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- [00:00]
Nicole Lapin
Do you ever feel like your money is working against you? I mean, I've been hit by overdraft fees that I didn't see coming, waited for days for paychecks to clear, and gotten blindsided by surprise charges when I just wanted to grab some quick cash from an atm. It is exhausting, especially when you're trying to get your money right. Chime understands that every dollar counts. That's why when you set up direct deposit through Chime, you get access to fee free features like free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, and more. Learn more@chime.com helpwanted. You know that I'm a big budgeting nerd, so Chime's tool for daily balance updates and real time transaction alerts have made it easier than ever to stick to my spending plan. Chime is just banking done right. You can open a Chime checking account with no monthly fees and no maintenance fees. Plus you get access to over 50,000 fee free ATMs. That is more than the top three national banks combined. Work on your financial goals through Chime today. Open an account in just two minutes at chime.com helpwanted that is chime.com helpwanted Chime feels like progress.
- [01:01]
Chime
Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp or Stride Bank, NA members, fdic, Spot Me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Timing depends on submission of payment file. Fees apply at out of network ATMs, bank ranking and number of ATMs, according to U.S. news and World Report, 2023 Chime checking account required Coming up with.
- [01:14]
Nicole Lapin
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- [02:03]
Jason Pfeiffer
So don't wait.
- [02:03]
Nicole Lapin
Please protect your privacy, Build your brand and set up your business in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com helpwanted and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered agent@northwestregisteredagent.com helpwanted.
- [02:26]
Jason Pfeiffer
This is help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor in chief of.
- [02:32]
Entrepreneur magazine, and I'm money expert Nicole Lapin.
- [02:35]
Nicole Lapin
On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the.
- [02:37]
Jason Pfeiffer
Helpline and help callers solve their work problems.
- [02:40]
And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.
- [02:45]
And it starts now. So, Jason, I started doing a thing that I thought I never would.
- [03:01]
You started playing polo.
- [03:07]
Definitely won't ever do that. But I really thought I was never gonna be a LinkedIn girly. It always felt a little ick to me.
- [03:16]
Yeah.
- [03:17]
Just very work ick. People trying to do connection things.
- [03:24]
Yeah.
- [03:24]
And so I was like, I'm gonna just sit this one out. And we've talked about this on the show. We had Gary Vee on the show telling me that I should get into it. And then I think I did one post. And then after the reason. And then I bailed. I think I did one post when you were like, just do one. And then for some reason, yeah, I think when the market just went in the pooba, I was like, I'm coming. I'm coming for you, LinkedIn. So one month ago, I came for LinkedIn.
- [03:57]
I've seen it on my feed. I've been very excited. It's actually somewhat disorienting because you have not been on LinkedIn for so long. Just today I was looking through my LinkedIn feed and then there was a photo of you and your daughter. And I was like, what is Nicole doing on LinkedIn? Oh, wait, this is a post from Nicole. It was very exciting.
- [04:17]
Breaking news. And so I think about you when I post because you are Mr. LinkedIn. Yeah. And I'm like, is this something that Jason would approve? And I've never actually asked you what you think or how I'm doing as a newbie. And I'm just trying some things out. And to be fair, I have had things on LinkedIn, but they never actually came from me. They came from folks who are helping our team post, like, announcements on all socials. They were pretty, like, generic things. They weren't like, essays or feelings or whatever. So now it is.
- [05:00]
Nicole Lapin
And I would love for you to.
- [05:01]
Jason Pfeiffer
Roast them for me.
- [05:02]
Oh, I.
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And, like, really tell me, because I don't know what I'm doing right? And now my husband has been like, oh, I want to be a LinkedIn influencer too. And I was like, first of all, mama is not a LinkedIn influencer at all. I have no idea. I still am like, wait, which button do you push to do what and why? Also, can you not change the photo after it's posted? They're just things that I didn't know because it hasn't been my social playground.
- [05:28]
Yeah.
- [05:29]
So tell me, what am I doing wrong? Am I doing anything right?
- [05:33]
Nicole Lapin
What's looking cool? What looks terrible?
- [05:35]
Jason Pfeiffer
What should I take down? What should I do more of?
