Finding Success on LinkedIn

Historically, I haven’t been a big social media guy. I only used Facebook in college to help manage my fraternity’s Facebook group and well, you can guess how well that went. I’ve never had Instagram, or Twitter, and while I did have a LinkedIn page, I was never very active on it.

Until COVID.

After starting my career in door-to-door sales, I was always more comfortable with in person meetings or networking events. You could count on one hand the number of times I’d posted on LinkedIn. I’d never gotten a lead through it, and certainly never made a sale. 

But when the pandemic hit, I found myself with a lot of extra free time. With in-person meetings no longer an option and networking events cancelled for the foreseeable future, I took a closer look at how I could use LinkedIn to create leads for my business. After seeing the success other people were having with the platform, I was curious if I could replicate that success to build partnerships, make connections, and find customers. A few weeks into the lock down, I made a commitment to start posting on LinkedIn. What's the worst that could happen? Since then, I’ve posted nearly every day for the last year.

That time and energy has more than paid off.

My connections have grown from less than 500 to almost 5,500 in under a year. When I started last year, a good post got maybe 100 views and a couple of likes. Now, a bad day is less than 2,500 views and I regularly have posts with well over 10,000 views. And more than just generating likes and views, using LinkedIn has brought in almost every customer Tilled has in our pipeline, as well as several investors and partnerships that have been more than worth the few minutes it takes me to post each day.

The first time I posted about Tilled on LinkedIn was in December 2020. At the time, I had about 3,000 connections, and announced what we were doing at Tilled in two posts. Just those 2 posts earned more than 20,000 views, leading to more than 40 inbound customer calls over the next two weeks.

Since then, I’ve doubled down. I’ve taken the time to learn about the algorithm, figure out a hashtag strategy, and built a content calendar. I have also taken the time to go back through my posts over the last year and see what worked and more importantly what DIDN'T work. Over the last few months I have had nearly 100 software companies and more than 30 of our referral partners come through LinkedIn. Even prospects that don’t come directly through LinkedIn often reference how much they enjoy my posts. 

Either way, my conversations have had a level of trust and friendship that was built long before I connected with them over Zoom. I’ve already established myself as a knowledgeable leader in the payments space, and while not every post is about Tilled, people who find me through my taco vs. sushi polls can take a look at my about section and read my backstory. At this point, more than 1,000 people each month are visiting my LinkedIn profile. That's 1,000 people every month that are reading about my business.

And all of it cost me exactly Zero Dollars.

A unique benefit of a platform like LinkedIn is it’s organic nature, and how much it prioritizes individual, organic content. My personal posts continue to get thousands of more views and interactions than Tilled’s company page posts — and that’s by design thanks to LinkedIn’s algorithm. And when you consider that only about 1 percent of LinkedIn’s users actually post, you can see how easy it can be to cut through the noise where you may find it very difficult on other social platforms.

The truth is, I’m not sure where my business would be today if I hadn’t taken the time to build my network on LinkedIn. And it did take time, with a lot of time spent creating content and reaching out to people who I felt would be good connections to add to my network. It was a slow start, at times painfully slow. But with commitment and a long term outlook, I’ve found success I could have never anticipated. 

So maybe I’m not a social media guy. But I now consider myself a LinkedIn guy.