A

Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner.

B

Hello.

A

Hello, Hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads and more sales. Today we're going to explore LinkedIn and we're going to talk about how to create winning written content on LinkedIn through the Lens of someone who crushed it with short form video. This is not about creating short form video, but this is about taking some of the lessons from short form and applying them to the written word and absolutely crushing it on LinkedIn. If you're interested in doing more on that platform, this episode is for you and I will be joined by Kasey Brown. If you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's now transition over to this week's episode, helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today we'll explore how to create LinkedIn written content that helps you grow your business. My special guest is a LinkedIn growth strategist who helps executives and founders increase their impact and income utilizing LinkedIn. Her agency is Digital Kairos and her cohort program is Brick by Brick. Casey Brown, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

B

Super excited to be here. Thank you, Michael. I'm, I'm doing good, doing good.

A

I can't wait to get into what going to get into today, but I'd love to start with your story. How did you get into LinkedIn? Take us on the journey.

B

Yeah, I mean it has been a, it's a wild journey. So I have been a full time entrepreneur for going on six years now. My background, I'll give a little bit of my background because I think it, it sheds light into this whole story. Right. So went to school outside of Chicago at Northwestern, graduated from there from, with an economics degree. And the thing about Northwestern is that you really only have two options. If you graduate with an economics degree, you can either go into investment bank or consulting. And so I decided I like talking with people, I like helping people. And so I went into the consulting route. But while I was in consulting, a lot of my projects and the things that I started to carve out for the work that I like to do was helping these companies or clients that we worked with leverage socials to impact their Bottom line, right? The whole idea or thesis that I came up with during this time was if we can leverage this growing engine at the time of social media, then we can actually increase our profits. Right? And so a lot of the corporate work that I was doing was still similar to the work that I'm doing now in 2021. I decided, you know what, I want to take this full time and work with the clients that I want to work with. And so we started the agency full time in 2021. And since then it has looked different, we have taken different vehicles. But the through line for everything that we are focused on and that I am frankly obsessed with is organic content and leveraging brand to build more of a moat. Right. To build a greater advantage in whether that is to sell physical product products, excuse me, whether that's to sell info products. Right. Or whether that's just to increase your moat to hire on a players and a talent. And so what we do now, a lot of the focus that we focus on now is LinkedIn. A lot of the background that I had was in video. But the things that we do now are on LinkedIn. And the reason I'm super bullish on the platform of LinkedIn is because supply and demand is just in our favor, right? You guys have heard the stats. I'm sure there's tons of people over there with LinkedIn profiles. Only 1% of people actually even create content on the platform. And so my whole idea was if we can go on this platform and at least create mediocre content, right? Like we probably can win on this platform. And So I love LinkedIn. I tell everybody, though I am platform agnostic, I love a good opportunity And I think LinkedIn is just this super untapped opportunity. And so we, we've switched all of our focus from even my own personal brand to LinkedIn and now we solely even work with clients focusing on LinkedIn.

A

Well, and I would imagine a lot of what we're gonna talk about is relevant on all the social platforms that allow this kind of content creation. The written word. But I'm really curious. You started out with video, I'm assuming it was short form video. And you went over to LinkedIn, like tell us about that journey. Because I had to be quite a pivot.

B

Yeah, I don't, I'm, I don't know if this is quotable. I should have found out this fact, but I may be one of the only tiktokers that has now converted to LinkedIn. But the thing about this, right, like I Just said, I'm platform agnostic, but I love a good opportunity. And I think for a while there I was looking at short form, right, in 2021, 22, 23, and I'm like, this is one of the biggest opportunities. Everybody is here consuming, but not a lot of folks, especially in our world, were creating, leveraging short form specifically, even on platforms like TikTok. And so we started there, we learned a lot of principles there on, on these short form platforms, you have to be good at content, you kind of gotta know how to capture somebody's attention, you have to become a better communicator, you gotta get good at editing. And so I think even pursuing TikTok and Instagram and these short form platforms forced us, and I'm saying us as a team, to just become better creators, right? And then when I saw LinkedIn, it was a similar opportunity that I saw, like I said, In 2021, 22 on TikTok, where it's like, hey, there's a bunch of people here consuming, but not a lot of us creating, right? And so to me, there's huge arbitrage that I love taking advantage of. And so even the principles we'll talk about here today, transparently I learned them and was forced to learn them because video forces you to get good, right? And now I just leverage those same principles where I can be pretty good on LinkedIn and still, and still win.

