Lessons - How I Hacked The LinkedIn Algorithm | Hala Taha - Podcast Host, Entrepreneur & Speaker

In this lessons episode, we dive deep into the world of social media strategy, uncovering how to dominate a single platform, leverage organic reach, and create impactful content that resonates with your audience. From growth hacks to algorithm insights, you'll learn the secrets behind building a thriving personal brand and driving explosive growth. When you approach, you know, we're going down the rabbit hole of the product that you're offering people, and I love unpacking this because I'm a marketer too. And to a fault, though, because I like to figure out things myself first, and then, but I'm not even trying to sell it to somebody. I'm just trying to figure it out myself. So I love to understand how you approach channels, how you approach unpacking algorithms, all the growth marketer hacks that you do. And when people hear hacks, it's not that you're doing something that is not allowed. It's that you're using the channel to the best of its ability. And most people don't know how to do that. I mean, there's so many levels to this. You're talking about CEOs that don't know how to build a personal brand that are so far removed from the day-to-day activities of actual marketing. All the way down to growth marketers that are running and operating in a social media agency that are trying to figure out LinkedIn and don't get it. But then it seems like some people every single post just hits. Yeah. All these different nuances and the span of knowledge that you have in bridging that gap between the tactical implementation because you've done it before and the needs and the wants of the actual customer serving, that's actually what's made it successful for you. And the $5 million run rate in two years is fucking insane. But as a marketer, when you look at different channels, you go into a new channel. What are the things that you think about? What are the things that you look for? Can you even describe something that isn't common knowledge on a channel that you do really, really well on that people should start to understand and look at social this way? Yeah. So number one, you want to make sure you're picking the right platform and you don't want to spread yourself to them. So one of the reasons why I really want in this whole game of podcasting is because when I started, I didn't focus on Instagram, YouTube, all these platforms. I said, you know what? I think my target audience are young professionals. And I think there's a huge gap. There was only like Lewis House, was sort of doing his thing on LinkedIn. And I just came in and I focused on LinkedIn and I became the number one podcaster, bigger than Lewis House, bigger than Jay Shetty, bigger than Jordan Harbinger on LinkedIn in terms of my engagement. And I got leverage from that. And that really set everything off. It set up my social agency. It enabled me to trade my audiences with podcast apps and then blow up my podcast later on. And so LinkedIn really kicked everything off for me because I just focused on that and realized my target audience was there and there was a gap. I could stand out in the feed because of my topic and because I'm a young woman, I stood out and I could be different and you want to be different on social media. That's how you win, you want to stop the scroll. So that's number one, figure out where your target audiences, where you have the most opportunity, where there's organic reach, right? And focus on one platform until you gain leverage and then move on to the next platform unless you have a huge team and lots of money. That's a different story. But if you're just starting out and you don't have that many resources, just focus on one platform where your target audience is hanging out in mass. Can I ask you one question on that? Because that runs counter to the GaryVee style strategy, which is everywhere. Which is podcast, 50 pieces of derivative content across every single social platform known to human beings. So that's great if you've got a lot of money in a big team, right? If you hire me, yeah, we can have omnipresence and I can crush it for you because I've already done that, been there before. But if you're starting from scratch, you need to learn the platform, the ins and outs. You need to be familiar with all the features. You need to understand the engagement hacks on that specific platform. You need to build a community on that platform and spend time engaging with your fans. And that doesn't happen by accident and spreading yourself to thin. I see this all the time. You get nowhere. And then you don't have any leverage to then make things bigger because you've got more power. You've got an audience to trade. That's a huge thing to have an audience to trade when you don't have a lot of money, right? And so figure out what platform you want to work on. Then you want to make sure that you understand, you experiment every day, you post every day. There's really two parts of a social media strategy that's important. Number one is like your content marketing. You don't want to push, I'm not a big paid ads person. I never got into it. Eventually I may have to do stuff with paid ads and I do paid ads for podcasts and stuff like that. But in terms of social media, I feel like organic is definitely the way to go. And so you need a really strong content marketing and then you also need to understand the algorithm. And