- [05:38]
So, first of all, welcome to LinkedIn. I am so excited that you're here. You've asked me to roast things. I'm not going to roast. Really? Because I think that the starting point for getting good at LinkedIn is doing exactly what you're doing, which is just try everything. Just post whatever. Just tear down the barrier between you and hitting the post button so that you're just getting things out and you're seeing what your voice is and what works and whatever. And then after you have a bunch, you can start to scroll through and see what resonated and what did people like the most. And you've had some hits here. I'm looking at this post. Got 1,841 likes or reactions or whatever. I think that's the most that you've gotten.
- [06:28]
The one with the Stop asking women how they do it all.
- [06:31]
Yes, stop asking women how they do it all. Start asking how much help they have. That's a great hook. And then you wrote. You wrote like a really meaty thing afterwards and you've got this good photo of you, but it also feels like a candid photo of you. You threw in some hashtags there. Can I just read a little bit of this? Because this is definitely your top performing post. So I want to. Before I roast other things. Let's just see what good looks like in your LinkedIn ecosystem.
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Also, this does have hashtags. And maybe I didn't do it on the others. Are we supposed to do hashtags on LinkedIn?
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No, no, not really. Yeah, hashtags are. I don't really understand why people do hashtags, but that's fine. You did it. I think it didn't add or subtract anything.
- [07:11]
Is it good to mostly look at the metrics for repost or you don't see the impressions part on yours?
- [07:18]
I don't see the impressions.
- [07:19]
You see the reactions of the hearts or the claps or the thumbs up.
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And the number of comments and reposts.
- [07:24]
So you think reposts is a sign of success more than the other stuff?
- [07:27]
Reposts is definitely a sign of success because it shows that people wanted to share this in full with their followers. And that is about as good an endorsement as you can get anywhere. But from the perspective I think of the algorithm, like, what does it LinkedIn reward? The answer is meaningful. Comments, maybe even before we dig into my assessment of your LinkedIn posts, let me tell you this. LinkedIn is programmed. The LinkedIn algorithm is programmed to look for and reward a few different things. Number one is what internally they call knowledge and advice. That's what they want to see, knowledge and advice. So they don't want to see generic information. They want to see stuff that's coming from your perspective and your expertise and that is designed to be sharing with others. This is language that comes directly from LinkedIn's editor in chief, whose name is Dan Roth. I've talked to him many times about the algorithm. He said that LinkedIn's algorithm is almost designed to think of each individual post as having its own total addressable market. And so it's trying to assess, like, what are you sharing here and who is it relevant to? And it's going to do that by assessing the information. It's also going to look at your background. LinkedIn is looking at what you are an authority on and what your background is. Because the reason to do that is because it doesn't want people to be getting a lot of traction for posting stuff that they're not experts on. So if you, Nicole, started posting about building construction, you don't know anything about building construction. Why would you be an authority on building construction? So it will see that you wrote something on building construction. It will look at your background, it'll say no building construction expertise there. And it'll say this is probably not all that authoritative and it will dampen it. But if you're writing within your area of expertise, which can be defined in a whole bunch of different ways, but like you obviously have a whole bunch of categories that you could say you're an expert on, obviously, like money and finance, but also publishing and media, and given who has historically been your fan base and who you have been very vocally supportive of, women in business or women in careers. And so like those kinds of subjects are all going to resonate, I think, really well. And LinkedIn is going to see that as places where you are authoritative. And then it's Going to look for meaningful comments, which is also language from LinkedIn. Meaningful comments, which is to say that LinkedIn wants to look at your post, say, okay, this is authoritative from this writer's area of expertise and it is targeting a specific audience. I will show it to some people in that specific audience, see if they engage with it meaningfully. Leave comments showing that they are thinking about what you said and have something to say about what you said versus like a bunch of generic comments that are just like, nice, great. And the more meaningful comments that are created, the more in which it will start to show it to other people in your total addressable market. That is what LinkedIn is looking for. So now that you know that I. Let's see. So this is a post from Nicole 4 weeks ago from when we are recording this. And it says, stop asking women how they do it all. Start asking how much help they have. And it's important so that you can visualize this, that you wrote that in one line, right? There was not like a. There was not like a space break.
- [11:01]
That I learned from you.
- [11:03]
Yes, you wrote a good hook. It's short, it's simple. In this case, it's two short sentences. I would. One modification I would have made on it is that you wrote it like a headline. So the S and stop and the A and asking and the W and women are all capitalized. That looks a little unnatural in LinkedIn.
- [11:20]
Changed that since then?
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You did. It's still showing up to me as.
- [11:23]
No, no, no, no, no. Like on the subsequent posts.
- [11:26]
Oh yes, I noticed that.
- [11:27]
So you don't like the upper.
- [11:29]
No, lower. No, that's. It looks too formal and too much like it's not coming from you, the person. And especially in a social environment, things that feel like they're coming from you, the person are going to be more engaged with. This is the reason why personal pages on LinkedIn vastly outperformance company pages. And this, by the way, is also a good rule to follow for email subject lines. So if you've got a newsletter, don't make the subject line with capitalizing the first letter of each word. If you just write it like a normal, capitalize the first letter of the first word. But then after that everything is like lowercase performance increases because it looks more like it's coming from a person and people are more likely to open emails from people. All right, next you wrote, we love a good how does she do it Story. The CEO who runs a billion dollar company while raising three kids and looks flawless at school. Pickup. The entrepreneur who scales a business from her kitchen table and still makes homemade meals. The politician who campaigns, legislates, and posts relatable Instagram stories of bedtime routines. We marvel at these women, et cetera, et cetera. Let me jump down a little bit to get to the meat of it. The real question isn't how does she do it all, it's how much help does she have and how much does that help cost? Behind every woman who does it all, there's usually an army, a nanny house, anyway. And so then you go on for quite a bit on this point, which is all really, like, strongly worded and really full of, you know, I think, perspective and passion. And you're connecting with people who are going to really relate to this and have a lot to say about it. And that is perfect. I see exactly why this kind of post worked really well for you and, like, why it would have engaged the audience. So before we go on to other posts, let me just ask you, like, where did this come from? Did you modify this post from something you had previously written? Were you just thinking about this one day and took to LinkedIn? What was the process to get to this post?
- [13:29]
It was something that I was thinking about and then took to LinkedIn. I don't think I've written about it before. And so as a new mom, I think about this idea of help a lot and this idea of how does she do it all? And I've always talked about this idea of doing it all before I had kids and defining what it all means and stop changing the goalposts and things like that. But I was doing an interview with the CEO of Skims, who is awesome and has four kids. And also I was doing another interview with Rebecca Minkoff, who has four kids. And I was like, what the heck? Like, they're such cool women's women. Like, Rebecca was so awesome during all the post fire stuff. She's like, can I send you my breast pump? All this stuff. And I was like, how do you have time to do all of these things? Because, like, I have one human and I can't. But then I was like, no, it's. We're. I just started thinking about this idea of help more. And so then I took to LinkedIn.
- [14:31]
I think that's great. I love that. Because here's the thing. The greatest ideas for posts are often going to come from your own life. And that doesn't mean that you're always narrating your life, but rather, I have trained myself to catch any moment in which I am just out living in the world or running into a problem or talking to someone, and something comes up that feels relatable and insightful to others. So sometimes that's like a friend asks me a question on, like, hey, how do you manage this? Or what do you think about that? And if I give them an answer and they say, that's really good advice, I stop myself and I say, write that down.
- [15:14]
That's a LinkedIn post.
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Like, that's a LinkedIn post. Write it down right now. Come back to it later. Because we have these thoughts throughout the day, and they're useful and they're valuable to other people, and they're often the most real because they're the things that we thought in the moment of experiencing something, not when we sat down to try to write a LinkedIn post. And that's the real valuable content. So my challenge to you and to anyone is pick a simple way. It could just be the Notes app on your iPhone. Pick a simple way to start capturing ideas in real time and then come back to them later.
- [15:48]
I need to do better at writing things down, especially with mom brain, where I'm like, oh, no, for sure I'll remember that. Obviously, you definitely remember. That was so good. Like, how could I not remember that? And then I definitely don't.
