600K views on LinkedIn in one week – How & What I learnt from it

All right, I am supposed to start with a fascinating introduction that would act as a hook for you to stick around till the end of this post.

But, I am going to make this simple.

Here is what I did?

Sounds too simple? It actually isn’t. After clocking over 40M views on LinkedIn, I kinda know what works and what doesn’t. Coming back to the story of why I am writing this post.

I posted 7 posts in 7 days and plan to do 30 posts In 30 days. I have never done that in the last 2 years of using LinkedIn. I would post one or two posts randomly on LinkedIn. But last week I decided to post one post every day and see what happens. In fact, I posted 8 posts in 7 days and result .

A total of 600K views, yes half a million views with over 6.7K likes. Crazy right?

Now, I wanted to know who are these 6735 people who liked my content.

There were two winning posts in the week.

Are most of them connected to me? Or are they second and third-degree connections?

I basically wanted to understand how is LinkedIn showing my content to an audience. 

So, I did some scraping.I actually ended up scraping my last 20 posts which had a total of over 15K profiles of people who have liked my content.

What all did I scrape?

• Name
• LinkedIn Profile URL
• Title
• Connection Type

Now that I have the data, it was not too hard to understand the simple data – all I had to do was a simple pivot table and boom!

Only 13% of the total engagement came from my 1st-degree connections while the majority came from second-degree connections.

This time, I could only scrape around 32K followers before which my friend’s account was put on hold by LinkedIn for suspicious activity 😛

So to perform this experiment, I need to compare about 12K Likers (second-degree connections) with 32K followers which I was able to scrape and decided to multiply the multiple to get to the closest ratio.

Soon realised that’s almost impossible with Google Sheets ( I don’t have Excel )

So, I called up a friend with a windows machine and Excel installed to perform this job. After 3 hours of loading, excel crashed.

Basically excel had to vlookup about 384000000 combinations to get us the data we want and it was failing. Could be RAM issues on my friend’s machine.

So had to come up with something much simpler. How about I take 100 2nd degree likers and compare it to the data set I have. Maybe I will get some close number.

So we did 😀

Here are the numbers :

Out of 100, only 3 matches with an URL in the 32K followers list i.e. if my math is correct if I was able to scrape all the 107K followers of mine ( have about 23k connections ), there is a chance that 10 out of 100 would have been in my follower’s list.

Even if I round up to 20 considering the quality of the sample we picked was a bad one, this basically means only 20% of the engagement came from people who are either my connections or followers rest of it came from non-followers.

Now this is good news as well as bad news

Good news because, even if you don’t have a following if your content is good. You will get reach.

Bad news because what is the whole point of building the follower base. Right?

EH! May be wrong. If you don’t get the initial traction, it won’t get that exponential effect which leads to overall crazy reach.

So bottom line, create content consistently.

I have decided to push 30 content pieces in 30 days. Already on track to 10th post today.

Btw, I have been thinking of coming up with a LinkedIn content accelerator program.

A 30-day program to help you come up with 30 content ideas for 30 days based on a framework that I have built which has lead to over 40M impressions on my LinkedIn content.