Have You Gone Viral Yet? If Not, Read This!
Anders Liu-Lindberg
Leading advisor to senior Finance and FP&A leaders on creating impact through business partnering | Interim | VP Finance | Business Finance
Post something to Facebook and you only get two likes. Write a new post for LinkedIn and 5 people like it with one comment. 98 views to go with it. Tweet a great reaction to Apple’s latest release but no one retweets it. Only your mom and your second cousin following you on Instagram. Being active on social media can be such an energy drainer. You put your heart and soul into it yet the responses are very limited and your efforts are almost wasted. On top of that the mechanisms of how to be successful measured in terms of virality changes more and more frequently. For myself doing most of my work on LinkedIn, it’s been an up and down quarter where I started to seriously doubt the effectiveness of LinkedIn. Before scaling down my efforts though I decided to test a few things with my network and publishing activity.
Your reach is limited but great content is still king
I did three tests to test my network strength and the value of my content. Actually, the content test was more a result of poor engagement and viewings so I knew I had to do something.
- Ask the simple question: “If you see this update please click like”. Result. My network has just crossed 2,000 followers split into ~1,100 connections and ~900 followers. 38 people liked the update. A mere 2% of your network is willing to testify to seeing your update or just seeing it at all. What that means for you is that in order to reach any significant part of your network you need to share your content many more times than once.
- Hence my second question: “Do I share too much?”. 14 replies i.e. less than 1% although all were positive in the sense that no one thought I was sharing too much but also more concerning replies from people saying that hadn’t seen any of my shares lately. I’ve been sharing a lot so I think that mostly goes to LinkedIn's distribution algorithm. In any case, what it means is that you should just go crazy in sharing or least don’t hold back.
- The two questions came on the back of lackluster response to my some of my recent posts especially the ones I’ve been writing on “Employee Branding”. The latest one not even reaching 40 views after a few days despite sharing it many times. So I decided to play around a bit with the headlines making it more focused on individuals rather than companies. 12 hours later one of them got featured on Pulse and went from 36 views and 3 likes to 587 views and 161 likes. Two learnings from this. A) You have to make a great headline and B) Don’t give up on your posts too fast. Even after a few days, you can still make it go viral with a few minor changes.
Being successful on social media is hard work
I’ve said it before like in “Personal Branding Is Like Building A Business” that being active on social media and building your personal brand is hard work. Above three tests clearly illustrate that point. If you think you can just post some content to see it go viral in a big way you’re fooling yourself. In order to break the viral curse, you have to keep going at it. Sharing, tweaking your content, engaging with your readers etc. All of this will help you on your way to go viral. In the end though at least on LinkedIn, you’re still dependent on getting a little help from Pulse features. The difference between features and no features is huge although getting featured doesn’t guarantee results. Having said all this let’s take a look at my social media results for Q1 2016.
The first thing to notice is how the Pulse hit ratio has plummeted. Only two features in Q1 and one of those only got 160 views at this time. To explain why then I only had 10% fewer views, first of all, I published at lot more posts but I also count all views in the quarter and not just the ones on the new posts. Hence, the 704 average views actually count views on past posts as well. I got almost 40% of my views in Q1 from posts relating to prior 2016. It’s still quite good though when comparing with Q1 2015 and the main reason for that is likely that my network has also increased significantly since that time. I don’t have stats going that far back as I only started counting end June. Since then though I have increased the number of followers from 1,281 followers to now 2,005 followers.
Numbers aren’t the only measure
Besides the numbers which really didn’t look all that good there were a couple of other developments in the quarter. The most interesting one was that I have been invited to co-write a book about finance business partnering. I have also started a group on the same topic which after 1½ months have gathered 55 members. I’ve also had my content featured on a few career sites not least Careermetis.com where I will have a series of posts published by also TopResume.com. In addition to that, I am working on getting some of my finance posts published on other sites in addition to wanting to finish my whitepaper on CFO types. These are all exciting projects and have of course I have a range of posts lined up for LinkedIn in Q2 where you will find new posts on finance business partnering, networking, and careers as well as more on employee branding and job searching. If you have any good ideas about what to write about just let me know and I will put some thoughts to it!
