Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle, said Socrates. Extend this saying to LinkedIn, and you can easily argue that every marketer you meet here endures the tough and never-ending struggle to stand out from the crowd.
Considering LinkedIn’s frequent algorithm changes, as a marketer, you inevitably have to resort to various tricks and gimmicks to stay ahead of the game. After all, over 800 million global LinkedIn members (and counting) raise the bar for brand authority and content visibility.
Among the numerous LinkedIn marketing techniques, lempod is one that went from waves of excitement to vile whispering campaigns. lempod has positioned itself as a user-friendly solution for marketers, entrepreneurs, and recruiters. And it’s no wonder since it creates automatic engagement pods and guarantees to generate three times more leads.
Wondering if this lempod practice is ok, or you’re interested to know how thin is the line between doing it the right or the wrong way?
Read more about it below and find out everything there is to know about using lempod to drive engagement on B2B LinkedIn profiles.
What are Engagement Pods?
Before examining lempod’s ins and outs, let’s start with the basics and see what engagement pods are in the first place. You can think of engagement pods as the typical social media game: you post something ‘really big’, send a link to it to all your friends and ask them to like, comment, or share. Obviously, it sounds incredibly familiar because everyone’s done it at least once in their lifetime, whether on Facebook, Instagram, or other social media platforms.
Still, if you’re not a marketer, you’ve probably used these engagement games for personal reasons more than anything else, just so your posts would bump to the top of the feed.
Now, let’s see what engagement on LinkedIn entails.
What is LinkedIn Engagement?
A perfectly polished LinkedIn company page is vital for your business, so you always need a strategy update to boost your reach and generate leads. Your personal LinkedIn profile is equally important in this sense. That’s why updating and keeping your personal profile active is the first step to building trust and attracting connections with the same or very similar interests. But when it comes to your LinkedIn posts, they deserve to get attention; otherwise, they’re not exactly useful.
The classical, old-fashioned way to boost engagement for your LinkedIn posts works the same as above. You share your post with your connections or join a LinkedIn group; most times, people create a dedicated channel on Slack or a group on Facebook. Then, you wait and hope your post will get as many likes and comments as possible.
Behind the curtains, LinkedIn will first display your post to your 1st connections. If they’re very engaged and your post gets many comments, LinkedIn will take it as a good sign (AKA, your content is valuable), so, it’ll start showing it to other connections too. But what’s the definition of “very engaged”?
Getting 10 likes and 2 comments on your post isn’t a great LinkedIn engagement score, even if some would argue it’s a good start. You can post killer content, but it won’t get enough traction, and you wonder why. Well, simply because you have to play by LinkedIn’s rules if you want to win. And the main rule here is to achieve the right engagement rate.
LinkedIn’s engagement rate represents the sum of likes, comments, and shares you receive for posts, divided by the number of followers of the page, all multiplied by 100. If you get an engagement rate of 2%, that’s considered good, while anything above 2% is awesome, great, stunning or whatever you want to call it.
If you’re not great with numbers, let’s take one example:
Imagine you have a LinkedIn post that received 295 likes, 112 comments and 14,088 views.
The engagement rate formula would look like this:
- Engagement (Likes + ½ Comments) / Views x 100% = Rate (%)
Translated to the example above, you get:
- (295 + 56) engagements / 14088 views x 100% = 2.49%
And voila! You have a great engagement rate!
Then comes the next question: how can you get so many views and comments? Sometimes, people just don’t have the time to engage, or they don’t immediately see your post.
Timing is everything, even in the case of LinkedIn likes and comments, and again, the culprit is the algorithm itself. It seems LinkedIn measures the final reach of a post in the first three hours of a live content post. If a person or more will “like” your post after 4-6 hours, LinkedIn won’t care much, and it will downgrade your overall engagement score.
Here’s where Lempod enters the scene.
What is lempod and How Does it Work?
Without going over Lempod’s history (if you’re interested, though, you can find out more details in this interview), this feature is a Chrome Extension that helps you to get 3 to 10 times more views on your LinkedIn posts. Following a precise and simple process, lempod basically offers an exchange where more LinkedIn members support each other with likes and comments.
You can create and join different LinkedIn Engagement Pods based on your target audience; in return, you’re awarded with an automatic engagement of your content. lempod’s marketplace tab offers a wide palette of groups sorted by topics, so you can make a relevant and organic-like engagement for your posts.
Check out the first steps if you decide to give lempod a try:
- First, login to your LinkedIn account, so lempod can enforce some automatic tasks.
- Install a lempod Chrome Extension and ask your connections to install it too.
- Open lempod, click on your picture and then click “Create Company Pod” (if you want to create your own pod) or join an already existing pod.
- lempod will generate a Unique “Pod ID” you can share with your LinkedIn connections, so they can join your pod.
- Create the content and promote your LinkedIn posts this way:
- Copy the link to the LinkedIn post you’ve just created.
- Go to the lempod and choose the Pod.
- Add the link to the “Add post” field.
- Write your custom comments that you want your connections to leave automatically.
- Start Engage This Post (OK button).
The outcome will be: when other people engage with your LinkedIn post, it starts appearing to their audience. As a result, you can get 20K views when you have only 2K connections because “friends of friends” will see your content too.
Keep in mind that visuals are a massive and essential part of online marketing. Here’s a more detailed look on LinkedIn content distribution, based on a study from 2021.
