https://www.listennotes.com/e/533eb41d72d04a7b96311858061982ce

Instagram is to show everyone how beautiful you are. YouTube is to show everyone how talented you are. LinkedIn is to show everyone how capable you are.

Big Paragraphs is like kryptonite for LinkedIn engagement because people just like they hit see more, they see a bunch of stuff, it looks intimidating, gone.

And what has worked for the big posts is agitate a common issue or ignore a nuance.

Welcome back to Unfucked My Startup. I'm very excited about today's episode. By the end of today, you will be able to make a LinkedIn post that gets 375,000 likes. Mark my word. I'll refund you the cost of admission if you don't know how to do that. Our guest is dissecting Mr. Virality on LinkedIn. This guy has gotten more likes than anyone. And he's the founder and CEO of Fame, a business that helps companies create amazing podcasts. But you might know him as The selfie king of LinkedIn. He's racking up insane engagement numbers like 300,000 likes plus and 175 million views. But the question we want to ask, are these just vanity metrics? That's what we're going to talk about today. Welcome, Tom Hunt. Happy to have you here, my man, all the way from London, UK.

Yeah, I'm buzzing. I have the six things I think anyone can implement to get to 1,000 likes, like this week. And then I've got the seventh thing, which I think can take people from 1,000 to 10, 100,000. So we're gonna go through that. And yes, I'm gonna share like the business impact. Like, did the 300K like post actually drive any business?

So don't go anywhere because I'm dying to know this stuff, by the way, as a guy who, you know, puts a substantial amount of time and energy into posting on LinkedIn. Okay. But the first segment is called the pitch slap. Those of you who've been here before, you know, and you love it. We are going to pull somebody up from the audience to pitch the 294 live guests. And then at the end of the pitch, we're gonna run a poll. And if the person gets above 66% buy, they get a swag box above 33%, they get a t-shirt above, below 33%, they get sent home with a nice wave. And then we ask if the audience wants to actually book demos. I think our record for demos is like 26. or something like that. It's the high 20s.

We've been getting like over a dozen the past couple weeks in a row. So this has been good. We've been cherry picking people. Audience, if you do want to participate in this section, email producer@rb2b.com, I'm gonna drop it in the chat. And today we are going to talk with Gajan Rettig Sabha from Spiralize. So we're gonna give them one minute to pop up into here.

And while we're waiting there, this show is brought to you by my newsletter. My newsletter is mainly talking about what happens on this show, keeping you up to date. So join it if you want updates on what's coming. And again, if you want to come on this segment next week, email producer@rbdb.com and we'll talk to you about it.

And there he is. Gajran, how you doing? Great to meet you.

Great. Thanks so much for having me on. I really love the show. I especially love last week you guys workshopping LinkedIn posts live. And Tom, what a great hook today. I gotta hear this.

I appreciate it.

So, Spiralize, we're an AB testing agency for SaaS companies. We run lots of AB tests on our client site to see what gets them more trials, demos, SQLs, all that great stuff. And we guarantee them a 30% lift in the first, a 30% lift in the first 90 days, and there's no fee unless we hit our number. I know that's a really bold claim, but the reason we can make that claim is because we run these proven winning tests. And I'm going to show you the first test we would run live on the RBB website. Could I take over the screen share? Thank you. Please do.

So, and sorry, just to clarify, when you say 30% lift, you're talking 30% lift in revenue in 90 days. Yeah, it depends on the client, but.

It could, for most clients, it's something like SALs. Okay.

All right.

Let's see it.

I'm going to show you the obligatory logo slide. Companies like CrowdStrike, OctaGusta, I'm showing you this because the magic is in the scale. If we had a win for one client like Tenable, we can very quickly take that and run that for all our clients. And we've gone a step further. There are 34,000 sites that actively test on the internet, and we scrape all of them and crunch that data. So Smartsheet, who isn't a client, runs a test. We can find if it wins and adapt that for you.

Whoa.

I crunched the data. This is crunching the data for RB2B. It's going out and getting these thousands of tests and saying, let's look at the companies most similar to us and let's look at patterns that are proven to win over and over again. And so here's a really interesting pattern is predicting for us. It's called form over UI. You take the lead form and you show it over a background image. of the interface. You can see here there are 158 companies that have run this test. The greens are wins, the reds are losses, yellows are nothing burgers. So say seven shifts ran a test, they had a conventional lead form. They put the lead form over a background image. It wins. So we can also just look at the aggregate data. You can see this is a highly performant pattern. It's got lots of wins and not that many losses. so here is what it could look like for our B2B. This is your current demo squeeze page. And you can see it's got a pretty conventional form. This is what we predict would be a really good test for you guys. You take the lead form, you put it over a background image. It visually sub communicates to the prospect, hey, the thing you really want to see the product, you got to fill out the pesky form. It's sub communicating all this really cool stuff like, hey, you're going to get de-anonymized traffic. So what we do over the course of, and because we've run that test lots of times, 158 times, we know it's got about a 53% chance of winning. So in the first 90 days, what we would do is we would run 10 tests like that. About three of those 10 would win. You'd end up with about a 30% lift. If you get 30%, you pay. If you get less than 10%, no fee at all.

All right.

That is pretty good. So everybody, so you got, by the way, as you were dumping, jumping into the RV2B, your yeses really were creeping up over time.

