Platform-Content Fit: Learnings from 100k LinkedIn Impressions & 100 Tweets
More experiments on short from content to find my favorite distribution platform
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In a recent post, I alluded to the importance of building your platform on owned vs. rented real estate. In the digital world, this means building an email list.
That being said, it’s still important to build a distribution engine for people to get exposed to your work that you can engage with directly likely via email.
After ignoring social media for about 5 years, I’ve been on a non-serious quest to determine which distribution platform best suits me.
It turns out that Youtube is pretty weak sauce for growing your list so the next places I turned were Twitter and LinkedIn.
I originally started out only on LinkedIn because that showed a stronger signal on my existing substack analytics, but I quickly realized that the content I was publishing on LinkedIn could often be repurposed for Twitter. So it made sense for me to run both experiments in parallel. I also just found myself enjoying tweeting spontaneous ideas that were alive for me.
I committed to try and post on both every day for 30 days and see what would happen.
Being One of Those (Mildly Annoying) Daily LinkedIn Posters
My highest engagement LinkedIn posts were about my reflecting on biggest startup mistakes, teaching mindfulness to children, and a story about a panic attack I had when starting the company.
To be honest, I was pretty surprised by these results. Considering I had 25,000 LinkedIn followers I assumed I’d drive a lot more subscriptions from it.
However, as you might have seen I only directly linked to my blog in posts 2x. This is mostly because lots of my esoteric content on things like going through energetic puberty really don’t make sense for my LinkedIn audience. My LinkedIn world loves talking about sales, marketing, and startup lessons learned - less so the meaning of life, inner transformation, and the nature of reality. I knew this going into this publishing sprint, but wanted to see how people would react to softer content on mindfulness. I probably could write until I’m blue in the face about dramatic startup lessons learned and tactics, but it's not really interesting for me to publish content for the sake of growth vs. authentically sharing ideas that are alive for me.
Nonetheless, I was surprised at how little conversion I got from my profile to my newsletter link.
The most exciting part of the LinkedIn experiment for me was connecting with some other entrepreneurs who are interested in the expansion of consciousness. When you run a company and are constantly recruiting you’re going to spend time on LinkedIn which is why there’s lots of founders on there. So perhaps the breath of interest is not there, but some shared depth of interest amongst some really cool people.
100 Tweets in 30 Days
Twitter
Top tweets in terms of reach:
Because my Twitter account got hacked a few years ago and I lost all my followers I basically had to start at zero at the beginning of this year. I was surprised by how much growth I saw on the platform in such a short time. What’s cool is the growth and reach compounds on all these distribution platforms except for TikTok.
The primary reason I think Twitter performed the way it did was simply that I shared 4x as many direct links to my site. This is because the platform conversation is more amenable to what I like talking about. There is definitely a notion of platform-content fit or resonance that I don’t think exists to the same degree for lots of my interests on LinkedIn.
The other thing I like a bit more about Twitter is it’s a bit closer to an active dialogue around the content. One thing you realize as a content creator is that so much distribution is about relationship building. This component seems like it has much more vitality on Twitter than on LinkedIn.
Moving Forward
I think the big takeaway for anyone reading this is you need to test a bunch of platforms and find your content-platform fit. Once you do, you can put more focus there.
I don’t really have an interest in creating content for growth’s sake vs. just following my natural inspiration, so not really sure this changes much for me. More than anything it highlights the potential power of consistency and helps me align my bow toward the biggest opportunity zone when I feel like pointing it.
I think it’s valuable to keep a list of ideas you have and share them so that you can repurpose them as you see fit. High-performing tweets can often be expanded to become LinkedIn posts and vice versa. And then the best ones can turn into blog posts or book chapters. You get the idea!
If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
Good article, Scott! Can you say more about why TikTok doesn’t compound? I’d love to know why that is.
really interesting observations. I find it extemely hard to get people on both Twitter and LinkedIn to subscribe to my substack. And my LinkedIn Newsletter has more than 5000 subscribers, but they also don't find the idea of subscribing to my substack newsletter appealing...