640 words. Estimated reading time: 3 min.
LinkedIn is the OG slop center, but it’s a popular channel with our ICP, important for recruiting, and our posts often do well there. Here's a few best practices to have your posts seen more on the platform.
Advice on LinkedIn posting
- The hook is everything. Get people to click “show more.” What works:
- Money - “We spend $X and here are the best things we learned”
- Dilemma - “What would you choose X or Y?”
- Provocative statements - “Collaboration sucks”
- Transformation stories, before and after - “This product helped us go from X to Y”
- Data reveals - “PostHog has seen an ~8x increase in traffic from ChatGPT in the last year”
- Resource lists - “Here are the 10 best posts on X”
- Takeaways - “After weeks of researching X, I’ve published Y deepdive. Here are Z interesting things I learned along the way.”
- Work - “I wrote a 2000-word long article on how AI impacts performance of software and systems.”
- Use lists and numbers.
- Be specific with numbers. Say “$8,500” not “around 8k.” This feels more credible, like you aren’t making it up.
- Ask yourself if there’s a story or anecdote you can use to make this real.
- Be useful. Write the posts you want to read.
- To drive clicks to links, either say “link in comments” and add it to the post ~6 hours later or include an image in your post. The algorithm hates direct posts to links.
- A great graphic goes a lot way. “Zero-click” content like ByteByteGo gets thousands of likes with basically just a graphic. Information does better than memes.
- Add a question at the end to get comments. People want to respond. Comments boost posts in the algorithm, often more than shares do.
- Commenting on popular posts works, comments can get 30k+ impressions.
- Posting time doesn’t matter to going viral, however it's good practice to post between Monday-Thursday and within 1 hour of standard working hours wherever most of your connections are based.
- Posting daily beats 1-2x/week “perfect” posts. A lot won’t hit, but this will more than pay off for the ones that do.
- If you are posting a changelog update, you can create nice images when clicking Add entry in the changelog. It's under the Social sharing header.
- Once you've posted, throw a link into
#shitposters-unite, and your fellow PostHog employees will shower your post with reactions, giving you a dopamine boost and helping it reach a wider audience.
Thank you to Lucas Faria for many of these tips.
Boosting posts from the PostHog brand account
If you post PostHog-related content to LinkedIn more than once per week and aren't scheduling it in advance, please:
- Ask Liam Graham to add you as a content admin to the PostHog LinkedIn page if you aren't already.
- Immediately after posting, switch your profile to the PostHog page and:
- React (like, love, insightful, etc.)
- Repost (the regular "Instantly bring [your] post to others' feeds" option)
The first couple of hours of a LinkedIn post are critical algorithmically, so sharing from the company page early helps maximize reach.
If you _are_ scheduling content, aim to engage from the brand account within ~an hour of the post going live (e.g. liking comments, adding the supporting article link as a comment). Liam will cover this when possible, but morning GMT posts may fall outside PST working hours.
LinkedIn posters and their newsletters
A primary way we use LinkedIn is to promote our newsletter, so here are some examples of people doing the same: