The Marketing Millennials: How to Build Authority on LinkedIn, with Mark Jung
Key Insights from Daniel and Mark
Identity and Consistency: Establishing a clear and consistent identity on LinkedIn is crucial. Your profile should not only reflect your professional capabilities but also your personal interests and beliefs. This authenticity attracts a likeminded audience.
Content Creation Philosophy: The essence of impactful content lies in its repetition and stance. Emphasizing what you believe in, through repetitive messaging, ensures your voice is heard and remembered.
Importance of Engagement: Engaging with your content immediately after posting can significantly amplify its reach. The initial hour post-publication is deemed the 'golden hour' for engagement, setting the trajectory for its overall visibility.
Networking and Collaboration: Building a network of creators and professionals who share your vision can enhance your learning and content's reach. It's about growing together in a community that values each other's growth.
Strategies for LinkedIn Mastery
Optimize Your Profile: From your profile picture to the headline and about section, every aspect should be a representation of your brand. Include elements that invite conversation and connection, such as hobbies or unique experiences.
Content is King: Consistently produce content that adds value to your audience's day, regardless of how simple it may seem. Tailoring content that would resonate or aid someone reflects thoughtfulness.
Engage Actively: Prompt engagement with your posts and audience comments significantly impacts visibility. LinkedIn's algorithm favors content that initiates conversation and sustained interaction.
Use Visuals Strategically: High contrast, vertical images take up more space, making your posts more noticeable. They act as visual hooks that complement your written content, enhancing its appeal.
Repeat Your Message: Don’t shy away from echoing your central messages. Repetition fosters familiarity, enabling your audience to resonate deeply with your brand over time.
In conclusion, mastery of LinkedIn entails a commitment to authenticity, consistency, and strategic engagement. By nurturing a vibrant community through valuable content and interaction, you position yourself as a thought leader in your industry, opening doors to endless opportunities.
Read the full discussion in the transcript below 👇
The Marketing Millennials 228 - How to Build Authority on LinkedIn, with Mark Jung
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the **** up. Your LinkedIn should not be that like gray middle area of like, yeah, I kind of like that. Take a strong stance of what you believe in. Find the hill that you would die on and repeat that over and over and over again. I think one of the biggest mistakes that new creators make is they think they always have to reinvent the wheel. They think that they always have to be original and that people have heard that line before. The truth is, you're going to have to repeat yourself dozens, hundreds, thousands of times before people will resonate with your message and what you are about. At a time when every platform is flooded with content, making your brand stand out from the crowd doesn't have to be as hard as you might think. With Artlist, you can get everything you need to make memorable videos, access a catalog of the highest quality music, sound effects, footage and template. And it's all covered by license tailored to your business. Go to Artlist.io to boost your brand. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today I have a very special guest. We just announced something on LinkedIn. So if you go on LinkedIn, you'll probably see or if you've been on LinkedIn, you probably saw. But I have my official new co-founder of an agency I'm starting, Mark Young, with me. He is Canadian. I don't know why I made that choice, just kidding. But yeah, we're going to... We started a business, well, I've been doing this for two and a half years stealthily, but we wanted to bring the offering to the next level. So I brought on someone who I know could do it better than me in the business. So I brought on Mark as a co-founder, but Mark, introduce yourself to everybody about yourself and then we'll talk about today how to build authority on LinkedIn. Yeah, I couldn't have asked for a worse. I mean, better partner, Daniel and I have been great friends and sort of advancing this motion for the last few years that we've been working together and partnering. And it's only natural that we just said, hey, let's go all in and do this thing. I can't remember how many talks we've given now together between South by Southwest and just really around our philosophy to building authority and how LinkedIn is one of the best platforms. So my 30-second rundown, which Daniel loves when I say, is I've been a career marketer, was an ex-management consultant, and I've been growing startups previously before this. I was the VP of marketing at Nextiva, leading kind of a $3 billion brand. And now Daniel and I are helping other B2B brands build authority on LinkedIn and helping them really reach the 97% of buyers who aren't ready to buy. The biggest thing that we're seeing, especially in B2B, is content marketing is investment and you want to make sure that your brand is top of mind and that your brand is trusted, liked, and thought of first. When those 97% are ready, you want them coming to you. So Daniel, hyped to be here, excited to announce the official partnership and ready to dig in. Let's get tactical today. I wanted to bring Mark on, like I said, because I wanted to help everybody on this podcast. I actually have some tactical things on how to build authority on LinkedIn and explain what it means to have authority on LinkedIn. But I'll get handed over to Mark and let him say why he believes LinkedIn is a great platform for B2B companies and why people should invest in LinkedIn. Yeah, let me rewind to almost four years ago. I was