How to Get Engagement on LinkedIn

This post is designed for the average food scientist to tell their story and get noticed.

This year, I would like to help more people share their story in the food industry. I think it’s really important for food scientists to have the same magic as entrepreneurs, recruiters, or career coaches, which dominate the content space.

I find LinkedIn the easiest place to start because you already have a  hungry audience of people in the food industry who just want to be heard.

Though I am by no means an expert in LinkedIn magic, I get a consistent rate of hits with a few home runs and because I’m just at that level, my advice might be a little more relatable than those who hit 1000 likes daily.

So here, I’ll share you the secrets I’ve learned to get my posts noticed on LinkedIn.

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Have you been on linkedin recently and realized that there are a bunch of people posting stories about their life? And then you see their likes and comments and they are soaring up to 100, 1000, or even 10,000 likes.

Linkedin has changed, it’s become a blogging platform and because it used to be a networking platform, you can leverage the people in your linkedin to read your stuff.

However, you can’t blog like you do on your website. Linkedin’s copy is a little bit different, with the biggest being that posts must be limited to 1300 characters. Therefore, you have to cram a post in 1300 words.

Looking at this, this sounds difficult, but it’s not hard with some practice. You actually have a lot of room doing this, you just have to adjust your mindset.

In essence, you have to create an engaging story or lesson in your posts.

Good posts will tell you a story in less than 1300 words. They start with a dynamic hook, a problem, and over the course of the post, they solve it. At the end, you hit your audience with a punchline dealing with a life lesson.

Because linkedin will only limit stories with 1300 words, there are still many ways to improve the quality of the story.

The biggest (also noted as the biggest annoyance) is spacing out almost every sentence. Josh Fletcher, founder of BAMF, says that this is because he wants his post to be mobile friendly, so keep that in mind. However, it does give your post the illusion of being big.

A good story on linkedin should be professional and solve a professional problem at its core. The story telling talent you put into it will make a difference if you are a beginner.

How to get Engagement on Linkedin

I started using LinkedIn as a social media soapbox when I launched My Food Job Rocks! And I did this because my target market were food scientists, and it seemed obvious that food scientists would be there.

Every time I created a piece of content, I used word press’s crappy distribution tool and sprayed and prayed for engagement to LinkedIn, Facebook, and twitter.

In the early stages, LinkedIn seemed to get the most responses, so I focused on just LinkedIn. I got my guests on LinkedIn, I got my messages on LinkedIn, I focused a lot of time on LinkedIn.

Every week, I posted and waited for a response and when I got 1 or 2 likes, I was kinda happy.

It wasn’t until recently, I started actually testing how to get likes and went from 0 likes to 250 (my highest). Then, you have momentum to make really good posts and really good engagement.

Consistency

I started posting 1 time a week on LinkedIn, then 3 times a week, and now I’m going ham and post 5 times a week

It takes time to snowball branding, but once you start building, you can’t stop. Or more like, you shouldn’t stop.

Think of writing like a couch to 5 k.

You write just a little bit, maybe 500 words a week.

Soon, maybe after 30 trials, you realize you have so much more to say!

Then you write and write and write, and you end up churning 1000 word articles a week. Some even break 1500!

In my opinion, your opinion only actually have an authoritative piece when you hit over 1000 words. More is better, that’s why we have books.

There are tactical strategies throughout the internet about all sorts of opinions about SEO and word length. The point is to have content so good, people can’t ignore it. You need to practice how your content interacts with people! Once you’ve figured out that people actually like what you write, then the incentive for writing grows.

And that’s hard for people to grasp because writing content and just posting a link on social media is the worst thing you can do.

After studying different posts, the best thing to do is to turn your article into a great hook, and place the link below. My engagement went from like 5 likes to 50 likes. It’s really powerful stuff!

But maybe that engagement jump comes from practice.

I write weekly because if I miss a week, someone will be sad. I can’t ruin their day because I didn’t write, so I need to keep on writing.

Whether that’s true or not, doesn’t matter. It’s a excellent motivator.

The moral of the story is, if you’re planning to be a writer, you have to write. Start writing, start posting. Start having people tell you you’re wrong, and then ignore them. It’s what makes good writers great.

Structure

The linkedin algorithm either punishes or promotes good content.

Linkedin Promotes Good Content if:

• It’s mobile friendly (plenty of white space)
• It has a really good headline or hook
• If you tag people
• If it has a hashtag (hashtags are nice because you can track your work)
• If it follows a structure or story
• Emoji’s are nice, but seem to help with engagement rather than algorithim magic
• The faster the post gets engagement (likes, comments, etc), the faster it will disseminate. Gauging your likes the first 3-5 hours is the best way to see if a post will get viral

Linkedin Demotes Good Content if:

• You post a picture (apparently, selfies get good engagement)
• You post a link
• You post a link AND a picture that links
• Your post gets no engagement the first day

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who know this structure which can get pretty annoying.

Most posts will look like this.

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I failed once

It hurt a lot

But then I realized a lot of other people have failed and then got successful

[A bunch of examples: pick one: Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfry, Walt Disney]

But then I learned a lot

Thank you Joe Bob and Jane Wayne for being inspirations.

#30ds

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Now you can go and do this and get plenty of likes, but you will sell your soul doing so, but that’s the artist in me. I suggest that you should try being a bit more unique about this. There is a lack of content on linkedin, for instance, that is highly technical.

Social Proof

Social proof is the chicken or the egg approach to getting engagement.

In all honesty, the best engagement starts by having a person love you so much in real life, that they like you as a person on the internet. Your content means jack to strangers in the long run and it’s only if you have the legitimate credentials that your blog can roll.

Take Tim Ferriss, the guy has had like 10 years of social media dominance so he can post 1 sentence and get like, 100 likes in an hour.

The main point to take away from this, is that brand building is a long term goal and that’s why it’s important to engage professionally in real life. Those people are the best to jump start your career.

When I started my podcast, my first 5 episodes were about my business partner, and 3 college friends. That was all. It wasn’t until later, I got founders, VPs, and professors on the show.

But it’s still vital to create a community of people who support you. I try to respond to all of my friend’s comments, just last week, someone messaged me about them NOT liking their food job and I hopped on the phone with her and talked her through what she could do about it.

It’s little things like that that build community and those are the people who win. Do small tasks for people that people will never forget. But also remember that your time is valuable that you can’t help everyone.

It takes time to snowball branding, but once you start building, you can’t stop. Or more like, you shouldn’t stop.