Your One-Stop LinkedIn Cheat Sheet

LinkedIn is, in many ways, the most important social media for you to “ace” if you’re an entrepreneur. There’s no better way to make dozens upon dozens of sturdy business connections while simultaneously building a loyal client base.

The catch is that it’s notoriously hard to break into the platform. While the average Instagram user gets 1,216 likes per post, it isn’t uncommon to see even well established LinkedIn accounts get as little as a handful of likes on certain updates.

So consider this your own little LinkedIn cheat sheet, packed with all the information we’ve garnered after several years on the platform. Master this and you’re well on your way to LinkedIn superstardom!

First up, how exactly does the platform work?

The journey that your post follows, from the moment you hit “publish” to the end of its digital lifespan, is where all the money is. Figuring it out is the first step to gaming it, so here’s a short, step-by-step account of the same:

1. The moment you post something, it’s sent out to the LinkedIn public feed.
2. This feed is accessible by all (think about it as TikTok’s For You page or Instagram’s explore tab), so the longer your post stays on there, the more people will see it and, automatically, the more likes, shares and follows it’s going to rake in.
3. Now here’s the important bit: people’s engagement with the post determines how long it’s going to stay up. If it’s creating a lot of buzz, it’ll stay on for much longer than if people seem to be ignoring it and scrolling past.
4. Once the algorithm notices that your post has stopped generating interest, it drops it from the public feed.
5. At this point, your post basically no longer exists except to people who actively search for your page.

So… Now what?

Based on what our experience, a ton of reading and what we’ve just learned, here are our top tips on getting that engagement up, up, up:

• Keep it short. The average length of posts that are getting picked up by the algorithm is decreasing. 100 words is ideal.
• Since your post is basically going to “disappear” in a few hours (at best), the key is to KEEP reposting the same thing! Even twice a day works. Just before posting this, we came across a case of a really well connected profile doing it. The first time they posted it, it barely made a splash. The second time brought home a whole cartload of likes and shares.

Repost others’ content! Similar to what you try to do on Twitter and other platforms, engaging with others puts you on their radar, makes you part of their online community and increases your odds of getting a repost from them somewhere down the line. The power of reciprocity can’t be overstated.

• LinkedIn has a direct video feature. Use it to make more informal, quick, informational videos that don’t cross the 1 minute mark (30–40 seconds is ideal). People don’t have the time to go through anything longer and half a minute should be enough to get almost any simple message across.
• Ask for feedback at the end of select posts. This adds to that comment tally and helps you improve on your content, a win-win.
• Start a debate in the comments! Great for engagement and people WANT to have their opinions out there. It may even help you learn something valuable about your audience.

• Since everybody is trying to make creatives to go along with their posts, the text-based ones seem to be cutting through that noise and getting noticed. Add in relevant emojis to the body to prevent it from looking too dry.
• Comment on your own post. This might count as engagement and leaves your post in the public feed for longer.
• Tell stories based on personal experiences. Statistics and studies are good only up to a certain point, the LI pool seems to resonate more with the intimate.

We hoped this helped, and if you’d like more LinkedIn specific secrets, be sure to let us know in the comments and we’ll see what we can do!