The LinkedIn News Feed “Retargeting” Hack

Hey, what’s up everybody?

Chris Mechanic here, I’m Co-Founder and CEO at WebMechanix and I have some really exciting news to share.

Generally, it’s an awesome time to be a digital marketer right now, but what I’m focused on, specifically, these days, well, among other things, is LinkedIn.

So here’s the deal, I wrote a long report on this, which you can get, you can download it probably, there’s a link above or below or somewhere, but here’s the deal with LinkedIn, they were acquired by Microsoft and they underwent a huge redesign in January of 2017 and they did all types of stuff, they even rebuilt the whole back-end of the platform, most people don’t know that.

But the idea is that they’re focusing heavily on the Newsfeed. They wanna get more people using the newsfeed, more people posting stuff, and more people consuming content from there because Facebook generates tons and tons of revenue from their Newsfeed and so LinkedIn is kind-of forever the copycat.

So they’ve really are emphasizing use of their Newsfeed.

So that’s thing number one, and a lot more people, because the Newsfeed is the first thing you see now when you log in, it’s getting the views, it’s getting the eyeballs, but the thing is that they haven’t, LinkedIn has not very successfully gotten more people producing content.

So most times when you see something on LinkedIn it’s just, like, kind-of a short piece and it links out, but they really want people to stay on the site and to consider LinkedIn the actual source of the news.

And so the long and short of it is that right now is a fantastic time for Content Marketers to be building audience organically on LinkedIn, and I call this hacking the LinkedIn Newsfeed.

You can almost get it so that you’re effectively re-targeting people.

So a lot of you have probably seen my posts on LinkedIn, you’re probably getting tired of seeing me ’cause I’m probably all over your stream.

Here’s a very kind of crude summary of how the LinkedIn algorithm works: So on Facebook, say you post something and you get some thumbs ups and stuff. Facebook’s algorithm says, okay, this person who gave a Thumbs Up is relatively likely to want to see this author’s other stuff, relatively likely.

LinkedIn’s algorithm is a bit dumber in a way.

It’s much more direct, much more linear, and so when you like something on LinkedIn, LinkedIn’s algorithm says, hey this person is way likely to want to see everything that Chris Mechanic publishes, and so they’re gonna basically be showing that over and over again.

This is a limited-time opportunity, though, because LinkedIn is well-aware of this problem, and they’re actively recruiting new Content Developers.

So when you’re in LinkedIn, you’ll see, everywhere you turn, it’s who to Follow, and it shows you Gary Vaynerchuk and these celebrities. Once you start following them, then your newsfeed basically just gets cluttered up with all of their stuff almost immediately.

I tried it, luckily, you can then unfollow them. But before long, people will be following all the celebrities and then it’s gonna be very very difficult to get share of voice. So basically, the long and short is it’s a phenomenal time right now to be building audience organically on LinkedIn.

So what do you do?

First and foremost, you gotta post, okay?

If you’re not posting at all, just starting to post, you’re obviously gonna get a little bit of traction.

But there is a little bit of rhythm to the rhyme or reason to the rhythm or whatever they say. What you wanna do when you post is post long-form content. The character-limit I think is like 1500 or 3000 characters.

You wanna post pretty long-form content.

And there’s certain things, in the guide there’s all types of examples but the very first few characters, like say the first 50 characters or so, you want it to be really catchy and to make users want to click through to see more because that’s an indicator of interest too. So even if a user clicks through to that See More button, they’re very likely to see your subsequent posts, even if they don’t like or comment or share.

So basically make that, make the very beginning of your post kind of of your post kind of a hook.

So for example: I did a popular post recently which said “Got ripped off yesterday, HVAC guy took me for 500 bucks.”

That was the beginning of the post, and it got over a hundred likes and a bunch of comments and shares and things like that.

There’s a lot more to this, I’m trying to keep this video short so for best results, download the guide, do it right now, and start just doing something on LinkedIn.

This is great for executives that want to build their brand out. It’s great for salespeople that need to attract prospects, entrepreneurs, executives of all type. Get on this bus because it’s leaving soon and soon it’s gonna be too late.

So look around, it’s either above or below this video. Grab the link and then you can thank me later.