It’s painful sometimes when all the good work you do on social media doesn’t get read or recognized by the crowds and Q1 was indeed such a quarter for me. It was not all bad though and my post on how to tell your story on LinkedIn has already crossed the 3,000 views. Let’s see what Q2 brings. I’m sure it will be both painful and fun (although not at the same time) and not least hard work! What are you plans for being more social in the coming months? Start a blog? Grow your network? Look for a new job? Whatever it is let’s have a conversation about it. Send me a message or write a comment below and I’ll be happy to talk. As always please also like and share to spread the message.
See below for previous posts on social media and personal branding.
7 Steps To Improve Your Personal Brand
Did I Start Publishing Too Soon?
5 Insights From A Year Of Blogging
Personal Branding Is Like Building A Business
7 Reasons Why Your LinkedIn Posts Will Fail
Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Publish On LinkedIn
How LinkedIn Changed My Publishing Strategy
How Is Your Social Media Business Going?
How To Use Social Media For Career Building
Hi, My Name Is. The Powerful Self-Introduction
Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Regional Finance Business Partner for Maersk Line North Europe and is working with the transformation of Finance and business on a daily basis. Anders has participated in several transformation processes amongst others helping Maersk Drilling to go Beyond Budgeting and transformed a finance team from Bean-counters to Business Partners. He would love the chance to collaborate with you on your own transformation processes to help you stay out of disruption. If you are looking for more advice on how to get the most of LinkedIn Anders also has a few tips to share as well as if you want help in your job search. Don’t be shy! Let’s get in touch and start helping each other.
CIO : CTO : IT Director : Information Security : Digital Strategy
8ySpook, on the day I talk about not having been picked up on Pulse for a while, I get picked up on Pulse! :o)
Communications Pro | Experienced Marketing Manager | Certified SoMe Expert | Content Manager | Influencer Manager
8yI really like the way you look closely at metrics of your social media activity Anders. Smart approach.
CIO : CTO : IT Director : Information Security : Digital Strategy
8yInteresting analysis. I've had a variety of responses to my articles, from 50 to 50,000, and it's not always easy to see why one worked and another didn't. Certainly if you don't work to promote yourself it is very hard, but the converse view, that working hard guarantees success, isn't necessarily so. There is clearly a hefty dose of luck in the mix, especially with the mercurial nature of Pulse, which is by far the best avenue to high readership. I have had a couple of viral articles, but it's not easy without running the risk of being seen as clickbait. One thing I have noticed in the last few months though is that more and more of the articles appearing in Pulse are not actually on LinkedIn, and would appear to be sponsored or promoted adverts. As a paying user providing what I hope to be quality content for free, this greatly irritates me, and I think is a strategic mistake by LinkedIn. From looking at those articles they often have very low numbers of views, so clearly the readers aren't all that interested in reading adverts in Pulse, and if they keep filling the feeds with them people will stop reading. Secondly, amateur writers such as myself will get fed up with putting in the effort to write a thoughtful, interesting and well written article, only to see it left on the bench while a cheesy advert is put up instead. Enough of that and we'll stop writing, and then Pulse just becomes an ad stream.
SVP Patient Integration at MEDx eHealthCenter.BV
8yI really feel it is a function of the number of brand names you mention, cat photos, inspirational quotes, bikini Betties and entirely too much glitter glove, jazz hand lip synching that garners the attention, and if you want to go viral - as always, include or reference Kim Kardashian's Ass.
Foreign Languages and Bioengineering
8yGreat analysis. In my opinion, much depends on the "environment", too: for example, LinkedIn's new algorithm is limiting notification to "stronger" connection; basically, it detects our most engaged fellow users and has them receive any notification about our new post, while "silent contacts" get none. This also makes our reach shrink. That said, I agree on the value of tenacity: we must conquer our place!