The Science behind going viral on LinkedIn

I’ve gone viral on LinkedIn about 15–20 times over the last few years.

Whilst going viral might not be your primary objective, it can be a very intoxicating experience.

Having thousands and millions of people engaging with your content can feel flipping awesome.

In this article, I’m going to break down everything I know about going viral.

If you really want to crack it, we teach it as a module inside our Six-Figure LinkedIn Course

But let me dig and tell you about going viral.

What does viral mean? Well, there is no official definition of what viral means, but I tend to view it as when you significantly exceed your connection / follower numbers.

What’s viral to someone with 100 connections could be 15k impressions, whereas for someone with 30k connections that might be an average day.

More broadly, people would expect viral to be over the 100k impressions and heading toward 1m impressions.

Catching the eye in the feed

Want to know something weird?

Most viral content is TALL. That’s right, it’s usually square images, portrait images or PDFs….or portrait videos.

Tall content tends to perform better simply because taller content takes up more space in the feed.

But it’s not just about taking up real estate. You need to stop the scroll. This is where a bit of clickbait, vibrant or home-made imagery tends to perform well.

Be careful you stay the right side of clickbait and don’t slip into bait and switch.

Your primary mission with your posts visual appearance is to get people to stop scrolling.

Two types of viral post

There are two types…. viral broad (the easiest) and Viral focused (harder).

Broad viral content you’ll see all the time, they are selfies, personal stories and motivational content. These are the easy to do if you have something which has broad appeal and it pulls on human emotions.

The second type of viral content is focused. We recently helped a client pull in 500k of organic impressions and 40 inbound leads from one 25 second video showing a comparison between different products in the manufacturing industry.

For most people this would be a bit boring, but it was a wow moment if you are in the industry.

Half a million impressions on a focused post is tricker, but still it’s the best post the company has ever had, including their paid promotions.

The best bit was, we repeated it a month later with a similar video 😃. The reach was down a bit, but still smashed through 300k.

It’s much harder to achieve focused virality it takes more thought and planning, but they are the viral posts you should be aiming for.

One of our team is great at constructing viral content, he’s earned the nickname ‘Viral Vasco’

The first two hours

Like any post, the first two hours of the post is critical. How much engagement (comments, likes and reposts) you get in that initial period is critical.

Timing your post can be the difference between success and failure. If you post at the wrong time, it can mean people miss it or you don’t get the initial traction that you need.

Typically, for me, posts that go viral usually are posted around the 2pm time, which coincides with the USA waking up. My audience is a mix of UK and USA so that mix helps accelerate my posts.

There are some important things to keep an eye on….

Typically, a post with 2,000 impressions at 1 hour in is a good indicator your post is going to fly.

We’ve also noticed that around 4 hours things really accelerate.

I can be at 2k impressions at 1 hours and 4 hours later be at 30k.

Likes, comments and reposts are the key driver of this but there is one more thing…

Discussion and Dwell

LinkedIn has this weird comment culture.

A lot of the comments are short and weird. It’s a thing and short comments won’t help you. You need proper discussion, long comments and discussions going back and forth.

LinkedIn’s own comment suggestions for a long time suggested innocuous comments, the trend of seeing “great post” — I blame LinkedIn for that.

The comment suggestions are better now, but many of them are hard to use or encourage bland comments…or at least comments that sound a bit weird on a social network.

Replying to comments and replying to keep the discussion going will increase the reach and drive more engagement. Those first two hours or engagement and replying is huge on the growth of the post.

TIP: Don’t just reply with “Thanks” reply with a question, so you get a thread of comments.

But there is more to this, it’s not just comments — you need people to stay on the post. This is known as dwell time. The more time a user spends on a post the better.

Getting comments are hard, so ask more questions and respond to every comment you get.

The more opinionated or emotive the post is, the easier it is to get comments. In other words, you need to touch the head or the heart.

Video is easiest

Video is by far the easiest media to go viral.

The key to going viral with video is to have a healthy completion rate. That means getting people to watch a percentage of the video.

The example below is a post from last month:

Weirdly, this got 219k likes, 354 comments and 14.5k reposts.

We’ve spotted that videos that have a 30% or more completion rate, tend to perform well.

If you take the example above, let’s work it out:

➡️ Video Length: 40 Seconds (0.66Minutes)

➡️ Views: 8,155,265

➡️ Minutes Viewed: 1,790,379

If you divide the minutes by the views, this shows the average view was 0.21 minutes (12.6 seconds)

This equates to a 31.8% completion rate.

Be careful, many people put 2 and 2 together and get 3 — they assume that short videos or 5 seconds or so might work — in many cases it doesn’t. It might get you a good completion time, but the engagement will be lacking.

Essentially you need to hold people for 12 seconds+ as a general rule. If the video is longer — you need to hold people longer.

Why go viral?

Going viral feels fantastic.

You should go viral with a purpose in mind.

If you’re running a campaign or just trying to raise awareness these are admiral goals. What I would avoid doing, is attempting to go viral for the euphoria.

Every now and then or to fight of a low point with your content — absolutely — but be careful about developing a dopamine addiction. I’m serious — it’s bad when you come down from a great run of high performing posts.

It can also push you into going viral just to satisfy your need for impressions, this can be a distraction from the true goal — building a brand and revenue.

I hope this gives you some ideas.

If you want to chat through any viral campaigns for your business or brand — drop me a DM.