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Yes, I realize LinkedIn has a bad reputation, but it’s a popular channel with our ICP, important for recruiting, and our posts often do well there. We're posting more there, so here's what we've learned about doing it well so far.
Advice on LinkedInposting
- 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 a long 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 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.
- 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.
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: