And then eventually we transitioned to trying to fully do that majority of the time when I say majority, like 85 90 % of the time, when we found that model to work really well. And what we found on the brand component side is less people are actually familiar with our company because of it. Or at least we're not top in mind as much for many companies. And back in the day, I would get Instagram messages and direct messages on other platforms and be like, oh, my dream one day is to grow my company so I can hire you to do my marketing. Once we get big enough, we're going to end up hiring you. Now we get way less of those messages, but we get messages from larger corporations asking us specific questions related to problems they have in marketing.

14:18Neil Patel:And we generate way more leads and we're building a stronger brand with our ideal customer profile. While before our ideal customers weren't really messaging us on social media because the content was too broad.

14:31Eric Siu:Just a quick break. If you want to run LinkedIn personalized ads and landing pages, you can't do it on LinkedIn ads right now, but you can do it with Carrot. It's www.carrot.ai.

14:42Neil Patel:Again, karrot.ai. And we'll see you on the other side. Yep.

14:47Eric Siu:So I think at a very meta level here for everyone to think about is you really have to understand the business that you're in. And again, like we have seen, we've seen mutual friends Neil that have just chased the views to the end of the earth and they become very popular influencers so to speak and they have millions and millions of followers but it distracted them from their main business and their main business kind of looks like a Frankenstein now yeah I agree

15:11Neil Patel:yeah I've tried chasing the views Eric's friends I've had dinner with some of Eric's friends be like oh I read your article you know the one you wrote on like what flying business class or how you spent all this money on Tom Ford and you know fancy clothing companies and what it did that was so cool like no joke some of those articles got millions and millions and millions of views and so many people would stop me on the street be like oh I read that article about you you know

15:37Eric Siu:buying more designer clothes didn't generate crap in Revy and at the end of the day

15:45Eric Siu:the what did you meet this guy at my mom's funeral the one that said that he read your article

15:50Neil Patel:No, this is when we were in Vegas and we did lunch at Aria and you were gambling before dinner because our reservation was doing a little bit. That was dinner at Aria.

15:58Eric Siu:Dinner at Catch or something.

16:03Eric Siu:I don't know where the dinner was. It was dinner with my high school friends. It was a bunch of girls, right? Yes. This is years ago, like more than 10 years ago. Close to 10 years or over 10 years ago. Anyway, so that aside, let's move on to the next thing. Neil, you'll like this one. because I've been sending Neil these stock charts where these things are going parabolic. So I want to emphasize, this is not financial advice. I'm going to show you a couple of things over here. And funny enough, Neil, I told someone yesterday, I showed him these stocks and he immediately told his wife to go buy them.