The New Rules of LinkedIn Growth | Marketing, Demystified Podcast

0:00Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. This episode I'm sharing is an episode where I was the guest. I jumped on the Marketing Demystified podcast and we talked about all things LinkedIn growth. We got into why commenting is one of the fastest ways to grow on LinkedIn, how to think about your content in three buckets, and why posting for yourself instead of your audience is the biggest mistake I see people make. If you're trying to build on LinkedIn, this is a great episode for you to listen to. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast.

0:38I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up.

1:22But LinkedIn is still one of the few platforms where organic reach is genuinely available. And the founders and other executives who have figured out how to grow on LinkedIn are building real business momentum. So today I'm joined by Daniel Murray, founder of the Marketing Millennials and Authority, a B2B LinkedIn growth agency that has helped build multiple seven-figure media brands using LinkedIn as their number one organic channel. Today, you'll learn what the algorithm rewards, how to write posts that perform, like commenting is one of the fastest growth lovers most people ignore, and how to turn one piece of content into something that works across multiple channels.

2:07Welcome to the show, Daniel. Thank you for having me. This is going to be fun. We're on LinkedIn, so this is a good place to talk about LinkedIn. day. Totally, totally. I'm a huge LinkedIn fan. And but it can be a little bit of a mystery to people sometimes. And even people that it performs really well for, it's not always like an exact science of, you know, add these three ingredients and get this, you know, delicious dessert at the end, right? Sometimes it works the way you expect it to. And sometimes it doesn't. So I'm excited to dig into some of the tactics that you've put in place that work.

2:40Yeah, I'm excited. Let's dive in. Awesome. So LinkedIn has kind of a reputation of being hard to grow. And I think that's becoming increasingly more true for brand pages and company pages. You know, people really follow people on LinkedIn and sometimes companies struggle to keep consistent on their brand pages if they're not getting as much engagement. So before we get into like growing on LinkedIn, can you talk a little bit about why founders should see LinkedIn as a channel for business growth in the first place and what makes it beneficial over some of the other channels? Yeah, I think one, obviously people are in the mindset of being in the business mindset on LinkedIn.

3:22So your audience is there. For most of the people, I would say I give you a plumber or something else, you probably should find a channel where your audience lives. For a lot of businesses, your audience lives on LinkedIn. They're in the mindset of business when they're on LinkedIn. And what I've been seeing over the last, at least the last year, is people pages are what people are following. So if you have a company, you should have multiple founders and multiple execs sharing your company mission, your company, what you believe in, stories. There's a lot of things we can go into of what you should be posting, but it's a missed opportunity if you're not sharing on LinkedIn because there's not enough posts on LinkedIn.

4:20And even if it feels like that, so the opportunity for organic growth and organic scaling is huge. But I know we'll get into some tactics on how to do it. Yeah, for sure. And I think you're right that LinkedIn is for people to follow people, but in the business mindset. And we really are speaking to a B2B audience. So your point about a plumber, if you're a B2C, maybe LinkedIn isn't your space and that's okay. But when we're talking about B2B businesses, that is where you want to be. And people really do follow people. but I think that like the brand pages have their own kind of role and I like to look at them maybe with like different metrics in mind or different success in mind where a lot of companies are struggling to like build following on their brand pages on LinkedIn but if your executives are really engaged on an individual level first of all it does help drive traffic to your brand page And I like to think of a brand page as more of a landing spot that, you know, when I'm discovering a new business for the first time, one of the first things I'm going to do is see if they're active on LinkedIn and what kind of content they're posting.

5:38Maybe I'm not engaging with that content or I'm never going to follow their page. but I think it serves a little bit of a different purpose. And I think you're right that it's a missed opportunity if you as an individual within your business that you're trying to grow are not posting your own individual content, just leaning too heavily on the brand content because I think it serves like a much different purpose. I would actually say that in, and I know you've said this at the beginning, you can grow on a company page and the way you grow on a company page, What I've seen in least in the last year is through comments, like being actual the social part of social media.

6:17Social media is actually two things and people put it as one role. There's a social part, which is like actually being active on social media, making comments, responding to people that are like you in your community. And then the media part is distributing content. So what I've been seeing is that three or four years ago, you could post a bunch of things on your company page and there was scale there. Now there's less scale there because I think a year ago, LinkedIn decided that they're prioritizing people over companies. So like only one or two percent of company pages get shown in the feed.