in management consulting before and was in an agency previously, and I was coming into tech. I knew no one in tech, no one in the SaaS world, and I needed to find a way to stand out, build a network. One of the very first things that I did was I started building in public on LinkedIn. At that point, this was Mark with 200 connections on LinkedIn, no reach, no network. I found that when just building in public and connecting with other people that were going through the same thing, it opened so many doors that I didn't even know ever existed. I first started, I was getting three likes and 100 impressions on my content. But over time, the people that you meet on LinkedIn, it really compounds. Fast forward today, it's like I've been doing a million plus impressions every week on my LinkedIn content. Every role that I've ever had in my entire career, from new to tech to VP of marketing for a multi-billion dollar brand, happened in almost three years. I've scaled two startups, one to a $300 million valuation, one was one of the fastest growing startups from C to Series A in tech. Literally all of these came as referrals after my first role in tech, 97% because I was building in public on LinkedIn. On top of that, almost every play that I've made targeting a go-to-market audience in my career has had a LinkedIn social strategy and a key organic social strategy as part of it. My very first startup, we increased our web traffic month over month by 7,000% in 30 days by building a media strategy on LinkedIn. We generated millions and millions of dollars of pipeline in the last three companies that I've been at through LinkedIn. The TLDR is just that LinkedIn just passed a billion users, but less than, I think the current status, 57% still don't engage in creating content. They're just kind of there consuming. If you are part of the 1% who are creators regularly, you're standing up and really standing out amongst the majority of the feed. We'll get into some of the tactics, some of the learnings and deep dive, but at the end of the day, the same way that people who think that it's too late to get behind AI, that's like saying it's too late to get behind what's happening in the internet in the first six months that it happened, LinkedIn is the same. Don't think of LinkedIn as something that's been around for years and you can't come to the game and you're too late. The best time to start is yesterday, so just like make it happen, build in public, it'll change your life like it has mine as long as you're consistent about it. There's two things that I wanted to add on there, and one of them is the law of the internet. I don't know where I got this from, but 90% of the internet are just consumers of content, so they just consume content. The next 8% of people are engagers on content, so they engage in stuff on content, which is comments, DMs, and all that stuff, and the next 2% are the creators, so if you were the one of the creators, it's exponentially easier to stand out if you just be consistent. That's one point. Number two is there's two types of different authority that we're talking about here. One is building authority for yourself, and authority meaning you are seen as a thought leader in the industry or seen as someone who is, if marketing comes up, you're known as marketing, or product marketing comes up, you're known as the authority in that space, and there's authority for companies, and that's a little different, and that's showing expertise, showing that you understand the customer, understand the problem, understanding who they are, and I think they both have similarities, but they both are a different place, but the best is when both of them work together where you have personalities at your company doing things that people like to buy from people, but you also have a company page that are showing that you understand the problem, that you understand the space, that you understand the people behind the content, your audience, so just wanted to add those two points on there, but you could go into more detail on some things that they should consider when starting on LinkedIn. The biggest thing that I hear creators struggling with, especially at the beginning, and I was there myself, is the worry that people are going to judge you for not having the answers or asking questions, and when I talk to even executives today who are trying to get on LinkedIn, there's an element of they worry about being seen as even like the founder of CEO, but doesn't have the answers or doesn't have everything figured out, but the key thing to remember is that your unique perspective is what people will value. No one has the one-to-one experience that you have, and a lot of people would try to tell you, oh, do it this way, do it that way. When I first started creating content, I purposely didn't try to replicate anyone's emotion. I wanted to figure out my own voice and how I brought that to the table, so don't stress about that because 10% of people will not like what you do regardless, and those are the people that you want to give attention or fuel to. Just focus, show up every day, and create something that will be useful for yourself six months ago, a year ago, two years ago. Think of when you're writing that content, whoever your audience is, if it happens to be you yourself, just think about would that be valuable because people undersell the value of what's in their head. Most times, 9.9 out of 10 times, there's someone who it's shaping their day. It's motivating them. It's inspiring them. It's giving them the tip, the reassurance they need to keep going. That was definitely me from my favorite marketing creators. Number two is LinkedIn is not something that you want to try to tackle inconsistently. I'll give you a stat. You want to be in the top 1% of podcasts, how many episodes do you think you need to actually publish? It's fewer than you think. 