Dominate LinkedIn Organic Social with AI - with Luke Matthews

All right, well, welcome to another episode of LinkedIn Ads Radio. Today I want to welcome Luke Matthews to the podcast. Luke is one of the best organic social wizards on LinkedIn. He's also one of the funniest and most dialed in people that I've seen on the platform. And if you spend any time on LinkedIn, you've probably seen his content. So I'm excited to dive in today and talk to Luke, who's a master on the organic side. I spend my time on the paid side, and I know very little about the organic side. So it's always fun when we can merge these worlds and talk about each side together because. So, Luke, welcome to the podcast. Can you start by introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got to where you are now?

Sure. Thanks for having me on, Anthony. Like you said, I love talking to the other side of LinkedIn. I think the grass is always greener. So when I'm struggling in the organic side, I'm always like, I should jump ship and join Anthony on the paid side. Nice coming on to chat with you. But my background, I started on social about nine years ago now over on Instagram and Facebook. So I was very much in the influencer, micro, influencer marketing world. Actually started out in the. The fashion space. I was one of those dreaded influencers that helped me quit my construction job, and that's actually what transitioned me into social media. So I was in all the pictures, the videos, and that's where I learned copywriting, because with, you know, every brand deal that me and my partner at the time did, obviously copy came with it. So I was writing tons of blog posts, tons of copy for posts, and I quickly realized I was actually much better at the. The copywriting in the back end than I was at being in the pictures and being on the creative side. So that's kind of where my journey started. Did that for about four years on Instagram and realized at the end of that journey that a lot of the brands I was working with, you know, they would get all these pictures from us. We would take like 50, 60 pictures, probably five to 10 clips of videos each kind of collaboration that we did, and they would only end up using, like, two pictures, one video, and they didn't maximize it. And so me being the social media nerd that I am, it bugged me. So I started pitching them, like, hey, can I run your page for two weeks after we do the campaign? I think you'll get better results. And that's kind of How I started getting into the social media management side, basically just pitching on top of influencer deals and again realized I was better at doing the management than the influencer stuff. And that's kind of where it all started. So for me, it started on Instagram, switched to LinkedIn thanks to Gary Vee. Like a lot of people, he was yelling at us to go on TikTok or LinkedIn and I went, you know what, I did the influencer thing. I'm getting old. I better do the LinkedIn thing. So I picked LinkedIn and it's worked out okay for me.

When is Gary not yelling at people about something?

That's what he does. Kindness, empathy and TikTok and LinkedIn, it works for him.

It's his style. People love it. So thanks for that backstory. And as I think about it, like, that explains it's good to know, like your journey and it also explains why you have like some of the best looking selfies of anybody that I see on LinkedIn these days.

I better have learned something in four years of being paid to take pictures. So it pays off in my personal brand. Now obviously LinkedIn is a little more you Instagram y now than it was in 2020, so it helps to pair the good copy with at least knowledge for photography for me and then my clients as well.

Yeah, because we're all just like, like visual people. So like that's going to be the big thing that we see and then grab our attention to read the rest of the copy. So I, I think I've always thought it's like an opportunity on LinkedIn because LinkedIn has been such a button up platform and if you can infuse some personality and show yourself a little bit more, like that's what people are going to connect to. So it makes a lot of sense. And I think you have some of the best selfie game that's out there.

Hey, I'll, I'll take it, man. I'll take it. Thank you.

And then next question is where, where in the world are you these days?

So I currently am living in Paraguay in South America. I started off like I said, in 2016, so eight, nine years ago now. I'm a Canadian, originally from the west coast in Vancouver. Started traveling once I started doing the Instagram thing like a good Instagram influencer does. You go to Bali, you go do the Europe trip. We did it all and I landed after all those travels in South America, just had never been here and kind of wanted to do Monk mode and went, well, why not? I'll just work on my business and, you know, go where I know nobody and test out this thing. When you work on the Internet, why not? Right. So.

Right. I haven't been to Paraguay. I've been to Uruguay and Argentina before, but I've not been to Paraguay yet.

What did you think?

It was awesome. We had an amazing time. We were in Argentina in Buenos Aires, and then we took a ferry over to Uruguay and, you know, beautiful. Everything was beautiful there. Food was amazing. You know, pretty cheap compared to the US So we had a great.

Very cheap.

Yeah, yeah.

Good steak down here. I'm a big steak guy now, so steak's like probably a fifth, sixth of the price the US So.

So diving into some content here. My first question is, your headline right now is Right with AI, but don't lose your soul. I was actually wanting to ask you to kind of speak to, like, tell me about that first.

Sure. So I think for me, I started using AI heavily about a year ago. I'm a. For those who don't know, I'm a LinkedIn ghostwriter. So I've been on LinkedIn for about four years now doing marketing. In the past two years, have specialized specifically in ghostwriting for founders and B2B startups. And the last year I moved into AI basically because I'm terrible at managing people. So I tried to scale my agency a couple times, realized that managing a big team just wasn't my skill set. I'm much better at the writing and, like, the creative side and we can't do everything and, you know, that's just my skill set. So I realized with AI, well, if I actually learn this, I can just replicate myself and I don't really need the team that I needed before. So I dove all in on AI, trying to figure it out. And what I found was it does work well for a skilled writer. The problem is most people lose the soul of their writing when they use AI. So they'll go plug in a prompt in GPT or any of these tools, even custom GPTs. Now, they still can't replicate your personality well enough. And most people are too lazy. They'll do a prompt, they'll get an input, it'll look pretty good close enough to a good post, and they'll hit send, and there's just not enough sauce in it. So for me, I blend the two. I use AI to get me out of blank page and to get a nicely prompted and formatted post. But then I go in and I use my editing skills to add that soul to it. So I like the combo. It's kind of a unique thing that I haven't really seen people do. I utilize AI, but I also keep that personality and that selfie kind of fun loving pizza side in the brand as well. So I think it's a nice mix.