those two things are really what can make somebody become an influencer online. And so in terms of the content marketing, you want to position yourself as an old friend to your community. And that means you need to understand your values. You need to understand your personality type. You need to clearly understand the audience you're trying to target. You want to mirror your personality to your audience. So for example, if I'm trying to attract young millennial men who are the people who listen to my podcasts, I want to make sure that I talk about topics they're interested in, that I sound cool and relatable and that I'm able to actually mirror the audience that I'm trying to attract. So what does that mean? I don't do makeup tutorials. I don't like do fashion blog. Yes, the bit of gas you bring on are certain types. I talk about person exactly. And so I'm always doing things. Not that make me happy, but that attract my target audience. Right? It's not about you necessarily. And you want to think about the impact that you want to make. And so like having a really clear voice identity is really important. A lot of people get stuck on visual identity on social media where they care about a logo, they care about branding. But promotional salesy things, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, actually do terrible because they don't stand out. And they're not authentic and they're not relatable. And so it's really getting clear on your voice identity. Being comfortable with showing your face is super important on social media. A lot of people don't like to show their face and that's one of the things that can like immediately just change things if you just get your face out there. And in terms of the algorithm, it's like, I do things like read engineering documentation, right? So I'm reading LinkedIn engineering documentation. I'm super nerdy. Yeah. Good. That's like, I thought I was nerdy. That's like taking it to another level. That good for you. That you need to do that shit to kill it because it's tough. Exactly. Yeah. No, I mean, that's absolutely wild. Now, you keep bringing up LinkedIn again and again and again out of all the social platforms. Like if you think about the common advice that people give, well, now you follow where the company is trying to promote. So the Reels and the Shorts and the Snapchat Spotlights. And that's where you focus your energy with short form video clips. Yeah. No one really speaks about LinkedIn. I'm obviously very bullish on LinkedIn. I mean, that's actually where I'm not, it sounds like as granular a marketer as you are, but I still understood that like LinkedIn is a content-efficient platform. Yeah. So when you put stuff on there, you get organic reach. I'm a big fan of organic, as somebody you did not have money starting at a podcast, then you have to find a way to tap into an audience. So I get LinkedIn and also their content is very similar. It's business content, so it hits. But I mean, I never put this much thought into it. So it's like, sometimes I'm just like a good accident. But I mean, you are very purposeful about all the shit you do. Yeah, very purposeful. Which is great. And that's probably why you have a $5 million agency. And I don't have one. That's a lot. But how do you actually, or why is LinkedIn so important in your content strategy? Why do you keep bringing it up? Like, what is the thing about LinkedIn? The differentiates it and put in layman's terms over focusing on YouTube or focusing on Instagram or focusing on Twitter or TikTok? Well, number one, like I mentioned before, the leverage of me being able to say, I'm the number one podcaster on LinkedIn. And I have a business podcast. So all the business brands love to sponsor me. And we didn't talk about it, but I have a podcast network where I grow and monetize shows. And a lot of my deals are 360 deals. So I'm one of the first podcasters that have monetized LinkedIn lives. I sell my podcast as a sign-all cast across my podcast, my YouTube and my LinkedIn. I'm the first one to do that, right? And so I've been able to like triple my impressions just because I use LinkedIn live as another podcast monetization tool, essentially. And so 360 deals are really important to me. Speaking engagements come from LinkedIn primarily. A lot of my clients are authors. Speaking engagements come from LinkedIn, not from Instagram, right? So really important for authors and the types of clients that I run. Something that I want to talk about, because you mentioned it before, but we didn't really get to talk about, is just basic rules of growing on social media. And I can take it from like broad cross channel to then we can focus on LinkedIn. Yeah, sure. So first, every social media platform, no matter what it is, their goal is to keep users on that platform, right? And anytime you post on social media, you need to remember that if you want to be rewarded on this platform, you need to keep users engaged and you need to keep them on the platform as long as possible. So if you do anything that brings users off the platform that boars them where people skim over your stuff, you're never going to win. You want to stop the scroll, you want people to spend time on your posts to take viral actions on your posts. And that means that you really need to know the content marketing that's going to resonate with your target audience, but then also have to like hack things to make sure that people do