6:53So the way to do that, last year, LinkedIn launched a feature called Common Impressions. and common impressions. If you get impressions by comments, people will see you in the feed and you're basically hijacking people's posts. Not hijacking, but being a part of someone who's popular as posts. And if your post does well, you're going to get followers back to your page and you'll be more active. So I've been focusing more on the commenting strategy on the brand page. And on personal pages, I've been following more. But I do believe you should still be posting on your company page and being active on your company page.

7:29because I do think it is not only a landing page for your business, but also a place where you could share your perspective, be a thought, their company could be trailblazing a thought, like some thought leadership content on there, your point of view, show your personality. So I think there is a space for that. But the best combination is when you have executives posting, I think not people have coined the term employee generated content. And if your company, people in your company are posting along with your company page, that's like the ultimate strategy I've seen is having both those posts at the same time.

8:08Yeah, for sure. Okay, wait. So let's hold on to like stick on commenting strategy for a little bit because there's a lot of different ways that this can come into play. So when you talk about a commenting strategy for your brand page, it wasn't always possible, but it is possible now to comment on other people's posts as a company page. And so I as an individual can comment on my own company content. I as a company can comment on other people's content. Like what are some of the different things that you recommend and like how should somebody think about commenting as a strategy on its own? So what I do is I have a bank of posts that are already made that if they fit a certain type of perspective I want to share on someone's post, I'll add that.

9:01So there's two ways to think about comedy strategy. One is testing ideas you want to create content for because it's like a low-lift way of testing to see does this idea hit or not. and if it does hit, I can now put it on the main feed. That's one. The second thing is remixing content. So content that you've seen performed before, you can bring it back as comments and get engagement that way. And you'll be seen in the feed more as a comment. And then third strategy, like what I do, since I'm a meme guy, I have like different meme templates in one place. And if I want to quickly, if I see a post that's interesting, I'll go into my meme templates.

9:50I'll be like, okay, this is the perfect meme for this post. I'm going to comment from the Market Millennial. So I'll comment from Daniel Murray. Because I already have this banked amount of posts that is saved in OnOcean or however you want to save your post. So I recommend that you build like a content library where you're ready to post. And I think most people don't do that for commenting strategy. They do things on the fly or they use AI or they say something. But commenting is really a way to get yourself to stand out as a brand. And I'm growing the same amount I'm growing on my company page.

10:31than I threw comments as I did two years ago where I was just posting on the main grid and not doing as many comments. So commenting is a huge growth for company pages. So if you're a company page, I recommend having a commenting strategy. Yeah, that's a great tip to have a bank of sort of like your perspective. If you have a thought on a particular topic to just have that ready so you're not having to create it from scratch every time. I think that's such a great tip. and you're right, people think about doing that for content, but maybe not for commenting. I also love your recommendation of like, if you've got content that performed well, that you've posted in the past, maybe it goes in your comment bank.

11:14I also think of it the opposite way. Like if I comment on somebody's content and my comment gets a lot of engagement, if you get a lot of people reacting to it and replying to it, then that's an indication it might be something that you want to write about. which I know we're all over the place. We're out of order in terms of our conversation today, but that's just, I'm excited that you brought up commenting early. But I think it's a great way to kind of, when you see what works and what gets engagement, to repurpose that and use it other ways. I also think it's an easier way to not, if you have a brand that has huge brand guidelines, it's an easy way to kind of step and test a little bit outside the brand guidelines to to prove that this will work as a post before you post it on the main grid and have to have that conversation so it's a good way to i love comments as a testing way of testing posts to see if they will work on the main grid a lot of times i will test posts before before i ever post it on the main feeds as comments.

12:27Some of my best viral posts were comments before. Wow. Yeah. It's super important to have a commenting strategy for sure. All right. Before we get too far down the hole of, you know, doing things that work and making those recommendations, I want to talk a little bit about what doesn't work. What are some common mistakes that you see on LinkedIn that brands or founders are making that are just killing their performance before it even starts? Yeah, I think there are a couple. One is I think so many people are writing like personal journals instead of like writing for their audience. Like you really need to like understand your audience pain points, what they like, what entertains them, what will inspire them and then write about that there's there's like five to ten common pain points that you could probably write about that you could spin up but a lot of people think they have this like original idea and they're like why isn't it working on linkedin because it doesn't have an audience for it so if you're not getting traction like the way in the algorithm works is they want linkedin wants people to stay on the platform so they're going to keep feeding the post to more and more people because they want people to say, but if they're not feeding your post to more and more people, that means they don't think your post is valuable.