Yes, I think that's an important distinction. And if you spend any time on LinkedIn there's like, I know for myself I can tell when other people's posts from time to time it'll just pop up in my feed and I'm like, that post is probably generated by AI and like you know, you just kind of read it and you're like, yeah, I can tell AI probably wrote that. And that like kind of just like makes you like less interested in it. It's just like different when a machine generates it versus a human generates does it does.

And we're still a ways out. Honestly, everyone thinks it'll fully replace it. I don't think that's the case. I think it's just about speed. Like when you're really good with GPT and all these different tools, like you can, you can write really good posts in three or four minutes. But when you're good at copywriting and editing, that's what really makes it special because you can take that framework and then quickly add all that personality and that's where you can't tell that it's AI. But even a nicely formatted post, there's just something within us. I think we can tell when something doesn't have soul. It doesn't make you feel anything. And we know with buying and trying to attract clients, like you need that emotion to get people to buy into you and buy into your product. And I think sometimes it's subconscious. It's not in the copy when it's fully AI and you can't really explain it fully.

So as you were saying that, what you made me think about is I heard this audio thing recently of somebody trying to copy themselves and talk to themselves and you could always tell when the person was talking versus the AI was talking because the AI was always pretty monotone and never had like, didn't have much inflection. And it was kind of lacking the emotion part where like you could tell the real person obviously spoke like a normal person, you know, would get excited at times. And that kind of like is a lot more interesting to listen to versus the monotone stuff. And it's probably the same with, with copy. Like the copy is going to be very average of like the midline in terms of emotion in a lot of ways. And that's not going to be interesting to people. So it lacks the soul.

So it does. And the storytelling. Right. The thing is, you can, you can write a really good post, have everything, have all the principles right, have the formatting right, have the hook right. But how do you get the stories in there? Even with, like, I've done some storytelling prompts that can get it pretty darn close, like 80, 90% with AI, but you still need that final percentage to really connect with people and understand nuance and all the things that you're saying. So we're not there yet. I don't know if it'll ever get there, but the AI nerds think so. So. Right.

All right, well, we're going to talk a lot more about AI in a second before we kind of dive further is let's start with some of the basics on LinkedIn organic social. We haven't talked much about organic at all on this podcast. So let's start with, like, why should somebody or a company invest in LinkedIn organic social media right now?

Great question. So, couple reasons. I think before I get into organic, I think the optimal state is doing both. So I think if you're investing in paid already, I think you're actually in a better position than someone starting from zero today that isn't going to do paid. That's just inorganic. We know these platforms get harder every single year with organic. Instagram was this way, Facebook was this way, and LinkedIn is trending this way. Like, when I started in 2020, the organic reach for organic social was crazy. Now it's. It's much more difficult. It's getting saturated. More people are coming for other platforms. So it is more difficult. But if you're already invested in paid, all the more reason to go like, well, look, if you're bringing people to your profile and they're checking it out, if you can actually add an organic element where you're getting and building an audience that's there already, so that when those paid clients, you know, and paid ads land on your profile, they see some traction. They see some reviews, they see some people commenting, they see some followers, you're going to convert those paid campaigns all the more. So I think it's an even stronger use case for people and companies that are invested in paid to also pair it with organic. You know, I've always been more of an organic guy than a paid guy. I'm cheap. So if you're bootstrapping as well, like, hey, paid, we know, paid works. Like, if you throw enough money at it, if you pay you, if you pay the right guy, you're going to convert. But if you have a tight budget for me, then I just go with, hey, if I invest my time and I understand the principles of a platform like LinkedIn, where people are coming here and they're serious about business and investing their time, they're not here to mess around. Like on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, people still are logging in to either find a job or hire people to do a job. And because of that, it is the best place to build organically. And so why not, if you can avoid paying, I'm cheap. Like, hey, why not invest in a personal brand?

I say the same thing too. Is like, it creates a strong foundation for any other marketing that you're going to do. You know, if you're running email campaigns or if you are doing ad campaigns, people are still going to go check you out on LinkedIn and they're going to go look up your company's page and they're gonna go look up your founders page are the most common. And if there's nothing there, then they're like, what are they doing? You know, again, I like, lack soul. So, like, if there's no content there, they're like, what are they really doing? But if, like, there's some good engaging content there, you show off some personality, you help people get to know you. It's just like, it's a great foundation for anything else that you could be doing.

It's true. And I look at like the classic example is, you know, like going to the golf course like our parents did or grandparents, they go to the country club and kick it around with the boys and meet people over a glass of whiskey. And like, we don't do that anymore. So LinkedIn can be that, though. If you invest your 30, 45 minutes Monday to Friday at a specific time, like, you really can get to know people, hop on a coffee call, meet up at a conference in the US somewhere later in the year. Like, you can end up meeting business partners and people you get along with just by investing a small amount of time to share a bit about your life, share a bit about your business. How are you building it? What's the behind the scenes? And I think if you add that to the paid element, it adds again that soul, that human element that is really missing, I think in 2024, not just in life, but in business. So it's kind of looking at like, maybe you can't Measure it in the same way you can with paid. But, like, sometimes the unmeasurable things are where you can really see a ton of value in business and in connections.

So have you ever been spotted in the wild or had somebody come up to you and be like, hey, I know you from LinkedIn.

Yeah, I've had a lot more lately. Randomly enough, I had. It happened like within the same week in Mexico. Like, I was just walking down the street and some dude rolled down the window of his Jeep and yelled at me. It was so funny. And then literally the next day, I was walking and the dude was running. Same thing. He's like, hey, you look familiar. And same thing. Like, I comment on his posts a bunch and it's.

You do have a unique look, so you, like, you could stand out. Like, in Mexico especially, you have a unique look. So someone's going to be like, there's the wizard there.

Yeah, I'm tall, I got fake blonde hair, and I run my mouth a lot on LinkedIn, I stand out a little bit. It happened in the UK too, when I was in the UK, like, really? This is LinkedIn. We're not on Instagram.

The first time it happens, it's like, it's so funny. So I went to, like, the LinkedIn conference a few weeks ago and like, somebody, somebody did come up to be like, hey, Anthony, I've seen you on LinkedIn before. And I was like, this is the first time anyone's ever said that to me. But then, like, I did it to several other people at that conference too. And it was like, just kind of funny. And, and yeah, it was fun to be like, hey, I've. We've engaged on each other's posts for a while. I've seen what you've been talking about. You've seen what I've been talking about. It's great to, like, finally meet you in person. And like, we kind of deep dove on a couple subjects there. So it's always funny when you, like, get to meet somebody in person that you've, like, met online for a while before, too.

It happened to me last summer, too. I went to a conference in Denver that I got invited to speak at, and there's a bunch of people that I've been engaging with for a while, but then I think it was about 150 people that came out and there was so many people that I didn't know existed. And they're like, yeah, I've read every single one of your posts for a couple years. And then they were naming, like, the camper van thing. And when I had a dog and I was like, wow, wow, this is a little bit strange. Like sometimes I just post stuff and you don't really think anyone's reading. I actually don't. Sometimes I forget that those impressions are real. Like there are that many people seeing your posts and you just kind of forget. And it's a number on a screen or a name on a screen, but it's an actual human reading your stuff and seeing your posts. It's kind of wild.

Yeah. And I think that kind of exemplifies maybe the power of social is if you're a company or a person. There's been lots of times where people have told me they're like, oh, I've been seeing all your posts, but we haven't talked in months. And they're like, oh, I've been seeing all your posts. It seems like you guys been really busy over there or working on some cool stuff. And that's just like a way to communicate with people at scale and like share your stories and let them get to know you. You know, if I was to go have one on one conversations with all those people, that would take up a lot of time. But that's a way to do it at scale and you know, be able to keep these connections and relationships warm and stuff like that. So I think that just exemplifies the power of social.

Well, and the funny thing is a lot of that's not easily measured. I think that's where a lot of times the guys on the paid side I find struggle with some of the organic side because it's not all measurable. Like obviously you need some measurables, like you need conversion still and followers and metrics and all that. But a lot of the power of organic is just knowing that year after year if I show up and I talk about my brand, all those people are seeing it like it's in the back of their mind. And that's always been my goal with my brand. It's just if I'm out there and I'm different enough, like I'm going to have every single person this platform know who that guy is. And I think that, you know, not every single person, but a large percentage do. And that's, that's the goal with organic is just show up, send it again and again and again. And eventually when someone's like, hey, I need a guy to, you know, ghostwriter, that's got a really crazy tone of voice, then they think of me.

So yeah, attribution is definitely one of the biggest challenges and problems, you know, challenges in B2B marketing at this time, definitely on the paid side. So I would ask, is there any, like, tools or techniques or things that you like to do right now? You know, I know there's probably more tools on the paid side because it connects into the apps platform. But I'm curious, is there anything on the organic side?

So the best thing that I found in the last year, I'm working a lot with AI founders and newsletters, and a lot of them have newsletters. So that's the easiest for me is kind of measuring newsletter subscription signups per month. And I have links that track it and we put it in the comments of their posts and sometimes in the posts a lot. So I can track that as like, hey, I had a good month driving traffic to that. So even if I can't measure, you know, how many brand collaborations did they get this month or did they land a deal or what have you, like, those are harder to measure. I do have landing page visits and we can, you know, we can measure that, but it's a lot easier to go like, hey, this month we had, you know, a thousand newsletter signups. That was a good month. You know, this month was 500. Maybe that wasn't so good. So again, kind of a basic way of measuring, but currently in the space that I'm doing, it's. It's the best that I can do other than, hey, you know, the classic followers and, you know, reach and all the standard stuff. Right.

And I interviewed somebody else recently from LinkedIn and I think her response was like, well, by asking that question, you're kind of like, that's the problem. You can't like ask that question a lot of times because so much of it is not measurable. A lot of these impressions, even if they don't lead to newsletter signups, they're at least seeing your brand and then they're going to be more likely maybe in the future. So you are creating a bigger snowball that maybe you're not seeing the whole picture of that.