- [16:02]
Totally. Here's the last thing that I wrote down. This will actually probably be a newsletter, not a LinkedIn post, but maybe it'll be a LinkedIn post too, which is. I was recently telling someone about my concert list. So when I was in high school and college, I kept a handwritten list of every. It was basically was a scholast, a list of every single show that I went to. And I kept it up for years. And I love that I have this thing now because sometimes I go back to it and I think, oh, yeah, that was so fun. That show is really great. Brings back these memories that I otherwise would have completely lost access to. And I was telling someone about it, and it. I. It might. I just made this connection in my head between something that Drew Barrymore said in a profile that we ran, Entrepreneur magazine years ago, which was that she often sits down and instead of writing to do lists, she writes done lists. Like, things that she's done she was really happy with. And I really love that. I mean, you know, Drew didn't make that up, but she's the person who I learned that from. And here's what I wrote in my Notes app. I just wrote my concert list and how it represents that Drew Barrymore done list instead of a to do list. We need to keep track of what we did so we can feel a sense of progress and joy. Hard to remember what we did and loved when we're always looking ahead. That's it. That's all I wrote to myself. And then tomorrow or next week I will return to that and I'll turn it into a piece of content and we'll see. So I love that you did this. This is great. Now let's look at some stuff that performed less well.
- [17:25]
Okay, great. And to be clear, I do want to say that I know that there's this anger against the EM dash, but.
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I love an EM dash.
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Yeah, I'm team EM Dash. In fact, when I went on a date with you know who, you remember?
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Yes.
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And he used an EM dash in. I remember like a text or something. I was like swoon, like EM dash my love language or something like that.
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Anyway, that's funny.
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Do you know I'm gonna keep using.
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The EM dash, first of all, for context in case people don't know. There has been this rampant accusation that if there are lots of EM dashes and EM dash for people who don't know is it's like the hyphen, but it's the longer one.
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It's misused so much all the time.
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It's terribly misused, but it's often used to either set up like a list or connect related ideas. I love it. I use it all the time. People say that ChatGPT is using em dashes a lot. So if there's a lot of EM dashes in someone's work, then it was AI written. I think probably what's happening is that ChatGPT is just using an EM dash like a regular amount of time, but most people don't know how to use it at all. So it probably is showing up in some people's works. But good writers use EM dashes and.
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So I do love an EM dash. A little self conscious about it now. So my most recent one is sans EM dash.
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Oh, don't worry. I. I use EM dashes all the time. By the way, on that thing about the EM dash and the tec. Next. Do you remember that in my first note on OkCupid to Jen, who then would become my wife, I used a semicolon and her response to me was, you know how to use a semicolon correctly. So we should get a drink and proper usage grammar for the situation. Let's go. Stick around. Help wanted. We'll be Right back. Welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it.
- [19:26]
All right, tell me what sucks. I want to hear it from you.
- [19:29]
Yeah. All right, so there are a couple posts that you did that have these. Like. All right, so you wrote, here's one. The United States is doing something no enemy has ever pulled off voluntarily giving up its financial superpower status. And then you've got as an image, this thing that says dollar hits three year low, and then a kind of dollar bill turned into a crown sitting on top of a globe and it's cracked. Did you. Where did that come from? Did you make that on ChatGPT or something?
- [19:57]
No, that was. Yeah, it was. What's the image one called?
- [20:00]
Well, Dolly just got folded into Dalio. I'm thinking about Ray Dalio. But like you called billionaire Ray Dalio and had him make you an illustration.
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That's right. So AI generated. I wanted to ask you about just what other photos to put because I really. Even though I post photos of myself, I hate them so much. I just hate all photos. And so I've been stumped about the photo essay connection.
- [20:29]
Yeah. Because this post didn't perform that well. It only got 4 comments and it's long, it's thoughtful, but it didn't do all well. So. Okay, here's the.
- [20:38]
So do I delete the ones that don't do well?
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No, it's fine.
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Just leave it.
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Yeah, just leave it. It's fine. Doesn't matter.
- [20:43]
And then also, does the aspect ratio of the photo matter?