I think Joe Reed says, take my money.

So, Godrej, could you pop your calendar link into the, into the chat? We're going to send you a swag box. I got your email. We were emailing before the show.

Yeah.

And if you want a demo, Right demo. This is always a fun one. It's gonna, it's gonna make, look at this. Come on. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. See? Money in the bank, Gajon. Money in the bank, man.

This is what it's all about.

Thank you so much.

Yeah.

I gotta run and tell my mom.

Yeah, they're still coming in. So, audience, keep in mind, if you wanna pitch something to our audience and book a bunch of demos, Email producers@rbdb.com, Gajjon, you're the man. Thank you very much. That's a very interesting product, by the way.

Thank you, Gajjon.

I like it.

Super cool. That was cool. That's like a co-op of insights and it just gets more powerful over time. That's fantastic. Well, guys, drop a link on his calendar. Ely, our video producer, is popping in his link, so make sure you jump in and book a demo. But let's get into it with our man, Tom Hunt here. So Tom, I, and I'm not just saying this, I think everybody will probably say the same thing. I've seen you get more traction on LinkedIn than literally anybody. Last week we had our own LinkedIn consultant on the show, Alec Paul, and he wanted us to ask you specifically, how the heck are you doing this? Like what are these vanity metrics? Like how are you able to get hundreds of thousands of you know, comments, are we thousands of comments, hundreds of thousands of likes. You had mentioned you have a six step formula to help people work up into this. If there's one thing this group loves, it's actionable lists of what steps that they can actually complete and get to a better end state. So let's jump into it. You want to just share it step by step? I'll let you run this how you will.

Let's do it. So we'll go through the six. And then if we're getting good engagement in the chat, I'll release the seventh reminder.

Oh, the man knows how to run a webinar.

That's good.

A reminder that the sixth will get you to 1K, seventh could get you to 10 or 1K. But let's go through the sixth then. So I think we have to think about the algorithm. So points one and two, how we initially can tell the algorithm to start giving our posts more attention. So, the first is if we think about somebody who we want to engage with our post, the biggest real estate when the post appears on their feed is the image. So, what I found is if we have a single image where a face, a human face is at 5 to 10% of the image, these always perform the best. It's probably something deep in our psychology that when we see another face, it stops us more than if we see a person in the background. And so I simply get my partner, who fortunately used to be a photographer, to take pictures of me, ideally wearing sunglasses with an espresso, ideally in Italy, when she's on the other side of the table from me. And that's like the backlog of the picks. So it really isn't hard. You just need a partner. You need to be in it now. You don't need to be in Italy.

You stop me there. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I have a wife. But yeah, keep finish.

And then I have a bunch of questions about this. So I want everyone to test single image with the face, like it just goes to the profile and look at the two big posts on the front of my profile. You'll see that the face is, I don't know, 5-10% of the image. It just works better. So that's number one.

And is that, so is the coffee thing too, like doing something just belligerently human, something that we all do, right?

I think that the coffee thing, two reasons. you remember the company at Espresso? They like relatively fit my product. So, like, was very successful, sold for a shitload. I think a big part of their success with the Branding, and I actually think the Espresso part of the Branding helps. I like, there's, like, an outsized amount of coffee on landing pages and in ads, because I feel like people that are addicted to caffeine, when they just see an image of coffee, like, get this dopamine rush, like, I get it. I love coffee. If I bought past Starbucks, I feel it. So I, it wasn't purposeful like that, but that's my backwards rationalization for why coffee works. I like to add it in anyway because it's part of my brand or something that I like.

Desiree says that's why people eat and brush their teeth in movies. It makes them relatable. I like that.

That's nice.

Spot on.

So by the way, I mean, you're a good looking guy. What if I'm not?

I am not sure if that is having an impact. What would I say? We just have to test it.

And how do you, are you gonna explain later how you split testers? Like, literally, 'cause LinkedIn's strange, you can't just like run two posts in parallel. You have to like post one, and then what do you do? You post everything the same two months later and change the photo or something like that, or like, how do you.

Run a split test on LinkedIn? Yeah, even if you're doing that like two months down the line, same post, different image, the algorithm might have changed. I've never split test anything, but what I have done probably for like three years now is post almost daily, and really spend time looking at the metrics. So it's not split testing, it's just learning from the data. Point number two?

We're ready.

Do it.

That was pretty good, man. That was more detailed than I thought we were gonna get. The sunglasses with an espresso in front of a city, that's a lot.

I know this is part of your LinkedIn formula as well, but the hook. So again, We're just trying to get someone to stop. The image comes down, it's someone's face. There's one or two lines of text. We're just trying to get someone to stop the scroll. So that first line is commonly known as a hook is quite important. So what I found is that if we I know you guys like to add numbers. That hasn't worked as well for me. What's worked well for me is a statement on one line that is curiosity driving. So I'll just give a couple from the big posts. My absolute favorite of all time is first I handed in my notice, then they offered me a raise. And we'll talk more about story and the topic later. And then another one I liked recently is I canceled a weekly one-on-one with a direct report. So very basic statements, but they're curious driving. Why was the one-on-one canceled? Why did I hand in my notice?

Yeah.

So again, those are both HR related, and we'll talk more about that in a second, but that's the second thing is how do we get someone to read that one line of text that's very simple and then get people to click see more? Point number three?

Point number three. So wait, sorry, sorry, Adam.

