Reflections on unemployment 4: LinkedIn engagement is important

I've put some things out there over the years. 

I used to run another blog - "pubsgrubsandbeers.co.uk" - where I wrote reviews of...pubs, grub and beers. 

I published a couple of apps, most notably the amazing "Ghostify" (RIP).

I've written a few LinkedIn articles, posts etc. And lots of reviews. 

It's fair to say, though, that I've never taken these things seriously from a money-making perspective. I've done these things for myself, to see if I could, to learn stuff, for fun...and anything on top of that is a bonus.

One time, a pub down the road invited me to eat for free at their restaurant to try and improve their one-star review on pubsgrubsandbeers.co.uk (a quirk in SEO meant that my review actually appeared above their own website on google searches) - this was a big win! 

Ghostify earned me some money. I think getting towards £100 in total. Having never gotten any money for code I'd written for myself, I was delighted.

Given that I've never really tried to make a lot of money off of these things, I've never really worried a lot about the algorithm. I know it's out there, I know roughly how it works...and because I know roughly how it works, I'd never had interest in getting involved.

This is largely due to two diametrically opposed facts:

1) You'll please the algorithm more by putting out lots of bad content than a little good content. 

2) I don't want to put out lots of bad content. 

So my approach to LinkedIn has always been to say something when I have something to say, and to not sweat how many people see it, engage with it etc. 

This changed during my period of unemployment, for two reasons. 

1) Networking is everything. Applying for jobs got me pretty much nowhere. Referrals through my network and LinkedIn opened far more doors. As such, I started to put a little effort into making noise on LinkedIn. When I did, I discovered:

2) Putting a bit of effort into LinkedIn makes a huge difference to your reach.

Let's look at the data

Yes, that's right. I'm 56,000% better now!

It feels inevitable that I'd start paying attention to LinkedIn analytic data eventually. We all know how much I love data. So one day I started clicking around, and this graph is pretty interesting. 

Before we start getting into detailed analysis...let's give a little narrative to this graph:

Q3 last year - looks like I didn't really do anything with LinkedIn content. Guess I didn't have anything to say. 

In October time I posted a few times. My tone was generally frustrated, so I wonder if I was just a bit stressed and venting about some of the nonsense that you normally put up with day-to-day. 

The beginning of January this year I did the same thing, for much the same reason...then mid-Jan I announced that I was unexpectedly unemployed! 

Did I mention I do all my own artwork for these blogs? 

From that point on you can see a couple of things. Firstly you can see me posting content regularly for a couple of months, and the general level of engagement rising. Secondly, you can see some things doing a lot better than others. 

Probably, some of the things I was writing were more interesting than others. But I was also experimenting. What kind of content works best? When is best to post? 

I think I instinctively knew the answers to these questions, anyway... but you know me...when there's a chance to have data validate a hypothesis, I can't not run the experiment anyway. 

Then there's a bit of a lull - Easter hit, I was faffing around getting Albitron off the ground, not much content hitting LinkedIn... 

And finally, there's a little noise as I've started posting a bit more regularly again. Including the good news that I've found a job - here:

If you're interested, there's also a really direct relationship between content engagement and the number of followers you get. See:

So, what did I learn? 

As I was experimenting with content, I played around with a few things...the type of content, the tone, and the time of posting. Let's address them one by one:

Type of content

Short-form content performed much better than long-form. Very few people (understandably) take the time to go and read a whole LinkedIn article...so posts perform much better than articles.

I tried one of those posts where you write text then share it as a picture. Fairly "meh" response...so didn't bother doing it again. 

Tone

No shockers here, more provocative and click-baity tone does better than plainer, less controvertial tone. 
"Things that give me the ick..." got over four times as much engagement as "A couple of weeks in to job hunting....". 

I'm not thrilled about this. Having to come up with a great "hook" for the start of each post makes the whole thing very forced. But it makes a big difference.

Time of posting 

Don't bother posting anything on a Friday afternoon, it's a dead zone. The posts that I had do bigger numbers generally accelerated over around a 24 hour period... so you need to stay at least a couple of days away from the weekend. And the morning performs better than the afternoon. 

As I said before, I think we instinctively knew this would be the case...but my relatively limited dataset supports this instinct, anyway.

I never tried posting first thing, as I assumed you'd want to wait for people to check their emails and get a coffee into them. Maybe I'll experiment with that and see what happens. 

Free,  bonus observation

I don't think I really have data to back this up...but I've had the distinct impression that scheduled content doesn't perform as well as things you post manually. Let me know if you have thoughts about this! 

But why does any of this matter? 

I refer back to the intro "Networking is everything."

So when you post and say "I need a new job", you want that to be seen by as many people as possible.

Now scroll up again and see how small the spike was when I posted my sad face message. I had 50% more people react to my smiley face post about having found a job. And that's the wrong way round! 

In fact, looking down the list, my post saying "I need a job" was the 10th best performing post of mine throughout Q1. And it was very nearly beaten by a post about the naming of shepherd's pie...That's not ideal!

It might be that there just weren't that many people that cared that I lost my job...and my whining about LinkedIn is just 5x more interesting. I don't think that's it, though. I think its was just a consequence of sharing something important without having fed the algorithm a bit first. 

And I guess that's the point of this post. You need to always be feeding the algorithm. One day you might need it. 

So, will we hear from James ALL THE TIME now? 

Ah, hmm. Sort of?  

Having presented my learnings, I've been more or less ignoring them for the short term. 

Instead of posting short, pithy content, I've been writing long blog articles like this one. 

And having observed that scheduled content doesn't seem to perform as well, I'm scheduling everything.

Instead of making content easy to consume, I've been posting it here. (I think the algorithm probably tries harder to share your LinkedIn articles...it doesn't care much for personal blog entries).

And instead of being upbeat, spicy and engaging, I've been my usual dull-as-dishwater, Marvin-the-adroid, self. 

So...What's the deal, James? 

I'm genuinely reflecting on my unemployment. I didn't enjoy it much, and writing these blogs is a good way of digesting what happened and processing things a bit. 

I'm also trying to add content to albitron.co.uk, so that Google may eventually deem my site to not longer be such low value. 

Fundamentally, I want to compile content that says something about me. During my unemployment, I started developing a loose "content strategy", if you could call it that. I wanted people to be able to look at my profile and see proof that I check boxes in what I consider to be the key areas of Engineering Management - People, Process and Product. 

My aim then, in time, is to have albitron.co.uk become a source of content that reassures future employers that I know my onions.

Finally, I'm trying to get some kind of writing flywheel spinning. I have a couple of bigger ideas that I want to get through and I'm hoping that improving my discipline at writing long-ish things regularly will help make large projects feel more doable. 

BUT. I genuinely believe what I said above - I need to be continually feeding the algorithm with things that perform better...so I'll be mixing in shorter-form content too. I still won't be posting out nonsense willy-nilly though. I am determined to make the algorithm work for me, not the other way round. 

I have ideas. Somewhere down the list of things to write are some things that would lend themselves to serialisation, or chunking up elegantly. We'll get there. Soon. 

James Ashwin: Thought Leader. Coming soon to a LinkedIn feed near you. 

Let's end it there. 

As ever, massive thanks for reading. I had quite a lot to say about this, I hope I kept it brief enough to keep you awake. See you in the next one!