Author: Emeric Ernoult / Source: Agorapulse

If you don’t feel like reading this entire post, let me give you the conclusion right here:

By repeating a LinkedIn post 5 times, I was able to get 24 times more views in total than the very first post had. That first post got 109 views while the next 4 got a total of 2,547 views.

You read that correctly. By republishing my link post on LinkedIn just 4 times, I was able to go from a disappointing 109 views to an incredible 2,656 views in total.

And it took me 10 seconds to set up by using the new “repeat” publishing feature offered by Agorapulse.

Now, if you want all the stats, read on.

The story behind this impromptu LinkedIn experiment

Nine months ago, I decided to start blogging on Medium about our journey as a business and my journey as a founder.

The content I share on Medium is probably the most difficult type of content to create. The lessons I share in my articles, like How we’ve built a profitable business in a highly competitive environment and 9 compelling reasons not to raise VC money for your startup, have taken me anywhere between 5 to 15 years to learn.

So when I share the posts I write on Medium, I want to make sure as many people as possible get a chance to discover them because I know they will learn something valuable.

Before this experiment, I’d start spreading the word the same way as everyone else would — I’d share it on my personal profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is an important one for me because it’s a professional social network. These connections are also more likely to enjoy reading the content I write. Sadly, my high school friends and family on Facebook don’t get as jazzed about me talking about growing a SaaS business. Go figure.

Even though I knew the importance of LinkedIn, I’d typically announce a post just once there. The results wouldn’t be great but I didn’t do much about it.

This August, as Agorapulse was adding a ton of new features, I decided to test one of them on LinkedIn: the ability to repeat a piece of content automatically with one click of a button.

And with that, my test began.

Why posting to LinkedIn just once is not a good idea

Like Facebook, LinkedIn has a newsfeed feature where you can see the status updates of your professional connections. But unlike Facebook, users don’t use LinkedIn daily to check their friends’ latest posts.

You’re in a very small minority if you check your LinkedIn feed more than your Facebook feed — unless perhaps you’re a recruiter.

If you’re connected with me on LinkedIn (checking in once a week) and on Facebook (checking in daily), the likelihood of my seeing your updates is 7 times lower on LinkedIn.

Prefer more authoritative data? How does this study on social media usage patterns from Pew work for you? ;P

It nonetheless goes without saying that posting your best pieces of content on LinkedIn only once will reduce your chances of gettting the reach you want.

Posting more than once will increase your chances. It’s as simple as that.

The downside of posting content on LinkedIn more than once

Repeating evergreen content on social media is a common practice. A lot of tools have emerged offering the Promised Land of putting your content on auto-pilot and freeing you from worrying about what you should post next on social media.

In that rant/post, I warned against the danger of repeating your content without being thoughtful about it.

Too many people do this and more times than not, it looks bad.

Would my LinkedIn connections be put off by my automated post recycling? Would they be bored, or worse, annoyed by my behavior?

I wasn’t sure about the outcome but I wanted to give it a try.

How I repeated my content on LinkedIn

The post I wanted to give a little boost to was this one: How we’ve built a profitable business in a highly competitive environment. It took me 5 years to learn but just 3 hours to write!

Using the “Repeat Content” feature on Agorapulse, I decided to schedule the first post on August 11 at 5:30PM. The post would then repeat four additional times, every 10 days.

Here’s where I set up the schedule — although I’m using other dates here. Just go with it

LinkedIn