Going viral on LinkedIn should be your goal. You don’t go viral by chance.
It’s the result of research, testing, lots of tweaking and good timing.
Content creation on any platform, be it LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., should always aim to go viral. Going viral is not just about getting your name out there and increasing your brand’s reach, but also about increasing the effectiveness of your content.
Here’s what it is.
Content may be king, but it costs a lot of money and energy to produce. The more views and engagements you can get, the more profitable it becomes. From a marketing perspective, you want to maximize everything you produce.
Commitments are another part of the equation. By increasing the number of engagements, you can increase the number of leads you can generate.
In this article, we dive into the topic of going viral on LinkedIn , how to achieve it, and what you can learn from the process. We will look at all the steps:
- Create a LinkedIn post
- Use growth hacking tools to refine your posts
- Understanding the LinkedIn algorithm.
The principles of virality on LinkedIn
With around Three-Quarters Of A Billion Users, LinkedIn is a massive market for you to tap into.
If you want to go viral on LinkedIn, you need to consider two things: value and engagement.
Value
If you want to go viral on LinkedIn, you need to provide content that provides value to your reader.
It’s not just about freebies or cool facts you want to share, but concrete value that can improve the organization or a prospect’s life in a measurable way.
Additionally, it is not important that the gift is free. If it’s readily available elsewhere, people won’t want to know about your message because they can get it elsewhere. A free profitability calculator would not be useful to many people since they can easily find it elsewhere.
If you want to know if your article is valuable enough, ask yourself: “Would I use this in my own organization?”
If the answer is “no” – which is most of the time with free content – then you should abandon your idea.
Engagement
Engagement is the key to going viral on LinkedIn, and here’s why.
The first 2 hours are crucial
The first 2 hours after your message goes live are the most important. This is where the algorithm determines if your post is generating enough interest to be shown to a larger audience.
Studying this phenomenon in depth, we found that the more likes and comments you get initially, the more people will see your post .
Speed of engagement and value matter
However, you should also pay attention to the decrease in the number of contributions.
The slower engagements accrue on your LinkedIn post, the less likely it is to be shown to more people.
This is why we talked about value. By nature, people want to engage in something that has value to them.
But did you know that there are many ways to increase the number of engagements you get?
We’ll talk about these techniques later, and you can use them on virtually any platform you use.
The Guided Method to Go Viral on LinkedIn
Choose the content you want to publish
The first step is to choose what you are going to post.
There are several things that generally work well with viral posts and we are going to share them with you:
- “ Gifts ” – as we said before, make sure they provide value. You can make an infographic, a dashboard, a calculator, a checklist, a database, etc… Make sure you use the template in your organization to determine its value.
- Video – This is naturally one of the most attractive and engaging pieces of content you can post online. However, on LinkedIn, you must accompany it with text. We usually suggest repurposing videos that are already viral and writing great captions.
- Founder Stories – These are high-converting posts about real life stories filled with emotion, passion, and inspiration, and they’re not difficult to make. However, it takes some time before you can use them.
- Slides – if you have a lot of information to share with your followers, consider using slides to do so. They make complicated information easy to digest and if your topic is interesting enough. It’s easy and it promotes the time spent by your users on your publication.
Set Post Caption on LinkedIn
Obviously your caption needs to be eye-catching, but you can increase the attention you receive by following these simple steps:
Lead Magnets and Slides
For “gifts” and slides, keep the message short and catchy. Your reader should be able to find the subject of the caption within seconds. You struggle with short attention spans.
Videos
For videos, make sure your video caption connects to your organization’s goals or values. I’ve found that emotional messages that focus on storytelling work best.
Use relevant CTAs
It’s not enough to have an awesome caption, you need to invite people to do something from the post you post.
Ask them what they think, invite them to comment, get your audience involved!
There are different ways to write a good message, but make sure it follows LinkedIn’s rules.
Boost engagement on your LinkedIn posts
Since LinkedIn’s algorithm primarily considers engagements to determine virality, the 2 hours after posting a post are crucial if you want to go viral on LinkedIn.
Adding a restriction to your posts
One of the best ways to increase engagement is to add a small restriction.
To do this, you invite people to comment on your article before sending them the giveaway link.
The Advantage Of This Method Is That You Get Something In Exchange For The Gift, Which Promotes Virality. But That’s Not All. People Who Take The Plunge Are Technically Qualified Leads Because They Are Both Interested In And Belong To A Particular Audience You Are Targeting.
Using LinkedIn Pods
LinkedIn Pods are essentially groups of people who are part of your industry and who will “boost” your message by engaging with it.
Repurposing content
Here are the steps for repurposing content:
- Find an article or video that has already gone viral
- If it’s a video, re-post it – with permission from the author – and change the caption to suit your audience and organization.
- If it’s a message, try to imitate what they did in that message to make it your own.
Also, there is nothing wrong with using templates.
“Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal – Pablo Picasso
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel when you innovate, but rather build on other models.
Do you need help going viral on LinkedIn?
Here are tools you can use
- LinkedIn Post Scheduler – to make sure you don’t miss the right time to post a message on the platform. (Buffer, Hootsuite, etc.)
- Pods – apps like Podawaa or Lempod can help you get more engagement.
- Analytics – you can use LinkedIn’s own tools to help you track your post engagements.
How a Pod works
Going viral on LinkedIn relies on two major considerations: the value you provide and the engagements they bring.
- How it works is simple : send the URL of your message to a pod, and members will automatically engage with it (comments or likes): a first boost that you will need to gain popularity.
- Timing – be aware of what time your potential viewers are. People often say that Monday is the best time to post, but you will be surprised to know that for a professional like LinkedIn, Wednesday is the best time. It’s the middle of the week and people are generally more lax. Trust us, we’ve done this kind of chart before.
How does the Linkedin algorithm work?
LinkedIn’s algorithm will put your post in front of more people, provided it continues to generate interest.
But why does LinkedIn do this? It’s simple.
The business model of each social network is based on the time people spend there. The more attractive your article is, the more people will spend time on it and the more the platform will simply promote it.
People spending time on LinkedIn means more advertising time for their ad-buying clients.
But it’s also a victory for you, dear reader. The more engaging your message, the more beneficial it is for your brand recognition and lead generation campaigns.
Let us now see in detail how this famous algorithm works.
Step-by-step operation of the algorithm
- When you publish your content on Linkedin , it is displayed to a sample of your network .
- This post must be optimized as we have seen and must (ideally) not have external links ( Linkedin, like any other social network, does not want you to leave their network )
- In addition, if you already have a reputation on the network, LinkedIn will tend to increase the size of this sample compared to a user who does not yet have any reputation.
- The algorithm then calculates the engagement rate of your post on the sample (likes + comments): the better it is, the more Linkedin will choose to present your content to a wider audience.
- If the engagement rate continues to be this good, LinkedIn will continue to show it to people in your audience with similar profiles to those who engaged. This is why it is important to maintain a quality audience on your Linkedin network and not always accept “everyone”.
So what’s stopping you from going viral?
You see, viral posts are not just there to entertain people, but you can use them to scale your organization, increase brand awareness, build funnels, and generate revenue.