The toughest part with what I do, honestly, because organic works the best after six months to a year, to two years, to three years. But obviously like, hey, if you're paying me month to month for the first three months and you're not seeing X amount of subscribers and you're not already bought into the power of organic, you know, you're going to cut the contract. And that's the toughest part with what I do, is that the Power really comes in, in the long game. And you kind of have to already believe in organic, that you can see the vision of like a Chris Walker, for example. You know, he talks about it all the time. Like, if you, if you see where it's going and you see the vision for it and you believe in it, you'll go, okay, I'm investing X amount of dollars, whoever I pay, whether it's me as a ghostwriter or a different team. Like, I'm investing this in organic social. And you kind of just trust the team that you picked and just go, I'm going to do this for the next five years. If I'm in business, that's my recommendation to people. Again, you have to vet who you pay and the team you choose and make sure they're sharing good content and all that. But I do think it's kind of buying into the power of organic versus being worried too much about individual posts or metrics and all that, because even goes up and down, organic's crazy. Like, you know, the last month has been awful for organic. It may change next month and be crazy good. And LinkedIn's kind of all over the place like that, right?

It's kind of like SEO. Like, you gotta play the long game with it, especially because in the beginning, you know, you're not gonna get a lot of reach. You gotta build up, you know, your audience. LinkedIn's gotta get to know you. It's like, sounds very similar, you know, in the way you describe that. Like, sounds very similar. Like SEO it is.

Except the main difference, which makes it tougher than SEO. SEO, you don't need to talk to those website visitors, really. With organic. Even if I do an amazing job with the content that I write for people and the traffic that I drive, if someone's not willing to be in the DMs and talk to people and network and do coffee talks and work on conversion, everything I do, it means nothing. So it's a tough thing where you kind of need to do everything for people or partner with the team where they again, go like, hey, I'm paying someone to write my content, to drive traffic for me to come up with these strategies. But I also have to be there in the, in the messages to convert and talk to people and build relationship. Because you can't, you can't really outsource like that. I know everyone wants to, but you can't really do it.

It's hard to outsource, like all your past relationships and who you are and how you're going to respond to these messages. So you just like, mentioned a lot, like, several interesting tactics or techniques there that I think most people don't think about or aren't aware of. I'd say, like the stereotypical case of somebody who tries it but doesn't have success that I've heard about is like, okay, we h hired an intern to go write social posts for us. She wrote like, you know, 20 posts and posted it, scheduled them, and then we didn't get any comments or any likes out of them. But what you just mentioned was like, you know, content's obviously like the main thing, but then what you talked about was like, DMs connecting with people, engaging with people. So can you elaborate a little bit more on some of those strategies that might help social.

Absolutely. So I've actually found, and this is not going to be popular, 95% of what you should focus on the first three months is actually the community building. It's nothing at all to do with your content matters very little, little in. In today's LinkedIn organic world, which would sound crazy. It's just the way the algorithm works. So if you're not commenting on other people's posts, if you're not adding 15 new active connections a day on LinkedIn and then messaging and networking, your posts aren't going to reach anybody. The algorithm's not 2020 anymore. Like, you can't do great content even and get any traction. So the hard part is outsourcing that. Because what most companies want to do is just they don't want to deal with that. They got their business to run. I don't want to be spending, you know, even 45 minutes commenting on some posts and answering DMs. So what some companies do is they'll hire a VA to do it, right? Like you said, an assistant or someone that'll log in for the CEO or for a vp and then they'll do the comments for them, right? Then the problem is, well, now what about the messages? Are you going to act like the VP and the CEO, as in the messages too? That could get a little murky and a little tricky. And so what really ends up happening, it just doesn't work. Like, like from what I've seen, having worked with tons of founders, tons of people in the space, like, you can't really outsource your messages. You can outsource the comments, but the messages and the conversion and all that and actually showing up, you can't. So again, what I've found actually works is what I think works is you need to find someone on your team that is willing to spend 45 minutes to 60 minutes a day on LinkedIn. Whoever it is, if it's the founder, you know, if it's an intern, whoever it is, and go, okay, this is, this is the face for the company. And ideally you'd have a few of them, you know, and they need to invest that 45 to 60 minutes and be there and talk to people and build relationships, do live streams. That's how you actually get traction now. And I think the mistake most of these companies make is, like you said, they'll pay someone to write some posts. It doesn't work. They try for two months and then they scrap it or they do it for six months and they get some traction, they get some messages coming in, but they don't convert anything because again, there's no one sitting in the DMs ready to convert, ready to go on a coffee shop, you know, host a call. So that conversion side going from, hey, we got the traffic, now what do we do with it? I don't think they think through that.