Can I, yeah, I'm just like looking through all, well, you have a lot of images. You had a little spate last week, it looks like, or no? Yeah, never mind. Let's go, let's go to the next one.

Cool. So, yeah, yeah. Nice. Here we go. Yeah, yeah.

So here's the, you can see it. So this is like, this is just, I mean, it's almost like hook steroids. Like you were like hook vitamins, these photos, cuz it's like confession time. And then it's just, it's the, the gesture, everything like mimics this hard thinking about like, oh man, I have a confession to make. And I feel like that hits so much harder than like, and look at the amount of real estate that, that this one takes up versus this. I mean, this is taking up almost my whole screen. or, you know, vertically at least.

So in your image. Well, we have a question here from Isha. How do you think of the hooks is GPT or brainstorming? I have the post concept first and then the hook comes after. I haven't used any AI to write any, any of these posts. Three and four are going to be quite simple to run through the first and maybe arguably one of the most important factors, I think, in big numbers is the topic. There are just certain topics that more people on the platform have in common and therefore have the potential to engage with. So these topics are pretty much anything within HR and workplace because LinkedIn is a work platform. There's obviously like LinkedIn itself. If you post about posting on LinkedIn, everyone in common, everyone has LinkedIn in common. The topics that like we talked, we might talk about pillars later, but I have two other pillars. One is business bootstrapping and the other one is marketing. you'll see if you go through my post that the marketing or the business slash bootstrapping posts get maybe 10 of the Engagement that the HR workplace wants to. So if I sold a B2B HR SaaS software, like I, things would be very different. Like, I'd probably be a AR numbers like you, you guys, you know, but I don't. I sell to marketing people. So we'll talk more about that, the business stuff later, but they're the misalignment there between what I get a lot of attention for and why I make money from.

The next- so, are you conflicted about that?

So I think if I, like, I love fame, I'm going to be doing fame for a long time, but if I was ever to do anything else, it would probably be in the HR space just to leverage the, not just to leverage the attention, I'm also interested in it. That's why I think I've written a lot of posts about it. That said, one other benefit, and we're getting into the business stuff now, is that we're a service company. And so it's very important for us to get the right talent in at the right price. And our core role in our business is the account manager. We went from roughly 50 applications a month for that role to 500 when this started popping off. And so our cost to acquire or to bring in an account manager decreased. We're getting better quality for the same or lower cost. So that is an advantage from posting about the HR workplace stuff. that is, I think, more specific to a service company.

Yeah.

Okay. Sweet.

All right. So topic has an impact. Number four is story. Humans are wired to, or something about being around the campfire and information being processed more easily if it's within the form of a story. And so again, if you look at the big name posts, the majority of them are these relatively short stories, again, in the HR workplace world, because that It is what pops off. So I have found that those posts often perform better because they're probably digested, more people digest them because the format is more digestible. Point number five, a very basic one, is I use Hemingway. So it's hemingwayapp.com to essentially proofread the post to make sure I'm not writing it too complex. Basically we want, it gives you a readability. score, we want grade one. If I'm at grade two, maybe I'll keep that, but I won't post anything with grade three. Again, if we're thinking about the algorithm, the longer we have somebody, or we get someone to stop scrolling, click see more, linger on the post, these are all signals that tell the algorithm to show the post to more people. And so if we put in a word that people don't, someone doesn't understand, they're not going to get past that, they're going to move on. And so the more simple the writing, So grade one on Hemingway is 0.5.

We, so we've had a few kind of LinkedIn heavy hitters on this. The topics, two, three and four are kind of overlap with things we've heard, which is great. Cause I mean, look, there's not, you can't argue that an amazing hook, topics that resonate and a great story are, aren't going to drastically help, right? Like those are such big pillars, but this idea that gets talked about less is writing super, super simply. And I think this not only blends in, I think this not only kind of works on LinkedIn, but like going to your, your, go to your website, read your website copy, you know, how, how, how simply are you able to break down these ideas for people? So a few people said the Hemingway app was just a great idea. I just wanted to like emphasize that because if you do everything great, but it's too complex, it's just not going to take off. People aren't going to adjust that.

And another thing, just on that note, I like to tell people when you're writing copy for the internet, The goal is to make it scannable and you get the full essence of it by scanning the ultimate lazy man who's only half-assing it. He can just scan down the page and get the gist of what you're saying. What that immediately eliminates, which is a huge problem I see with a lot of people who start writing on LinkedIn, are these big paragraphs. I think big paragraphs is like kryptonite for LinkedIn engagement. because people just like they hit see more, they see a bunch of stuff. It looks intimidating. Gone, you know, like literally gone. Anyway, that's my interjection.

I think that and like also the way, I mean, the way both you, Adam and you, Tom, write and I see this a lot with people who just create great content even off of LinkedIn. Mr. Beast is amazing at this is like having the TLDR at the very beginning, right? Like, you know, in the very beginning of your post, you know what exactly what the rest of the post is going to be about. And it gives you that Intrigue to keep going as opposed to giving that at the very end when, like, most people aren't going to make it there if they don't know what the heck the post is about. They're not going to, like, go on.

This deep Discovery Mission. It's just, there's too much content out there.

Yeah.

It needs to be provocative enough to get a Seymour click. So the Cliffhanger needs to be good, but it needs to be relevant to.

