How To Create Viral LinkedIn Status Updates

Do you see users getting hundreds and sometimes thousands of likes and comments on their LinkedIn status updates and wonder how they have done it? Are your status updates getting no traction and you’re wondering whether there’s a formula you can follow to get your message to the masses?

Well, LinkedIn status updates are an incredible way to get a lot of exposure to your target market – cost effectively. And in the process, building your followers of targeted people and generating high quality leads.

Over the past few months we’ve been testing our own posts and doing research into others to find what works on LinkedIn to get a lot of exposure. So in the post we’re going to cover the formula we’ve developed in detail so you can start creating your very own viral LinkedIn posts to build your influence on the platform. Follow the steps below and see your posts start to get more attention from your target market in just the time it takes you to create the post.

Creating Distribution

First things first a viral post will go no where no matter how good it is if you don’t have anyone to see it. If you don’t have anyone in your network yet, time to start building it.

So you need to create distribution on LinkedIn. Distribution is having people within your LinkedIn network, people who will see your posts when you do send something out as they are directly in your connections.

So how do we begin building your network? Well, firstly when you join the platform you are recommended to connect with your contacts whether that’s through your phone and email database.

That’s a good start, however that might only get you a couple of hundred people early on if you’re lucky. So next place to look is to start connecting with LinkedIn’s suggested people that you may know based on the network that you have already created. You can do this by clicking the My Network tab in the menu bar of LinkedIn as shown below:

There might be some low hanging fruit here from people that you may have met before, but haven’t got them in your network just yet. We don’t suggest to start just adding everyone from this area as a lot of them will be untargeted and if you were to post it might be irrelevant and therefore hurt your chances of going viral.

Only find and connect with people you have connected with before and send a personalised connection request. We suggest to build your network to at least 1000 of your target market or those who know you.

During this period you need to be engaging with your networks content by liking and commenting as well. The more you do this the more likely they are going to like and comment on the content you share as well improving your chances of getting traction from your posts.

Planning Your Content For Your Audience

Once you have built up a quality network of targeted people you now need to start planning out your content that’s going to get engagement from that particular target demographic. We’re going to go into a formula for how to structure your posts in the next section, but firstly we need to know topics that we are going to create.

For each one they need to be work related, remember LinkedIn is a professional network so writing about something you had for dinner isn’t going to fly. Unless it’s a story that relates to customer service when you had dinner and experienced a key take away. With our LinkedIn posts what we have found that works really well and is easy to create are posts that are:

– Story based
– Controversial
– Question based

Let’s look at each one in detail.

Story: This is a story about an experience that you have had that your target market can relate to. It has to be emotional, engaging and have a key take away at the end.

For example let’s say you are in sales, perhaps when you first started in sales you hated it and you almost quit. Then something turned around in your career and you are now where you are because of that experience. People love these stories because they can relate to them.

Controversial: These posts are created to get people to agree or disagree. It’s an opinion you have on something that may not be as widely agreed upon.

This is good. Now obviously you don’t want to be offensive, it has to be something professional, but for example you may disagree with an accepted norm in your industry and your opinion on how it should change.

Question based: In this example you want to ask a question around something in your industry. Perhaps it’s something that you would like an opinion on. Let’s say you’re in digital marketing and Google has recently rolled out a new advertising platform.

This might be a good opportunity to share your thoughts on it and ask a question to see what everyone else thinks and how it might affect the industry. When brainstorming we suggest creating a big list of potential topics, at linkfluencer® we use Evernote and add ideas for posts in an existing note that we have. Then when you have an idea for content you can pull out your phone and simply add the topic to the list so you never run out of content ideas.

Formula for Viral Status Updates

Now that we have an idea about our content, next we need a formula for creating it. We have found on LinkedIn that text posts are getting a lot of cut through right now. This is because on LinkedIn the users are reading a lot more as they are generally in their office or on their way to meetings.

Therefore they have a quick read through LinkedIn posts when they get a chance. So here’s our formula for creating viral LinkedIn updates:

– Make it text based with no images
– Take advantage of spacing don’t write big paragraphs (1 paragraph max)
– Make the posts 1300 characters maximum
– Start with an emotional hook that gets the reader straight away
– Create a story within the post to make it engaging
– Write conversationally so it’s easily absorbed
– Have a key take away at the end
– Post around 10AM or 2PM during the week
– Ask close friends or colleagues to like and comment straight away so it gets traction early

Here’s an example of a post our founder shared using this formula:

The result? The posts we are doing are getting hundreds of likes and at over 100,000 views from other people outside of our network. Some of our posts we have tested have had over 250,000 views with no advertising spend.

This is because the more people who post on it the more their audience who aren’t connected with you see it as well. Could you imagine how much the cost would be to get this many views from traditional forms of advertising? Here’s an example of the insights we had from another one of our posts:

As you can see these are from high level people, over 1000 views from CEO’s, Directors and Founders. So writing content in this style is an amazing way to get a lot of attention from people in your target market so you can build your influence and generate more business from your LinkedIn activity.

This is a huge opportunity to get free exposure from a great audience without spending thousands on advertising. Take advantage of leveraging LinkedIn now to really grow your personal brand and business through sharing great content.

Developing great content that gets engagement and turns followers into raving fans takes skills that are not created overnight. Our founders content gets hundreds of thousands of views, comments and likes each and every month. This then results in hundreds of opportunities whether that’s leads, partnerships and speaking engagements that come from that content.