A week ago my father-in-law passed away in Indianapolis. He had been a lifer at Eli Lilly and received a nice letter from the company president on his 25th anniversary there. The letter was proudly displayed at his funeral and I posted a photo of it on LinkedIn.
That post has now reached what I call “social media escape velocity”: that rare, rare phenomenon when a post is so popular that it does go viral. By midday Sunday, three days after I posted it, the post had been seen by an impressive 5,000 people and engaged with (liked, shared, or commented on) by over one percent of them. Apparently that was the tipping point for the LinkedIn algorithm. In the next 24 hours LinkedIn showed it to more than five times as many people — over 25,000 with a still high engagement rate.
Once people at Eli Lilly discovered it it went through that world, of course, but still they were less than three percent of the people who saw it.
Positive and even inspirational posts tend to be the most popular on social media (outside of politics and sports). It’s not uncommon to see personal posts on LinkedIn get thousands of likes and comments. A marketing or other business tip is not likely to achieve that level of enthusiasm. Sometimes these personal posts elicit “LinkedIn is not Facebook” admonishments, but given the posts’ popularity these tend to fall on deaf ears.
What I posted wasn’t purely personal. It has to do with how a company acknowledged a long-serving employee: what the president rightfully described in the letter as “a mutual compliment”. But in any case, in social media you don’t need to be all business. You can and should let your personal side come through.
BTW, I also posted this in Twitter where I supposedly have more than 3X as many followers, but it got no action there at all. I find in general that LinkedIn is a far better platform for business engagement.