A

I love it. And I just want to like double down on, on one important thing you said here twice, which is that most people on the socials are not creating content, they're consuming content. And there is a shortage, if you will, a glut opportunity, a greenfield opportunity, right, for those that know how to create all the various forms. Because there isn't a lot of people creating, there's a lot of people consuming. So when it comes to LinkedIn, what do you see as one of the biggest kind of misconceptions or untruths, if you will, that a lot of people might be believing that others are talking

B

about, you know, you said, and I even emphasize, there's a lot of folks consuming, there's not a lot of people creating. I will also add in, in parallel to consuming, there's a lot of folks critiquing, critiquing, consuming, not a lot of folks creating, right? And I bring this up because I think one of the biggest misconceptions of LinkedIn, a lot of folks have critiques around the content over there, the platform, oh, it's a little cringy. Oh, it's a bit boring, right? Like, it's not. Maybe my people aren't over there. I think a lot of folks have. And I even had this misconception, transparently. I was thinking about LinkedIn and pursuing that as a platform of scale probably since around 2022. I kept pushing back on it because I was like LinkedIn, like every time I would get log into that app, it would just feel so cringy, so boring. Right. And so I think a lot of folks feel like, or maybe have this misconception that there's not a lot of opportunity here on LinkedIn and. Or it's just not a platform that I need to be on. Right. It's just a bunch of AI slop content. There's a lot of people just trying to sell you in the DMs and none of the cool kids are there. Right. So maybe this isn't something I need to prioritize right now. But again, I have a different lens now. But I think that some of the things that I hear on LinkedIn, I think the other misconception is that you can just enter that space and push out AI slop style content and just win. Right? Like, oh, it must just then be easy to win. And I think that's far from the truth to actually create impactful content on LinkedIn and win.

A

Love it. Okay, so we're zooming in on the written word and I'm curious, what are the things waiting on the other side, the benefits, the upsides that will come if everybody pays attention to what we're going to talk about today and they do written word well on LinkedIn. Just curious what you're seeing from your lens.

B

Yeah, I think there is, and I do not say this lightly. I'm not one of these folks to just say things. I do not see a world where you take what we're about to go through, you take some of these principles we're about to go through and you don't win on LinkedIn. Whether that, whether win for you looks like increasing your email list, making more sales, finding more clients, finding more customers, booking more speaking gigs. I do not believe that you can listen to this and be consistent on the platform and not win.

A

Love it. Okay, cool. So what you're telling us is I'm not a hype person.

B

Trust me, I'm not. I am just a facts and numbers person.

A

I speak truth. I have a degree in economics. Okay. So it's all about the facts. Right. And I love that. Okay, cool. So before we get into like what we're going to talk about today. Is there any groundwork we need to set, any foundation stuff that we need to be thinking about when it comes to written content on LinkedIn.

B

Yeah. So we'll go through this framework, right? And again, I hope this, this framework helps a lot of you guys. And this framework, again, I learned it was forced to learn through video. Before this framework even makes sense, we really have to do the cliche, boring work, right? The success is in the boring work, the work that a lot of people don't want to do. And just stay with me, right? Like, this will sound boring, but then we'll get into some, some, some of the fun stuff. But we really have to understand first who we're talking to and what transformation we want them to have. I use the language icp, ideal client or customer profile. Right. I have to really understand when I go click posts or publish or upload, right? Who is this for? And also, what do they get out of this? Right? What's in it for them? What transformation do I want them to have? Another way, when we're onboarding clients or when we're coaching folks for the transformation piece of this, I ask folks, hey, if somebody just followed you for 90 days, or what would transformation would you hope they had? Right? And so I need to get clear first on who I'm serving, and then second, what transformation am I trying to help them with through my content. That's the baseline for this framework to even have success and to work.

A

Give us an example of who you're creating content for. Maybe you could just explain who your ideal customer is and what you're helping them solve for, just so people can wrap their head around it.

B

Because it's.

A

Yeah, we're marketers here, okay? And this stuff. Oh, yeah, I know that. But the truth of the matter is we don't sometimes fully process what it means, you know? So give us an example of what you're doing over there with your content icp, right?

