I got a message from Inc. Magazine Columnist and good friend, John White, on Facebook saying “Nice viral video on LinkedIn Jeremy!”
I was confused and didn't know what he was referring to.
I jumped on LinkedIn to find a recent post I made. The post was a complication video about Mark Zuckerberg responding to a question from a senator. I made the video just recently after sitting through six hours of Mark testifying to Congress in April of 2018.
The question Mark responded to was...
Senator Hatch to Mark Zuckerberg: "If [a version of Facebook will always be free], how do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?"
And in response...
Mark Zuckerberg: "Senator, we run ads."
This small exchange of conversation was quite humorous to a lot of people. The exchange garnered a lot of attention in the media.
I looked back at LinkedIn and that post (that I had only posted a few hours before) with 100+ connection requests, around 20,000 views, hundreds of likes, and dozens of comments on that video.
The video trended for “Facebook” and “Zuckerberg” on LinkedIn.(By now this video is over 250k views).
Before 2018, LinkedIn was a dull, stagnant, and boring “social” media that people didn’t use very often.
LinkedIn still needs some major culture shifts, but things have been changing. In early 2018, LinkedIn made some major innovative changes to their platform... to name a few...
- Native video for both profile and business pages
- Updates to an algorithm to favor engagement better
- UX/UI profile updates
- Added Gifs
The most notable update, in my opinion, is NATIVE VIDEO. Previously, users would share YouTube and Vimeo links when sharing videos to engage their audiences on LinkedIn. This, of course, worked very sparingly because social media algorithms don't appreciate links take people off their site.
The LinkedIn algorithm, similar to Facebook, favors engagement so strongly that just a handful of likes and comments on a video can get you a few thousand views.
There's two types of engagement on social media. Active engagement and passive engagement.
Passive engagement is the most minimum level of engagement a user can take on your content. It might look like a user "clicking" on your post, a "Post click".
Active engagement is when someone comments on or shares your video. On Facebook and Instagram, Dennis Yu explains the positive vs negative feedback point system.
"Social media algorithms have a weighing system for all content. Dennis shares some rough analysis they’ve done on the impact of different types of engagement. If a like is worth 1 point, then a comment is worth about 6. A share may be worth 13, a 3-second video view might be 0.25, and negative feedback (“hide this post, hide all posts, report, spam, unlike page”) is worth a minus 100."
So each comment I got on the video, I replied to it. I stacked as much engagement as I could on the video which made the algorithm push my video in so many people’s feeds.
I tried to start conversations on the video because every comment on I got made the algorithm push my video even more. I even got into arguments with people (not recommended). Some arguments generated 15+ comments. In their heads, they’re thinking I just want to win an argument but I’m actually just inviting them to continue comment on my video. When in reality, all they're doing is telling the algorithm, "hey share this content to more people."
Application: Post videos on LinkedIn.
In addition to posting videos on LinkedIn... remember one thing.
ENGAGEMENT.
Go after engagement. So post interesting videos that encourages people to like your video or comment on it. Then remember to reply to every comment to generate conversation.
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