The per, you know, they need to know that it's relevant to them.

Right? So that's the balance.

Some people said TLDR stands for too long didn't read. If kids, I think it started out on Reddit when people would have a long post, you scroll to the bottom, you get the whole paragraph in two sentences. And David says literal or metaphorical? I mean, kind of literal. Tell them what the heck it's gonna be about before they start reading the whole thing. All right, folks, while we're gonna go over 0.6 right now, and then we're gonna have our midway section of the show. When I say folks, I mean audience. I don't mean Tom and Adam. So audience, grab a LinkedIn post of yours recently that you feel did not take off and you cannot figure out why you're trying everything. Drop it into the chat here and in a few minutes we're gonna roll through a few and have Tom and Adam in the panel break them down. We did it last week. It was great. Next week we'll get back to regular on Fuck My Startup, but Unfuck My LinkedIn lives for another week. I already see them coming in. Tom, step six, my friend.

We've got a couple of questions on the images. So Steve's saying interesting that images are not related to the information at all. And then a question from Jason, does the image have to be of yourself? In an ideal world, every image would be of yourself and it would be relevant to the post. However, I have a business and a life and therefore I'm trying to also post seven days a week, having a picture that's going to be relevant to every post is probably not going to work. Jason, it should be a view. Yes. Ideally, what we're trying to do here is get people's attention so they learn more and think more about you so that when they want to buy the thing that you sell, they'll come to you. So having a picture of someone else, you're basically going to miss a big chunk of the benefit. Let's go to point six. Again, if you think about what we're doing with all those points is we're trying to have people behave in a way that informs the algorithm that it should show your post to more people. And so the final thing, and actually point six and seven point towards much stronger algorithm signals. So point six is how do we end the post in a way that's gonna inspire action that again will tell the algorithm that this post people are getting value from. And so the classic ending that I used to do a lot, but I've stopped using now, is simply ending the post with agree. Um, this again, quite cringe, but it worked. If you go to the big post, you'll see that that was the outro because it just seems to get people to, to increase the comment rate basically, which is then telling the algorithm. So it doesn't have to be that, it doesn't have to be a question, but it just has to be something that ideally gets someone to take an action, whether that's like or comment. So that's six. Um, I think we're gonna wait until after the break, guys, but do you think we've, we've got enough engagement in the chat to release number seven? There's a lot, there's a lot of.

Engagement in the chat.

So I think they're gonna be waiting for an eight and a nine too, Tom.

So by the way, Tom, I try to in my stuff, rather than saying something that elicits comments, I try to just end it in a really coy way, which is like, he gives a dopamine hit or whatever. Do you also do that, or are you literally just trying to maximize comments on every post?

Yeah, I used to end every post with agree. more recently, that theme is quite a cheap way now of getting engagement. And so I don't think it has to be a CTA. I think if we can, again, the Koi ending that elicits some emotion, I think will also increase chances of a comment. So it doesn't have to be the CTA and what you're doing is perfectly fine. And yeah, the agree I rarely use anymore.

What are some of your other faves besides agree?

So I'm going to scroll through. There is like the, your thing is a lot now where people are actually asking for the comment and the like in order to get the thing.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the ultimate, that is the ultimate shenanigans right now.

But I'm seeing it work, you know? So I, I'm just scrolling down, down these big, down these big posts.

Yeah.

So, like, he, he, here's a good example of, like, a koi kind of inspirational way. So the post is around an employee handing in their notice and. the message of the post is that you want to roll out the red carpet and be nice to people that leave. And so the final two lines are like, don't treat a resignation like a rejection, bit of alliteration there, roll out the red carpet again. Like, there was four hours, that's a nice one. So again, that's an example of a coin earning.

Yeah, that's pro player stuff right there. Four hours and four hours and six words. I mean, yeah, like until you break it down, people don't even know why they like it. you know? And we just love alliteration. And I love the like, and even just while we're on the topic, like tapering down the length of the text, you know, like down to this thing that like very gently like massages people's eyes into the end and then it's like a banger like that. Like that it is crazy as it sounds like that makes it get more engagement also. you know, and it makes it get more whatever, like time on page, whatever, you know, like the whole experience of.

The post, you know, that's like post, post aesthetics are also important. You're totally right, Adam.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's a crazy thing to say that, like, that is something that we do, but we do, you know? And after you say, like, as Tom's.

Going through all these points, it's like, oh, of course. But, like, it's so, you can't pick it out of a hat. It's just so, you know, or out of your brain. It's just so hard to do. And then you go back after knowing, you're like, of course, this is the formula. This is how we all, you know, all act. Let's. Let's jump into some posts, folks, shall we?

Yes.

I'm gonna share my screen. I pulled up a number of them, and we're just gonna rifle through. So we have Doran here. He's got the picture. I mean, I already like the picture personally, but let's. Let's go through the text here.

Yeah. Okay. What do we have here, then?

Cool.

All right, so we've got two images, I believe.

Yeah.

I would take that. Okay.

Yeah, I would take that down to one. Can we just scroll up a little bit? Decent engagement. Yeah. Okay. So I would see how in the first line, we're like, let's try to keep it as simple as possible. Here we actually think two things. I wasted months and then here's what works, you know? So just simply putting a full stop or a dot after the right way and bringing here's what actually works down the line, I think is gonna improve engagement on that right away. If it's the stylistic thing that you do all caps, then fine. I personally wouldn't do it, but that's against my style. But if that's part of how you write, then that's fine. And then after here, what actually works, I'll probably get rid of where most FDRs get it wrong, like cut that out. and just trying, like, the first three. I like what we're doing, basically, but the first three parts are like, it's just a bit confusing. Like, I just want to get into the thing.

