I only put holiday pics on LinkedIn for 1 month! Here’s what happened..

How many times do you think someone said to me “This isn’t Facebook, you know..”, well keep reading to find out how many times that happened!

Recently Emily, myself and our three children relocated / went on holiday for four weeks to Spain.

We caught a ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao on the last day of term, drove south to Toledo for two nights, then to Nerja for 5 nights, before staying in Sayalonga for 3 weeks before returning home with a night in Madrid on the way back to Bilbao.

I say relocated / went on holiday as we did work whilst away, quite a lot of work actually and does it ever feel like a true ‘holiday’ when you have three young children with you?!

As we were continuing to work I decided that I wanted to keep my LinkedIn presence up. I didn’t want to post everyday, but figured a few holiday pics here and there would be perfect.

I had no real agenda to this, other than sharing pictures and to keep active on LinkedIn with these posts. I am a sharer by nature as an extrovert, so I found that part easy.

After about 3 weeks into our 4 week trip, I was seeing a slight correlation in the engagements / impressions of the posts, so tested that with my ‘ Party Ring ‘ post.. In all fairness, that post did have a slight agenda then! 😂

👉Let’s get going..

What I did..

• I posted whenever I wanted or felt like I wanted to. Day / time just didn’t matter.
• I replied to every comment and asked questions [#BeSocial always] at times that worked for me, which was usually when the kids had gone to bed.
• All pictures were 100% holiday pictures.
• Captions were a mix of business & personal. It was interesting to see how they performed differently differently!
• Some captions were based around me & some about what we were doing! Again interesting to see them perform differently..
• I hardly tagged anyone in the posts. Just Emily or an odd brand if relevant.

What happened?

Here’s my post impressions for the past 90 days.

You can see an slight increase in impressions for the period of July to end of August when we were away. I do feel this was more through consistency of my posting, as I have a love / hate [usually more hate] affair with LinkedIn so I’m not always consistent..

Here are my post engagements for the same period.

Once again, no real difference to my usual engagement. Yes, there are some peaks and we’ll come to them.. That’s what I found the most interesting!

Firstly, before I look at the individual posts, what else happened..

• At no point did anyone anywhere ever say “This isn’t Facebook” you know..
• I had people say that they were enjoying following our holiday / relocation adventure.
• I had zero work enquiries through these posts. Although, if you’d like to chat work, do get in touch.. 💛
• My followers / connections did go up in line with the consistency of my posting. I felt!
• I played with #’s. Some worked well..

👉Right… The posts that didn’t work well..

This was my worst performing post and my thoughts on why it didn’t perform as well as the others.

I feel this didn’t perform well because ultimately I made it about me! I asked for some thoughts on me and historically, people dont like that. It’s self gratifying and people prefer to share about themselves rather than comment on others!

And.. The post just wasn’t fun!

My second worst performing post was this one.

Once again it was more about me, asking you to think about me and just a bit more contrived on reflection. I feel it was really, just me crowbarring in a cool picture of where I’m working! Which is just not cool, even for a sharer! 😂

👉What worked best.

Top 3 in reverse order! Stand by. I think you’ll be surprised… And then I’ll talk about them afterwards..

3.

2.

☝️☝️☝️This one had the most comments..

1. 💥💥💥💥

Why these three? Well, who actually knows! But here’s some thoughts.. Oh and 4th was my post about Party Rings! Who says LinkedIn is only for business posts! 😂

• Family / personal brand features heavily.
• They look fun.
• 3 & 1 I share something that may be contentious, just interesting or you may have an opinion on!
• The top post does lead with some ‘intrigue’.
• All cover art is clickable I feel.
• Actually, number 2 was a throw away post. Where I was desperate to share something yellow and that’s all I had that day!
• Those roller blades weren’t even available in my size in the end.
• 3 & 1 also asked you to join in with me being a geek or not buying into work / life balance! People like to connect with likeminded people!
• Interestingly, 3 & 1 were early on in my trip! Perhaps you were still fresh to my personal posts.

👉What have I learnt from this..

Personal posts are absolutely fine, people like to join in and find out about you. In actually fact, we should all post more personal posts! The balance is them making sure that people know about what you do for work as well and trying to not make your perusal posts only about you, but about the people reading it, which lets be honest, is tricky!

Surely it can’t come back to the very old adage about being a brand on social media! 80/20! 80% fun / personal brand / personable & 20% being about business… Well, yes it blimmin seems to..

That doesn’t mean the 20% of your work posts have to be boring! They can also be fun, engaging and about you the reader!

I purposely didn’t post a ‘work; post throughout this period, as a) I was a bit bored with ‘work’ but b) didn’t want to and wanted to see what would happen. I’m now wishing I had!

👉My thoughts and questions as I just love learning from you all are…

1) Do you feel more engaged in me and 💛 Yellow Tuxedo?

2) Do you know what we do here at 💛 Yellow Tuxedo?

3) Do you even care what we do, if you think Emily & I are ok people?

and..

4) Do you think you may post more personal posts now?

Thanks for reading and have fun always…

Alan

PS.. In my love / hate affair with LinkedIn. The ‘hate’ is just because it’s so businessy and I want it to be more fun!! 😂

PPS.. Obviously, if you’re a #linkedinexpert and can deep dive my results a bit more for me, please do get in touch.. 💛💛

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.