Something totally unexpected happened to Angela on LinkedIn this week. 👀
Her post went…viral??! 🤩 It got 100x more impressions than what is typical for her, reaching more than 27,000 Impressions and 13,000 people in just 2 days!!
What happened demonstrates a few points we teach our clients about, so she made this video to show exactly how and why this post took off. 👇
TLDW: Skip to 5:40 and 10:30 (it’s all about getting comments 💬 from people who are well-connected).
Transcript
A couple days ago I posted on LinkedIn, and to my surprise, the post completely took off.
It had 22,000 impressions in less than 24 hours.
Now, about 48 hours later, it has 28,000 impressions, and it’s reached 16,000 people!!
Looking at my more typical posts, I’m usually in the few hundreds of Impressions.
So why did this happen? I’m going to walk you through exactly how it happened and demonstrate why that is so important.
This post is pretty typical for me, I find PDF slideshows work well, they get a lot of engagement and that leads to high impressions.
In the first hour, a few of my 1st degree connections commented on it.
I actually have a little Slack group where about a dozen business owners in San Diego like myself share their posts on LinkedIn, and we support each other by engaging. This is SO important, because I really want to reach the connections of my connections. And that’s the main thing I want to talk about with this example.
The content of this post is from Richard van der Blom’s latest LinkedIn report. I’ve been following him for a while, ever since I started managing LinkedIn company pages for clients back in 2021. His reports are gold! It’s SO important to understand the algorithm and all the changes LinkedIn is constantly making. You really can’t just post blindly without knowing how LinkedIn works if you want to reach people.
So you can see I cited his report as a source here but did not tag him.
That’s important because if I tagged him and he didn’t engage with this at all, it would negatively impact the reach of this post. Because LinkedIn says, hmm, they are tagging people and those people are ignoring them, so this must not be worth showing to many people.
But, later, in the initial comments from my connections, I did end up tagging Richard because I mentioned again the source of this information. And I know that tagging people in the comments, even if they don’t respond at all, won’t impact my post’s reach the way it would if it were in the post itself rather than the comments.
Well, here’s where the magic happened. Richard commented.
Now, Richard has hundreds of thousands of followers! So when he comments on a post, that post is shown to HIS followers. So now, my post is showing up in the feeds of his followers.
Let me show you an example of that in my own feed. For example, I am seeing this post from Noah Stokes, who I don’t know at all and is a 3rd degree connection. Why is this showing up for me? Because my 1st degree connection, Benjamin, commented on it.
So this is how MY post will look to Richard’s connections in their feeds. You can see how important it is to get engagement on your posts. That is what will get your post out there to more than just your 1st degree connections.
And that’s exactly what happened when Richard commented on my post. He actually came back and left a SECOND comment later that evening, which just set things off again.
I kept engaging with and commenting back on almost every comment I recieved, which is super important to keep the moment going. It’s key to have these little mini conversations inside of the post comments. Now, LinkedIn even exposes how many impressions your comments get!
One thing I noticed throughout this 36 hour period was that I got a ton of new followers.
I don’t typically get many/any followers, so this was interesting, but not surprising given the more than 16,000 people this post reached. I ended up getting about 120 new followers and about a dozen connection requests.
I’m super interested to see how my next post performs, because past performance does impact future performance in the way the algorithm treats your next posts.
The key takeaway with all this is that it’s incredibly important to connect with people who have connections that are relevant to your business goals.
Everyone following Richard is interested in LinkedIn marketing, so that is super relevant to my business since my business offers LinkedIn company page management for B2B organizations.
I’m not sure if I’ll get any new clients from this exposure or the new followers, but it definitely meets my goals of establishing myself as a thought-leader about LinkedIn marketing. And it was a great example of how the things I teach my clients about engagement work, and sometimes, occasionally, a post can really go big!