- Duration: 67 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JYPSBWP7KRJ647PVHMYBGQ1P (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JYPSBWP7KRJ647PVHMYBGQ1P)
Transcript
[Blake Emal]: talking at all. I’ll let people in. I’ll answer questions in chat. All right. [Michael Houck]: Blake is on chat management and audience management. I’m going to intro them, intro us, give them some context. And I’ll do the I’ll do the little first section kind of pitching us and our credibility. And then I’ll turn it over to you when we get to the algo stuff and you take it from there and I’ll just jump in as as needed. Yeah, that sounds good. [Blake Emal]: I had to change my bio a little bit because I can’t talk about anything copy or related beyond just that it was there. [Michael Houck]: Let me put the music on. You guys tell me if this is going to work or not. What did we have on before? Was it club vibes? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Funky grooves? [Michael Houck]: That sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Can you guys hear this? [Blake Emal]: Yeah, a little bit. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Let’s move it a little further over. Good? Good. It’s funky. Yeah. Okay. Should we let people in? Anything else we need to talk about or are we good here? Are you going to share your screen? [Blake Emal]: I’ll share my screen right now and I’ll just be the only one sharing. Don’t share yet. [Michael Houck]: Wait till we get to the, wait till I kick it off. But then yes, you share your screen and you do it the whole time and just take it through. Okay. All right. It looks like there’s 10 people. Let me give it a, give it a minute here. Let it get a little bit of a bigger initial rush. Pause this, very funky music. All right, I’m ready to fucking go. Let’s do it. Unmute is off. Blake, do you wanna, or Blake Stewart, do you wanna request recording two? I know I’m doing it, but just to get two people doing it. [Blake Stewart]: It’s already going, so I can’t even ask because you’re already doing it, so looks like that’s covered. [Michael Houck]: All right, we got 12. Yeah, let’s give it one second here and then we’ll, yeah, it’ll be good to get like 15. Oh, one of those a fathom note taker. Gonna kick that. One note taker, 14. Another note taker gone. This is a person. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s a person or a note taker. All right, I’m gonna let him in. Turn the music back on and we are good to go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What is up, everyone? [Michael Houck]: How you guys doing? We got a lot of people already. What’s up, everyone? Really pumped for this. Drop your name and your company and also your LinkedIn profile in the chat. We’re going to be live auditing someone’s profile at some point. So if you want to be part of that and get some free tips on how to optimize your profile during the session, then definitely drop that in the chat right now and let everyone know who you are. We’ve got some great people in here already. There’s a bunch of folks who RSVP’d over 10K followers already. So also some people who are earlier in their journeys and just sort of trying to figure out what we did and how to use it for their startup. So a good mix of folks and it’s going to be a great session. So yeah, please drop in the chat who you are and who you are up to so everyone can connect. Also another thing that might be good to drop is just like what you’re struggling with the most or what you’re just curious about on LinkedIn. You know, whether that’s finding the time to create content in the first place, whether it’s higher results from your content once you put it out there, or whether it’s getting people off platform, generating leads or subscribers or whatever your main API is, or if it’s something else entirely. Just drop it in and let us know what’s top of mind for you as we type into everything here. And we will be doing a Q&A at the end. So if you have questions as we go, just drop those in the chat. We’ll keep an eye on them. Some we might answer in real time, others I come back to at the end, but we’ll take note of each and every one. Um, and you’ll be able to unmute yourself and ask your question live at the end as well. Um, so yeah, stick with us for that. Uh, there’s more people. Yep. More people here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Let Brad in. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [Michael Houck]: We’re going to give it another minute. We’ll probably get started around, uh, three Oh six Eastern. Just want to give some folks a minute to filter in here. So let’s do that. Yeah, in the meantime, if you haven’t already, please drop in the chat who you are so we can show you, and also your link to the URL so we can connect with you. I think that whoever we do for the live audit is going to be fun. We’ll give them a lot of tips on some of the sections that you won’t usually think about optimizing, but actually can drive a lot of clicks on platform or can drive a lot of clicks into your profile from the posts you make. We’ll give it one more minute here and then we’ll get rolling. We’ve got Aidan joining. Amazing. We’ll be sharing the recording of this as well as the docs we go through at the end. You guys will have access to that, so don’t need to worry about that. You’ll get an email from me later today. Welcome, Aidan, if you want to drop your LinkedIn in the chat as well. We’re doing a profile on it of one person during the middle here, the middle of the session, so if you want to be part of that, definitely drop it in. I guess we can get ready to jump in. We got about a couple more seconds here, 4306, so we should get rolling. Blake, let me turn the music off, and then do you want to share your the screen. Well, let’s do this pump for this, everyone. So for anyone who doesn’t know me, I’m Michael Houck, and we’ll get into me and Blake in a second. But first thing I want to say is just like your LinkedIn profile in particular, also your profile across all social, but specifically for LinkedIn is your social landing page. You know, people aren’t going to try to get people off platform these days. People are trusting their algorithms more and just taking whatever is on their their feeds. So you need to stand out in that in that place, both in the feed and then once you get them to click into your profile. Also, most other sort of marketing channels these days are not doing as well as they were a few years ago. Andrew Yeung from Andreessen Horowitz wrote a really interesting piece that I’ll send you guys after this, or Blake, if you want to drop the link in the chat, you can, about why every marketing channel is sort of saturated right now. And I think content and audience building, especially in a world where differentiation is harder than ever or service differentiation is harder than ever. Building trust with person to person is probably the best way that you can grow your business or grow your profile, whether it’s, uh, um, you know, just building an audience or, or, or building a startup behind it. So, um, yeah, that’s the link. Thanks for sharing that Blake. Um, so yeah, so that’s sort of the, the, the Genesis of this, we want to crack distribution on LinkedIn, either for businesses or for personal brands. Uh, and, uh, Blake and I are two guys who have done that, so we’re happy to, to to talk through that. So yeah, so this is me, I’m Michael Houck. I’ve raised a series A from Andreessen for my last startup. I built a large personal brand across multiple platforms. My sub stack is at 217K, my LinkedIn’s at 44K, and I’ve built a $2 million personal holding company, but totally bootstrapped, basically just helping founders through content, distribution, and also other things like fundraising support and things like that too. So that's me and then Blake is a even more of a guru than I am. He runs content at megaphone, which is our content agency and distribution platform. Every piece of content we write goes through him and also he has built a huge audience himself between LinkedIn