21 episodes of a podcast puts you in the top 1%. Think about that stat for a second. How many people start a podcast and then maybe they get a few seasons in and they just give up? The same is true for LinkedIn. You need to treat it like you would if you're investing in a sport, a language. It's not something that you can be like, oh, I'm just going to post. Block off time every day. Even if it's 30 minutes, jot down your ideas, have an accountability partner. The more consistent you are, that consistency will compound. There's so many new creators I know that treat it as kind of like here and there and then as a year later and they wonder, hey, I'm not growing, I'm not seeing engagement. No one can beat you if you show up every single day, stay focused on your audience, and try to again be that person that's adding value and give it. The third thing that I would say is it's better to do it with friends, with numbers, with your people. When I first started in my career, I started surrounding myself with people who had been there, done that, had learned, and I've just found myself sort of in circles, even building momentum internally in the companies that I was leading marketing for and got our team posting on LinkedIn. The reason that was so valuable is every single person's learning, we brought back to the table and it compounded when we had three people, five, eight, 10, 15 posting. Was it just me learning how to write better hooks, how to optimize our profile, how to do this? If all of our learning was compounding 1% better times 15 people every single day, it also made it way more fun to do together. So if you want to do three things, number one is you have value, don't rule yourself out, and don't worry about other people going to judge you. Two is create systems, block off a space, be accountable, and be consistent. Consistency is literally 80% of the battle on LinkedIn. And three is find people that you love doing it with, who you'll learn from and get better. The goal of being a creator and being in content is you want to be the stupidest person in the room. I've always had that to be my moniker is be around the people who have been there, done that for years and learn from them because it'll help you skip multiple years. That's how I went from kind of new to tech right to VP so quickly is because I built a network through what was previously Revenue Collective, now Pavilion, and I just connected with a lot of go-to-market leaders, creators, and I doubled down. But those would be my three principles. Curious what you would add to that, Daniel, if you had to pick just one more principle as number four. I always say that to win on LinkedIn, it takes B plus content and A plus consistency. And what I mean by that is you're just slightly above the average and you do it for a longer period of time than everybody else, you will stay at the top. And what I mean by slightly better than the average is that you're adding some value to me is adding to someone's day. That's what value is to me. So whether you're adding something educational, where you're adding something entertaining, where you're adding something informative, inspiring, if you add something to someone's day, you're adding value on LinkedIn. So if you can add value and you can be top of mind for a number of days of the week, you will stand out in a feed as a personal brand. I'll add one more thing and it's think of who you want to be beyond the job you're doing right now. So this is for personal brands, the job you want to be, but you want to be known as the best product marketer or the best plumber or whatever you want to be the best at something in the industry and double down on that content. I see too many people being so industry specific and they switch companies and then they're in a different industry and they're known as that person in the industry for three or four years and then on the company page side is what I like to think about is think of your page as the go-to place for your audience instead of thinking of it as the go-to place to just throw company announcements because nobody's going to follow a page that is just giving out stuff about them all the time and it's a one-way speech. Building an audience and building followers takes giving a lot and that is like I said before, entertaining, informative, inspiring, educational, sometimes it could be all four of those in one, but if you could do that and add someone in the feed, that is how you do that. I'll ask Mark right now what are some tips to make a post stand out in the feed so when you're starting this journey you can actually add someone. I have some tips to get started. Yeah, one more thing. And then I'll dive into some tips that I think a lot of people are afraid when they start creating content on LinkedIn is challenge me, I think one of the biggest things that I did early on as someone who was coming to tech with zero tech experience, you know, I didn't have the playbook from five past SAS startups to run with, so I brought my perspective in from agency life and for management consulting, and I brought that unique and challenging perspective to say, Hey, why, why has this been done this way? And I think if you take that unique perspective of whatever experience you have, it's valuable. Don't be afraid to be that polarizing take. If you feel strongly about something, the biggest advice that I have, if you only take away one thing, your LinkedIn should not be that like gray middle area of like, yeah, I kind of like that. Take a strong stance of what you believe in, find the hill that you would die on and repeat that over and over and over again. I think one of the biggest mistakes that new creators make is they think they always have to reinvent the wheel. They think that they always have to be original and that people have heard that line before. The truth is you're going to have to repeat yourself dozens, hundreds, thousands of times before people will resonate with your message and what you are about. And then more importantly, as your audience grows, all of your new audience haven't seen that content or that message before, right? It's the same way. If you had an amazing outfit or a signature dish that you make at a dinner party, never wearing that or never cooking that again, it's like one of the worst things you can do. So let's jump through and I'll get really tactical and kind of dive into the key areas that I would recommend for new or growing creators as they're trying to scale on LinkedIn. The very first thing I recommend is get real with your writing. And what I mean by that is a lot of people, when they start writing on LinkedIn, they don't read their writing out loud, their posts out loud. And it's one of the best things that you can do before you post. I do this for any email and any hooks that I write for LinkedIn. If you read it out loud, does it sound like you? Would you engage with it? Would you click see more? It's one of the fastest ways that you can also start to bring your voice to life. When I was starting out, because I came from management consulting, I was always a little bit worried about bringing my like real authentic self, which I think Daniel knows too well is sarcastic and brings a ton of humor and edge and isn't the buttoned up version, you know, in many cases that I was in, you know, suit and tie back in the day, but that's what your audience wants. Bring your unique voice and be you real talk converts, right? So the analogy that I always give is don't be that like middle of the road chicken dish at a wedding that's completely forgettable. If you have a strong stance, be bold, stand behind it, and don't be afraid to say something that's polarizing. If you believe it, because in many ways it's better to have a real discussion with people than it is to just, you know, tell the same things that people are like, yup, I always bring it back to one of my favorite essays by Kevin Kelly. And it's about building something that a hundred people will love, not something that a thousand people will kind of like, and the same is true for your brand. Your brand should not be for everyone. It should be uniquely you. And it should relate to that one hill you would die on in many, many ways. So getting real tactical, this is one of the first things that I'd recommend doing. Start just jotting down ideas and talk to three or four of your close friends and ask them, Hey, if you had to pick the one subject, the one thing, you know, that I have a unique take on or that like I'm known for, what is it usually in the first like two to three people who know you, you identify a pattern. Workshop that until you find that mantra, that hell you would die on. That's kind of step one and to Daniel's point before, make sure it's something that is going to be exciting for you to talk about, not just for months, but for years and years and years, it shouldn't be something hyper-specific to your industry or your role. It should be something that you believe in deeply. So for me, mine is all about that B2B shouldn't be boring. And that it doesn't matter if you're marketing to a chief human resources officer or a marketing specialist, people are people. And there's a line between like B2C and B2B should just be completely removed because like people are people and the best marketing is psychology for that reason. So that's not something that's like industry agnostic or that, you know, I change when I move from company to company, it's like, I believe in that through and through. So that's always where I recommend starting getting really tactical. There's kind of three things you need to do on LinkedIn. And number one is that hell you would die on and that message and what you're about should live everywhere on your profile. It should be in your headline. It should be in the link that goes out to maybe a secondary publication because the end of the day, attention is the commodity of the market that we're living in. And without attention, you're not going to get people to kind of, you know, progress them down and learn more about you. The more that you can have that North star that you believe in be everywhere, the more that your content will get people to familiarize you in that topic. And you can help kind of progress them down your funnel of learning more about you. Maybe it's your podcast, your newsletter, your website, whatever it is, but be really consistent. The stats show that less than 20% of people are going to click the see more to expand your about section on LinkedIn. So your first two lines should summarize who you are and what you're about. The same goes for your LinkedIn posts. So I'll talk a little bit more about the structure of the posts, but before that, Daniel, we'd love to get your take on profile optimization and some of the things that you see are critical to building your initial strategy on LinkedIn could be from like your banner, your links, your about just like the fundamentals that we often see, you know, creators not optimizing to the max. Want to take your brand marketing to the next level with Artlist? You can. Artlist is the ultimate destination to get inspired and create amazing videos using cutting edge tools. Choose from over 400,000 royalty free premium assets, including the best music sound effects, stock footage, templates, and more. Artlist's powerful digital assets and video editing software are perfect for marketing departments, creative teams, agencies, and app developers. Visit artlist.io to get started. A couple of things that I recommend to everybody is one, your profile picture should be something that's consistent and consistent on multiple platforms, not just LinkedIn. So I have yellow and it's on yellow on Twitter, yellow on LinkedIn, yellow on my email, wherever I go, there's a yellow background. People know who I am. So when I'm in a feed, I show up, they can recognize my first thing. The second thing I look for is the header line in, in your profile. The reason why this is important is every post you post, people are going to read that first line