Right? I think so. Let's, let's start with like the people just getting started, you know, as I've like, you know, explored the organic platform more, I'm like, how do you, how do you get people to like comment on your. Like this sounds like a funny question to ask. Like, how do I get people to engage with my posts? You know, number one, I think, I mean, the default thinking is like, if I put good stuff out there, people are going to engage on it. Well, that's not always the case because like I see lots of other people posting and like, you know, LinkedIn's obviously a network. You know, I'm seeing second and third degree stuff. Like I don't know some of these people and I'm like, I don't know this person. What they're saying, like, maybe a semi interesting to me, I don't know them well enough to go like, leave a comment. So I think, you know, what I've kind of thought is I'm like, you almost need to like make friends online to like, you get people who are going to get people that, who are going to comment, you know, engage with your content, you probably need to engage with theirs. It's like kind of needs to be reciprocal, I think, in that manner. But you've kind of like mentioned like several things here of like, you need to like be willing to chat with people, get to know them. You mentioned like having a coffee hour or something like that. But it kind of sounds like to me, like you kind of need to like make friends online on LinkedIn if you want to get that, you know, get that engagement built up, especially in.

The beginning, a hundred percent. So if someone was starting from zero today, like Luke, what do I need to do? I'm willing to invest. You know, I want to post three times a week. I've got an hour. What, what do I do? So if it were me, I would pick a regular posting time. So if that's your lunch hour, if you have a regular job or if it's before work or after work, doesn't really matter. There are optimal times. But I just go take that one hour that, that you can invest for the next, ideally six months, let's say three months. Let's say you're going to try it for three months and stick to the same hour. Now what you're going to do for the first week, don't worry about posting at all. Just start to notice who's sharing posts. You know, oh, I don't have anyone in my, in my feed that's sharing posts. Well, then what you need to do is just go into your search bar and search for some keywords. So it was, you would be, you know, paid marketing, B2B marketing. For me, it would be AI, organic, social. If you, if you search those keywords, you'll start to see some people's posts and you'll be able to find some active users. So the key kind of is finding people that are online during that hour that you're able to invest. And then like you said, you kind of need to befriend them. So for me it was, hey, I, I've had this one hour. I found some people posting that I actually enjoyed reading their content there in my space. And I just made a bookmark folder on my computer. So on Chrome, I made a folder, added them to it, and every day I would just go and leave a comment. And sure enough, you know, you like anything. If you go to the coffee shop or the golf club or whatever you do, you know, if you show up every day and you leave a comment, you say hello every day, eventually the conversation is going to go beyond below to something a little deeper and then you send a message and you kind of go from there. So it really is just how to make friends online at the start. And to push your content, you do need to do that. You can't just show up and hit post and leave a couple comments and expect it to take off it really is about building that active network. So that's what I would do. Then I would also add 15 new people a day. So this is where a bit of the work comes in. I have some free guides on this that I'm happy to share as well. But basically you're wanting to find 15 people in your space that are active, ideally during your posting time. So there is a little bit. It sounds intense, but it's not that intense. Once you kind of get used to it, you start adding people that are active when you're active, and you'll build a community that's, you know, online, when you're online. And that's where the engagement starts. Really?

Yeah. So there's two things here that I feel like I've learned from you or, you know, this is why you should follow Luke. It's because he shares a lot of great stuff and guides and like, how you can do this and how you can get started. Luke shares a lot of great tactics and tips. Two things that I've learned that you just mentioned was, number one, like, posting times. And in the beginning, like, I would just post randomly whenever, like, the thought came across or like whenever I finally polished up the that post. What you've made me realize is like LinkedIn, like anything else, people have their rhythms. Like, there's different people that check. Some people just check in the morning on the way to work, some people check in the lunch hour. And like, that's just like their natural time. And maybe they don't do that every single day at the exact same time. But people, humans, you know, we have our, our rhythms that we usually go through. So if you're always posting in a certain window, you're going to be more likely to make friends in that certain window and just build, like, affinity with people. And like, I think you mentioned coffee shop. Like, if you go get a coffee on your way to work every day, you're probably going to bump into the same people. And then after you bump into them 10, 10 times, you're like, maybe you say, you know, every day you're like, hey, I see you every day. You know, you talk to the barista, stuff like that. And it's just like, this is how we do this online now, you know, so that's just like, funny to think about. But yeah, if you're just getting started, maybe you just choose your, your posting times and then you post frequently during those times and you're going to be bumping into the same people and that's going to help you get started. So that was one and then the other one was what we've talked about is like, you know, if you're on LinkedIn, there's like some like, you know, really big people and like almost even you as an example that like everyone will comment on the big, big profiles, number one, because there's something in your post that they like or they like your content or they also maybe want some visibility too. So ways to find other people who are active are finding those maybe thought leaders that you share in common and seeing who their followers are and who are commenting on their posts. Obviously you can see that these people are making the effort to go do commenting and spending time being active and will, you know, and they're out there commenting and liking on posts. So if you, there may be good candidates to build friends with first. If you are going to, because then you know you're going to create a relationship with them. They're already doing that. You can see them doing that versus if it's somebody who's not doing that, you're not sure if they're even going to engage with you online. So I thought. So both of those like blew my mind when you share those with me. So Luke has lots of great stuff to share. Follow him on LinkedIn and learn, learn his, learn his ways of the wizard.

