Monitoring and analyzing what people with big followings post on LinkedIn can elevate your LinkedIn game.
Receiving notifications when certain people post on LinkedIn has changed the way I create content on the platform for the better, and can likely help you do the same.
(You can activate this feature by clicking the yellow bell on the upper right-hand corner of someone’s profile.)
Those “certain people” I’m referring to are regular people with relatively large LinkedIn followings. They’re not celebrities, business leaders, or other A-listers.
I’m talking about people with generally between 7,500 and 20,000 followers.
I want to see what they’re posting, when they post, how often they post, and how their posts do so that I can improve the quality of my posts and their reach.
Remember, LinkedIn’s algorithm doesn’t serve every one of your posts to every one of your connections or followers. So, to see every post someone publishes, you’ll need to click the yellow bell on their profile so you’ll know when they’ve posted something.
Here are the four ways that tracking these people’s posts has helped me improve my LinkedIn content game—and could help you improve yours.
The opportunity to reverse engineer
By seeing what these people say each time they post, I can try to reverse-engineer their content.
For their posts that received a fair amount of engagement, I can try to uncover what they did that seemed to win people over and got them to like, comment on, or share the post.
On the other hand, for their posts that underperformed, I can try to identify what went wrong. Why didn’t these posts connect with their audience? Are there changes they could have made to a post that might have improved its performance?
Substantive inspiration
Reviewing these individuals’ posts gives me inspiration for my posts from a substantive perspective.
If there are topics that tend to perform well in their posts that I feel comfortable discussing, I can work those topics into my posts. By getting notified whenever they post, I can see the full range of topics they cover in their posts.
Do they often talk about themselves, such as discussing successes, failures, their family life, etc.?
Do they frequently discuss best practices related to their work?
Do they often talk about current events, pop culture, or other similarly timely topics?
Structural inspiration
Aside from substance, reviewing these people’s posts gives me inspiration for my posts from a structural perspective.
Do they often write text-only posts?
Do they ever post videos?
Are they posting carousels?
When they post photos, do they post cringe glamour selfies? Are they posting photos of their kids?
I’d also consider the “when” and the frequency of their posts to fall into this category.
Do they tend to post at the same time every day? What time is that?
How frequently do they post? Do they post more than once a day?
Though I don’t do this personally, you could keep detailed statistics regarding the post types and times of the people whose posts you’re tracking and deduce, or use AI to help you deduce, patterns in their post type, time, and frequency.
The knowledge that not every post is going to be a banger
Perhaps most importantly, reviewing these individuals’ posts lets me see that not every post they produce is a home run. Their large following does not guarantee a ton of likes, comments, and shares on each of their posts. Yes, even people with large followings publish duds.
It’s also a good reminder that you only tend to see people’s best posts because of LinkedIn’s algorithm. The algorithm tends to serve up posts that receive a fair amount of interactions soon after they were published. Thus, we rarely see posts that fall flat.
But when you or I choose to be notified about someone’s posts, we get to see those duds. We see that everyone, including people with large followings, struggles to consistently produce top-notch and/or viral LinkedIn content.
This makes me feel better—and may also make you feel better. These people are only humans. They don’t have a cheat code for LinkedIn success. Yet, they’ve grown their social media followings, and you and I can too.
Review posts, improve your LinkedIn game
The one wrinkle here is that you’ll need to set aside time to analyze the posts you’re tracking. That’s a good reason to limit the number of people you choose to receive notifications about. This way, you can keep the number of posts you need to review to a manageable number. I’ve been reviewing posts daily, but a weekly review could also work, provided you have some time on a weekend to devote to reviewing these posts.
When you analyze these posts, actually analyze them. Take notes. Reverse engineer them. See what lessons you can learn from them. And, see if you can draw inspiration from the substance and structure of the posts. You could experiment with running the posts through AI and seeing if it can find patterns or themes.
However, you’ll need to devote time to actually reading and reflecting on these posts.
If you breeze through them when working your way through notifications and don’t think more about them, you’re not going to get value from this exercise.
But if you thoughtfully analyze these posts and learn something from them, there’s a good chance those lessons will help you produce better content on LinkedIn.
At the very least, you’ll walk away feeling better that even people with large LinkedIn followings do not always hit every post out of the park.
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