How to avoid being the worst at LinkedIn
On the surface, LinkedIn is a very simple platform. You take pictures of yourself, you leave cookie cutter comments on other people’s new job announcements, and you stalk people you went to school with to make sure that your career is more successful than theirs.
It shouldn’t be complicated. To further this uncomplication, here are three key ideas that I use to make sure I don’t get it twisted.
Nobody cares: In the beginning, the fear of announcing that you’re doing something or a new product that you’re building is centered around a fear of judgement. “If I announce this new business I’m building on LinkedIn, maybe everyone will think I’m stupid…” It has helped me tremendously to remember that absolutely nobody cares. In the beginning, the chief obstacle to overcome is the fact that nobody has ever heard of you at all - not that you’re somehow going to build a bad reputation because your content isn’t that good.
You will end up making dozens of post that nobody ever sees, and some of them will likely be so bad that you’re happy nobody ever sees them. But once you realize that nobody cares, I think it gets easier to start.
Doing cool stuff is the hard part: Anybody can talk about their work. Few people do work that others want to learn more about. If you’re someone who wants to use social media to advertise what you’re doing, it helps to be doing really incredible things. That’s part of why DSE Media’s Go-To-Market strategy centered around making podcasts for cities - there’s a limit to how much you scale that on a locational basis, but it’s so new and interesting that it gets people excited about the work that we’re doing.
Advertise yourself by advertising others: I remember a book I read a long time ago with a description of heaven and hell which I feel work perfectly here. In both cases, people sit around a table, a good distance away. The table is covered with food, and each person has a set of very long chopsticks. In hell, each person attempts to feed themselves and fails, because the chopsticks are too long to bring food to their mouths. In heaven the only difference is behavioral. Each person feeds the person next to them, and thus all are fed.
When I make content, my goal is to provide direct, actionable value for the reader, or to celebrate the efforts of others in such a way that they’re incentivized to engage with my content. Nobody cares about me tooting my own horn, but testifying on behalf of others is much more interesting. Plus, if you’re supporting people who are genuinely good, and genuinely useful, then the shine of their strong reputation will eventually land on you.