Source: SocialInsider
So, don’t forget to attach nice and relevant pictures for your posts. If you can add videos, that’s even better!
lempod Engagement Strategy – DOs and DON’Ts
Lempod is a magical hack, but you should use it wisely if you want the best results. There are a few best practices and things you should avoid.
lempod DOs
Look for the engagement group that suits you best
The easiest way to start with lempod is to join an already existing group instead of creating one. Look in lempod’s marketplace for groups that match your industry and interests by searching for relevant titles, keywords, or phrases. It’s also helpful to think beyond your immediate niche or explicit professional affiliations.
Include questions in your comments
Think about legitimate questions people would have regarding your post. You’ll create an interactive comments section that eventually will attract even more people outside your pod to come and leave comments. Plus, an intriguing post with good comments will stick in people’s minds, and they’ll inevitably follow your next posts.
Grow your audience naturally
After you’ve found the right pod, you can always invite your LinkedIn followers to become a member. The idea is that people who have already shared and liked your posts in the past will likely and gladly do it again. This way, you will help your pod thrive in a natural way.
Limit number of posts
If you use lempod for more than 1 post a day, you risk having your account detected and banned. We actually advise you to use it one every other day or three times/week at best for a healthy engagement rate.
lempod DON’Ts
Preload auto-comments for your posts
Lempod has this auto-comments feature sparing you the trouble of writing your own. Better un-check this option and take the time to write them (at least 10 comments of 2-3 lines) as if you were a real user. Also, keep in mind that a good (valuable) comment is not something like:
- ‘Great post!’
- ‘I always like the stuff you write!’
- ‘Super! Thanks’
Although you can add a few comments like these, mix them up with longer ones that actually express an idea. Also, don’t be afraid to use emojis, but don’t use them in all your comments; it’ll look like it’s part of a mechanical process.
Cover only positive and complimentary comments
It’s super-easy to fall into this trap of always adding flattering comments to your posts. Have the courage to take sides against yourself once in a while. Keep in mind that these engagements have to look legitimate, and you can’t always be perfect and right about everything. Sometimes, people may not agree with what you wrote, and that’s fine.
Accept being a member of any pod
When you take this step of being part of a pod, you should always thoughtfully consider the decision. Do a thorough research and see if it’s a right fit. Otherwise, you might accept to engage with bad quality or irrelevant content and that will harm your goal of reaching the right audience for your profile.
Leach engagements
Leaching engagements is when you’re not contributing to other members’ posts. When you agree to this mutual like and comments sharing, you should accept and take the responsibility for it. This doesn’t mean you don’t have the freedom to hold back from any type of engagement at times for whatever reason. But it also doesn’t mean you only join a pod for the sake of it and never contribute.
Top lempod Tips
Apart from DOs and DON’Ts, here are some valuable insights, so you don’t fall into common lempod traps, or as we call it, innocent beginner mistakes:
1. Don’t be misled by the fancy names or titles of some engagement groups!
It’s best that you do a bit of research before jumping right into joining a pod. Here’s a real-life example: there’s a group called “worldwide professionals” – which at a first glance leads you into thinking it has something to do with B2B or maybe life coaching. Well, you couldn’t be more wrong; this group is actually dedicated to fitness pros. You’ll have to believe me, it happened to us when we rushed into becoming members of this group.
2. Make sure the pods aren’t spammy!
Yes, LinkedIn is no stranger to spam content and once the social media platform triggers any sign of spammy behavior, the entire community of that pod will suffer. Again, before joining a group and checking closely the groups’ topic, take a look at its members too. You don’t want to be associated with ‘undesirable’ LinkedIn members and it won’t bring any value or benefit; you’ll simply have to quit and look for a truly relevant pod.
3. Don’t make comments too personal!
Once you have the approval to leave auto- comments on behalf of pod members, avoid strong, extreme, or too personal arguments. Or better said, don’t put words in people’s mouths (read LinkedIn comments!) unless you know they’re true and they would agree to make them public. It’s one thing to have a personalized comment and another to make a comment that’s “too personal”. Some examples:
“I really hate how Google tracks my data”
Hate is a strong word; the pod member may not be happy with Google tracking, but maybe he/she wouldn’t choose this wording to express what he/she feels.
“I’ve never been to France, but…”.
Imagine you mention a person has never been to France, but maybe that person completed his/her studies in Paris and everyone knows that.
These are innocent mistakes but nevertheless, they could hurt your engagement pod.
4. Try to keep a realistic comments to likes ratio!
We have to go back to numbers, but the idea here is that having something like 600 likes and 5 comments doesn’t look good. If you want to make it look realistic and closer to cross-social averages, you need to keep a 5-15% comments to likes ratio. This would be a good general rule to avoid getting detected that you’re in the auto-commenting business. That also means you should not overdo it and have too many comments either. 200 likes with 10-30 comments looks like a natural engagement.
Conclusion – Take a Leap of Faith and See if lempod Suits You
You’ll hear and read different opinions about lempod. The truth is it may not be the right tool for you, but you wouldn’t know unless you try it out. If you want more visibility for your LinkedIn posts, lempod is a quick and simple solution.
It can take some time to use lempod the right way, as participating in an engagement pod is a serious commitment. Between the back-and-forth of giving likes and comments, it goes down to assessing the balance of time and effort on the one side, and the beneficial results on the other.
But if you stick to best practices, and join the right pods, you will inevitably grow a relevant audience.