Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
In this Part we start to build out and engage our audience. Now we have a strong, optimised profile and content starting to roll out we begin to grow our following.
Let’s get started:
LinkedIn Audience Engagement
1. Find your audience via other accounts
The first thing we need to do is find the people who already talk to our audience.
For example because I’m in the AI space I’d want to find LinkedIn accounts that talk about ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence that have high numbers of followers.
I will then build relationships with those accounts. Doing so makes me visible to their followers.
Here’s an example to make this clearer:
In this example I’ve found an account that has 45,000+ followers. The account owner talks about topics like ChatGPT and gets good reach. When I find a post that I can add value to I leave a comment.
That comment will now be seen by the 100s or 1000s of people who follow this account. A % of them will come to my account. And a % of those who visit my account will choose to follow me.
We make sure that the accounts we do this with are i) large and ii) in similar topic areas to us so that there is an overlap.
In the previous Part we started this process with our research. You should have already started to follow people. Continue this process to fill your Feed with large, high quality, similar niche accounts for you to interact with.
If you want to add more topic areas use the Search bar to find keywords. Search for keywords and not the # hashtag version. Doing so will let you see the “people who talk about X” search result, which lets you identify large accounts.
2. Interaction with large accounts
Once you have filled your Feed with high quality accounts you need to consistently show up.
Here’s the basic order of operations:
- Follow the account
- Like all their posts
- Comment on posts you can add value to
- Repost extremely valuable content
- Get them to Like your work
- Get them to Comment on your work
- Initiate a conversation via DM
You want to move through this order with all the big accounts you are following. It’s a process but it well worth it.
The majority of the work here is simply commenting on their posts. We’ll focus here.
Here’s a basic prompt to generate a valuable comment:
Act as a social media manager
Write a valuable, concise, easy to read response comment to this post.
2-3 lines max.
Add spaces between lines to break up the text.
Use natural conversational language. Do not overly praise.
Include a single minor formatting error as if writing manually on a phone - do not correct or reference the error.
Do not use hashtags.
Do not use emojis.
Do not sell.
#Post Begins#
Simply copy/paste the original post under this prompt.
Here’s the example post I’ve used in the Output below.
Prompt Output 💬
All of the constraints in the prompt above ensure that the comment doesn’t sound like ChatGPT – otherwise ChatGPT will write a long, complicated but meaningless comment.
Noticed I’ve also asked for a single error- this will be something like missing a capital letter or a full stop at the end of sentence. This makes the comment much more human, as if it was written from a phone. Feel free to remove this.
As always review and edit the comment before sending it.
Also add genuine expert value to the comment if you can. Good examples include referencing how their post has helped you or how you wish you had known sooner about what they talk about.
3. Groups
The above technique of leaving comments to increase your reach can also be used in LinkedIn groups.
LinkedIn groups is an interesting beast. Most are trash. But there are a handful of gems hidden in the rough.
Use the Search bar with your topics to find groups:
Go through the groups and try to find the engaged genuine groups.
You’ll know immediately if a group is rubbish. For example the group in the screenshot with 1M members is already ringing alarm bells – that’s too many members for it to be cohesive.
A quick check inside shows that it’s full of spam posts. It can be ignored.
You’ll need to manually check and join the ones that do seem to be legitimate. Often these will be closed and require you to apply. This is a good thing – it means less spammers!
Once in you can often write a Welcome message- make sure you do. Talk about what you do and how you help people. Invite others to connect with you. Do not sell in your welcome message – that’s the quickest way to immediately get kicked out. We’ll get to selling in Part 5.
I’d recommend finding a small number (5-10) of groups to check in with daily.
Anymore and this becomes too much of a burden. Be very aggressive with cutting groups – if they don’t work, leave the group.
You can do two things in groups:
- Post the content that you are creating, directly into the group to improve visibility of your content.
- Comment on other people’s successful content in the group to increase visibility of you profile.