It's almost like, here's what actually works is saying the same things.

Exactly.

Where most sdrs get it wrong, you know, so, like, it's one or the other.

If we clean up that, the, the intro, I I quite like the content itself. We're not going into all the detail. And then I'm probably just getting rid of the photo description and putting that in the first comment. Again, I think we're nearly there. It's just the cleaning the intro, getting rid of the photo description, putting that in the comment. We're actually doing pretty well here, I think. And it'd be amazing to see just doing those two or three things. So, Doran, could you please do those two or three things? Even DM me on LinkedIn and I'll rewrite the intro and outro for you. And then we'll repost it with one image, and then I reckon we'll get double the engagement.

And someone asked, A, oh, perfect. First of all, very nice, Tom. Someone asked AI too, maybe. I don't know if this is gonna be a fun game or not, but if we guessed if it was AI or not and then had the person reveal it at the end of the breakdown, that could be fun. So, Darn, did you use AI at all for this? Was it proof written by AI? Let us know and we'll hop over to the next one here. this one was a company post. So company post, a little different, usually don't perform as well. We'll look down to the performance quickly. Six reactions.

I can just jump in right here. Like, this just screams ad to me. And I immediately am like, I don't care if I'm in market for this, I'm annoyed that I'm looking at an ad. That's just my personal view. And I think it's probably the view of a lot of people on LinkedIn. It's like, I want to be moved emotionally by story. I want to connect with human beings on this platform. I do not want to be shown ads. I view ads as a regrettable necessity to keeping the thing going. And I don't know if there's more to say about this than every single thing about it reeks of an ad. Company page. Yeah. So, how I would do this different is I just would post something from a personal page that is along the lines of what we're talking about rather than this. And like this may have some use as like retargeting, maybe, you know, maybe.

The ones that the ones that performed the best, at least from what we've seen, are the ones that took off organically. And that's how we would cherry pick what we put dollars behind. And those were always the non ads. I mean, ads, anything that's somewhat of an advertisement or promotion, a feature announcement, an upgrade, whatever. that's why I wanted to call this one up, just because I thought it's LinkedIn's littered with it and it's worth going through. We'll go to the next one. By the way, Doran's post, not written by AI. Fantastic job. All right, so we got Gabriel here. Let's look at the image. So we got low engagement. The image, Tom, this does not fit your image standards, does it?

Yeah, I think if a bit we can improve here, I would put like the line I actually like. is the, in the first paragraph, it says standing out of an endless battle. Again, I might move that to the hook. Like, if it's not an amazing hook, but it's a single line statement, that, yeah, I don't know if that's the best, but it is probably, that might get a bit more attention than what we currently have. Someone recently told me we're going to get rid of the hashtags. They just don't work. And then if we are going to ask a question, we only ask one, we don't ask three. like, getting, trying, like, trying to get anyone to do anything or. Yeah, anyone to do multiple things reduces the chance that they can do anything. And then photo wise. Yeah, I don't know. Let's. Hey, I'm not sure if the, the picture of Gabriel is actually, is, like, relevant enough for this post, so maybe I would just, I don't know, not put a. Well, I guess it's a red ocean. So it does, due to the posts.

Adam, what are you thinking? Yeah, I, I'm, I'm thinking. Similar to you, we used to have, Pete and I used to, my first company was an email newsletter app. We would always tell people, only have one CTA per email. Your conversion rate will be 5x what it is if you do anything else. So I agree with you there. One question, Max. The second you said standing out as an endless battle was what you would put the hook, I was envisioning a Tom Hunt post. And, I was just picturing you like with the same espresso biting your lip, looking down like that one picture that Pete pulled up and like, I might have to click see more to like know what you're talking about, you know? But like that image would make this human and relatable to me because I'm feeling that right now, right? Like I am feeling like I have a new competitor every day that's undercutting me and just copying, right? Like, I don't know.

Yeah.

So again, like, zooming out what the topic of the post is, we're essentially pitching the business, which is never a post that's gonna get a lot of attention anyway. So he's definitely at the bottom of the funnel posts. So I wouldn't expect it to get math of engagement regardless.

Yeah. And I say this a lot. I rarely talk about RB2B, my company. And when I do, it is more like a character in this drama that I'm presenting that I'm either like, I treat it like a child. I'm either like patting it on the back or I'm slapping it on the wrist or I'm talking about how it's behaving poorly or like whatever. It's like not, I would never say RB2B identifies your anonymous website visitors and sends a LinkedIn profiles to Slack and try to push that out to LinkedIn. They'd be like, fuck off, bro. I don't care about you and your company.

I think on that point too, I remember when we launched all your posts were like, it was about your goal, growth goals for RB2B and how you were gonna not run into these pitfalls you had on previous businesses and like, you know, and then people would find someone even posted in the chat, like the personal posts lead to people to find your company and products. They're going to, if they relate to you, you're going to know everything about them.

