LinkedIn has exploded as a social channel.
You might have even initially heard of my newsletter through LinkedIn.
The noisier it gets, the more challenging organic growth becomes.
Plus, we’re always at the mercy of the ever changing algorithm.
There are tons of ‘hacks’ you can do for social growth, but we always look longterm. “Play longterm games with longterm people”.
This called for insight from one of the most knowledgeable on LinkedIn’s platform – let’s get into it.
3 Things from Sam’s Playbook for LinkedIn Growth
Sam McKenna, Founder at #samsales shares 3 aspects of her playbook👇
1. Craft a compelling hook
While this may sound ‘obvious,’ it cannot be more highly emphasized. A big part of LinkedIn’s algorithm is dwell time, and you have a limited number of lines to capture attention (3 lines without a picture, 5 lines with a picture). The goal is to compel users to click “see more” to increase dwell time and in turn, reach.
One way that I (Scott) personally do this is by writing out my post, then actually rewriting it with the hook in mind. Often, the best hook is the last part of the what I write out – don’t underestimate starting with the conclusion.
2. Write content for your target audience, but also beyond that
While growth outside of your ICP alignment isn’t the goal, including some content for adjacent audiences can be helpful for growth. For example, if your ICP is executive level, consider writing for varying levels.
The expanded exposure not only fosters overall growth but inadvertently exposes your ICP when they operate within the adjacent space.
3. Systemize growth
Growing your audience systematically can increase engagement and visibility. Strategies for achieving this include:
- Connect with people who engage with your content, particularly those in your ICP – use a friendly and non-salesy approach in your connection requests, thanking them for engaging with your posts.
- Proactively add people within your ICP. If you have SalesNavigator, filtering through a list daily is an efficient way of doing so and can be done in as little as 10 minutes.
This is actually Sam’s last week before maternity leave, so we wish her well!
More on LinkedIn in our podcast episode with Justin Welsh.
🍿 Upcoming live event:
Join Jesse Williams and David Stillman, Co-Founders of Stori, and Sophie Buonassisi, our VP of Marketing, to learn how you can use messaging and positioning to differentiate in this increasingly cluttered market.
Register below to attend live or get the recording.
💚 Sponsor shoutout:
This newsletter is brought to you by Common Room—the modern buyer journey platform.
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Check out Common Room and give your GTM teams the gift of conversion.
👀 More for your eyeballs:
Social media platform Reddit has drawn up detailed plans to launch its initial public offering (IPO) in March. Read more here on the plan to IPO.
Unicorns ballooned 14x in the past decade, from 39 to 532. They now serve a wider array of sectors (we’re tracking 19) from climate and crypto to vertical SaaS. Read the full breakdown of SaaS unicorns and trends from their rise to demise.
👂 More for your eardrums:
Leena Joshi is Co-Founder & CEO of CloseFactor, a GTM strategy and execution platform that helps enterprise tech hone in on the exact right prospective customers and accelerates their conversion by helping your sales and marketing teams be contextually relevant to them. She has led GTM teams at high scale B2B companies such as Splunk, VMware, Redis and has a unique perspective on the convergence of sales and marketing into an efficient, high performing GTM organization.
🚀 Start-ups to watch:
- breathing ai – they have a free Chrome extension. The mission is to minimize the side effects of excessive screen use by recommending breathing breaks and adapting screen colors to benefit the user’s experience. Full disclosure: I’m currently writing this with both the timer for breaks and color functions on 🙂 Check out breathing.ai or read about them in FastCompany.
- Postal – hot off the press, Postal just launched Smart Collections, which leverages Postal data from millions of sends to determine the direct mail and gifts that drive the highest conversion rates for customers.
🔥 Hottest GTM jobs of the week:
- Strategic Sales Leader at Writer (Remote or San Francisco)
- Staff Program Manager, Marketing at Vanta (San Francisco, US)
- HR Business Partner – GTM at Atlan (Remote – US)
- Sales Engineer at Gitpod (Remote – US)
- Business Developer Representative at AudiencePlus (Phoenix, US)
See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.
That’s it, that’s all.
It now only feels appropriate to say: see you on LinkedIn!
While I drop into your inbox every Friday, I always love hearing from you any day of the week over LinkedIn.
Have a great weekend ahead.
Barker ✌️
