How I got 200,000+ LinkedIn “Post Impressions” in 45 days (and why that doesn’t really matter)

Happy Labor Day Weekend all! I hope you are finding time with your family, friends, and self doing the things that fill you with joy, stoke and excitement. I wanted to try out the new TalentStacker “BlogPost” functionality and what better use-case to have some ‘value-add’ than telling you how I got 200,000+ LinkedIn “Post Impressions in just 45 days (and why that doesn’t really matter).

A year ago, I was looking for more learning avenues and tried PluralSight, a library of instructional content for many tech-areas. It was the one place to get David Liu’s “Apex Academy” videos he had recorded in 2016/2017. I had zero Apex knowledge and I wanted to be able to have a introduction to apex and developer coding so that I could do my day-job as a Salesforce Consultant better. I signed up, paid the $300 for a year of ‘unlimited’ access and promptly never touched it. A year later, with 45 days left before it renewed or expired, I decided to self-motivate and do 30 minutes of learning from the lessons each consecutive day for 45 days. This was nothing special, but I thought it would be a great opportunity to start posting more original content on LinkedIn instead of just re-sharing posts or URLs of SalesforceBen articles.

I started with making my own hastag: #45daysofapex and tracking my nightly journey after the kids went to bed. I would post a few lessons learned, include an image for eye-catching clicks, and try to keep those first two ‘preview lines’ somewhat of a ‘hook’ to get people to ‘click to expand’ with the ‘see more’ text. By keeping people engaged, it started to get traction. I followed all the suggestions in the TalentStacker modules (put any URL links as the first comment, include an image to catch the eye, respond to each reply quickly to help the algorithm, etc). It also included the other emotional responses: rooting for the underdog, the hero’s journey, having a trackable progression [night X of 45], predictability [i’d post generally same time each night], having an end point [Day 40 of 45 … almost there!], include plenty of the same hastag # words that relate to salesforce development, taking feedback [if you ask for help people don’t respond. if you post something technically wrong, people can’t NOT respond to point it out! They can’t help themselves!].

Again, I didn’t expect anyone to read or care, but many people were rooting for me to keep going, to finish the quest. I just wanted to learn SOMETHING about apex and I did. After 45 days I had a good beginner understanding of apex triggers, code coverage, functions and syntax. I’m not ready for PD1 but I did increase my LinkedIn metrics…

Profile Views (Last 90 days) = 827 > 2245
Followers = 3244 > 5025
LinkedIn Connections = 3500 > 4578

Average LinkedIn Post Impression: 4733
Total LinkedIn Impressions: 212,916

But most importantly: This whole thing doesn’t really matter. When I got to hug my kids good morning, they didn’t care if the previous night’s post generated a ‘dud’ of 1400 impressions or if somehow went a little more ‘viral’ and had 11,000 impressions. I just wanted to learn, turned it into content, and went along with my day. Now that it is over, people move onto the next shiny object, but the hope for me is that the next time I want to learn something in more detail, I may try to use some of the same above tactics (maybe for only 15 days or 30 days) to both engage with the Salesforce Ohana as well as provide myself personal accountability to keep the learning going!

I try to live by CANI: Constant And Neverending Improvement! Or as Brad Barrett from the ChooseFI podcast says: Make your life 1% better each week and see how the aggregation of marginal gains can really make amazing positive changes in y our life.