- [20:47]
I wouldn't worry so much about specific formatting, and I would instead just worry about this. Does this image create natural curiosity and engagement? Because that's ultimately what you're trying to do in a way. You think about it like this. There are multiple hooks that you're creating to try to get somebody's attention. And the first hook is the image. Photos of you can work great. It doesn't mean that you have to always use photos of you, but they do work. When I'm looking back at your posts, the top performing ones all contain a photo of you. The ones that work less contain some kind of AI generated image or something else you've posted. So that tells you something. Now, what does it tell you? I think what it tells you is that the photo of you is catching people's attention enough to then read the thing that you wrote above it. And that is what's actually going to drive them to then be interested to read more. So you want to think of the image as something that's just going to grab and hold attention. It doesn't have to be a photo of you, but it has to be a photo that feels welcoming and creating intrigue that's relevant to the audience that you're trying to serve. I'll give you an example from a completely different industry. There's a friend of mine, Matt Adelman, he's a retail expert. He like helps brands get onto Target shelves. Target the store. And his LinkedIn is primarily pictures of shelves. Like he'll just wander around Target and I'll just take a picture of the juice aisle or whatever and then he'll write a post that's like breaking down what he's seeing on the juice aisle. Oh, here are these changes that are happening and you don't, you know, broker changes or whatever, blah, blah, blah, retail. But those things work really well for him. They don't actually drive gonzo numbers because it's again that, remember the total addressable market idea. Like the total addressable market for that post is really small, but it hits that market and it drives value. Like he, he has gotten many clients out of those kinds of posts. So in that case, that image is super relevant to people who are interested in retail and then it's driving them to be curious about what he's writing about. So I'd say like the more in which you just think about who are you trying to reach. And I would guess that a lot of the reason that your posts with photos in them work really well is because they in some way or another represent the person who you are reaching through your content. Like here you, you've got a photo of you and above it it says we agonize over which blender to buy, but when it comes to our money, we wing it. Okay, that's making money personal. And there you are as a stand in for any woman who's seeing this post and is like, yeah, I am winging it on money. And here's another one. It's kind of hard to see you because there's like sun in your face. But the real threat to wealth isn't price, it's lifestyle inflation. Inflation didn't destroy my wealth. A fire did. Okay, super personal. Seeing you brings people in. Like all this stuff is not promoting you. It is using you to make a personal connection with an audience who's going to see you as relatable and then want to engage with what you're saying. So I wouldn't worry so much about it.
- [24:11]
So how do you do your photos? You make the meme Style, which is why I then tried to do a meme style, but I didn't do it as well.
- [24:18]
Yeah. So most of my posts are advertising breakdowns. I take an ad like a commercial, like a Burger King commercial or something, and then I will put a caption on top of it because you don't often know what the hell you're looking at otherwise. One of the caption styles that have been killing it for me is when I get an ad that features one brand attacking another brand, like Coke versus Pepsi or Burger King versus McDonald's and the caption says, never insult your competitor unless you do it like Burger King did in this ad or something like that. Like, for some reason that seems to really interest people. And again, I'm writing that in the image. It's a video file, but it's got the commercial playable video. I just put this together in Canva. It takes two seconds. But I have found that playing around with the photo, putting text on the photo, trying to get cutesy with the photo often doesn't work. It's actually just almost the plainer photos. Or maybe I've got a kind of quizzical expression on my face or just something that kind of makes people a little curious. But also, oh, hey, that guy seems okay. What's he got to say? That seems to bring people in. It's like a delicate balance. You want to put it out there, but you don't want to try too hard. I know it's hard, but like, okay, so look, here's. Let's see, there's another one that you wrote that didn't perform all that well. The image is this. It's very complicated image. The text says, by buying directly from China, are you really avoiding U.S. tariffs? And then it's got American flag and the Chinese flag and some fancy looking handbags.
- [25:56]
This was actually inspired by you.
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Oh yeah?
- [26:00]
Yeah.
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I hope I didn't steer you wrong. How did I inspire you?
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Because yours to me. Look me, me. The text looks Mimi. Say that 10 times.
- [26:11]
Yeah, Mimi. Mimi. Sounds like the name of a dog. This is what the post says. A Birkin for $1,400, a Louis for $50, a Lululemon dupe for five bucks. And not from Canal street, but straight from the factory. Then it cuts off and then you've.
- [26:26]
Got to click and the tiktoks say.
- [26:28]
Well, if you click more then you'll read more. Welcome to the latest Swiss in the US China trade, war, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, it's interesting. Clearly these things that were kind of news. Hooky didn't perform all that well for you.
- [26:38]
Yeah.
- [26:39]
And I think that tells you something. What exactly it tells you is hard to know without some more data. But this is the reason to be posting lots of random stuff, to just see what works. My gut might be that, number one, the hook wasn't that great. It's clever. A Birkin for 1400, Louis for 50. A Lululemon dupe, five bucks. I actually don't know what that means. What is a Lululemon dupe? Is that a product from Lululemon? What's a dupe?
