Meet Michael Philpott. He’s freaking excellent at LinkedIn content and particularly notorious for showing up on LinkedIn on video every weekday for a whole year. He has 12,284 LinkedIn followers and gets regular business enquiries from LinkedIn.
All of which begs the question, why the hell is Michael paying me to write his LinkedIn posts for him? He clearly knows what he’s doing. Why would he need help?
So, I asked him that very question. And he talked me through his LinkedIn video process. Which wasn’t quite what I expected … but ok.
Turns out making videos is a lot of work …
Michael puts a huge amount of time, energy, and effort into creating video for LinkedIn. He makes it look effortless, but it’s anything but.
He explains, “You labour over this witty, educational script, then you get dressed in your fancy clothes. Maybe you even comb your beard. And you head down to the video studio, load your script into the teleprompter and edit the flow so that you can read it at the right pace. When everything's ready, you start filming, and you give it a couple of goes until you end up with a take that feels golden. Then you get it off to the editor and that takes more time. It’s a lot of work.”
“But you get your video back, and one morning you're sitting there and you decide, today's the day, I'm going to share my amazing video with the world.”
“Then you realise you’ve got to write your damn LinkedIn caption. And there's a bit of resentment that after doing all of that work, you still have to come up with some quirky, witty shit to make people care enough to push play on your video.”
You can bust your balls making amazing videos, but if your LinkedIn captions aren’t hot shit, you’re wasting your time
Michael loves video. But he acknowledges captions are critical.
“That's the thing with LinkedIn video content. You can do all that hard work on the video, but if you can't nail your LinkedIn caption it will make or break whether people engage with your content. So much good content goes to waste because people can’t grab browsers’ attention.”
“And even though I know how they work, writing LinkedIn captions is not my forte. I know the first line needs a strong hook, and the next line needs to provoke curiosity to get people to read on. I know all of that, but I also feel why should I have to put this much effort in when I’ve already busted my chops making a video?”
“So, I’m self-aware enough to know that negativity will come through in my caption and that’s why I hand over to you. You come in curious and interested and you ask all these great questions. You put the same level of enthusiasm into my LinkedIn captions that I put into the videos, so the caption’s energy level matches the videos. Whereas if I try to write the captions my energy tapers off. But that doesn’t work because the caption is the most important part of the post.”
Capturing Michael’s voice and essence
It’s kinda awkward asking people what it’s like working with me, but you gotta practice what you preach, so I overcame millennia of Scottish diffidence, and asked Michael what the whole LinkedIn ghost writing experience had been like for him.
“You’re structured, but at the same time you work in a relaxed way. You're not bound by rigid structure, yet you also have an ability to follow someone and explore ideas without fear of getting lost, which is why working with you works so well for me.”
“Your flexible approach enables me to fully explore my meaning and memories rather than being restricted by a rigid process. I feel like I can go anywhere, and I like that. And your approach captures my vernacular so accurately. It’s very well done.”
“You’re so good at what you do. There are very few people who are truly experts. And believe me, I know, because I'm one of them. So, when an expert sees another expert, it's like, dude, you're really good at what you do.”
Making testimonials more memorable
As well as writing captions for Michael’s video posts, I create client stories as context for his customer testimonials.
Now the testimonials are glowing because Michael is amazing at what he does. And they could stand alone. Michael could chuck them up with a bashful caption saying, “Proud to work with Bob at Big Corp. Look what nice things he said about me.”
But whenever you wrap a story around something, you make it more memorable. So, I want all the juice. How Michael met each person, what they needed help with, what they were like as a person, and how the project went. I hunt for the funny, human details that make professional coaching engagements so rewarding.
Michael valued revisiting the details because it had been a while since he'd worked with some of these people. “By being genuinely curious, you forced me to viscerally revisit moments from my past. And that’s how you get great stories. It's getting people to relive experiences and reconnect with their deeper meaning.”
“We can't do that on our own because we tell our best stories to someone else. Telling a story to a person who’s smiling, nodding, and asking smart questions encourages you to get more vivid with the details. That’s why when I write my own copy, even although I’m telling the same stories, it isn’t as engaging, because I don’t have you there to ask me questions to bring out all the gold.”
Hiring me to ghost write his LinkedIn captions led to a 200% increase in Michael’s post reach
Michael explains, “Before you wrote my LinkedIn posts I was averaging 1,000 views for a post. The last 10 posts you wrote averaged 2,998 views each.”
“Not only that, but I’ve had more business enquiries. Usually, the beginning of a new year is pretty stressful because January is quiet. I come back from holiday and often I don’t have any paid income until March. This year people were booking me over Christmas. I had consultation calls booked for my first week back on January 9.”
“The value you’ve added is huge. And I like that we've added things like sign offs to my posts so I’m reminding people what I can do for them at the end of each post. It isn't a hard sell, just cumulative little reminders that the good stuff’s over here.”
“I’m posting two days a week right now, but my goal is to have content scheduled seven days a week. Because from a business perspective, if two pieces of content are getting these results, what’s gonna happen if I post three, four, or five times?”
What indeed?
Michael and I will be continuing to create LinkedIn content together in 2023, so I’ll keep you posted on how things go. I’ve a feeling it’s going to go off.
Up your LinkedIn game and grow your business
Know the importance of building your personal brand, but can’t find time to craft thoughtful, intelligent content for LinkedIn?