B

I think it's one of these. Or at least I challenge myself to revisit this quarterly and to continue double downing on it and getting more detailed on it. So maybe V1 of my ICP looks like, hey, I'm just trying to help people build brand online. Maybe V1 looks like that. That does not work here in 2026 because that does not cut through the noise, right? And so probably a V6, our ICP looks like, hey, we work best with anybody that kind of falls into this bucket of speakers. Coaches, consultants, right? And they're doing at least 20k a month already. And we help them build the systems for organic content so they can continue to scale their impact and their business. Right. This is what a V6 of our ICP looks like. This only comes from looking at the clients that we work with. Who do we work with best, who can we serve best? Right? And we keep kind of solidifying that icp, but that's generally how detailed I'm trying to get with an icp. You know, like, what do they look like? What keywords could I even put into LinkedIn and find them? Right? Maybe what schools they went to, what regions they're in, maybe some of their background. That gives me certain signals of, you know, kind of how their business can look now. But that's how detailed I want to get on my icp. I want it to be as detailed as I could just hand over to a VA and they could go find those people by putting in keywords on LinkedIn. Love it.

A

Okay, so in your particular case, you're targeting people that are like, authors, coaches, consultants, those kind of people that are making a certain amount of money and they a desire to scale that, right. To maybe double or triple that. Right? So what they're looking for is a path to growth. That's really good, right? Because it's one thing to know who your ideal target is, but it's another thing to know what they actually desire, right? Because that's going to inform a lot of what we're going to talk about next. So, okay, we've got this groundwork built now, so what's the next thing we need to worry about or focus on? Maybe.

B

So after we have that icp, and again, to your point, the transformation, like, how am I trying to. To help them now? I start creating the content, right? And this is where I've come up with this framework. I think the one key to understand. Everybody asked me, like, what's the biggest hack? How have you won on all these platforms? The biggest thing that I understand is honestly human psychology. Humans, we are designed and wired to be selfish, right? The selfish brain served us at one point. Hey, you're hungry, go get food. Hey, you're cold, go get. Seek shelter. And so our brains are designed to think about us, what's in it for us? And so if we think about that as creators on these platforms, at least 90% of my content has to be for the reader, right? It sounds cliche, but most creators are clicking publish or post and only thinking about them. Did I sound smart here? Did I Share enough client testimonials here. Am I going to make a sale off of this? Right. But when the priority becomes, what is my icp, my ideal person receiving from this? How am I helping them? Then? People have this impact or a feeling when they're consuming your content. Like, holy cow, this was so good. Holy cow, this was great.

A

Right?

B

And then every time they see your name pop up, they want to just keep consuming and keep digesting that information.

A

Or they might tag somebody who they know that fits that perfect audience, too, Right?

B

Which is one thing we will get into for the bottom of this framework, one of the things that we optimize for, right? And so once we kind of have that baseline, then we start putting this structure into our content.

A

Good. So let's start with your structure.

B

All right? I like little. Little fun words and little acronyms to come up with for these frameworks. Most importantly, to help myself remember these things. But the first thing that we have to do is get the stop, right? So the first letter of this, they're all going to be S's, but the first one is stop. It's super important because as humans, as consumers, right? We are all just scrolling through. As the creator, my number one job is to get somebody to stop, right? We've heard this before. I gotta stop the scroll. This is important. And again, I was forced to learn this on video, right? There's different things we do to get the stop. When it comes to written content. The biggest levers that we have to get the stop, especially on LinkedIn, are our first two lines, right? The sentences. Most importantly, the biggest thing that we can use to get the stop is the photo that we attach to our actual post. So we have the photo and we have the first two lines of text to get the stop. Now, one little tip for photos, because you might hear this, you might just say, okay, Kasey, let me just go attach a photo to everything. The biggest tips that I have for photos is, again, you want to put yourself in the shoes of the average person scrolling LinkedIn, but also the average creator on LinkedIn. And so you want to use a photo that has some sort of pattern interrupt. This is why you start seeing a lot of people using selfies and things like that. We work with a lot of authorities, a lot of experts. They don't love just using selfies. We use a lot of infographics, but even for those infographics, we want that infographic to stand out, right? We want it to as somebody scrolling through, we want somebody to have the feeling of like, holy cow, what's this? Or if something's in bold, like, oh, what does that say? Or what does this mean? A little tactical tip for photos is that you can use vertical photos more than horizontal photos. So a vertical photo, Right. If I'm holding my phone vertically and take a selfie, or if I have an infographic and it looks more like a document instead of like, you know, a traditional photo. Exactly. Right. I want to go landscape. Exactly. Yeah. I want to go more, more vertical. This again, as I'm going through, through the scroll, I'm just taking up more space in the feed so I have a higher chance to get somebody to stop and at least look at my post. Right. So the first thing I have to do is get the stop. And so there's some tactics there for the photo and then there are some tactics for the text as well. So photo.