and X. So just a quick deal. You are at the beginning here. Megaphone is our is our product and our service. We create content for families, founders, VCs, execs, and even some big creators who we don't talk about, who they want distribution, they want content creation. We have a network of over 500 creators with 60 million combined followers who we can loop in to engage with your content and also handle everything from writing to posting and scheduling to metric reporting and ops around your account, DMs, and more. So that is the gist on us, and we'll talk more about how that fits into this strategy further along but I want to get to the meat of this quickly. So just a very quick mention at the beginning here. We have some great people in this chat. I think I saw Andrew Yeung just come in. Welcome, Andrew. Drop your LinkedIn in the chat so people can connect with you. And yeah, as I said, we'll be auditing one profile in a bit. And yeah, I'm pumped for this. So Blake, if you want to take us away and go through the first part here of what to expect in LinkedIn Algo, You can, you can take it from here. [Blake Emal]: Let's do it. So can everybody just do me a favor and let me know if my mic is okay. Is it loud enough for everyone? Is it too loud? Am I offending your ears? Okay, cool. Uh, it looks like we're good. Really quick. What to expect here. The goal is we want to help you founders kind of see the path from content to revenue. A lot of the time we'll talk ghostwriting or things like that. And we really just focus on ideas and content and we don't connect it to that other side of getting leads. And converting those leads. And what does that whole funnel look like on a platform like LinkedIn? So that's the goal today. And some of the things we're going to cover to get to that place, I'll give a quick TLDR on the LinkedIn algorithm. Some of this will be kind of second nature to you. Some of it might be totally novel. So we'll start there to set the foundation. Then we'll talk about your profile and then we'll get into things like content and getting leads from content. We'll cap it off by talking about engagement and why that's important and how to do it. It. And then we'll have some time at the end for, for the Q and a and how could mention, we'll, we'll be doing a profile audit during this as well. That'll obviously happen during the profile optimization ish range. So drop those in, you'll have another reminder as we get to that point. If you have any questions, put them in the chat, we'll kind of sift through those as well and prepare for the Q and a later on. Otherwise for the Q and a, we can just kind of do it ad hoc as well. So let's talk algorithm for, for just a minute here. And you'll we're not doing slides. We're going straight through a Notion doc, and this will be, I believe, shared with people after the fact. So this resource, don't need to take notes on this stuff, but definitely take notes on your thoughts on it. The LinkedIn algorithm at its most base form works in three core steps. First, it filters for quality, then it tests based on engagement, and then it ranks relevance. And I want to walk through what that actually means. So this is kind of the step-by-step of when you post something, What happens on LinkedIn side of things and how can you use that to your advantage? So it's not exactly the same kind of platform as X or TikTok where it's more of a for you page. LinkedIn is still more of a traditional algorithm. It'll change here and there just like any algorithm does, but it's still a little bit more traditional than those. And what happens when you hit publish on one of your posts, LinkedIn automatically knows to filter for quality first. So it's going to filter it based on if it thinks it's a spam post, something that might fit into that category is something that is very poorly written, very bad grammar, something that's just a huge block of text, something that has 50 hashtags, something that's clearly written by AI with no edits or anything like that. So some of that stuff could come across as spam, also potentially offensive content, things like that would fit into this category. It'll look at if it's low quality. So in the case of spam, it probably just won't you any credence at all. It will not filter that past that stage. You're going to get nothing out of it. With low quality, if it filters it through that lens, you're obviously going to get dinged and probably not have a very successful post, but it might get shown to somebody. A low quality post is probably just something that doesn't have a great hook, doesn't have good content, maybe is not offensive or spammy, but clearly isn't interesting. So it'll get filtered a low quality post filter and go to a very, very small group of people, or it'll be perceived as high quality. So it's got a good hook. It has good structure. It's legible. It's readable. It's well-written. It's on a topic that you talk about often. So it's not just completely out of left field. It fits your audience. Those are just some ideas of what might go into a high quality post. Now, when that happens, obviously that gets pushed to more people. So again, let's go through spammy posts. We're looking at tagging a million people people, millions of hashtags, too frequent of posting, which would basically be on LinkedIn multiple times per day is going to hurt you pretty much immediately. So you want to go one post per day is around a good range. Some people might even do less, but that's an acceptable range. But those get blocked and limited. If a post does pass and gets at least barred as low quality but passable, it'll get shown to a small group of people for that initial engagement. Testing and what they're looking for there obviously is metrics like impressions and likes and dwell time on that post. Is there a disproportionate amount of interest in that? For every 10 people that see it, do a couple of people seem to like it? If so, it'll get boosted to another group of even increasingly larger people. So I think we kind of know how the algorithm stuff works from there. But it's looking for meaningful engagement. So if it's getting a thoughtful comment, that's going to mean more than just a like, And a like is going to mean more than just an impression. So there are levels to it. What you're really optimizing for above all on LinkedIn and basically any platform at this point is dwell time. If you can get people to just stay on that post for whatever reason, that is going to be your biggest determinant of if it gets pushed to that next larger group and if it can make it past that stage to an even larger group. And then that's when we're talking about a post that might go viral or at least have substantially outsized engagement compared to what you usually get. A lot of this is dependent on what happens within the first hour as well. So you'll often hear about that golden hour. We're going to talk about that a little bit in terms of engagement later on as well. But within that first 60 minutes, what are you doing to engage on your own post? What are you doing to get more people onto it, to comment, to start a conversation? That's often going to be the biggest key factor of what decides if it's going to go viral or if it's going to work well or not. And when I say viral as well, I think it's worth noting on LinkedIn that they have actively said they don't really like viral content, which kind of goes against what you would hope to hear as a creator. But LinkedIn doesn't want things to go viral. They just want things to be useful, which is why they don't have a For You page. And so you're not going to see the same kind of mechanisms. If you see something blow up on LinkedIn, that can happen, but it's more likely that you just kind of get a significantly higher amount of engagement than usual for a post, but maybe not astronomical. On X, you could get a million impressions on LinkedIn, maybe not so much, but the quality of the conversations within there and the relationships you build will likely be much higher quality. So there's a balance there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think one good question from the chat from what is, does using an AI generated image effect post-traction? Can LinkedIn detect if what you're putting out is AI generated? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it's a good question. [Blake Emal]: I personally don't know how well they can detect things like that, but I can definitely say that if the image is just not an interesting image, then it doesn't matter. What you're really looking for there, if you're going to be generating with AI, whether it's content or imagery, it has to be really good. And if it is clear A lot of people will just filter that out and you'll get no dwell time. So I would say, worry less about if the algorithm's gonna ding you for using AI, but more so, are you making the content actually good? Like, is the AI making the content itself bad? That's what you can actually control. There are instances where you could use AI imagery and it looks really good. And it actually is like moving the story along. So yes, it can work, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: One good example here is Greg Eisenberg. If you guys don't follow him on LinkedIn, you should. He posts a lot of great stuff. And one thing he's done recently is use AI generated images, but with his face in like unique situations. So it looks like he's in a space. So I think that's a way you can stand out and not sort of look like a generic AI image. Greg Eisenberg is his name, Liz. So yeah. Blake, if you wanna drop his LinkedIn in the chat. Yeah, there we go. Okay. [Blake Emal]: There is also really quick here, another tool called napkin, if anyone's used that, that is more like using AI to generate graphs and infographics and things like that. And as long as you can feed it good context that's actually real, you can get AI-generated graphs that have real information. You just don't have to actually be the one to go into Figma and build out the whole image. So it's a lot easier. So things like that, great. But again, just be cautious both on the content and imagery side to make sure it's actually good. [Michael Houck]: That's the ultimate filter. Forward to the audit. Um, so we're going to go through somebody's profile and give some, uh, yeah, give some optimizations. Let's first go through sort of best practices and then we'll, we'll, we'll go through somebody in the audience. So if you want to, uh, have your profile, uh, audited by us live and you haven't already dropped it in, please do so now. But like, if you want to go through and, uh, and talk about best practices first, feel free. Yeah. [Blake Emal]: So we're going to, we're actually going to use how, uh, LinkedIn to go through some of this and we'll go back and forth here and go talk So when we're looking at the banner first, basically. Now what I want you to notice with a banner, it's pretty crystal clear. There's not tons of things going on, but it is bold. So there are a couple of elements here that really work. First off, he's got the company that he's building, and then a core belief, a core message, a call to action. One simple phrase is more than enough. Sometimes you're going to see these banners that have a headline and a full paragraph of subtext. Plus check marks of everything that they offer, plus their phone number, plus their email address. You can kind of get overwhelmed by having that much information. People aren't, they don't really need all of it. And it makes you look actually less authoritative than if you just have one clear message and you let the rest of the page do more of the talking to flesh things out more fully. So what works here, again, you've got some bold colors to draw the eyes in. They are on brand. This orange is like a lot of the products that Hauk has. Use orange. So it's related to him visually. One strong message. So tactics for ambitious founders. It's broad enough to encompass a lot of things that he's building, but not one specific thing. So that's just kind of a hot tip. If you have multiple projects, you can go a little bit broader and appeal to a bunch of those. But it's still one strong phrase to give you an idea of what you're looking at. So let's go back here. Remember that this is the first thing that people will just see without having to actually think about it. They will read your actual headline, but this is the first thing that they don't have to think about. They just naturally can visualize this banner and see what you're all about. It's a huge opportunity to give them context right away without expecting anything from them. So make it yours, be bold, display one thing. If that's the only thing that you did in your banner, you probably done a pretty good job. And then if you do have like a small bit of social proof, like, you know, we don't have that on here necessarily, but Hauk could put a couple logos on here of companies he's worked with, if it were maybe a little bit more specific to that one offer, you can add social proof in there as well. But then you kind of want to get out of your own way and allow the rest of the page to do the talking for you beyond that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. This is, we'll get into hooks when we get into the content section, but the hook is 90% of everything. You have to get people's attention first and the banner photo is the hook for your profile. So once people land there, they need to like that in order to view the rest of it in most cases. [Blake Emal]: Totally. And thankfully on the profile, you kind of get a couple shots at a hook. Like you get, you get this, and then you do have this secondary shot in your, in your headline as well, or your title. So let's talk about that. Usually what I'm going to recommend is don't over-complicate this and try to be overly clever because if you do, you're just going to confuse people that actually might buy from you. Instead, think through this formula. What do I do? How do I help a certain person? And what, or what's the outcome? So I help X group of people accomplish Y. And then some people can add like a using Z method or formula. If you have a specific framework or formula for how you do things, especially if you're an agency or something like that, if you want to differentiate, but I help X group of people do Y thing. Yes. It is kind of like a cliche formula because it works. You don't want to add too much stuff here. So for Hauk, it's helping 75K founders with fundraising content and PMF. You get a few things here. First off, you get credibility, 75,000 founders. That also gives you context on audience. And then you get topics, fundraising content and PMF. So there's enough context in here in a very short headline to make you feel like this is a credible person. You have some kind of idea of what they do. Or how they can help. And then you can keep moving on to their call to actions and their about section to get deeper context. So hopefully you can see the pattern that when you're starting off with these first two elements, banner, headline, it is not necessary for you to add every bit of context about yourself. There are other places to do that. This is where you get people hooked on trusting you. So credibility and that you might be the right person or they might have the right offer or at least knowledge that you want to steal from them. Hauk, anything to add on that? [Michael Houck]: No, I think we can move forward. I want to make sure we get time for everything. So let's get through all the sections here and then move on to the audit. [Blake Emal]: Well, final thing here, just don't use Ninja, Wizard, Growth Hacker, stuff like that. Just be clear about what you are in your headline. There's really not much reason to veer away from that. Now, CTAs, this is where we start getting into, how can I actually use my profile to convert people? So for you'll notice here, the normal DM thing, we'll ignore that. But then you have this custom CTA to funnel into his newsletter. And when we click through there, we actually go into the newsletter. So this is one way that we treat this as a landing page, right? Some of you are gonna have this set up already. If you don't, make a note of this and go do this right after the session. What is that next step from free content to whatever? What's the next step that you could do to get them into your funnel. Probably not best to immediately jump into like buy my $10,000 offer, but if you have something in between that, this is a really good place for that. And you can add, I’m not sure, I think. [Michael Houck]: One thing I want to flag here is that this view my newsletter thing, or you can have it say website or whatever. This actually shows up under your name and your one-liner on any reply that you make on other people’s content. So this can generate clicks from you if you’re just replying, even if you’re not posting your own content. Organic people to view your profile. This is super valuable. Blake, I want to make sure we get to everything, so let’s keep it rolling. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Blake Emal]: All right. About section, we don’t need to spend tons of time here, but I think the biggest thing to note here, a lot of people treat this like an actual timeline of your whole life, and it’s more like bullet points and it’s not a story. What’s the concise story that you can tell people that kind of leads them to where you are now? You can see he starts telling his story here, but then it eventually gets to this is what I am working on based on this history that I have. And you actually get into more CTAs here. So again, this is an opportunity for you to expand on what you’re actually doing and drive people further down your funnel as opposed to just spending it telling your entire life story. So keep this brief, keep it story-driven at first and lean into, all right, now here’s what I’m doing now. And that’s where things should kind of cap off in that section. [Michael Houck]: One very quick thing here is that if you notice before Blake clicked in to see more, I just had those two lines at the top and it didn’t even say anything about, you know, what I’m offering people or anything like that. It was just a very quick and interesting anecdote from my background of like I started with no connections and then I did this this big thing that makes people want to click more. Again, this is thinking in hooks. This is another hook. You want people to click in and read your whole story. You got to give them something that’s interesting at the top that’s very concise. [Blake Emal]: Everything’s a hook. Yeah. And that also includes once you start getting into featured, you have this very small space to promote different links. A couple of things I’ll mention here. You don’t have to just only feature your best performing content, although you can do that if that’s a core goal. But you’ll notice that Hauk here is basically just promoting the newsletter again. So it’s a very focused CTA. That’s okay. You can post that a bunch of different times without worrying about it being redundant. You want clear focus. You can add here as well, depending on what kind of business you are, is like case studies and social proof. You can format this to fit really whatever you want to do, but you can build credibility right in these cards as well. So on mine, you’ll notice that I actually have case studies and testimonials in the featured slot, and then like a book, a call to action on top of my newsletter. So there’s a bunch of stuff you can do with featured as well, all CTA related. Anything else there, Hauk? [Michael Houck]: No, you do that way better than me. [Blake Emal]: All right. And the final thing here that Hawk does really well in your experience, everybody’s already got this fleshed out, but two things that I’ll say first and foremost in the actual content here, I would focus less on what that company actually does and more about what are the outcomes or results that you drove to that position. So if you’re a founder, um, that’s, that’s easy. Cause you literally do all of it. Um, You can show what it is that you do, but also can you tie it back to numbers, credibility, things like that. And then the second thing is you can add links to every experience. So Hauk does a good job of this. Again, that’s the thing that he’s working on right now. It’s really easy for me to click based on that and just have another call to action. So just on this page alone, you can see like 10 different times where I can click onto a clear call to action that Hauk has laid purposefully coming from free content into hopefully lead gen. So there are a lot of opportunities on this landing page or on LinkedIn where you can drive people toward a specific action. And the more that you can keep that focused, meaning not having all 10 of those CTAs be completely different, the more likely it is that you’ll drive people toward that next step. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So do we want to very quickly do a little audit of somebody here, Blake? Yeah, let’s do it. I’m going to drop the link in our chat here. Let’s go quick. We’re a little behind on time. So let’s go quick here. But we can definitely do this. [Blake Emal]: So I dropped it in our Slack if you want to pull it up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Pulling it up now. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. So I can go through and do this just for my sort of POV here. So I’m gonna echo a lot of what Blake said, but we’ll make it unique to Sushant’s here. So the first thing is there’s no banner. I don’t really know who Sushant is when I land on this page. There’s nothing that catches my eye instantly and tells me that, what to expect from him, from his content, what have you. So that’s the first thing that I would add. The one-liner is pretty good. It tells me what you’re gonna be talking about. It doesn’t really tell me what I’m gonna get from you, but it does tell me what to expect from your content. And it sort of shows some of your credibility. So I like that, but we can make this maybe more readable as a sentence about what you can help me with and why I would click in. Let’s go down. So the about section, there’s no featured section, first of all, but the about section, I think, yeah. So I think let’s tell a story here. There’s a lot of great experience here that we can talk about. There’s probably unique stories about how you made things happen and all that. And so I would say like let’s let’s make this more narrative. Let’s make it broken up more with more white space so it’s more scannable, more readable for people and try to get people to then click into that that see more button once we have more content in here. So that’s what I would say. And then in the experience section. Yeah, so I actually I like that we have the link here. The link is relevant. It tells me more about you, which is good in the context of the Dubai Future District fund. So that’s amazing. Experience is pretty concise. And there is white space there. So overall, I would say that that section is pretty good. I would just say that telling me more about you at the very, very top is going to be what gets me to read those further down sections and then more narrative in the about sections. That’s what I would say. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: And no call to actions here, either the plain text one or the button here. So opportunity to add that as well. So I think being more intentional about what that next step is based on the content is an opportunity here. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay. And we’ll, we’ll, um, we’ll send out recs for some more people to after, uh, afterwards, uh, later this week. So, um, don’t worry if you weren’t the one chosen. Um, but okay, let’s move forward. So Blake, let’s talk about content. Now let’s talk about what makes best practices for highly performant content and let’s, uh, let’s make sure we’re concise. So we get time in for the magic framework as well. Yeah, cool. [Blake Emal]: So this should be pretty simple because all this just ties back to the algorithm, right? Everything we’re doing is to please the algorithm. So again, optimize for dwell time. What does that mean? Well, first and foremost, content’s got to be really, really good. And we want to optimize for saves and for comments. So we should ask for those things. That’s the easiest way to get what you want is to ask for it. So try to incite conversations by ending your post with that. Ask people to save it or create save worthy assets like imagery or carousels, things like that. Another principle here, we want to trigger a fast reply loop inside that first hour. So again, going back to that first 60 minutes, are we asking for comments? Are we replying to every reply that we get? Are we going out and being proactive on other people’s content to build that network so that when we post, they kind of return the favor? Anything that we can do to trigger a faster reply loop, the better off that post is going to be. And then again, you can use any kind of format. LinkedIn is very versatile with formats compared to platforms. So you can use documents, carousels, multi images, single image, plain text, video, you’ve got a lot of options there. And when you’re using things like carousels or documents or multi image, you’re kind of requiring people to need to look into more things to get the full context, which inherently boosts your dwell time, which will probably boost saves as well, because people want to come back to it if they don’t have time. So those are principles overall. But again, hooks are 90% of this thing. So Let’s dive into a couple examples here. Cause if your hook doesn’t hit the second line is basically pointless. You should spend 90% of your time writing just the hook and making sure that’s totally zeroed in because people scan a lot more than they read until they finally decide that they are hooked and then they will read. So let’s, let’s go into a couple of these here. Just, just some examples that we pulled. So Kyle here, there’s no sentence that’s guaranteed to trigger me more than I’m just an SDR. So you get a two liner here. Works really well because you’re like, what could possibly trigger this, this person, especially if you trust Kyle, you know, Kyle, this hook is going to generate curiosity right away. And then the second line is going to generate some kind of feeling like, Oh, I’m an SDR. I’ve referred to myself that way. Uh, you’re going to get shown this if you’re an SDR, probably because he called it out in the post and it’s going to target that audience pretty clearly. So you’re creating an emotion there. Let’s go into Justin’s here. 4,000 weeks. That’s all you get. First line, 4,000 weeks. That’s it. You can notice how so, so short this is. It’s so simple. You do not have to elongate your thoughts to seem like it’s, it’s more research or better. Shorter is usually better. Um, unless it’s really like a complex thought, but, but 4,000 weeks immediately peaks your curiosity and you’re kind of wondering, all right, Where’s this going? 4,000 weeks till what? Let’s go to another one with Greg. How can already brought him up? This is a little bit of a longer one and it’s still pretty short sentence, but the most dangerous skillset combo right now, builder, designer, engineer, plus filmmaker. Again, this is like a spiky POV. If anybody has heard of Westcow, she talked about this spiky POV concept a lot. Every post kind of needs something unique, something uncommon that reads unlike things that they’ve read before. And this does that. This is uniquely Greg. This is his kind of way of saying something longer, but every word is actually impactful and interesting. Let’s go into. [Michael Houck]: We can actually, what we’re going to do is, if you scroll down a little bit, you can see in the email you guys get later today, I’m going to include actually some, a lot more examples from our own internal Megaphone hook library that we look at, we’re always adding to. So these are things that we use for content inspo. And we’re going to send a little database with a bunch of those to you guys just for being here. So keep an eye out for that. And there’ll be tons more examples and some thoughts from us in there too. [Blake Emal]: Great. Yeah. Let’s move past that. Then the big thing with hooks again is start with an emotion you want people to feel or a spiky point of view and reverse engineer everything from that. Because seriously, if you can’t get them past that first line, the rest of the post doesn’t matter all that much. So, so kind of flip your time allocation on that. Content that’s winning right now, we already kind of talked through this, but things that maybe increased dwell time is basically the pattern here. Longer form text, multi-image posts, carousels, even video now on LinkedIn, whether you love it or hate it, it can work pretty well. So use these platforms or these formats to your advantage. Increased dwell time, that’s a huge takeaway here today. How can I get more people to actually read end to end, everything I’ve written. [Michael Houck]: And one quick thing on video, you don’t actually need to spend a ton of time on video yourself anymore, like recording, like if you’re uncomfortable in front of the camera. For example, we have clients who we’ve built AI Digital Twins for, and their accounts grow with just scripts that we write. We throw them into this AI Digital Twin, put some fun B-roll around it, and it’s an engaging Instagram Reel, YouTube Short, TikTok type video. And those can post either vertically or horizontally on LinkedIn and do well. So it’s not just thinking about it, to be in front of the camera. There’s some funny ways you can do it now too. [Blake Emal]: Totally. I’m not going to read every don’t, but I do want to call out a couple of these here. This kind of flip side of we’re talking about what does work for content. Don’t do these things. Don’t write super long paragraphs. Try to avoid jargon if you can, unless your customers really speak that way. Avoid hashtags. They really don’t do anything. If you must use a hashtag, use one or two maybe. Try not to do too hard of a sell in post as well. That’s why we have this funnel on your landing page to get them to a logical next step. They will naturally funnel over there. A big one here is clickbait. Clickbait’s not actually bad if you deliver on your promise. So for all your hooks, it is okay if your hook is pretty polarizing. If you feel like you can deliver on it in the content. Where you get in trouble is if you create this outlandish hook and then your post is not about that thing or doesn’t deliver on it at all, then it’s clickbait and people are going to kind of see you as spammy. So avoid that. And you got the rest of this list here. Again, this will be shared with everyone. So I don’t think we need to go through everything here, but this is a pretty solid list of things that you really should avoid when you’re going through your checklist when you’re writing posts. All right. Are we ready to move on to how do we actually turn contents leads because I think this is the part where most people stop. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think that a lot of the people think about putting a content out there on LinkedIn and they don’t really think as much about, OK, how can I get a measurable ROI for my business or my service or my product or what have you? [Blake Emal]: So let’s let’s talk about the magic framework. Perfect. Awesome. So magic framework is basically a way to think about content generally that actually gets emails or leads, whatever form you’re kind of looking for. So M is for magnetic hook, which we already covered. You have to have that or else you’re kind of dead on arrival. Then we go into A, so authority or proof. Now these are all things that should be included in a piece of content, by the way. So when you’re thinking through, this is actually a structure that you can use for a specific post. You want to talk about why you’re credible, why people should trust you, results you’ve gotten, things like that. There are a lot of forms that this can take. It doesn’t always have to be salesy, but you do want to establish authority. And sometimes that happens in the hook as well. You want to spend the bulk of the body content actually giving value. So just giving a POV away that is very valuable, a how-to, a video reaction. There’s a lot of formats this can take, but is the post valuable or entertaining? That’s the G. I invite to action and see capturing leads. These are very connected. So once you’ve created the post content, you don’t want to miss out on the chance to actually ask for the thing you want them to do. Again, half the time that people don’t take that action is just because you didn’t invite them to. So don’t be scared to say, Hey, if you like this, subscribe to my newsletter and then have a system for capturing those leads. So a couple of ways, different ways that this is working right now, biggest one is just posting organic content like you normally would and inviting people to visit your profile or to follow you at the end of your posts. And then naturally that page will funnel them through into some next action. This is the most common way. This is basically the way that you don’t even have to think about. Now, if we’re getting into a strategy where it’s more intentional and you have to build a campaign around it, we get into the second one, which is the auto DM tactic. You basically create a valuable piece of content that is attached to some lead magnet or resource that you have created externally that expands a lot more on what you gave in the post. And you just ask them to comment a specific keyword to trigger an auto DM. So once they comment that word, you can use some kind of software to auto DM them and push them to a landing page to collect emails and then push those emails into your CRM. Very common. This is also called Tripwire. A Tripwire campaign works super well. Auto-plugging your newsletter as the first comment of any post. Again, that one’s a lot easier to do. Every time you post, wait about 15 minutes And then post another comment, plug in your newsletter or service. The reason you want to wait 15 minutes is the algorithm usually likes it when you don’t just do it back to back. Uh, they kind of basically just see that as adding the link into your post, which will throttle your reach. So if you wait a little bit, you can kind of skirt your way around that a little bit. Um, and then one last tactic is, is megaphone. So the, the thing that Hawk is, is building as well, basically is just a way to automate a lot of this stuff and get really, really good engagement. But I’ll let Hal cover that for two seconds and then we can move forward. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. So two things here. So one, as I mentioned earlier, with the Megaphone platform, we have 500 creators with over 60 million combined followers who we can loop in to comment on and amplify your content to be seen by more people. One thing that we actually are finishing up right now and should be going live in the next week or so is automatic lead capture into your CRM as well. So anybody who engages with any post of yours on LinkedIn or on X, we will be able to grab their email, grab their name, grab their job title, and funnel that into your CRM, regardless of whether you use Airtable or HubSpot or whatever you might use, it’ll automatically show up there as a lead for you. So that’s imminently launching, but yeah, the Creator Network for Amplification, and then to capture leads, we have this being built into, so pretty exciting. [Blake Emal]: Sweet, thanks. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, so again, use the magic framework for a piece of content, if you’re really trying a new campaign or trying to push into a call to action, great framework to use. And then hopefully, you know, these tactics are just kind of time tested and they work. So they may not be the most novel thing in the world, but they work and you should use them. If you’re trying to push people to that next action on LinkedIn, there are also other ways that you, you know, get creative with this, but let’s, let’s dive into engagement a little bit. If that works for everybody and just cover this as kind of the step before we go Q&A, because this often gets overlooked. But every day, if you are able to just leave a couple comments on other people’s content, you would actually be shocked at the amount the algorithm will benefit you for that action. If you can do more, 10 to 20 plus, I know that I can get hard for a lot of people, but basically what this does is not only does it get you in front of somebody else’s audience, which is what we kind of all think of, there is an actual algorithmic benefit to doing this. If LinkedIn sees that you are not a selfish account, but a selfless account, they will give you more reach, more impressions, and more likely will filter you as a high quality poster whenever you post. Whereas if you never comment, never take any actions on the platform, they are obviously not going to do you any favors in that case. Their goal is to keep you on their site as long possible and to have you be as engaged in getting other people dwelling on the site as possible. So if you help them accomplish their goal, they help you accomplish your goal. So again, five comments minimum per day will do wonders. The more you can ramp that up, the better it’s going to perform for your own content. And we’ll talk about this in a second. But the closer you do that to when you actually post every morning, the better that’s going to work for you. A couple other things to be proactive. Use voice notes and DMs. They stand out. They’re unique. Most people won’t take the time to do them, so they’ll get opened at a higher rate. Share small wins. Share insights and DMs. People without expectation of anything other than, hey, I learned this thing. I thought it was really cool. Most people won’t do that. If you start a DM that way, it’s a lot more appealing than just asking or pitching. Now, when we get into This is essentially on your posts, how you engage with people that engage with you. So again, golden hour applies. Respond to comments within the first hour. Try not to just say, cool, thanks for replying, but actually ask follow-up questions and keep the conversation going. Again, that’s going to increase dwell time. So it all has the same purpose at the root. So don’t just thank people, expand on their points, keep them talking and coming back. The more comments you get, the more reach you get, and it’ll expand to further and further groups and try to do everything you can within that 60 minutes. If you just treat every morning, there’s 60 minutes where you’re not like on LinkedIn constantly, but it’s open and you’re willing to be on it during that hour, you’ll have some good success just by engaging proactively, engaging on the stuff around the time that you post. That’s basically it. It’s not very complicated on the engagement side. Once you get into deep, You can do a lot more specifics, but we’re not going to cover that today. And again, the algorithm just wants a mutually beneficial agreement. They want you to help them with their goals and they’ll help you with yours as well. So the more you DM, engage, look at other people’s profiles, take actions on the app, the more that they’re probably going to push people to do that stuff for you as well. So that kind of takes us to the end. I’m going to let Hal take it over for a second here to wrap things up and then we can flow into a Q&A. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, absolutely. [Michael Houck]: So a lot of that stuff around engagement that Blake just mentioned, either our platform or our ops team can handle for you. So let me drop my Calendly in here again. And please grab some time with me if you want to chat more about this. Let me just drop it here, because we’d love to help you guys out with this. So please feel free to grab some time. But I want to make sure we have a good amount of time for Q&A. And it looks like we do, which is great. Got the full amount we planned for. So amazing. There were a couple of good questions that came up in the chat that I have here that I want to get to first. But then also, please feel free to drop any questions you guys have. If there was anything that we went too fast through or didn’t cover at all and you’re curious about, you know, we’re happy to chat about anything, answer any questions. So please drop those in the chat. But yeah, let’s let’s get to these two questions. So the first one was from Liz. Was around what’s your take on cadence? People think every day, seven days a week with one post a day is best, but I don’t know about that. And I agree, it’s not sort of binary there. I think it also depends company page versus personal page. So there’s some difference on LinkedIn. A personal page, if you’re posting 10 times a day, the algorithm is gonna view you as sort of a spammer. If you’re posting from a company page, they actually want you to post more because you’re more likely to buy their LinkedIn sales nav and LinkedIn recruiter and products like that. So the restrictions and any nerfing or shadowbanning on your account from posting more from a company page are actually much, much more generous than they are from a personal page. With a personal page, I’d say 1 to 1.5 times per day is like the max you want to do. From a company page, it really, really doesn’t matter. With that said, and I’m sure Blake would echo this, especially early on, More Shots on Goal is the name of game. You want to be seen by people and train the algorithm that you’re a consistent person posting good quality content on the platform. And it doesn’t know that when you’re just getting started. So I’d say there’s overall limited downside to posting that frequently, like once a day, as long as you don’t anger the algo as a as a spammer. Another thing to mention is that, you know, most people aren’t going to actually see your posts, whether they’re, you know, or at least you’re not going to remember seeing every single one of your posts, because LinkedIn doesn’t and share your post automatically to every one of your followers. So it does become a bit of a volume game just to stay top of mind for them. Another thing, again, this is more for if you’re early on, is prioritizing comments over long-form content is probably a smart use of time. To Blake’s point from earlier, the more comments you can do on other people’s content, the better the algorithm will treat you. And also, the more you’ll get seen and get free impressions from their viral posts that you’re commenting on, too. So I don’t know, Blake. To add anything to that, but that’s my POV on that. [Blake Emal]: No, I think that’s the big thing. And that’s why a lot of people will also pair that with like posting on X because you can post shorter stuff all the time and test ideas and then put the best stuff over on LinkedIn. [Michael Houck]: So there’s a lot of ways you can get more shots on goal. Yeah, definitely. OK, and then we had we had another good question here from Sushant about how effective is LinkedIn to drive traffic and conversion for high ticket B2C fintech products? So maybe we would just think about high ticket B2C. The LinkedIn case for B2B and solopreneurs is established, but what about high ticket B2C? I can share my thoughts here, and then Blake can also be curious on yours, because we both do high ticket sales through LinkedIn. I think if you’re in that kind of market, standing out by building trust and letting people kind of see how you think really reduces the amount of work you need to do on that first interim call or sales call with them. It really gets them to have some level of trust that you know what you’re talking about and you understand their problem, you understand their niche early on. So I would say even in B2C that holds true. And I think particularly if you pair that with a good outreach strategy through DMs or getting them into your CRM with something like Megaphone can be very effective at taking those people off platform and building relationships with them. So I would say build the trust in the same way and then pair that with an effective outreach strategy. [Blake Emal]: What do you think, Blake? Yeah, I mean, nothing, nothing much else to add. You got to kind of forge your own path with it. There are more instances of B2B working and like the playbooks a little bit easier there, but B2C can work. You kind of just have to follow similar principles, test things out, throw out what doesn’t work. [Michael Houck]: Um, we have a good question here from Ryan about the sort of company page, personal page relationship, which I think a lot of people struggle with. It says, what’s the stance on posting from a company page and reposting from the personal? So it’s interesting that you frame it that way. I would actually think about it more so the other way. People buy from people, people build trust in people before they build trust in faceless brands that they just come across online. So I would prioritize founder-led growth or founder-led audience building first and foremost, and then use the company page as a repost mechanism early on to send an engagement signal that your content is getting some engagement. Someone who’s done this really well on both LinkedIn X is Andrew Yeung. He built up a huge personal brand himself, helping startup founders and then has built up his company Acquire.com’s accounts basically by leveraging the personal brand. So Ryan, if you want to let me actually let you jump in here because I think you have a follow up to this. Let me make sure you can. Unmute. Yeah, feel free to come up and I think we’re both clicking at the same time. There you go. [Michael Houck]: I think I got it. Cool. Thank you. The reason I ask this is because earlier you mentioned that LinkedIn algorithm favors posting from the company page because they want you to buy in stuff. I’ve heard the reverse where you post from the personal. Does people buy from people? Yes. But if LinkedIn algorithm favors posting from the company and people buy from people, that’s what I’m trying to figure out if we flip the relationship around. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s a good question. I would say that focusing on high quality content from the personal page is in most cases, the best strategy depends on sort of what you’re selling. Like if you’re just trying to build a meme account or a brand or something like that, then you can totally go at it. Like the Marketing Millennials has done this really well on LinkedIn where they just built up a very funny kind of lighthearted personal brand or a company brand through LinkedIn. And so you can totally do that and you have the frequency to post as many memes a day or as many short form kind of quips as you want. But if you’re trying to sort of stand out in your niche, maybe build relationships with investors or potential partners and employees, and or sell high ticket, then I would say that building yourself up on the personal side first, even if the amount of posts you can make is smaller, making sure that those are high quality is probably gonna help build trust faster. Perfect, thank you. Let’s see, we have another question here from Cahill, thank you. Cahill, do you wanna come up? Insights on changing your SSI focus, just changing who you engage with in content. We wanna get some more context on that from you. So if you wanna pop up here, let me make sure you can unmute yourself too. [Cahill]: Yeah, you’re good. Hello, can you hear me? Yep. Okay, awesome. Yeah, so the question was, it seems like the SSI score for myself and for some other clients is good, but it’s focused on an industry that is not really my focus at all. So I suppose that’s part of me creating content around a specific topic in this case, podcasting, but really I’m not looking at, it says I’m in the video and audio sales space, which is not accurate at all. So I’d like to change that completely and get like, yeah, okay. I have a podcasting AI tool, but I’m not in the sales space for podcasting and audio. So I just want to change that. And so, I’m doing a lot of content related to founders, CEOs, that type of thing for thought leadership, brand awareness, et cetera. But I’m just wondering, is there any way to accelerate that change in your SSI score and focus that you actually have? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s a good question. The SSI score is a little bit of a black box. But I would say you’re doing the right thing, which is just trying to be very intentional with the content you post. I would say it’s tough because if you’re talking maybe about the podcast and podcasting, it’s gonna try to group you into that sort of inherently. But as long as you position the content right, the content to be more focused on the niche as you are doing, I think that’s all you can really do. Blake, I don’t know if you have any more insights on that, but from my understanding SSI is kind of a kind of a black box. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, there’s actually a part of the algorithm is that once you start really being known for something, changing it will ding you for a pretty long time. I’ve been through this myself. So all you can really do is either start from scratch and do a whole new account, which is like obviously worst case scenario, or post for a really long time about the new thing and build new momentum toward that. So that’s, unfortunately, there’s no like super shortcut there. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And for anyone who doesn’t have context as LinkedIn SSI, is there a social selling index? I think it’s the, what it’s for is basically how it sort of identifies you in some ways in terms of how established your, your brand is. So it’s sort of a, sort of an unfun black box metric. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: but it’s an important one for who your content is shown to. [Michael Houck]: Okay, any further questions? Feel free to just pop up or raise your hand and I’ll unmute you or drop it in the chat if you’d prefer. But yeah, anything we didn’t cover or anything like that, Blake, anything you feel like we should spend the last couple minutes on here? [Blake Emal]: There was one last question from somebody that is not in the chat. I don’t know if we want to cover that one. [Michael Houck]: Um, where did I miss it? What’s the question? [Blake Emal]: How do you learn and expand on the tone of voice of a personal brand when you do written for you content? Oh, sure. Yeah. Do you want to take that one? [Michael Houck]: Sorry about that. I missed that one. I am trying to understand the question for here. [Blake Emal]: How do you learn and expand on the tone of voice of a personal brand? Uh, I guess it’s just asking, how do you like get to a place where you know, tone of the voice and it’s zeroed in. I am not sure. But in that case, if that’s the ask here, ultimately, if you can treat initially your social like an idea testing platform, you’ll find your voice because your audience will tell you what your voice and tone and topics and all that stuff is. They’ll vote by their engagement. So the more that you try things out and try to stay true to how you like to write, the topics you need to write toward, the audience you want to serve, the more that you get shots on goal on whatever platform and treat it like an idea testing platform, you’ll get this engagement, these analytics that will tell you what’s working and what’s not. And they will make that very clear for you. So you’ll know what your voice that resonates actually is and the topics that accompany it and the formats that they like to consume. So the more you post, the more that becomes clear for you. I would go that way instead of guessing, because I think most people do go the guesswork route, and it takes a lot longer. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and that’s something we actually focus on with our clients at Megafone quite a bit. We work with busy people, so we’re not trying to put a ton of meetings on your calendar for content interviews or anything like that. We actually set up shared Slack connect channels that are native to your workspace and ours. And all we require from you is if we send over a few questions every Monday with some research in the niche that came up that we want your POV on, all you need to do is record a two to five minute voice note right into your phone. And we’ll handle the rest and make it in your tone. Your intonation is going to get your unique POV to come through, so I’ll drop by Calendly one more time in here so you guys can grab time if you want to chat about that. We got one more question here that I’m going to. I’m going to get to, or I guess there’s there’s two. Let’s see if we can get to him both. So one from Cahill and one from Ryan. So Cahill says I see influencers commenting on their members content all the time and blowing it up. Any problems with this? The answer is no. You know, that you follow, that you trust, that you like, they all do this. They all have engagement pods in WhatsApp or in iMessage or in Telegram or in DMs, even if it’s on X, for example, where they are sharing their posts every morning, right after they make them, and they’re all commenting on each other’s posts. They’re all liking it. Maybe they’re reposting it. This is how they grow. This is how every big audience creator grows. They form relationships with people who are around the same size initially, but who have good content. And then they grow together and they overlap their audiences. This is what I’ve done, and actually this is a big thing that I think a lot of people don’t know, which is why we built Megaphone. Megaphone’s creator network, where basically if you don’t have those creative relationships, you can get those same creators with that same social proof with bigger audiences to engage with your content right away within an hour after you post it, where it’s still in golden hour, it’s still super fresh. So this is something that I don’t think the platforms encourage, but as long as it’s all happening off platform and it’s safe, which obviously our platform is and any group chat that you set up on your own also would be. The engagement pods are super, super common and have been a part of social for a very long time. So that’s what I would say there. [Blake Emal]: I don’t know if you have anything to add on that, Blake. No, I think you nailed it. Last quick note for me is that algorithms change, but content is still valuable. No matter if there’s AI, no AI, whatever, it looks a little different. But writing and content is kind of a foundational principle to growing anything. And that remains true. So while you may need to conjugate your systems and thinking a little bit, uh, this is going to be important going forward. And so if there’s anybody that is. You know, needing that help to take the next step, feel free to reach out. We’d love to give my two cents as well. We can, we can, we can hop on a call and chat. Um, but, but I think there, there, there’s just so much room to grow in content still, and it’s only just beginning. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and then to answer Ryan’s question, which I think was a quick piggyback off of the last one, it’s how do you find someone’s voice if someone else is writing your content for you? I think if you find the right partner who works into your workflow, there’s someone who can, A, sort of take that on for you and take that off your plate, and B, as you sort of see what works and see the data points of, hey, this type of content for my account is resonating, you can always go in and write some of your own content that way as well. We’ve seen folks do that with great success. So sometimes it’s just good to have a partner early on to sort of speed you up on the learning curve there. So happy to help with that. But yeah, I think we’re at time, or we’re actually one minute early. So we did well, guys. We’ll share the recording. We’ll share the Hook library. We’ll share the Notion doc. And I’ll share my calendar again through email later today. So keep an eye out for that. We’d love to help you. We’d love to work with you. So yeah, grab some time, and we’ll chat more and can go deeper. [Michael Houck]: Great session.