Thank you, I appreciate that. But the last point's true. It's just you kind of pick like you said. I liked what you said in the first point too. Like everyone has their habits and it's kind of hacking yourself. Like you need to know. Okay, if I want to get into the organic game, what is my habit? Do I check at lunch? Do it. Do I check at the beginning of the day? Do I check at the end of the day? And kind of knowing what you're already like doing and then kind of notice, well, what kind of content do I actually engage with or what do I read when I'm not at work? Like, you know, like some of us. And that's kind of like how I hack myself because I, I want to stay consistent. So I only connect with topics that I enjoy reading, you know, and lucky for me, it's what I do for work. I know not everyone likes what they do for work, but it helps. It helps if you like it. Same thing with content. It helps if you actually enjoy like what you're writing about and what you're doing or on organic side, you're probably going to quit because it's not something you're going to see results in, right? Away. So you kind of have to know how to hack yourself and meet people and play the game correctly.

So yeah, I've seen you had some re. Some interesting events you've hosted or been a part of recently on LinkedIn with some, like, some topics that I've been interested in. And I'll kind of ask if you like, want to share about any of these topics. So I think the ones I've seen recently are the dark side of LinkedIn, lead magnets and then like right with AI. So obviously we'll talk more about AI. But I'm curious, what is the dark side of LinkedIn?

Absolutely. I love talking about the dark side of LinkedIn. It's the wizard thing. Okay, so look, paid. I don't know if paid really has a dark side. I mean, you could tell me if it does. But organic people want to hack the game, right? Like we're saying it's a tough game to win organic, like, you have to show up, be consistent. It's not just about writing great content or understanding your space. It's also networking at scale. So to really do it well, it takes a lot of time. Like, like when I first started during the COVID years, I was on eight to 10 hours a day, which is, I know it's crazy, but it's what I did that, that's how I built 150,000 followers. There's no hacking. It was me online all day. So to get to that size audience in organic, it's showing up a ton. Really. There's. There's no way to hack that now. Some people hack it. And what do I mean by hack it? In organic social, you can actually buy followers. You can join engagement pods. Now there's an engagement pod is essentially artificial likes and comments on your post. So you can actually sign up to platforms right now and websites where you just put your profile in there and whenever you post, you automatically get a bunch of likes and comments on your post. There's websites that do that and then there's also WhatsApp groups where people are sharing to hundreds of people again their content. And everyone likes and comments on each other's posts. And basically it helps you get boosted outside of your network on LinkedIn because you're getting a rush of comments and likes and LinkedIn algorithm thinks, oh, this content is incredible because you're getting so much engagement early and it pushes it to the explore page. So the reason why it's the dark side, this is against the LinkedIn terms of service. You're not supposed to use Artificial means to inflate your content. And so there's kind of a war within the potting side of things. And honestly, it's been a part of Organic Social since it started on, on Facebook and Instagram. I don't think it's ever fully going away. But it can discourage people when they're getting into the content game on the organic side, because they'll post, like you say, get one or two likes, and it's a real grind. And then they'll see someone with like 5,000 likes and, you know, 200 comments and they get discouraged. And it's not to say everyone with big reach is cheating, but it's just kind of knowing that there are artificial numbers out there on LinkedIn and it doesn't necessarily mean someone's successful or good at their space or even good at organic just because they have big engagement. So.

Right. I think, you know, we can't, you can't have an episode about Organic Social without like, at least mentioning this, this topic. And I think, you know, what, what to make clear here is these are against the LinkedIn terms of service. LinkedIn is a very smart platform. I'm sure they're going to find ways to get rid of those people that break their terms of service. I know, I've seen on Twitter that Elon's very clear when he's like, we're clearing out the bots and we're deleting all these accounts and like, you know, I' LinkedIn's doing that behind the scenes too. If you're doing this, you have the chance of getting restricted or shadow banned or whatever you want to call it.

So, you know, it's not worth it.

We're not recommending these methods.

No.

And I think the other thing that I've thought is, like, when you use, you know, these other means that are not natural, your, your profile is going to get skewed and your network's going to get skewed into a direction that is not ideal for your content. So suddenly LinkedIn thinks you're going in this direction, but you really, your content's over here and then that's not, that's not help. You're not reaching the people you want to reach anyway. So maybe the likes look sexy, but really you're just not reaching the people who you're going to want to reach anyways.

It doesn't work for most of the B2B space. The reason being the problem with pods is if you join them, your content gets shown to more POD members or more People that their followers are, and they're. It's basically getting shown within this little bubble on LinkedIn. The only ones that kind of win in the pod space are the ones that aren't selling a high ticket product. They're selling something really low ticket and basically they're driving traffic to their newsletter. So that's where they'll go viral with pods and the reach is really broad. And so they'll drive traffic to a newsletter that's broad, that can work within pods. Again, I'm not saying to do it because, you know, it's. I wouldn't do it, I don't do it, I don't recommend it. That's really the only case that I see it even slightly working. If you have an actual business on LinkedIn or an actual service, it's really not going to benefit you anymore. It's going to get you in trouble. Your content alone is going to be shown to the wrong people outside of the.

And sometimes I can also always tell like when someone's doing it because like, you'll see the comments and like it's, it's like the AI comments or the comments just like, don't make sense or like, and like, is that beneficial? Or like that also looks bad. You know, when I look at someone's and they have like, like random comments and I'm like, I don't trust this guy. Like these comments like, don't make sense. I can tell he's, you know, using something like that.