And like, by the way, like this to me is like the game you got to play as much as sort of algorithm arbitrage. Like you have to not pitch your company even though you want to. as much as you have to do all this other stuff to get engagement. And then people will, you have a View My Services link, Gabriel, I might change that to visit my website, because that's kind of like a clear call to action, in my opinion. What do you mean View My Services? What am I going to get? It's kind of ambiguous what's going to happen when I click that link. I think visit my website is so clear that I just change it to that if it were me. So yeah, that is my thought on that post and topic.

The last thing I want to mention that Alec Paul, who's our LinkedIn consultant, he was on last week, he says hashtags do nothing on LinkedIn. I don't know if Tom, you found that too, but especially anything that's just not actually serving a function and maybe you just didn't know that. It's certainly not intuitive to know that, you know, hashtags on the specific platform don't work, but eliminate all of those things. And then just lastly, too, before we get to the next post, Lori asked, how do you use voice notes on the LinkedIn app? Lori, it's on the mobile app only. Pull up a DM. You'll see a microphone there. For some reason, you can't leave voice notes on the web. I have no idea why. Let's get into Lydia's posts, though. So this one took off better than some of the other ones. We got two images, no faces. I'll let the pros, though, dissect from there.

Yeah, the, I think this is this is promising. Let's, let's diagnose this hook, though. So I optimized for Google by going into AI search. That's the first thing. By leaning even harder into what matters most. That's the second thing. So we're trying to convert, communicate two things in this hook again. We have one second to try and communicate what this post might be about, and trying to do two things is gonna minimize the chance that we get anyone to look at anything. So I'm tempted to tweak this to I optimized to Google, but got into AI search full stop, and then maybe even a double line break so people can't see what's coming next. And then I probably just get rid of the by leaning harder, leaving it leaning even harder into what matters most. Probably get rid of the yes, I followed the SEO best practices, but then I'd likely double down on authenticity. So I think we need to clean up the hook. Okay, so we're talking about a photo of my husband working late at night. That's like the ideal. Like, I've posted a lot of screenshots on LinkedIn. Never, ever perform as good as a human. So, Lydia, if we're happy to post an image of your husband working late nights, that is going to really make this one pop. So, clean up the hook, add image of the husband. Like, again, the outro. if he's aligned with how you, how you normally speak and you normally use the orange heart, great. I do think it's important to have a writing style. But if it isn't, I would probably get rid of that as well. And maybe call back out to your husband at the end to bookmark the post.

The only screenshots I've seen work well are like a super simple tweet by a very notable person. It's like a five-word tweet by like Sam Altman or something.

It's kind of like, that's more shenanigans, though. There was a time when that was doing really really, really well, because probably I think people clicked on the tweet, you know, to like make it bigger and just look at it and to X out of it probably, or maybe they just stopped on it. But yeah, agreed on that end. I want to add to all of you out there that want a hack on how to evaluate hooks, I would suggest like looking at your own hook for literally no more than two seconds and looking away. and like, were you moved by that? Because that's kind of what's gonna happen to you as people are scrolling through the feed, you know, like you're gonna get one, maybe two seconds. And if I think you can do it unemotionally, like literally just look at this and look away, like, did it pull me in or not? You know, or was it kind of confusing or was it kind of long? Like, did I immediately, was I just like gripped by that? You know, I think it's an exercise you can do.

I actually stopped a lot of your old post, Adam, and you, you did used to do the, image of the tweet way back, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Tommy Clark was. Was my guy then.

And that.

That strategy was one that he was using a lot with his clients.

Yeah, makes sense. I just went on the feed, and I just want to bring this hook up because I saw it posted nine hours ago by a guy called Alex Dick. His hook. Simple sentence. Maybe he's been learning from me. All it is, I fired my best recruiter today. and I think it's a picture of the recruiter. I'll put a link in the chat. Like, Alex, this excellent.

Yeah.

Drop it in. I'm gonna pull it up.

Yeah.

Yeah, please. I haven't even read the post, but it's already popping.

Oh, yeah. This is great. All right. I'm re-sharing.

Oh, it is like Alex has been studying at this. The school of Tom Hunt post, if that exists. So let's have a look. Scroll up. Hook is epic now. There is something that I think is quite important, is the double line space or not. If you have a single line space after the hook, the third line will actually show, or at least on desktop. Here he didn't do that, and I would actually maybe have added that because just he was amazing thing, I don't know, I think it just complicates a bit. Stepped over the line. Okay, I feel like maybe he's actually a bit of a joke post. Yeah, yeah, okay. Here's actually a joke post. Maybe he's taking the piss out of my formula, but he's got the agree at the end and it's going to pop off. He's got a big face. Maybe the face is too big here.

So yeah, excellent. He's definitely, I don't know if he's making fun of you, but he is getting engagement based on your formula. That is for sure. We just, we just listen to you break down your game and then you.

Just showed us an example of someone else who made that post. I mean, I'm happy for anyone to satirize the method and get, as long.

As they're getting attention, that's what matters. It's also these paradoxes are just killer. Like I now in that, there's a meeting that Adam has on Mondays with Alec and I sit on that meeting. And I now know when a killer hook, like the whole meeting knows when a good hook was just written based on the how big of a paradox and how heavy of a paradox it was. Like I just fired my best anything is insane. He was amazing. I mean, come on. That's like, that's unbelievable.

Incredible hook.

