Want to Go Viral on LinkedIn? Here’s How

In episode #2877, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss effective strategies for going viral on LinkedIn—the importance of engaging content, consistent posting, and authenticity in communication. They outline a five-step framework for achieving viral success, including focusing on trending topics, maintaining a regular posting schedule, and mastering copywriting skills. Don’t forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube! Check out more of Eric’s content (Leveling UP YT) and Neil’s videos (Neil Patel YT) TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: (00:00) Going Viral on LinkedIn: The Framework (02:58) Engagement Strategies for LinkedIn Success (06:06) That’s it for today! Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more! Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric’s ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel X @ericosiu

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. We're gonna talk about how you can go viral on LinkedIn.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  This guy got 26 million impressions. We just talked about how views are not the most important thing, but we're gonna talk about how you can go viral, okay? Here's the five-step framework to consistently going viral on LinkedIn. So I'm just gonna share a couple of things.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  No, share all five?

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I am gonna share all five. I'm gonna go with the one that's most interesting to me first. So some topics do much better than others on LinkedIn. What do you think they are on LinkedIn?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Motivation, business, aha moments, like someone learning something.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Close. So these are the topics that do the best on LinkedIn. So talking about LinkedIn itself, okay? Culture, HR, leadership, remote work. Because you have a broader, broader audience TAM for that, a total addressable market, right? And so it says, why? Because they applied to a broader set of audiences. Anyone at any company in any industry can chime in on any post about remote work. He shifted his strategy to include a lot more workplace content, which gets five to 10x the exposure versus marketing and business content. Now, this is where I'm like, you can go for the views, we just talked about it, but I'd rather go for marketing and business and go for a more targeted TAM, because that's gonna drive more dollars at the end of the day, right?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Number two, I would say here, post five to seven times a week. He believes you need to post often for the algo to give you some love. And that's true, right? If you're not posting enough, we've talked about this before, all of these algorithms, they need to see if you're a reliable employee. If you're not a reliable employee, you're posting like once or twice a week or whatever, they should, why should they give you the reach? The reach is golden. They should give it to somebody else. And the other piece that's interesting here... I don't have the energy to do this. I don't think you do either. But if you're starting out, maybe engage plus comment on 10 to 30 posts per day. So you're gonna, you're gonna post. And then once people start commenting, you immediately respond to those comments. But then you also have to go respond to other people's posts, 10 to 30 of them. So you're writing 10 to 30 comments a day in addition, right? Which makes sense. You're trying to engage, you know, people might give you the love back, whatever.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  And then I would say the fourth thing over here, he spent 10 years trying to sell things on the internet. Once he learned how to write persuasively, he went from 25K followers to 185K followers in just 11 months or so. So he's grown a lot. Um, copywriting is a great skill. Are there any good copywriting books out there? The Boron Letters, that's a great copywriting book. Go check it out.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Ogilvy has a amazing copywriting book. I forgot what it was called.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Ogilvy on Advertising?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  I have a couple of his books. I'm reading one called Ogilvy.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  There's, there's a few of them, but Frank Kern told me about it so many years ago.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Ogilvy is a book, just the name Ogilvy, and it has a lot of his memos in there. That, that one's interesting. So, and the final piece he has here is ignore nuance and bait, bait comments, which I think you would just ignore naturally. But I think that my biggest takeaway from this one is you can go for a larger audience TAM and just engaging. So that's what it is. That's how you can go viral.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  I do agree, you know, I agree with all of them, but the thing I've learned over the years is responding to comments and engaging helps so much. I used to respond to every single one of my blog comments. It would take me so long.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  You were old school with that. You were, you were doing that since like 25 years old, probably a little sooner than that. You always had someone, if not you, helping.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  At the beginning days for many, many years, it was always me. Then eventually I hired someone because it was too many, like responding to like four or 500 comments a day is a lot of work.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  My thing on you always was like, dude, he doesn't enjoy responding to comments, but he's like, he's doing it for the algorithm.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Well, back then it was the blog. There was no algorithm.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, the blog made sense.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  But I was just responding because people took the time to leave a comment.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  You got a lot of comments on the blog.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  I used to get a lot of comments. Now I get zero comments.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Really?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I disabled comments.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Oh, smart guy, smart guy.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Okay. And then the second thing that I've learned over the years. With social is it's not about writing persuasive copy. I like writing like how I would talk in a very conversational way. It's just natural. People can relate. They love conversations versus reading something that makes them feel like you're selling to them or you're talking at them. So that's something to keep in mind.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Actually, can we stop? Hold on that one for a second. That's, that's a big one because a lot of people think you should write a certain way or you should do this a certain way. It's not even you should do that. Like you should run your business a certain way. You should. It's like whatever works for you.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  And like I talk faster than Neil, for example, that's what works for me. Neil likes doing things in certain ways in his business. I do things certain way in mine. Like it's whatever works for you and you learn that later in your life. And you don't need to cater to anyone's style, right? Cause you start to become unnatural if you start to try to copy people.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  That's right. So if you start writing like the way you talk, it'll be very natural for you. If you're naturally salesy, you'll integrate that. If you're naturally persuasive, you'll integrate that and so forth, so on. I think that's great because then people will look at your content as content as much more authentic. And the third thing I would say is yes, you need to post ideally once a day. But if you're posting crap that's getting no engagement, it does hurt you in the future. So you want to make sure the stuff you are posting is quality. And that helps you even more in the future versus just posting tons and tons of junk. Cause it takes time to recover. If the algorithm is like everything Neil posts or Eric posts or John posts or Suzie posts is just junk. It really hurts in the future.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Have you ever wanted to target a bunch of accounts on LinkedIn at once and personalize them? Well, previously you couldn't do this. Let's say you wanted to target 500 enterprise companies and you wanted to hyper personalize those ads. You can do that now and LinkedIn has confirmed with us that nobody else can do this right now. Only we can do it. The product is called carrot. That's K A R R O T and it's carrot account based marketing. So if you go to carrot.ai, you can go learn more about it and we'll see you on the other side. It's funny. I got, I got the most backhanded compliment on my YouTube channel today. So this is the video with Seth Godin, which is, which is doing well, right? And he's like, dude, I'm so proud of you, Eric. They say success is a game of attrition. I've been a subscriber for years and seeing your videos barely get any views year after year after year after year.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  The fact that you never quit that are finally seeing success is inspirational AF. I'm like, that's good. I saved it.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that's another lesson, actually. Sometimes you just keep going. If there's any one thing that I, any one trade I have, it's a

• 6:29Speaker 01

  You're relentless.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you gotta be relentless, right? You're relentless. The same thing for you, too.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we love that.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  To a fault.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  In certain situations, yes.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  All right, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency. And guess what? Neil and I, we're doing a session, a private session with the group tomorrow. Marketingschool.io/agency. And we'll see you tomorrow.