How to triple your LinkedIn profile views
I started KeithonCareers 10 years ago and ever since I have recommended that people write publicly. Cogent writing is a great proxy for cogent thought. So if you can articulate something interesting and share it, people will find it, be impressed, and want to talk to you. The career ROI is huge. You don't have to do it perfectly. You don't even have to do it often. I have had more career opportunities that started by people finding my blog than I ever would have imagined. That's with only publishing 6-12 posts per year.
My personal struggle is that I have many ideas for posts, but I'm a perfectionist and not a natural journalist. So writing a blog post can feel like work and take a long time. Separately, attention spans are only getting shorter. So I decided to launch an experiment. Instead of adding my ideas to a growing list of "future blog post ideas," I would just write down the fundamental idea and share it on Twitter and LinkedIn (without the full post). So I used a free Buffer account, set up a queue to post once at 9:30am and once at 4pm. Whenever I came up with an idea, I would write it in Buffer on my phone, queue it up, and then ideas would automatically publish on a relatively steady basis.
I posted resume and interview tips.
I posted cultural observations.
And I posted a few things that might just strike a chord with people.
After 1-2 weeks, I saw a few things happen:
Some posts really resonated, some didn't. I wasn't able to predict in advance which were which. So it was a great way to test ideas before investing in a long-form post.
I had a few interesting conversations in the comments.
My LinkedIn posts got 10x as many views as my corresponding Twitter posts. With Twitter's 280 characters being much more restrictive, I found that posting on LinkedIn and using up 300-500 characters was my best bet (LinkedIn accepts more but the point of this was to keep it brief).
My LinkedIn profile views went up exponentially (see featured chart at the beginning).
A number of people reached out to me, folks I haven't met and would like to, and people I know but haven't talked to in a long time.
The results were super valuable. I'm just instigating interesting conversations, but if you're looking for a job - you should consider posting to LinkedIn. In 300-500 characters, you can get surprising results. Every chief marketing officer has a Facebook strategy, an Instagram strategy, and a SnapChat strategy. I still don't think they have LinkedIn strategies, which means the content feed isn't completely saturated yet. But the demand for content is there. So take advantage while the getting is so good. It's seriously underrated.
To see my future career tips and observations - follow me on LinkedIn.
