Ifyou have ever had a post or an article you published on LinkedIn get a large number of views or a ton of engagement, it is easy to get caught up in trying to do it again.
My LinkedIn articles tend to get in the middle to high hundreds of views, and my posts ten to twelve times that amount. A good article for me is a thousand views with a couple hundred engagements. A good post is ten thousand views (my rule of thumb has always been 1 article view equals around 10 post views) with the same couple hundred engagements.
Then there are the outliers. An article about your Weekly Search Appearances got 88,000 views, one on Fake LinkedIn Profiles, 25,000. And the granddaddy of them all: What Is A View on LinkedIn, over 170,000 views (and yes, the irony is not lost on me). All of these were articles. The equivalent number of post views would be maybe ten times higher.
The upside is that at various times over the past five years ago I have written and publishedsomething on LinkedIn that readers really liked. And apparently they still do - I get notifications every week for new comments and reactions to those old articles. The downside is that since that first article that did really well I have had several hundred shots at publishing new articles and replicating that success. Which I have done around once a year since. So four times out of maybe three hundred.
But I don’t worry about it and here’s why: I have no clue why those articles did exceptionally well and why none of my other couple hundred articles did not. I think you can write as well as you can, hit publish and then it is out of your hands. If it goes viral, enjoy your moment in the sun. That one article on views that I published got over one hundred times the views I normally get. I don’t know what was different about that one from others I have written. I don’t know the secret.
And no one else does either. Anyone who writes that they know how to go viral is full of it. Otherwise they would be viral every time they published...and wouldn’t have to write about how to go viral.
And while views are good for the ego, engagement from those views is the real deal. LinkedIn doesn’t tell me who my viewers are, so I have no way to identify and contact them if I wish to. People who like, share and comment are identifiable so I can contact them. I consider content with three hundred views and sixty people engaging with me to be more successful than having three thousand views and thirty people engage with me.
Don’t sweat going viral or piling up huge numbers of views. Views are good for the ego. Engagement is good for business.
The obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month.
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