- [27:05]
What? Where have you been?
- [27:06]
A dupe is like a person who got duped.
- [27:09]
Like a knockoff.
- [27:11]
Oh, okay. So here's what fails about this hook. It doesn't tell me really who this information is for and it doesn't tell me what's going to come next. And that is the power of a good hook is it identifies the audience and then it promises some payoff for that audience. Like when I go down to this one that you wrote, that killed it. Stop asking women how they do it all. Start asking how much help they have. So those two lines clearly identify an audience and they promise something to that audience that if you read more, you're going to get a breakdown on this very powerful statement that was just made. And you're going to either feel better about your own inability to quote, unquote, do it all, or you're going to have some useful insider like something, Right? Like you're identifying an audience and you're promising something to that audience.
- [28:05]
But then I started trying to do more of the stop doing blah blah and start doing blah blah. And then it became too like formulaic.
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Yeah.
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Do you think if it works, just keep replicating it?
- [28:15]
Yeah, yeah, if it works, just keep replicating it. The best example that I have of that right now is this woman whose last name I don't know how to pronounce. So I'm just going to absolutely butcher it. It's Jenny S T O J K O V I C. She is a venture capitalist and I have been watching her rise fast on LinkedIn. Here is the reason that I want to show you her stuff. If you scroll down on her posts, what you will see is that every three or four posts she's got a post with the exact same format. This is the most recent one, right? It reads like this. This 30 year old CEO was fired from her own company, then became the youngest self made billionaire in America. That's the hook that's all the text you see unless you click more. The picture that you see is a picture of Lucy Gao. I actually not sure how to pronounce it. Founder of Passes and co founder of Scale AI. She has silhouetted this picture of Lucy and then she's put this bright blue background behind her and. All right, so just remember that language that I just said to you. This 30 year old CEO was fired from her own company, then became the youngest self made female billionaire in America. Now we're going to scroll down a little bit on Jenny's posts and we're going to find Boom. Here's another one. Ready? This 50 year old spice Girl became a sports icon for young girls while secretly almost dying of an eating disorder. And now you've got a picture of Melanie Chisholm and it's the same thing. It was silhouetted and then put behind a very bright color background. And now I'm going to scroll a little more and we're going to find boom. Here's another one. This 36 year old CEO made history as one of the first black female engineers at NASA, then became the first Bahamanian to go to and then you got to click to read more and then again, same. Anyway, the point of this is she has found a formula that works and she is unapologetically hitting that formula over and over and over again. M I would say that instead of coming off as annoying and repetitive, what this does instead is it creates signal out of noise.
- [30:29]
And she reposts every one of them.
- [30:31]
Yes, isn't that interesting? She reposts every one of them. I should start doing that. If she's doing that, my guess is it's because some smart strategist told her to do it. So maybe I should do it too. Yes, she's posting it and then like shortly thereafter reposting it herself. But yeah, so think about it like this, Nicole. I'm sorry to say people do not pay as close attention to your content as you pay to your content. Like you know everything that you're writing because you're thinking about it, but other people don't. Instead, what people are seeing is like a constant stream of craziness on their social feed. And if you find something that works and then you return to it regularly, you don't feel repetitive. You instead feel like signal in noise. And people will eventually come to be like, oh yeah, I recognize that. That like that post. Oh that's a Nicole post. Or oh I love that she keeps sharing those whatevers with me. You know, I do These advertising breakdowns. Every day, after about a month of doing it, people just started leaving comments. They were like, I love your advertising breakdowns. Like, I look every day for your advertising breakdowns. They come to expect. It is great because it's formulaic for me. I don't have to spend that much time thinking about my LinkedIn posts now. And it already. So, like, part of the reason to be throwing things against the wall is to see what works for you and for your audience so that you can start to create some systems around those kinds of posts, which then will just make it easier for you to get stuff up.
- [32:02]
Sweet. So what. I guess the thing is, when I look back and I say, okay, this, I don't know what you would call it, like, emo mom post is working well.
- [32:14]
Yeah, emo mom.
- [32:15]
I don't have any. That. I don't have that much more emo mom stuff to say.