header. So it should be something that's very strong to say, give you credibility. I like to say that's like a credibility line for you. So if you're a founder at X or I run marketing for Y or I, I help people do X, Y, and Z, it gives you credibility. So you can be able to do something. LinkedIn now recently added a link now. So now you can add a link to your profile or view your website or view what you're doing. So make sure you have something there to give you even extra credibility. So, and I see that as a CTO of something that you want someone to drive to. For me, it drives a link tree that has my newsletter, my podcast, when I have events, it goes on there. So it allows people to see a little more. So that's quick stuff. And the next things I would think about optimizing after that is one, a lot of people don't know this, but you can get top voice in your industry pretty easily if you just contribute to articles on LinkedIn. So contribute to three, you get top voice that adds an extra credibility to your profile. Again, all these things I'm giving you is credibility. The next thing is actually growing your following, which I know it's a little hard, but that number, even if it's arbitrary to you and you think like follower count doesn't matter. People just trust people and it's known that have more and more followers. It's just how it is. So do some of the things we've been talking about to start growing a profile. That's why I think that company pages should have followers and all that stuff. I believe it. And then Mark talked a little bit about the about section. The about section should read like you talk. I think a lot of people read it like I am Daniel Murray and I am a specialist. Like I like to, it's better to be like, Hey, what's up? I'm Mark. I, I run, I've done this. I've done that. I like to eat burritos on the weekend and I like to hang out with my pet dog and it gives me stuff like that. Also a little hint that I, uh, one more thing in the profile, add something that is totally like a hobby that you do. So why I say that, I say like football, previous D one football player because it is a starting point for someone to reach out to you and say, Oh, are you a foodie? Like I'm a foodie too. It gives you a talking point that kind of helps that person reach out to you and break the ice. A lot of people break dice with me with saying like, Oh, I'm an athlete too and I do this. And so it helps something break dice and get you connected to more and more people. That's some quick tips that rely on posting. Obviously there's more things that you could do, like make sure you have links in your profile on that link section. So people can drive to see what you're doing, your portfolio, whatever. There's a lot of things you could do with the main things. I want to sum it up as profile pic, headline, get that top voice by contributing to articles, get that link to make sure you are linking out. So you got more credibility. All these things are to add more credibility. So when you post people actually listen and then Mark, we're going to, after you see the picture, the headline, the length is that first couple lines of copy that is very important that will help people read more. And also something else that you could do to add that is even more that takes up a feed that more people will stop the scroll. Yeah. And the, one of the things to take away, I'll have to find the most current stat, but I remember when I was reading this before around the state of LinkedIn, it's like the average time per profile visit was let between like 12 and 17 seconds. And when you think about that in the same way, if you're familiar with the F pattern in psychology around how people parse a website or at the read, the top headline left to right, but on the read another one, then you'll scan down the bottom of the page. The same is very much true for your LinkedIn profile. So, you know, for example, with Daniel, one of the first things that, you know, we joked about when we met years ago was like, you know, he played for Cincinnati and what a lot of people don't know is like the, one of the most famous people in the world right now, Travis Kelsey, Daniel played football with Travis Kelsey. And it's like, you see this media happening around Taylor Swift and everything that's going on. It's like, that's an immediate talking point between right Daniel and people that, you know, we've, we've met together through the business. So find that unique way to tell your story very consistently and very scannably. Like it should be like quick parse in that 12 to 17 seconds, because like, that's why it needs to be clear, consistent. And I think a lot of people be overwhelmed on their profile. They have five featured links. They have five messages. They have a busy banner. If you look at Daniel or my, their profile, you'll find kind of one message, very kind of personal, direct, short summary, scannable bullets and just that kind of one clear thing that we do, right. Authority. It says we help you turn attention into authority to grow your business on LinkedIn. It's a very simple message, but it's a key thing that we do. So I want to jump into some more like intermediate to advanced techniques and get really tactical for, you know, the rest of the show. And we can always add a prelude that, you know, we'll get into this, um, sort of about the tail end, but the same way that when you're writing your about section, those first two lines matter 95% because if people don't stop and pay attention and see more, the content that you have doesn't matter because it didn't exist for them. Think about that. When you're writing your LinkedIn posts, what are people going to see? They're going to see the first two lines. If there's an image, they'll see the image. If they don't click see more or stop in the feed again, it didn't matter if you had Michelangelo's David in that post. And it was a revelation. They didn't see it. So a lot of people I think get too hung up on putting time into the body of their content, but then their hook and how they get to stop someone in the feed is just an afterthought at the end. I've always been a believer. You know, when I was in school, it's like, right. I was originally thinking, it's like, you know, write your thesis first, then write the content and then come back and like rewrite it based on where you landed. The first two lines of your post, you're like initial hook, the line one. And then that second line that you had, you're like re-hooked to get people engaged and take them deeper. It should summarize 90% of what you're trying to say, but while still getting people curious about what's going on. This is not something new. This has been around forever, but Dago, David Ogilvie had a famous quote that said on the average five times, as many people read the headline as they read the body copy. So when you've written that headline, you spent 80 cents out of your dollars. So basically most of the people are going to read that those first two sentence. And if they, if it doesn't stop them or doesn't keep them going, they're not going to get anywhere. That means you should probably, if that is five times more red, you probably should spend five X more time on the first three sentences than anything else. I'm sorry for interrupting, but I think that's just so important for anything in marketing that even in ads, even an email, even like your subject line, an email, every little thing that you get someone to stop needs to be spent on way more than you think. It can't be just, Oh, let's just add this first two sentences and keep going. I'll try to get really tactical. And I'll give you an example of a post I wrote a few weeks back. Again, it reached more than half a million people and it had a lot of engagement and it was a really short and simple post that I was thinking about after talking to a founder and I'll read you the hook and the re-hook in the body. And we'll get into the psychology behind why it works and how I think about writing hooks and how writing a good hook is what's going to get you the attention to tell your story and get people to connect with you. So the post goes first line, marketing is the most difficult profession that looks easy, easy in quotes, which is dangerous. Why? Why? Those are the only two lines. And when you think about that, and you think about that message, what's going on here? The first thing that I'm trying to say is that a lot of people think that they know marketing. Marketing is one of those professions that everyone seems to have an opinion on because like from the outside, it looks like, oh, I could do that. And immediately there's this emotional and social connection to marketers because everyone in marketing, there's a running joke that like, marketing is the one role where everyone tells you how to do your job. The number one thing you learn in marketing is you need to learn to take advice from non-marketers. The second point here is saying that this is dangerous. Dangerous is a power word. When you say dangerous and you see that in your feed, it makes you stop just by the word itself, right? There's kind of a power to that word. And then why? Sometimes you don't need to have an elaborate cliffhanger like, and here's what happened next. It could just be, let me break this down. Let me explain, here's why. There's immediate tension between that first hook, right? Something that seems difficult, right? Seems easy, is difficult. Then there's a clear power word that gets people engaged and then we're unpacking why. You know, the rest of the post just goes and talks about all of the things that we have to learn as marketers from psychology to conversion rate optimization to, you know, the years and years and years that we spend learning how to even write good content that gets engagement. The problem is at face value, content looks easy that anyone can create and do. So when you think about that, almost it's like a movie trailer, right? Your hook should bring 80 to 90% of what you're trying to say. The second thing about writing a great post and great hook, one message. If you have one, two, three, four messages, the same in your profile, you're going to lose people. Everything that you're saying should connect back to kind of one theme, one topic, one key message. One post, one message. So one of the best things that you can do is just keep it really consistent. And when I think about a lot of the, you know, the tips and tricks that we've learned, there's a reason why a lot of people are using vertical images in their feed. And I like to give the example of, let's say that I place Daniel in front of three people that he could go on a date with. It was marketing a bachelor, right? Daniel has three people. Maybe Daniel's very specific type is X. And there's a one in three chance that he's picking one of those people A, B, or C. If I present just one person in front of Daniel and say, hey Daniel, do you want to go out to dinner? And obviously Ari, you know, Daniel's wife, you know, we know each other well. We're not sending Daniel on actual dates, so don't worry. But there's a one in one chance that if Daniel was interested in that person, he's gonna be like, yeah, I want to engage with you. The same is true of why you should use vertical sized images. We use 800 by 999 in your feed. That means that your feed is only gonna be one post. Your entire post takes up someone's entire feed on mobile. You know, the exact stat is like, I believe it's like 75, 25 or almost 80% of LinkedIn regular usage now is on mobile. So you're not designing your content on mobile to take up the entire feed. You're positioning yourself as one of two or one of three posts that someone could engage with. Maybe your post was great, but someone else's was like the pet subject that was really interesting. So someone may skip yours and go on. You want to give people the longest dwell time as possible to look at your content and make sure that