And honestly, the number one way you can tell really if it's, if it's an influencer, especially if they're selling like a guru course or program or something, do they go live? Like, like I always ask this, does this person go live or not? If they don't go live, it's questionable because you can't bought live streams. So you can see like if someone has, you know, a hundred thousand followers, 200,000, 500,000 and they're going live and they're getting like 100 people show up, 50 people show up, then there's probably something fishy there. You see this on Twitter with, with people with big followings. They'll go live and they'll get like 50 people and they have like 400,000 followers and you're like, okay, you know, I, I can see through this. You can't cheat lives, right? So if you see someone go live, they got a big following and a bunch of people are there and there's a ton of comments and people are really enjoying this person. You probably have a better idea that, hey, they actually do have, you know, an audience that enjoys the content that shows up, and it's personable. There's no bot comments on live streams. Like, you can tell someone's listening to you live and commenting. So that's kind of my ultimate test, beyond the arguments and all the other metrics and things, is do they go live and you know, how many people have shown up for them?

All right, let's switch gears to AI. What everyone wants to talk about these days, you know, but the hottest thing is AI. AI powered this. AI fueled that. But I thought a lot of stuff we mentioned at the top of the episode was interesting on how to use it the right way. Because I've fallen in that trap of, like, generating stuff and, like, I'll go through seven different prompts, and I'm like, this isn't perfect, and I ditch it. Yeah, so tell us. Tell us, you know, talk us through the right way to walk to write with AI. And then I think you have some training materials, so let us know about those too.

Absolutely. So what I think the right way to look at AI is not trying to get a finished post or a finished product. It's going, hey, I. I have 30 minutes a week to invest in writing posts, or 45 minutes, whatever it is. You know, do I want to spend all that time writing 1 post without AI or do I want to use AI to get me really close and then work on my editing skills as a copywriter? So that's how I teach people. There's prompts that can get you about 80% of the way there, where you have a nice structured post about a particular topic, and then you take your own expertise and you go in and you humanize it and you edit it. So that's mainly what I teach, is getting you off of that blank page syndrome to a nice product that's 70, 80% of the way there. And then learning how to see that and turn that into a finished post is where the real skill is. And you can't really shortcut that. That's just time spent practicing, editing and rewriting and all that. But I think if you kind of change the way you look at AI from like, oh, I'm getting frustrated trying to make this. This prompt perfect, instead to, oh, I just went from nothing to something that's pretty decent. And now I just need to learn how to edit and add flow to makes AI a lot easier and a lot faster. And I mean, again, there's so many LLMs now. And different tools that you can use. Like, you know, GPTach. GPT is the main one, but like Gemini is really good now. Claude, you know, I use Copilot a lot actually, and I've got a course coming up that I'm releasing, teaching people how to write with AI. And I actually moved from GPT to Copilot, mainly because Copilot actually still uses GPT4 Turbo, which is the technology for GPT. And it's free, so with Copilot, you don't have to pay for a subscription. And I love, actually love the browser Bing because you can actually scrape web pages in real time and it adds another element to the prompting and stuff, which makes it pretty cool. So Copilot's kind of my number one now. But yeah, it's, it's really just the way you look at writing with AI. Don't look at it like I'm trying to get a finished product. Just look at it like it helps you beat writer's block, get you really close to finished product. And then you're gonna still have to work at editing and writing a little.

Bit because there's just something about like a well formatted post that like just looks so nice.

It does.

And GPT, well, I don't know. In my experience, like I haven't trained it very well. It like just puts like way too many emojis in random places and I'm like, ew, that's. That doesn't look good. That looks gross.

I mean, you can get it with my prompts. Like I can get it formatted so it looks like my post, but still again, it's just to get it exactly like it with the tone and the soul and everything you can't do but formatting you can, you actually, can you. I just have to give you some prompts, but you can actually get the formatting pretty much bang on. Nowadays it's more like adding that call to action at the end or the perfect hook with emotion and the story in the middle and all that kind of stuff is tough stuff to, to make happen.

Well, I know you've been working hard on the, on the course that's coming, so I'm definitely gonna have to sign up for that. So a follow up question I have is how many times a day or a week do you recommend posting? Like, yeah, how many times a day a week would you recommend posting?

It's a good question. So I go back to the consistency thing. It really is about consistency. So for me, over a long time, the last six months, I Only posted three times a week. Three, four times a week. So I was doing Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and then Sunday and I skipped Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays. So I think you can get away with 3 to 4 if your quality is really good. When you first start out, I usually recommend five, five, six times just to kind of get the reps in, kind of like at the gym until you kind of figure out what you're doing and what you're good at, what you're not good at. But nowadays it really is a quantity over or sorry, quality over quantity issue. Um, so if you can only get three really good posts out a week, I would do three. If you think you can do five, go with five. But I'd err on less and making sure each post is a really good one.

Okay. And then if you were to get to, you know, if you wanted to maximize or move as fast as possible, like is more better. Like if you, if you were going to spend the time in write outs is more better.

Usually it is. But I would call, you know, qualify it with what is the best is can you engage every day? Because really what's going to make the difference is can you show up for that hour or more if you have the time? I mean if you want to go fast, it's really about putting more engagement in then more content content right now. So my answer would be still. I'd still go for three or four, but I'd show up six days a week at the same time. If I looked at your post and I went, okay, you're, you're putting out four bangers a week then yeah, let's see five, let's see six. But most people are not doing that.

So that's interesting. So the advice is go make more friends first.

