viral LinkedIn post

Saturday, January 26. I was browsing LinkedIn while wrapping up some work. Now, I try not to open my laptop much on weekends, but I’m an entrepreneur. You know what that means — sometimes, we work on weekends. That particular week had been quite the doozy. Our team director had resigned the weekend before, suddenly and without warning. So, I had no choice but to pull an 80-hour work week re-assembling everything, jumping in and doing extra tasks to get my business back up and strong. I helped our clients get their content on time, wrote and edited, alongside training my new team managers and still staying on top of all my marketing campaigns and day-to-day tasks. Plus, I had just been invited for no less than four speaking engagements in the next two months. To say I was busy would be an understatement! So there I was on a Saturday, browsing LinkedIn and using the Recruiter platform to talk to candidates I was interviewing, with my four-year-old cuddled beside me on the couch watching Netflix. I decided to hop on over and check out my inbox for messages. I scrolled down and started to read the dozens of messages I’d been sent the week prior from all kinds of people. Guess what was in my inbox? Pitches. Ugly, cold, sales pitches. Dozens by the handful, coming from new connections I’d recently accepted. One was from a guy with an agency of offshore writers pitching me on using his team. (I thought to myself: “Did you not look for two seconds at the company I lead?”) Another was from a lady, following up the fourth time in three days to see “where I was at” on booking a call with her about PR services. I scrolled, deleted, and blocked as I went. All these pitches had one thing in common. The people sending them were seeking my wallet, and not a relationship first. So, I decided then and there to create some “content on the fly.” (I’ve been doing that quite a lot. For example, I’ve completely stopped scheduling anything to my Twitter feed except some basic promos — I go in and tweet whatever I want to, whenever. And it’s worked surprisingly well. It helps that I enjoy Twitter.) I wrote a short “rant” about the problem that all those cold pitches had in common. My brow furrowed as I thought and thought of what kind of media I could attach. A meme was not sufficient. A GIF wouldn’t work. An image wouldn’t cut it. And then it hit me — why not make a fun Boomerang video from Instagram of me “facepalming”, and make that the media? It was PERFECT! It was 100% relatable, fun, and exactly described how I felt at that moment, reading those sales pitches. (I have to give some credit here to my friend Jessica Campos. She had a course student enroll from an Instagram Story clip of her shaking her head and being silly!) So, I wrote a short message and posted it. It was 100% authentic to how I felt in that moment. It looked like this, and if you pressed play, it was a 4-second Boomerang-produced video of me facepalming myself: See the status I posted here (you have to be logged into LinkedIn). I was not prepared for what happened next. Here is the story. Learn what happened, what came from it, and the four lessons from my “viral stint” on LinkedIn. [bctt tweet=”The problem that all cold pitches have in common: Seeking my wallet, and not a relationship with me as a person first. Read @JuliaEMcCoy’s story & lessons from a #LinkedIn post gone viral ” username=”ExpWriters”] The LinkedIn Viral Story: The First 24 Hours After I posted the LinkedIn status on Saturday, I logged out and pretty much focused on resting, relaxing, and having an enjoyable family day. We had a friend’s birthday party to attend, so my husband, little one and I went out for lunch at Panera, headed to our friend’s birthday, and didn’t come back till late in the evening. That Saturday evening I logged in to work on some Write Blog tasks, and LinkedIn was up in my browser. I went over to it, briefly, saw a lot of red in the notification area, and flipped back to my tasks. I typically do a million tasks at once, just because I can be in the middle of hiring, training, communications, marketing tasks, scheduling, and more, all at once. So, LinkedIn wasn’t high up in my priority list. I had a lot to do. But after working on my tasks for a while, I subconsciously recalled how “red” the LinkedIn notifications were. It was around midnight when I finally went back and checked on the LinkedIn post. I had 99+ on the “Notifications” tab, which was strange. I knew something was up. I clicked on the post that had all the notifications, and that’s when I saw the status on the video I’d posted that morning. 398 likes, over 100 comments, and 22,000 views! I’d never had that kind of results with any LinkedIn post, so my jaw dropped a bit. But, it was late on a Saturday night, nearing midnight: so, after scrolling through it and experiencing a small “YAY!” moment, I closed the computer and fell asleep not too long after. I woke up Sunday, went to church, and pretty much forgot entirely about the post. I Slept, I Woke Up, Had a Relaxing Sunday Morning, and Then Logged Into Crazy Town After church, I had a couple hours before heading to a friend’s house. I opened my computer (again, something I try not to do on the weekend, but unavoidable given the business issues at hand to fix). I worked on recruiting tasks for a while. Then, I saw the LinkedIn tab still open, and I leisurely clicked over to check on it. 425 likes, 133 comments, 24,000+ views! Whoa! I scrolled through the comments, and … Read more