Well, let's get back into, so that was a good, I hope everyone liked this, this unfuck my LinkedIn. We will have to get other people who are just LinkedIn gurus on here so we can do this a little bit more often. We'll get back to unfuck my startups next week. Let's get into it. I mean, Tom, do these people deserve 0.7 or should we just end the webinar now? It's totally up to you at this point.

I know it's getting late in London, so. I have seen, I've seen some strong engagement on that 2.7. So again, if we think back to all the six points, we're just trying to get people to do the thing that show the algorithm they should show your post to more people. I believe that the strongest algorithm signal are big chunky comments from people that don't know you. Again, if you're the algorithm and you're seeing a post get these big chunky comments from people that have third degree connections, Then you're like, wow, this content must be resonating with the audience. We're going to show this to more people. So then the question is, how do we get big, chunky comments from people that don't know you? And what has worked for the big posts is two things that are a little bit risky, but is to agitate a common issue or ignore a nuance. I'll just give some examples. The two of the biggest posts did this very well. And actually, I don't even know if I was planning this beforehand, but the first post was about a team member who was going to work from another country for six weeks. And it was very uplifting. I don't care where they work, et cetera, et cetera. It follows all points 1-6. What we found was that a big percentage of comments was from people within compliance, HR, etc. asking me if I considered the tax implications, the compliance implications of somebody working from a different country for six weeks. So that's the nuance I ignored there. Another quick example is the post I mentioned earlier about cancelling the weekly one-on-one with the direct report. A lot of the comments there were, again, HR people or other leaders saying, it's actually not your job to cancel the direct report. Did you ask them if they wanted to speak to you? and obviously I didn't mention that in the comment. And in reality, I obviously did tell the person that I was canceling the one-on-one because I was happy with their work, Etc. But that wasn't in the post. That was the Nuance that was ignored. So how can we agitate an issue or ignore some Nuance that's going to get a lot of people to come in and leave those chunky comments? Those people get to show the world that they know a lot about HR, they know a lot about their work, maybe It gets a bit of negative press on the post for you, but you're getting all the attention. So that's the deal. And that is what will propel a post from 1K likes to 1,000 or beyond.

And how do you pick those out? Do you write your post first and then say, what can I omit that'll kind of piss some professionals off? How do you do that?

Yeah, so I have written posts where I've taken detail out. because I'm hoping that that's gonna, it's gonna allow people, I mean, we're actually doing these people a favor. They get to come and show the world how intelligent and knowledgeable they are about remote working compliance. So, yeah, I think that's his, his.

Like, what was the one, like, what was the, in the 375,000, 309,000 like posts, like, what was, what was that for that?

That's the compliance one. so can we get the post up on the screen and see if we can find some of the comments? There's like 50 comment threads of compliance people arguing whether I, whether this was legal or not. Let's try and find one.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see what you're saying. Yeah.

So, so the comment about other people's comments, I have to say again, because many people are commenting and complaining about the issue of walking aboard with strict tack laws, blah, blah, blah. But the main point is yeah, yeah. That comment there is somebody commenting about all the other comments from Sabrina Johnson. But maybe I'll try to find a link to, like, one of the big threads so we can see the example. But, yeah. So again, if you think about that, every time we got a comment that was telling the algorithm, wow, okay, this, this content people are engaging with, you, you just have to have slightly thick skin. I've only ever had to delete one post, and this was where I probably did this in a little bit. too much of an inflammatory way. The hook was, oh, I can't remember the exact hook, but there was something about firing somebody. I think it was like, I fired someone yesterday. And the post was actually uplifting, and it was like actually firing people. I shouldn't have used the word fire, but actually ending a working relationship with someone can actually be a very positive thing for both sides. And that was a message in the post. It was like uplifting. I wasn't being negative about people. But then a lot of people that comment him were like, why are you bragging on LinkedIn about firing someone?

Oh, yeah. That happened to me a couple of times.

Okay. Just delete the post. I mean, keep it housed.

Yeah, I left the post, but like, yeah, it's like, you know, I do a build in public. Like we did a layoff last year because we woke up one day and we're like, man, it's just changed. Like, We can do the same thing with like, you know, a team that's smaller or whatever. So I posted about it. I mean, my executive team's like, don't post about it. I'm like, if I don't post about it and it like gets out, it's like what it compromises the whole content stream and value of the information. So I had to. And then, you know, 75% of them were like, that really sucks for you, for them, everything. And then 25% is this like venom. Like you, you know, you are the worst person ever. Like, I can't believe you're writing about that, you know? blah, blah, blah. Just like, the problem is you, you know, like, it was incredible. Just the ferocity.

How did it perform?

Well, yeah, well, very well, you know, it wasn't my best one ever, but like very well. Another example was we, of this, by the way, of like something very similar to this was when our first six weeks of RBDB, we had this vision for pricing that was just like wrong. We were trying to go free and five, in 495. And I kind of like post after I sort of after we had decided what we kind of wanted to do, I just was like, are, you know, nobody's converting, what's going on, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it was just this invitation to like come in and just sound smart for like product people, you know, and it was, it was so while I don't think we made decisions that were like different than we were going to make before, it actually provided an unbelievable amount of insight. And those posts did incredibly well. So a couple more times I kind of went back, like when there was a problem that was, you know, we had a general idea of how we were going to solve it. I just acted like I was nowhere on it. I was like, I don't know what the fuck to do. Like, can somebody please just like look at all these numbers and tell me, you know, and people want to volunteer in that information, you know, on LinkedIn, right? Like, I think what's interesting about LinkedIn.