Do the first sparingly and only if people are reacting well. Start slow and build up.
Do the second as much as you can – depending on your time. And only continue if you comments are getting seen and liked.
4. Own follower interaction
Through your profile optimisation, content creation and engagement with larger accounts and groups you should start to see account growth.
In the next Part I’m going to show you how to really turbo-charge this growth.
First though let’s talk about how to deal with people who start to follow you. Before we press the accelerator we need to make sure our engine is in good order.
As soon as anyone comments on one of your posts make sure to return the engagement. Like their comment and also respond with a reply.
This not only shows engagement to the LinkedIn algorithm (which will lead to expanded reach) but also helps you cement relationships with the commenter.
Here’s a basic prompt:
Act as social media marketer
Write a response to a comment on my post. 2-3 lines maximum, separate each line with a line break.
Thank the responder and further elaborate on their point. Do no undercut them at any point but instead make them feel valuable.
Refer to the content of the original post and their comment for context.
Keep the language simple and natural.
Do not use hashtags. Do not use emojis. I used this original post (a poll) and the pictured comment in the output example:
Prompt Output 💬
Nice and basic. Notice that even if I disagree with the point being made the response is polite and professional.
Of course if you want to add a more personal point (or even argue back!) then go ahead! That’s even better engagement. The purpose of the AI response (as always) is a jumping off point.
5. Polls
One additional powerful method to engage your followers is using Polls.
LikedIn (and LinkedIn users) love polls!
These are a great way to engage existing followers as you can find out more about them directly.
Want to know what their level of experience with the topic is? Ask.
Want to know what tools they use in your field? Ask.
Want to know what their burning desires are? Ask.
It’s a strong way to learn more about your followers and what they want. Use this insight to adjust your content moving forward.
What about creating polls? We can use this ChatGPT prompt to give us lots:
Act as a LinkedIn Expert.
Give me 10 potential polls I can ask about [topic]
Make each poll question a curiosity hook so people want to engage and find out the answer.
Each poll will have 3 or 4 answers. Use an emoji with each potential answer.
Provide a table with all ten polls, the question and 3/4 answers per poll.
The questions shouldn't be "quiz" style.Prompt Output 💬
which will format nicely into LinkedIn like this:
6. Cleaning followings
One last point before we wrap up.
It’s important to keep the list of people you follow clean and tidy.
The reason is we’re using our Feed to find content to engage with. If that feed is full of trash content that we don’t want to engage with it takes us longer to do our engagement work.
You can use premium tools like Taplio (affil) to make this process easier but I want to present the free option so everyone can follow this guide. This means keeping our following list clean is important.
Two basic methods to do this.
The first major method is to be aggressive with the unfollow button whilst scrolling your Feed.
You have three options once you see a piece of content you don’t like.
You can either simply click the X button at the top right of any post. That won’t unfollow but it will tell LinkedIn that you want to see less of that sort of content.
Alternatively you can click the … button and click Unfollow or Remove connection.
I’d recommend Unfollow – that will stop their content appearing but you’ll still have a connection via LinkedIn. That serves our purpose without shrinking our network.
The other major method to tidy our Following is to navigate to My Network > Following and Followers > Following.
From there you can see everyone you follow and quickly unfollow as required.
I recommend doing this quite consistently so that you don’t end up following 1000s of people and having a long and painful process to unfollow!
Pulling it together
We’ve looked at both how to engage with other accounts in order to grow our following and how to interact with our direct following.
I recommend doing all of this consistently, even if it’s just for a few minutes per day. Consistency beats splurges of engagement.
In the next Part I’m going to talk about methods for much more rapidly expanding our reach and our Following. We’ve now got all the basics in place are in a good position or hyper-growth.
Part 1: LinkedIn Niche
Part 2: LinkedIn Content Creation
Part 3: LinkedIn Audience Engagement
Part 4: LinkedIn Growth
Part 5: Monetising LinkedIn