- [32:21]
That's fine.
- [32:22]
So then how do I replicate that?
- [32:24]
Well, there are a couple important questions to ask yourself.
- [32:27]
Number one, like, I tried to do it today. Yes, you did, kind of.
- [32:30]
Right. So today you posted a photo of you and your daughter, and it says, what do kids want to be when you grow? What do you want? What do you know how to read? Not anymore. It's a string. It's a string of very short words, which actually is hard to read in a social format. What do you want to be when you grow up? Is the wrong question to ask kids. There's a number of reasons why this might not have worked. One is actually because it's possible that the hook just scanned a little too difficult. Right? I. It's funny, especially on something like LinkedIn, one of the things that. And I'm sure you never really thought about when we were just in traditional journalism is that writing is also visual, which is to say that the actual shape of the text and the way in which it looks can impact whether or not people engage with it. And so really difficult to quickly read things or like, big, giant blocks of text often turn people off. And this is why I love EM dashes, is because it creates, like, a visual break, but also something like this. What do you want to be when you grow up? Is the wrong question. Ask kids. Another way you could have done that is don't ask kids, colon, what do you want to do when you grow up? Which it uses a lot of that same language, but it would put it later in the sentence, which I think actually would have made it a little easier visually to get to. And then underneath is ask this instead. Either way.
- [33:55]
Hmm.
- [33:55]
You'd ask, you know what, if you're, like, running out of, like, mom stuff, that is also okay, because do you want to be, like, the mom, the mom person on LinkedIn?
- [34:06]
I don't think so. I mean, I'd like to talk about general money thoughts and opinions about what's going on in the news, but nobody wants to see that.
- [34:17]
Yeah, I think that they do want to see money as it relates to them personally.
- [34:22]
And, yeah, current events are not super resonant on the LinkedIn.
- [34:27]
It's not super resonant on the LinkedIn. And I don't know if that's the audience or if that's the algorithm, but work backwards from why that works and what serves you. Your brand has traditionally reached younger women, right? Not exclusively, but that's been a big part of your audience who are looking for help, feeling like they understand money and have control over their finances and so on. I'd say that LinkedIn could be either a good place to find more of that audience or to prove how well you own that audience for other partners and sponsors who are like, nicole is saying exactly what we've been saying to our audience. She is exactly the right person to partner with. That's another reason to be doing this stuff. But there's lots of different ways to hit that. So when I look at Jenny's posts, for example, the VC who's writing about these successful female founders or business women, what I'm seeing is someone who is clearly trying to signal I am a champion for women in business. And then she's finding different ways to do it. Sometimes she's posting about herself, sometimes she's posting about successful women. And either way, what she's doing is sending a signal out into the marketplace of, this is who I care about, and this is who I serve, and this is who I'm focusing on. And if you care about that too, then you follow me and let's work together. You know, like, you could start from, okay, the mommy stuff has worked, and then what's the, like, next concentric circle out from there, it's women stuff, and then women in finance and women in controlling your careers and women, whatever, and you'll find that that, like, area. And sometimes it's about you, and sometimes it's about some other people and whatever. But keep your eye on the prize, which is establishing your voice and your name in an area that matters, that you want to draw attention into, not just from consumers, which is what you do on Instagram, but also from corporate partners, which is who you'll find on LinkedIn.
- [36:14]
Hell yeah.
- [36:15]
LinkedIn for the win. So you feel good? I'll see you on LinkedIn.
- [36:19]
Yeah, I'll see you there.
- [36:21]
That didn't sound that convincing.
- [36:23]
I'm scared. You're the LinkedIn king. I'm just a mere.
- [36:28]
You are one of my subjects. But you were one of my favorite subjects. Oh, come to me anytime, and I will reward you with a like and possibly a comment.
- [36:37]
Dream come true.
- [36:43]
Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason.
- [36:48]
Pfeiffer, and me, Nicole Lapin. Our executive producer is Morgan Lavoy. Do you want some help? Email our helpline@helpwantedoneynewsnetwork.com for the chance to have some of your questions answered on the show. And follow us on Instagramoneynews and TikTok MoneyNewsNetwork for exclusive content and see our beautiful faces. Maybe a little dance?
- [37:08]
Oh, I didn't sign up for that.
- [37:09]
All right, well, talk to you soon.