Go make more friends. Honestly, if for anyone new it would be for a month, make friends, post once a week, but show up six days a week, week for 90 minutes and no one wants to hear. It's the unsexy part, man, we don't want to do that. We want, we want to post the content, get the engagement, get the dopamine. There's no dopamine in going and commenting on someone else stuff. Yeah, that's where you win though.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, people are willing to put in the time and effort there. Then that's what's going to help you stand out. And that's why, you know, I think there's also like an element of like you're, you're like you have, you know, I'll give you some appreciation. Like you're like a fun and friendly guy online and like, it's like fun to see your post, like read your stuff and like I like commenting on it because like, it's like, it's entertaining and you learn something. It's like that, that edutainment combination that like, you know, it's like enjoyable to read and you learn something which is like the ultimate combo. So if you can put out content like that and like help invite people in, that's like probably, you know, that's probably. How can you do that for your brand is like the question other people need to ask themselves. And I'll give you kudos for like, you've done a very good job of that.

Oh, I appreciate that. Another guy might be worth checking out if you're struggling with that. His name's Alex Sheridan. He's a, he's a video creator on LinkedIn. But he talks a lot about edutainment and he helps kind of more corporate B2B brands and businesses kind of figure out how to do that and how to teach that. My skill set's more the entrepreneur and the solopreneur kind of teaching people how to do it. But he helps more if you're struggling with how to do it. He's someone that does a really good job with, with edutainment maybe worth following and checking out.

I've seen a lot of, a lot of great videos from him and you know, some of them are like very, you know, pretty direct in the content. And I think my favorite ones are like when he has like a topic or a prompt and like, like he like simulates being like the LinkedIn guy, the Twitter and like responding as all the different platforms. Like those are like the funniest ones.

Yeah, those skits are awesome. He hasn't done them in a while. Bug him to make some more. I know.

All right, so finish telling us about this course. When is it coming out? How do we find it? How do we sign up?

Perfect. So I'm dropping the course on May 14th and you know, you'll see it on my page if you follow me. It'll basically be everywhere. It'll be on my profile. Basically I'm running a kind of a five day opening at a lower price and then I'm going to leave it online, but it's going to be a little bit higher after that. So basically it's going to show you how to write with AI with Copilot, which is a free tool. And actually the whole course is Using free tools only for 90 days. Because again, I wanted to make more people accessible to more people. And I forget because I pay for a bunch of tools and not everyone wants to do that. So I actually had to change the curriculum to make it free tools. So they're all free tools. It's going to drop on the 14th. Excited about it? It is how to write with AI, but it also will teach you how to get started on LinkedIn in the organic side. So if you're not posting, it'll show you both. It'll show you how to best leverage the platform like I have for growth in 2024, but also equip you to save all the time you know that you're spending writing the content so you can, you can do the hey, let's make friends side, which is the hard part.

So that's, that's awesome. So definitely have to check out this course. I feel like the two challenges that I see the most and even guilty of myself is like number one, just getting started, started and figuring out what to post and if. And it seems like you, you're like very much a process guy and like have it down and like this course sounds like really interesting to get new ideas and like putting that onto a process so you can generate your ideas and keep your posts. You know, create your, maybe create your initial posts and then the second path is like keeping it going. Like once you start posting, it's so easy to then fall off because you get busy with other things. I've done this myself many times. So having a process where maybe you can just invest, you know, a certain amount of time every week, week, get, get your post created, have your content plan. It sounds like this is going to save you a lot of time so that you make sure you're staying, you're sticking with it through the long term and really getting those results and not just quitting after a couple weeks like I have before. So.

Exactly.

Check out Luke's course.

No, I appreciate that's the goal, man. Cause I think it's, it's, it's. There's so many people that start off strong and then they fall off on organic. And it's just the value is right when you quit just like the gym. So you got, you got to see the vision.

All right, I have a couple rapid fire questions for you to wrap up here. If your game do it. First question is, what's your favorite kind of pizza?

I like it's, you know, I'm thinking I, I've been carnivore So I haven't had a pizza in like six months.

So you do meat only? Yeah, yeah.

I miss pizza so much. So much so that I'm struggling to think it's the pizza meat lovers with, like, meat on it and stuff. There you go.

Well, if you follow Luke at all, you know, like, pizzas are his thing, so that's awesome. Second question. How many cousins do you have?

Have? Oh, man, I have quite a few real cousins. They're all. They're all real. Probably at least 10.

How many of them are on LinkedIn?

Oh, just. Just one. No, two. I've done two. One that's active.

Yes. And number three, how many countries have you visited before?

I think it's in the 30s.

Oh, wow. That's a lot.

Yeah, yeah, I've been nomading for a long time.

Question four, how many times you've been kicked off a social media platform?

LinkedIn seven times. Instagram a couple times. Facebook once.

Number five, what's your favorite emoji?

I like the sunglasses guy.

Me too. Then last one, what country's next on your list?

Oh, probably Colombia.

Oh, cool.

I go back to Canada and, like, it's a stop. It's such a long way back to Canada from Paraguay, but so logically it makes sense.

There you go. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us today, Luke. It's been great to deep dive on everything organic, social. I think you have some great strategies and techniques and processes there. So for anyone who wants to get more into organic, go check out Luke and his content. He shares a lot of great tips and tricks and check out his course. So thanks for joining us today, Luke.

Hey, thanks for having me on, Anthony.