The tactical shift that led to 35,000% higher visibility on LinkedIn

By cdelprincipe@hubspot.com (Curt del Principe)

Sam Meller is the Head of Social for The Hustle, but we briefly got to borrow her for Masters in Marketing, because she makes everything she touches better.

That’s how I got a chance to hear about a tactical content shift that led to a startling 35,000% increase in visibility on LinkedIn.

When I heard this story, y’all, I threw an Asana card on our editorial calendar so fast I nearly broke my clickin’ finger.

In short, it’s the cautionary tale of how even good content may not be the right content for your audience. And how, even in this data-soaked paradigm, sometimes you still need good ol’ human instinct.

A Tale of Two Targets

When Sam first stepped into her role at The Hustle, she started with an audit of all its various social media channels.

“I wanted to really get a sense of what was working, what wasn’t working, and where we had opportunities to grow.”

She quickly noticed a disconnect: The Hustle was killing it on Instagram, but on LinkedIn? They weren’t feeling the love.

At the time, both channels were using the same content strategy: Daily recap videos where the host of The Hustle Daily Show would do a rundown of the headlines of the day. But while these videos were popular on Instagram, they just didn’t seem to land with The Hustle’s LinkedIn audience.

This is where a lot of marketers would simply assume that LinkedIn just wasn’t the right channel for their brand. But with over a decade in content marketing, Sam has learned to trust her gut.

“LinkedIn should be a really strong platform for us,” she explained. “Given that our whole brand is about business, careers, and entrepreneurship technology, it’s a natural fit. But we weren’t really getting any traction.”

A Tactical Twist of Topics

Around this time, Sam noticed that LinkedIn had launched a (then new) short-form video feature, similar to Instagram Reels.

“I’m just exploring [on LinkedIn] and starting to see a lot of these vertical videos of podcasts or explainer videos, and I think, ‘We have that! Let’s try that out!’”

But making unique, tailored content for each channel would simply take too much bandwidth and budget.

“I had the idea to test out podcast clips from My First Million with Sam Parr, who was the founder of The Hustle.” And, while sharing the same name didn’t hurt (Sam-ple bias? Wakka wakka), her thought process was more about aligning topically-relevant content to the expectations of the platform.

The results were nearly immediate.

“[Before the test] we had 71,000 total impressions in the month of August, and in September we had to the tune of 25 million impressions just from LinkedIn alone.”