What I Learned Speaking to a LinkedIn Expert Behind a 1M Follower Page

Aidan Brannigan has been instrumental in the rapid growth of The Marketing Millenials LinkedIn page, helping them grow from 200,000 to 1,000,000 followers. He’s also taken his learnings and applied them to his personal account and grown it to over 20,000 followers.

The Hobby Letter founder Buster Scher sat down with Aidan on an episode of The Buster Show to discuss everything he’s learned about LinkedIn. You can listen to the full interview here: Apple | Spotify

Below are some of the key lessons we learned from Aidan 👇

• LinkedIn offers a higher quality user base than any other platform

• If you want to stand out from the crowd… you’re going to have to make content that’s different from the crowd

• General entertainment content isn’t the move on LinkedIn, you need a business angle

• LinkedIn’s organic reach comes with a co-sign

• Take advantage of LinkedIn DMs, people actually answer

• LinkedIn’s profile verification is going to help keep bots off the platform

• Use AI to help you ideate content, not to create the content for you

• Engagement pods get you engagement, but not the kind you want

• Post your content without links, and then after ~20 minutes add the link in to not lower your reach

LinkedIn Offers A Higher Quality User Base Than Any Other Platform

LinkedIn’s business value prop is not how many users it has (which is a staggering 1 billion+), but the types of users it has. LinkedIn is a business platform, meaning 10,000 followers on LinkedIn could mean 10,000 potential customers, 10,000 potential employers, etc. There’s no platform like it if you want to accelerate your career.

“The real reason why I started on LinkedIn was I could build a high quality, high value audience. I don't need 150,000 followers or 10 million followers. I can have 10,000 followers here and really move the needle business-wise and career-wise.”

If You Want To Stand Out From the Crowd… Stand Out From the Crowd

When coming to LinkedIn a couple of years ago Aidan took stock of what everyone was posting and came up with a content strategy where he would be posting content that was different from everyone else. He felt that everyone was being too button up on the platform and it was time to bring a little fun and humor to LinkedIn. Today, business memes are the norm on LinkedIn but Aidan was pioneering business/marketing memes when he joined the platform. If you’re starting today and want to stand out from the crowd, you won’t do it by trying to be like everyone else.

“Part of choosing LinkedIn was the shock factor. I was bringing some wild content to LinkedIn and that just added fuel to my flame.”

The advice he gives to a new LinkedIn creator today:

“I would go on the platform and ignore everyone else. Do not follow any playbook that is working on the platform. Because if you follow someone else's playbook, the best you're going to be is second. You have to innovate upon that at the very least. But I would just come in with something fresh, something crazy, usually the most insane posts on LinkedIn are the posts that nobody's ever touched on LinkedIn before.”

Is LinkedIn Exclusive to Business Content?

As of right now, if you’re posting on LinkedIn you’re going to want it to be about business. Don’t let that discourage you from coming over to the platform though. The School of Hard Knocks that Aidan mentions below post man on the street style content. Normally, man on the street wouldn’t work on LinkedIn, but The School of Hard Knocks does man on the street entirely around business. Whatever your content is about, find the business angle and bring it over to LinkedIn. Another great example of this is Joe Pompliano, who makes sports content on LinkedIn, more specifically, content about “the business and money behind sports.”

“I don't think LinkedIn's at that point yet where you could bring like a HoopsNation on the platform and it could go crazy viral. My friends, The School of Hard Knocks on socials are now posting on LinkedIn. Their content is like entertainment, but it is still business focused and so that is about as close as you could get to like a non-business content and theme page or just page in general going viral on LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn’s Organic Reach Comes With a Co-Sign

LinkedIn might not have TikTok levels of organic reach but it’s reach rivals if not surpasses other platforms. The true benefit of LinkedIn’s organic reach is the network effect. When someone likes your post on LinkedIn, that person’s followers see that they liked it as well. Not only are you getting in front of new eyeballs, but it comes with a co-sign from someone they know.

“That's another big factor of why I post on LinkedIn, the organic — I wouldn't say it rivals TikTok anymore, but it is on par with a lot of other platforms. And it's a much more valuable audience if you're trying to build a business or looking for clients or selling a SaaS tool or something like that.”

DMs On LinkedIn Get Through

MrBeast only has 200,000 followers on LinkedIn, way less than any other platform. Odds of him (or someone on his team) seeing your DM is way higher on LinkedIn than anywhere else (this doesn’t just apply to MrBeast).

“Another cool aspect of LinkedIn is that everyone that isn't within reach on other platforms is substantially more within reach on LinkedIn. What I mean by that is if someone were to send you a DM on Instagram, I don't know if you see it or reply to it, but if someone were to send you DM on LinkedIn where your audience is way more intimate, you'd probably see it or at least acknowledge it more than the one on Instagram or TikTok. I've sent DMs to the most random people ever and I've gotten responses from almost all of them via LinkedIn. Good luck doing that on any other platform.”

Is LinkedIn Going to Turn Into Twitter?

Aidan’s answer says it all.

“I don't think so. Just because that anonymous account and the burner account side of things; I think that's a clear differentiator. I like LinkedIn because (I'm sure some people slip through the cracks), but you have to verify your identity to create an account on the platform. I can't create another Aidan Brannigan account because it just doesn't work that way. So I think there's so much value in that because a lot of these platforms struggle with bots.

And I think LinkedIn's video feed is already better than Twitter's video feed. I think Twitter's timeline is hard to be optimized for video, whereas I feel like LinkedIn's scrolling video tab is already legit.”

AI For Content Ideation > AI For Content Creation

Your uniqueness as a creator is your greatest strength. Relying on AI to make all of your content eliminates your greatest strength. Why would you want that?

“AI content is the freaking worst. I think the most important thing is differentiation. If you're using the tools that everyone else is using to create content, it's almost impossible to be differentiated. AI is great for idea generation. Maybe you're working on 50 things at once, you can use ChatGPT to prompt you with some ideas and get the juices flowing. I even use that for some of my content idea generation. I'm like, “okay, I have these three ideas, but I need 20 more”. That just gets the ball rolling because sometimes I don't have someone to brainstorm with. But AI content in general, I'm a hater, absolute hater. Maybe this is me being old, I don't know."

Do Engagement Pods Work?

Let’s put it this way… fake engagement doesn’t lead to real business.

“Engagement pods, I also hate. It's the same feeling to me as forced networking. To network you don't go to someone like, “I want to network with you”. You talk with the person, if you like the person, you get along, you stay in touch. That's networking. I'm all for being scrappy. Engagement pods do work but I've never been in an engagement pod. What I have done is I've made friends with people like Buster, Daniel Murray, and Ari Murray. When they see my posts on the timeline, they're going to like it and maybe throw some love because they're my friends now. That's the real engagement pod where it's not forced.”

A Pro Tip When Including a Link In Your LinkedIn Posts

Post first. Wait 20 minutes. Then link.

“Post all of your posts and then maybe 20 minutes after posting, go in, edit, add your link. With The Marketing Millennials, every single post, we would have a link — we'd have some sort of CTA but we would post the content first and let it get some traction immediately. And then — it's different for everyone — but if it was like 50 likes, then we'd edit it, go in, post the link. But if it's a personal account and you see maybe two or three people liked it already, just edit it, put the link in just so that there's no shot of LinkedIn limiting the reach.”