13:50I know that's a broad term, but valuable to your audience or entertaining or inspiring. So they're not going to feed your post to more and more people. So that's the number one thing is that they don't do that. Secondly, they don't structure their post like with a hook, like, like you got to draw someone in like the first couple, sentences are the most important and i also think images are hooks like i think if you like one of the things that work really well in linkedin are images so images are a good way to hook someone in and take up the whole feed so having a hook is another another thing and then i think now is like a call to action and a call to action to share a call to action to comment get more people in the feed.

14:38But you have to pay attention to what platforms are doing. LinkedIn now has, in the metrics, shown sends and saves his posts as a metric that is in their metric. So if those two things are what LinkedIn is trying to show you, so you should do things that are going to try to get your posts sent in the DMs or saved. So if it's like guides or something that someone can come back later or something that's funny that they will send to their friends or screenshot to their friends or something that really sparks someone's interest or is something that's thought inspiring. You should do things that the platform wants if you want that.

15:22Otherwise, you can keep doing, you could keep trying whatever you're trying to do, but just know that it's not going to be seen by more and more people. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's a challenge that a lot of people are having is like, what does the platform want? Right. Because it does change quite frequently where, you know, I mean, there was a period of time where people would say, oh, answer this question in the comments and, you know, to try to get additional, you know, people to comment on their post. And And then LinkedIn started noticing. So if you wrote in your posts that you were asking people for comments, then they would deprioritize it, right?

16:02Like the algorithm is constantly changing. There's always new kind of rules of what makes a post successful, what makes LinkedIn want to show it to more people. So you're bringing up, you know, saves and sends. This is, you know, something that's a little bit newer. So if you're operating on a strategy where you're trying to get more comments and LinkedIn is now putting more value into saves. I guess, how do you keep up to date onto what it is from a technical perspective that LinkedIn wants? I think the thing you said is that LinkedIn wants to keep people on LinkedIn, right? So that's one thing that is good to kind of just think about as a whole, right?

16:45Like, how do I keep people on the LinkedIn platform? But yeah, how do you keep up to date on that? I think the biggest, another mistake people make is if you want a channel to be your best channel, you have to give that channel 100 % effort. And the way you give a channel 100 % effort is you have to be, people might hate that and say, you have to be a consumer on the platform and understand and look what is working on the platform. Like, look what people in your niche, what's working in your niche. And it's obvious that what's getting fed and what's not if you are a consumer on the platform. But if you're there writing posts, posting and leaving the platform and then not coming back and not putting 100 % effort, you're not going to get 100 % results on the platform.

17:29Or another thing I see is a problem is people are on multiple platforms, like too many platforms at once and they're spread too thin on those platforms. If you want LinkedIn to be your best channel, you got to focus 100 % on LinkedIn as the channel. And then once you got LinkedIn to a level where you know it's repeatable, you're getting engagement, you're getting seen, then you can start moving to Instagram or X or whatever other channel you want to do. But I think a lot of people think that it's just like a post and I leave type channel. But that's not how social media works. And that's not how you went on LinkedIn.

18:09Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think a lot of those channels sort of require a, you know, an individual strategy. So if you are a hundred percent focused on LinkedIn, you can't just be taking LinkedIn content and putting it on Instagram. That's not going to work for you either place. Um, so yeah, that recommendation of kind of focusing a hundred percent on the channel that you want to grow is a great one. So let's jump into some of the tactics for creating good LinkedIn content. You already started to touch on a few, right? You know, understanding what people want to hear about, what questions do people have?

18:48I think of it similarly actually to like search optimization, like what topics do people have questions about? If you're answering people's like, you know keep me up at night questions on search or on linkedin or in other channels that's how people are going to discover you um but yeah how do you how do you write a good linkedin or i won't even say post but just good linkedin content and then think about how do you think about some of the different formats like you mentioned using images or you know let's jump into some of those best practices? I think first is like with AI, it's made it very easy to do research on what's working.

19:29So you can go on like perplexity or other places and say like, what is the top pain points for marketers that is showing up on Reddit, blah, blah, blah. Social, what are the top posts? You can go on like Grok for that's access tool and see what are the top marketing posts going on. So you could, or whatever in your industry, you just add your industry and see what is trending in your industry. And you'll have some ideas of what's working. You do the same thing on LinkedIn. Just see what's working. And when you see a post that is working or doing, save it and put it in your bank of posts to know like, this is a format that works.

20:08This is something that doesn't work. Like have a swipe file of, of, of things that work and don't work. and you can go back to them and remix. The easiest way to start is remixing, like taking an idea and making it your own. So like if you see something that went the same, got some attention, you can take it in another industry. That's why I always think like pay attention to not only your industry, pay attention to what's happening in other industries because you could take ideas from other industries and put it for your industry. And now it's like a new original idea. That's what I kind of do sometimes with my meme templates is I will see, okay, this is going, this template is going good for finance.

20:58How could I make this a marketing meme or image or post because it's working for another industry and how could I remix it to make it? So remixing is one easy way to do it. also like going off of like news that is relatable right now so if something just launched like open ai is launching new ads like what is your opinion on open ai launching ads on their on their platform is taking relatable because what works in content in general is doing things that are relatable to your audience the best type of content is relatable um and i think whether it's relatable in the news, a relatable show someone's watching.

21:43That's why I think you need to start with understanding pain points, but also understanding your audience, what they like outside of their pain points. Like, is your audience meaning millennials? Do they like The Office? Do they like Friends? Are they watching The Bachelor? Like, what are they doing outside of work where you can bring in other things to make it relatable and use comparisons to things that they already know to make your content more interesting and spice it up? Hmm. Yeah. And I think that that relatability and also authenticity really does perform well. And I found like with my own content on LinkedIn, if I try to craft something and I spend weeks making it perfect or whatever, like it doesn't perform as well as the thing that you just like have an experience, write about it in a way that you've learned something or you have new questions that you know are relatable to other people.

22:39Like something that sort of, you know, whenever I post something a little bit more in the moment and I don't overthink it, it tends to perform better. And I think that's like, you know, that relatability and authenticity versus like trying to create a post or a piece of content that's gonna perform. Like, you know, trying to create the performance is the thing that doesn't necessarily perform in my own experience. Yeah, I think overengineering posts are one thing, but I also think it's not over and you can, there are ways to just say like, write a good hook, have an image that have an idea that's performed in the past and redo it and it works.

23:20There are formulas to get a post to work multiple times. I think what the problem a lot of people don't do is repeat their winners. It works in everything you do in ads and social and something. If you have ideas that are winning, keep doubling down that you can remix it and make it in different formats, different styles. You don't have to have a new idea every single day. Nobody's going to remember a post that you did three days away, two weeks. if I asked you right now what you posted on Monday, March 31st, you're probably not – I don't know if you remember that that was Monday. But let's say I asked you what you posted two weeks ago.

23:59You might not – I bet you're going to have to go look and look that your audience – if you can't even answer that, why do you think your audience is going to remember what you posted two weeks ago? So you could remix as much as you want and keep a running toll of like this idea, perform, this idea. The beauty about organic social, it gives you signals of your ideas working or not because you're not putting any paid behind it. It's saying likes, shares, engagements are signals that this idea is interesting to that audience. Even if you get 50 likes, but it's 50 likes of your ICP and everybody is in your ICP, you're like, okay, this one got 50 likes versus this one got 10 likes.

24:44Why did this get 50 likes? Maybe we should repeat this in a different way. Maybe we should change the hook. Maybe we should change the image. Maybe we should do a different format and just try new things over and over. And you'll find a repeatable ideas that are working over and over. So you don't have to spend so much time posting. It's more changing your ideas and saying the same thing over and over because it is marketing. After all, it's like, you want to stay in your audience top of mind with who you are over and over. That's why I think if you have a repeatable format or repeatable messaging or repeatable thing, people will start knowing you for that idea that you're repeating over and over and over and over because that's how you stay tall in mind.

25:31It's not saying 80 different things and trying to be 80 different things at once. That's such great advice because I think what holds a lot of people back, I get this question a lot from people about, you know, how to post on LinkedIn effectively. And everyone feels held back by this need to create fresh content all the time. And what you're describing isn't that at all. It's this, you know, create once, find what works and double down on the thing that works. Or like you say, remix it. And so maybe we can talk a little bit about that. But I love this concept of, you know, sort of keeping that catalog outside of LinkedIn.

26:13I certainly don't do that. I don't know a lot of people who are like keeping a running tally of, you know, what's working or, you know, like you said, your comment bank. It sounds like there's a lot of behind-the-scenes work that can actually make your efforts on the platform a lot more effective, which I think is a great piece of advice. yeah i think i mean as marketers we do it on every other channel um that is not a paid like you're not going to put out an ad an ad on paid social and not like track like clicks like impressions roas cost per click cost per acquisition and you're not going to just be like oh let's repeat this one because i i but i don't know the data behind it like there you just look at the data and if something performs once it's probably going to perform multiple times and that happens in ads too like people turn out their winners too soon people take out their winning organic posts too soon just keep repeating them i also think there's another thing that i want to bring up is everybody has a different goal on a platform your goal might be to get impressions and be top of mind to bring people off LinkedIn to get into your middle of funnel.

27:36Your goal might be, I want to be, this is my only channel, so I want to be the thought leader on this channel. Your goal might be to, I want to get leads for my business. You have to start with that in mind and reverse engineer that. And then also I think you have to have like your hill you would die on, whatever. you need to have a content matrix of the hill you would die on and always go back to like that messaging that you want to repeat over and over so if you're if your business is held to die on as it say like we make we believe content everybody should content remix so that's your belief you can come up with multiple categories under that belief and you'd always should connect back to that belief that you're that you're trying to bring out into the world so you should do that work ahead of time so then you're not just throwing random things the the belief could like change met wording to stick better or you might believe that your belief actually nobody cares about and we might have to think redo our messaging but start with something and then you could rework it after things come data comes back and you see do I get engagement do I not do people care do people not care yeah that's a great approach um for sure and I think it's an important point you made you mentioned this earlier in the conversation about like what your audience actually cares about and um so figuring out if your if your core belief is something that people don't actually care about then maybe that's a signal that you need to do some some bigger work but I think, yeah, like you would never with when it comes to advertising, you would never just like every week create a new ad, just totally fresh, totally brand new, not related to anything that you had ever advertised before.

29:30You just wouldn't do that. And you wouldn't base it on zero data. Right. So thinking about your organic channels as a paid channel potentially is a way to help optimize it. I want to talk a little bit about maybe measuring some of those metrics. I think it's an important point you made that like everybody has a different goal. So it's important to understand what your goal is before you start measuring the effectiveness. But what are some of the metrics that you're tracking that are maybe leading indicators or to show that your efforts are working and how do you separate like the metrics that really matter from maybe something that's a little bit more of a vanity metric?

30:18It's funny because I don't, I don't think that any of those metrics are technically vanity metrics. I think some of them are leading indicators and some are like metrics that you are, that, that matter at the end of the day to your business like i think likes signal one thing i think comments signal another thing i like to look at especially on my is like shares because i think if someone is sharing your posts to other people um they're like double cooking your idea and and sharing it to mobile a like is just like a nod that they're in they're interested a comment means you're doing something there's a con a conversation starter or you spark something and then mine but a share is like or a screenshot is where you want to get where the real virality happens where people are sending it off platform sharing in slack channels like you should always i always believe that you should optimize your content for a shareability they get if your if your idea is shared with more and more people That's how you get more and more top of mind.

31:27That's how you create content that actually people care about. So I really double down on looking at the shares and sends because I think that those are, and I do the same on Instagram. Like Instagram, I look, if I post, I get a reshares or remixes or, I mean, reshares or, I mean, shares to other people or sent in the DMs, I know that my content is relatable to my audience and I should keep doing that piece of content. Yeah, it's great. Getting it in front of multiple audiences beyond your own, right? That's how your audience grows too with followers. And I find that, you know, I think it's interesting.

32:15I don't know if LinkedIn breaks this down as well as like Instagram does, for example, where you can see the percentage of your engagement, even down to a specific post of your followers and non-followers. But I think it's like, that's how you get to the non-followers, right? It's from people engaging with or sharing out your content to their audience. But doctor, that and it gets to non-followers because your followers are telling the algorithm that this post is relatable to them and it should share to more people like them in the feed. So they're going to share to more marketers, your audience.