you have the most time to get engagement from them. Second thing there is making sure that you have, to Daniel's point, consistency. There's a reason why you see on LinkedIn a lot of people are using high contrast backgrounds and their face on the image of a post with some text. You may not exactly see right Daniel's headline and the link in his body, but if it's in the middle of his post and it's on a vertical image on a black background, high contrast, his face is in the feed, right? And it stops you right there. Not as one of three posts, but one of one. You're more likely to even take that second look, that half a millisecond at that headline and then click see more. Getting into a little bit more around like the anatomy of a post, LinkedIn rewards very specific behaviors when you're posting. When someone clicks see more, that's a signal to LinkedIn that people are engaging with your content. The dwell time of them engaging with your post, even if they don't like or comment, signals to LinkedIn's algorithm to show your content in the feed more. The same is true when people hit save on your content. It is one of the signals that LinkedIn values the most about your content to show it again in the feed. But do you know what the number one highest signal to LinkedIn is right now? That your content is engaging, that it's gonna show to more people? It's comments. It's not repost, it's not see more, it's not saves, it's comments. So one of the best things you can do, and why if we bring it back to the beginning around having a strong stance, asking good questions and weaning in about who you are, is when people in your feed, and the order that it goes in is gonna be like your first degree connections, right, and then it cascades down according to kind of relevance. When people see your content and they comment, that is signaling that it's gonna show that to their audience, right? You're gonna get like a 1.5% boost every time someone comments, and that will continue and continue and continue as long as you see that level of engagement. So there's two kind of more critical roles in LinkedIn content that, you know, I wish I had known years ago, but number one is the first hour of your post. And even the first 10 minutes, when you think about kind of like the golden hour of like engagement, do not just post and ghost. A lot of people when they're new to LinkedIn or even, you know, creators that are going deep, you need to show up and engage. That first 60 minutes is really what matters. More particularly, if you are mentioning people in your posts, make sure that they will be around to engage and reply. If you mentioned three to four people in a post and they replied, it actually signals to LinkedIn's algorithm positively that you're gonna get more engagement. You actually get like a boost if those people engage. If those people don't engage, remove their mention, unfollow you, LinkedIn sees that as spammy behavior. So ask good questions in your posts, right? Lean in on your takes. The more that you can get people to comment and engage the better. It's why every single post that I read on LinkedIn, I include a PS and a question mark. There's a question, there's a question mark. It's asking people, hey, what's your thoughts on this? How would you approach it? You know, what would you add? Getting people to answer a question and engage in a comment is key. And that first hour is gonna set the tone for how your post is shown. The next like six to seven hours of your post is what's gonna basically dictate how it's gonna continue to show for the next few days. A lot of people get too aggressive about posting multiple times in a 24 hour period. Something to keep in mind is if you post again within like 12 to 18 hours of your first post, LinkedIn's actually gonna take the total reach that you could have had from that first post and it's gonna cap out and share between your two. So if you have a post that's doing really well, it's better to wait at least for that first 18 hours for it to continue to grow rather than posting again because you're essentially reducing its potential reach. Another thing we always recommend is after your post has traction, as long as you're editing that post less than 15%, any edits that you make won't reduce its continued reach in the feed. So let's say that you had an event coming up or you're promoting a newsletter or something like that. If you're writing a post and it gets great engagement, in that first 30, 45 minutes, you can edit that post and you can include a link to your newsletter, you can include a call to action and you're not gonna see any of the downgrade that you typically would if you started the post with a link or some type of way to get people off of LinkedIn. And the reason being, LinkedIn wants to keep people on the platform. If you guys haven't noticed, they wrote out messaging for company pages recently. And when anyone turns it on from their company page, what do you think the first call to action that LinkedIn shows? It's not the external sign up, visit the website, no, no, no, it's message me because LinkedIn are trying to do whatever they can to keep you on the platform, spending more time and engaging more. LinkedIn's job is to keep you engaged. They want you on the platform, right? The same way that Netflix has the watch the next show at the exact 4.3 seconds that is at that moment where we're more likely to sit through and engage. So kind of in summary, your hook should have tension, it should have power words, it should sum up the post with enough curiosity without giving everything away. You should write content that's gonna get people to comment above all else, see more and save your post as a resource. Likes and just engagement is one of the lowest forms of kind of boosting your content. It's better to get people having a conversation than it is them to like an existing idea that's known. You should always be maximizing your vertical feed space so that you're one of one and not one of three. High contrast always so that it's easy for someone to scan on mobile, maybe they're on the go, maybe they're at an event, you know, maybe you're on the subway, whatever it is, scannable high contrast is key so that way you're only competing against yourself. And make sure that you're committing to blocking off that first 60 minutes to engage with your content because the better you get that going, the better it's gonna serve in that next six to seven hours of your post, which is gonna signal. And again, if you get a winner, let it go for 18 hours, don't double down or you're cutting out your own heels and minimizing its engagement. And again, there's 107 other tips that Dan and I could dive into, but those are some of the key things if you're kind of, you know, intermediate or leveling up your LinkedIn game, that'll help take sort of your ability to grow your audience to the next level. One thing I'll just add on to a couple of things is an image. Think of it as your headline. I think a lot of people think of it as something else, like it's part of like that headline you're doing. So that's what's gonna get something to stop. That's why a lot of people have done tweets and one line, and just because it's a headline, it's something that's quick, engaging, something could stop ads, it's bigger than your text. That's why it gets more engagement. Also, images get shared, images get screenshotted, and those type of things grow your following. The one tip I always give to people is, think of posting as you're posting a group of friends in that niche that you wanna share that content with. Would you share it with those people? Think of it as a text message group, because if you would share it with those people, more people will probably share it with their friends, and then that cycle goes on. That's what I did with the Marketing Millennials. I only share memes and tweets and things that I think that other people would be interested in, other people would think it's funny, other people would share. I do kind of tests on the side to my marketing friends, be, is this funny or is this not funny? Would you share this, would you not? I believe my wife is a marketer, so it's easier to get her quick glance. Sometimes I'll be like, hey, did you see this meme? And it's my meme, just to see. So that's one thing I always say to people is that. And then I would also say that at the end of the day, just put out things that you think are valuable and don't think that everybody knows it, because there's someone who doesn't understand that piece of content. So when you're gonna put those things that you might think is simple, there's probably hundreds of thousands of people that don't think that's simple, and you're helping them realize something that they've never thought about before. Obviously, some marketing leaders will be like, oh, that's so simple, why are you sharing that advice? Or someone in the industry is gonna be sharing that, but that's something to think about. So I know we're running pretty over today, but I wanna ask Mark where people could find him, where could people find his journey? Yeah, well, appreciate you having me on, Daniel. I'm excited that we're taking authority to the next level. For anyone that wants to learn more about the business that Daniel and I are running, helping founders, leaders, and company pages grow on LinkedIn, you can check us out at authorityb2b.com. Definitely, if you wanna connect with me and talk LinkedIn tips, I'm always game, so you can look me up, markpyoung, J-U-N-G, on LinkedIn. Shoot me a connect, would love to hear your thoughts on the episode. And again, if you only take away one thing from this episode, only one thing, is just show up at BU. Everyone's gonna tell you to run it their way because they've been there and done that. I went against every best practice when I started on LinkedIn. I shared memes, I made music videos, I did all the things that I think just made me me, and it's like, you don't wanna be a carbon copy of every other creator. You wanna find your unique voice and how you speak and how you bring yourself to market. So yes, there are best practices and things you should do, but those are just the frameworks. You should always use that to bring your own unique voice to life. That's gonna be the way that you're gonna connect and build real relationships with your audience, is just being real. So don't be afraid to be you. I posted a meme the other day of the Duolingo owl saying, let's review your mistakes. I was thinking about this at three in the morning when your marketing brain's on, you're going through all the things you could have done, and it's like thousands of people resonated with that message from CMOs all the way to Fortune 500 executives. Even though it's a funny, engaging idea, it doesn't mean it won't resonate with, right, because people are people. Yeah, thank you so much for being on this podcast. I truly believe in the power of LinkedIn. It's helped me grow my career. It's helped me grow, meet everybody here from the marketing millennials. I wouldn't have done it without LinkedIn, so I truly believe in the power, and thank you so much for being on the episode. Yeah, you and I literally would not have met if it wasn't for LinkedIn. This business wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be doing kind of all the things that's to come. LinkedIn changed my life and my career. Literally almost everything that I've done is based off LinkedIn, so don't sleep on it, folks. It's never too late. Everybody, have a great rest of your day or night or morning, whenever you're listening to this. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks, Hop. Peace. Thanks so much for listening. Tune in next week to hear more great insights from marketing's coolest operators. If you haven't already, please consider subscribing to the Marketing Millennials podcast and giving it a five-star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.