What happens when you engage in a specific action every day for a month?

Previously I had written about completing monthly challenges of picking a new set of habits and executing them daily for a month each. Since the idea’s inception in August 2017, I’ve completed roughly 22 monthly challenges, ranging from trying intermittent fasting to meeting a new person every day. 

For the month of June, one of my challenges was to post on LinkedIn every weekday. My impetus was to see if I could a) be more engaged with the content from my field of organizational development, and b) learn about the posts’ impact on my network and efficacy to connections. 

The types of content I created or shared can be broken up into two main categories:

➡️ Personalized article shares, either with or without some sort of audience ask.

(I found these articles while browsing websites like behavioralscientist.org or Google’s Discover feature.)

➡️ Personal posts, with pictures (like about my graduation or a mural I’d seen), or text-only posts (like a quote from a book I was reading). I tried to frame these posts as ones that would make people in the feed stop and just savor an idea for a moment. 

(Some of the text-only posts just asked the audience a question–I wanted to experiment with soliciting feedback.)

Now, I want to pull back the curtain on my results to show you how simple it is to drive engagement on your own posts and profile.

Here are the metrics and their implications:

1️⃣ Overall, my profile views skyrocketed for those four weeks. Three of the four weeks I saw increases in views, which we can partially attribute to a potential positive correlation between post views and profile views. 

Implication: People saw my posts in their feed, and subsequently clicked to see my profile. (See graph).

2️⃣ On average, my posts garnered about 350 views each. Let’s break down details. Fewest views: I reshared a post of an emotional intelligence expert sharing an article he wrote (45 views). My reshare post was published on a Monday, and had no hashtags.

Implication: The timing (early in the week) and lack of hashtags may make a post less visible, according to Hubspot and Oberlo. 

Implication: Conversely, using hashtags is good! Someone reached out to me saying they found me because they follow the #organizationaldevelopment tag, which I had appended to one of my posts. Use them wisely!

3️⃣ Most views: I shared a graduation picture from my Master’s program which garnered 2,513 views, 44 likes, and 10 comments (as of June 30). 

Implication: Personal posts with pictures of authentic human faces do really well, especially if announcing an accomplishment. I’ve seen that for other LinkedIn users, too. 

4️⃣ Of the ~16 posts I made during the month, only a handful were of just text, and tended to have only 100-200 post views. 

Implication: Varied media, like photos, videos, and articles, tend to have more views than just text alone. Humans are visual creatures, and this is strong corroboration. 

5️⃣ I did not post on the last two Fridays of June because there was not a huge number of views for my first two Friday posts. (Of course, there may have been other confounding factors at play, such as post and content relevance to the LinkedIn audience or algorithm.) Additionally, I either posted between the lunch hour or between 4-5pm EST. 

Implication: Best days to post were Tuesday and Wednesday (confirmed by, again, Hubspot and Oberlo). I chose those lunch-hour and end-of-workday times to catch folks on LinkedIn during their downtime or commute. 

6️⃣ My favorite moment? I reshared an article that came up on my feed by a non-connection who’d written about an interview he conducted with Laszlo Bock. Laszlo was and is an inspiration to me in the organizational development field (ex-SVP of Google, Humu founder, author of Work Rules), and I tagged him in my post about the interview. It was a Russian nesting doll post of sorts (I posted about an article written by someone who’d interviewed Laszlo)–and Laszlo ended up liking my post (and then we ended up exchanging messages)! Cue huge fangirl moment for me. 

Implication: It’s okay to judiciously tag folks in your posts to help spread someone else’s ideas or writing. You never know who may interact with your posts. 

In sum, because I’d never been a consistent poster on any social media platforms, I wanted to challenge myself to see what could work on LinkedIn, a platform I frequently use and evangelize. 

Beyond the six lessons learned and reinforced above, the whole monthly experiment made me pay more attention to topics in organizational development that I found fascinating and wanted to share, hoping others would plug into the conversation, too. I learned that it was very difficult to get users’ written interaction with my posts; only about half of them garnered any comments. This is a point of growth for me: producing content that not only makes users stop and ponder, but also leave their own two cents. I see short video clips and other interactive media being the next step. 

And perhaps that is a challenge for another month!

I’m curious: what has helped you engage with an online audience of yours? Do you have any tips or best practices? 👇