My LinkedIn Flops

Author

Matt Jonns
August 01, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Ah LinkedIn... We/I love it. We/I hate it. We/I find it cringe. We/I find business opportunities on it. It’s a love-hate relationship.

I think about the mysterious ‘LinkedIn algorithm’ far more than I would like to admit and it continually frustrates me when I post something that I think is really insightful content, only for it to flop.

So, I thought I’d share the posts that didn’t do too well on LinkedIn, so they can have the potential at a second life, and share some of my learnings after being active on LinkedIn for around 3 years.

I would highly recommend being active on LinkedIn. I’ve found investors, investments, advisors and made a load of industry friends on the platform. I often have conversations with people that I’ve not met before, but it feels like I know them or they know me already because of our content.

It’s a great way to break through cold intros/conversations !

PERSONAL BRANDING
LinkedIn Flop Number 1

👉 Marks & Spencer made £11.9 billion revenue in 2023.

5 years ago, not many people would have predicted this.

👉 Meta’s share price has recently quadrupled to $476.69.

In 2022, not many people thought this was going to happen either.

Marks & Spencer defied the closing of the High Street by diversifying, stocking brands beyond M&S ones and in part because of the collapse of other department stores.

Meta defied doubts by getting on the front foot early with layoffs (coined the “year of efficiency” by Zuckerberg) and generative AI. They were undervalued because the Metaverse distracted attention and potentially overlooked their progress with gen AI, and the core business. Now, they’ve indicated they’re going to start paying dividends !

There are so many successful companies and industries that look obvious with hindsight, and there will be so many more in future too.

We think that digitising offline businesses, what we call ‘offline to online’, will be a “looks obvious in hindsight opportunity”.

Taking analogue, “proper”, offline businesses and adding technology to increase revenue, and efficiency is a big opportunity.

There’s lots of talk about building new businesses, but there are already thousands of successful businesses waiting to be boosted with tech.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

What are your ideas of things that we’ll look back in 5 years with hindsight and think was so obvious?

PERSONAL BRANDING
LinkedIn Flop 2

I’ve seen lots of successful people telling founders “It’s OK to quit”.

But, is this actually good advice?

It is a tough balance. You’ll always struggle initially when building or starting something and it will take a long, long time to get off the ground.

And of course you don’t want to be flogging a dead horse, but some of our portfolio companies over the years have faced huge difficulties, gone into cockroach mode, and come out the other side really successful. It’s only because those founders had the grit and determination to carry on - when many would’ve given up - that now means those companies are thriving.

So when is the right time to give up really?

I worry that advice like this means that people are going to give up too soon because they are being told by super successful people that it’s ok. And they’ll flip flop from idea to idea without really giving anything a proper go.

And I’m sure the people who are saying ‘it’s ok to give up’ could have given up sooner than they did, but they didn’t… and that’s why they’re successful.

Take every piece of advice with a grain of salt (inc this post ! 🤣)

PERSONAL BRANDING
My LinkedIn Advice

While I’m never exactly sure why a post doesn’t do as well as I expect (I think it’s down to luck half the time) I’ve seen a shift over the last year or so towards much more in depth, detailed content. Despite ‘click-bait’ posts still performing well, spending more time writing insightful, interesting and thought-provoking content is a much better bet. Plus:

1) If you’re not posting right now, it will start slow, but just get started– my first year or so of posting was incredibly slow. I’d often get between 5-10 reactions per post, sometimes less. It takes some time for people to find your content and for you to nail down what you’d like to write about.

2) Experiment and don’t be afraid to fail but take note– content can get very samey and boring. Plus, the illusive algorithm changes frequently. Make sure you’re trying different formats, video, text-only, pdfs, images. I would also advise to only post images of yourself where appropriate, it can look very forced.

3) Comment as much as possible– beyond your content, this is a great way to interact with others in your industry. I’ve had some of my comments get more reactions than my own posts. Plus, if you’re in a content drought, you can still remain active.

4) Write ideas in your laptop notes/phone– I have reams and reams of notes on my phone of content ideas. Most of my ideas come when I’m walking around, so I note them down to be written up at a later date. Extra tip: make sure you are going to understand your note at a later date… some of mine I read back and have no idea what I was thinking.

5) Repost content– When you don’t have enough time for original content, repost something that did well previously or re-write a post that didn’t do as well as you expected. I posted a video of Brian Chesky a few months ago and it did ok (see here). I reposted it and got 600+ likes (see here).

6) Lastly, just have fun and don’t take it too seriously !– I always remind myself, today’s post will be tomorrow’s chip paper. People won’t remember a rubbish post, they’re too busy worrying about their own life/content.

PERSONAL BRANDING
What I’ve Noticed

Gary Vaynerchuk has been posting 1-second videos with most of his posts. The post could have an image but he choses a video instead. I’ve searched to try and find out why, couldn’t find anything but I assume his bet is firmly on video performing better now than image.

Equally, and more importantly, this means while his audience reads the post, the video replays a few times, gets more views and gets pushed further by the algorithm.

Interesting ! Could be worth a try !

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All the best,

Matt Jonns