I mean, you can kind of take all these social platforms, like Instagram is to show everyone how beautiful you are. YouTube is to show everyone how talented you are. LinkedIn is to show everyone how capable you are. And like in the world, and we're getting a couple questions, like how do you deal with these negative comments? Cause this is something that creates traction, but you know, there's like emotional turmoil waiting for you on your phone three hours later. how do you run head first into that? And how do you welcome that? Or is it just knowing that the results are going to follow and that's going to be worth it?

One of the things that we were going to talk about here is the short-term gain of doing all this stuff basically versus the long-term value that I might be missing out on. And so my answer to that question and to this one is that my background before the entrepreneurship it's like hardcore online marketing and we're like bred to whenever we find arbitrage opportunity to just completely ruin it and like push it to the absolute limit to maximize short-term profits. And so that's why I've like come up with those seven things and pushed it so hard. And that's also why I can get through some of the hate is because I'm just hardwired to try and maximize the arbitrage opportunity. So it's not that I don't feel bad when I get a negative comment, it's just that I'm just driven to try and maximize the attention.

Yeah, I mean, I like to say that it doesn't bother me. I don't care what people think, but it does. It sucks. And luckily, I don't have to spend that much of my time in that space. There was the Six Sense thing that happened and it's horrible. I'm just such a positive person, generally speaking, but that arbitrage was attacking, you know, attacking this company in, like, a somewhat disingenuous way.

Right?

Like, they're not. I was making the claim that they were afraid of me, and I had a three-week-old startup.

Right?

Like, that's not. That's not reality. Right? Yeah.

Yeah.

So, like, in, like, so much, you know, and I just get so worked up emotionally. There's this guy, Clark Baron. I don't know if he's on here or not, but, like, he always goes after me whenever he can about whatever, and, you know, it's. It's. It kind of like, you know, I don't, it can just, the way I feel it, it's like, it just ruins the hour around when you're engaging with the post, in my opinion. You know, it's like, it just spoils a couple hours or an afternoon or something.

It can be bitter sweet though, because you know that every comment, even if it is negative, is getting your post more attention. That was true. The six cents post were legendary, by the way.

So.

Well, he said, this is, I mean, just, this is the ultimate thing to end on. Haters will always watch, so give them a good show. Tattoo that on my back. That is fantastic. Yeah, totally, totally.

Yeah.

I got, I got, like, I got, like, a three hater. Like, some guy started going after us for what our HubSpot integration did, which we built because people asked for the feature. And then the HubSpot thing, like, tells you what it's doing. And he's like, this is crazy. We're downloading it, and we're like, And then this whole crew jumps in and they're like, why don't you just at least give people the option of opting into it? And it's like, dude, the integration tells you exactly what it does, and then you hit okay or cancel. It's opt in. I'm not sure what you guys want from me, but it's the pile on. And then the next day, another guy had this post, and then the next day, Clark's like, oh, it's spyware. They're selling your customer data to other people.

They're selling your, it's just like, Jesus Christ. I get anxiety for you when those pop up. I'm like, man, I just, yeah. So, but hey, you're fighting the good fight. We all appreciate it because that's why we're all here, Adam. So, Tom, where can people find you? LinkedIn. I know you got fame. I'm going to drop some links into the chat so people can check it out.

Yeah, that's basically it. LinkedIn, feel free to DM me. I'm happy to review posts. I actually really enjoy reviewing posts if you, if you want to DM. Um, famed SO is the domain and also podcast, confessions of a B2B entrepreneur. That's how I first met Adam, who very kind of came on the show a while back.

And that's it. Heck yeah. Tom, you were a fantastic guest. We hope you'll come back on in the future.

We'd love to have you again. Yeah, let's see if we maybe we get some pressure.

No pressure. No pressure. Maybe we'll say no. It was terrible. You know, whatever. Next week we have Ryan Alice. We'll be joining Adam in Austin. He founded eye contact, as basically a teenager, made millions of dollars, sold that company. it's gonna be an awesome show. This recording will go live ideally by Friday on Adam's YouTube channel. So check that out. I'll post a breakdown, too, of all of Tom's seven steps in my LinkedIn. Tom, thank you so much, everybody.

Thank you for joining. Yeah. Tom, this was awesome. If I had to guess what your steps are, and I read a Finn post about this, too, I would have been, like, kind of close to this, but, like, you really articulate it well and, like, I think a great show is just like a checklist that people can do that is somewhat surprising and like you just delivered on it. So thank you very much.

I really appreciate it and I really appreciate everyone attending and engaging in the chat. It's a great show you guys have here.

Yeah, we had a pretty good show. I mean, they're dropping off now, but we were like, we're probably like mid 400s uniques, which, you know, we're not going to complain about that for a B2B show. A B2B weekly live show.

If you want to get higher response rates, you got to get in the inbox first. Guess what? I always tell people this. If my awelita, you know, messages me and or emails me, I'm gonna open that email. I don't give a shit what the subject line is, right? Most people that you talk to about cold email today will say cold email sucks. It doesn't work. And I go, really? The subject line is the most important part of the email? No, it's not. It's actually getting the email in the inbox. The second most important part of the email.