spend time on your posts and don't leave the platform. That's how you get rewarded no matter what. The other thing is that in this world, everything is mobile. You want to take up as much real estate as possible on the feed. It's super important. People miss this. So on LinkedIn, for example, people will put up horizontal images or text posts with no graphic. That's the worst thing you can do because the average person on LinkedIn is scrolling through nine posts, right? And if they just skim over your posts, you're actually going to lose points for the algorithm because you didn't have dwell time. Nobody actually stopped and looked at your stuff. And so the bigger the image, the better. So on LinkedIn, that's like a four by five aspect ratio for a graphic. And if you have a photo with a person on it, people are spending more time looking at the person rather than like a promotional graphic or something like that. And so big photos right now work the best on LinkedIn. Videos don't work well. The only thing that works well with video on LinkedIn is like LinkedIn Lives. That's why I do a lot of LinkedIn Lives. And so people try to take the same strategies like Instagram Reels and do it on LinkedIn. It doesn't work. It's a whole different platform with a different set of rules that are prioritizing certain features. It's not like Instagram. So that's a big problem. I see people trying to replicate, you know, what they do on one platform when it doesn't work that way. No, I was going to say one more thing. I guess on that point, I don't want to fire. No, no, you're good. You're good. I love it. It's an easy interview. But when you see people that are just copying the strategy, I just want to highlight something. I think what you're seeing is you're seeing people that follow Gary Vee or some other social media influencer. And they see that Gary has a very sophisticated strategy. But you do see that he'll just take a random video that he posted on Instagram and he'll post it on LinkedIn. And he'll get thousands of likes and... But you cannot equate what he has, which is critical mass of an audience versus what you're doing, which is no audience. Yeah. And I think that's the issue. People replicate that. And they're like, well, if he's doing it, I should do the exact same thing. You're playing at a different level. And you have to play at the level that you're at to eventually get to where he is. Yeah, and by the way, so somebody like Gary has well over a million followers on LinkedIn and his engagements the same as me and I have 200,000 followers. So he actually has a very poor engagement rate because like you said, he's just replicating and he's just got this huge audience. So it does well. But he could be doing so much better if he was leaning into the features that LinkedIn is actually promoting. The other thing is skimmable content, right? People don't like to read. And these algorithms want to keep users on the platform. So a platform like LinkedIn is actually going to deprioritize your post if you've got big chunky paragraphs and you're making people work because they know people are going to skim over them. And so big chunky paragraphs, you get deprioritized. Linking in the caption, taking users to another website, deprioritized. The other thing that's really unique about LinkedIn is that the last stage of the algorithm is actually human editors. This is way different than any other platform. And so an influence are like me and all my clients. I know how to manipulate the algorithm so much that like we're always going viral. So my worst performing post, 1500 likes, you know, and then ranging from like 1500 to like 5,000 likes. But then sometimes I'll get 100,000 like posts, 60,000 like posts, million, eight million views. Tell me like nobody's getting these types of results on LinkedIn. And the reason why is because my content is actually aligning to the LinkedIn editorial agenda because the LinkedIn is actually scanning the most popular posts and anything that aligns to careers, hiring, graduation, point in time holidays, Women's Day Month, Black History Month, whatever is on their editorial agenda, they're going to pour gasoline on it. And they're going to stop anything that's salesy, anything that's promotional, anything that's promoting me, my LinkedIn masterclass or whatever it is. And they're actually going to pour gasoline on the stuff that aligns to their agenda. So whenever I'm thinking about client strategy in terms of content marketing on LinkedIn, I'm like, what is the intersection of your niche and careers? Because that's how we're going to go massively viral. What's your ratio of promotional to editorial guideline focused content? On LinkedIn, sales happen in the DMs. Always. Always. LinkedIn is going to do, from the first step of the algorithm, LinkedIn is deprioritizing sales and promotional stuff. If you link out, deprioritized. If you have salesy keywords in your post, deprioritized, LinkedIn is in the business of making LinkedIn money and keeping users engaged and entertained on the platform. And they want to reward content creators who do that. And by the way, only 6% of people who are on LinkedIn are actually content creators. So there's a huge opportunity for everybody to be that dominant person in their niche, just like I was the number one podcaster or the number one podcaster on LinkedIn. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one. [♪ Music Playing [♪