A

Let me ask some clarification questions on, on the photo. If we do a regular photo on our phone, which is like 9 by 16 instead of 16 by 9, approximately. Right. What part of that is shown? Does it get cropped? Does it get shrunk with little black lines on the sides? Like, tell us a little bit about, like, structurally, what that might look like on mobile and what that might look like on desktop.

B

Yep. So the, the beauty about this is again, if I just take a selfie on my phone or again, I do this a lot with infographics or guides. I'll actually take a screens and just crop it on my phone and make sure that the dimensions are the same as a selfie. The beautiful piece about this is it doesn't get cropped on LinkedIn as I just upload it. The entire thing will show. Okay, Right. The entire thing shows and takes up more space in that feed.

A

Okay. So if that's true, then we gotta get strategic about what in the world we include inside that photo. Right. So tell us about the kinds of things. Let's start with just like, you know, simple smartphone pictures. You know what I mean? Like, any particular tips on if you're going to actually take a selfie? You know what I mean? Like, any tips on how we should do that? And then we can also talk about like the other kinds of images that you'd recommended.

B

Biggest tip if you're going to take a selfie is to use your back camera. So back camera, you're going to go into 0.5. Right. So it's a little different than just using your front camera taking the selfie. You're on. Go point five, turn Your phone around and use your back camera, right?

A

That's going to be like a super wide angle shot, right?

B

Super wide. Super wide. Why? It gives me more of the background. It just brings somebody. Which I'll talk about here in a second. The five Cs, it makes the viewer a little bit more curious. It gives more things in the background to just be curious about. To even help that scroll stop a bit more, right? So little hack there, use your back camera, go into Your wide angle 0.5. I use an iPhone and then upload something like that.

A

Okay, so for writing stuff on LinkedIn about business, like, what kind of. Should we just be taking selfies everywhere we go? So we have a big library of them. Mean, like talk to us a little bit about this.

B

You know, you can, you know, I, I did a stage talk maybe two months ago and we got the most leads ever on any like lead magnet or anything we've created. And all I did was on the stage, I had one job to remember and I took a photo, the selfie, Like I'm explaining to you guys, I turned my phone around, I did 0.5. I had the entire audience in there and it was me on stage, right? We uploaded that photo with like, hey, if you want my slides from this presentation, just comment slides. We got 3,000 leads from that post.

A

Wow.

B

I posted it again because I just wanted to test it, right? I posted it again with one of the professional photos that I got from that Seeking engagement, right? Me on stage, presenting with a little microphone, very high res, nice photo. Posted again. Hey, if you want my slides, you know, we got 200 leads, okay, from, from that, right? And so this is the power of just leveraging a photo. The thing about this, right, everybody on LinkedIn, the ones that are creating, are uploading some version of that professional headshot, the professional speaking thing, right? And so me doing a pattern interrupt with a selfie of me on the stage, right? Not the best lighting or anything. It stood out. And I always tell our folks that we work with, we don't have to be better, we have to be different. And so those are just some little tweaks that we can make to just stand out. Like, okay, I'll use this kind of crappy selfie to promote this speech that we just did and we get a couple thousand leads off of that.

A

You also mentioned something unusual, which is the idea of creating some sort of a infographic for lack of better words or chart or something like that. I would imagine this is where AI can come in really handy for this kind of stuff. Is this or Canva or something like that? Is that the kind of stuff you're recommending?

B

Yeah. So a little hack that I use now when we're doing our sessions, I do these office hours with our clients once a week. And there's always some good question, right? And so after that, I'll note what question was pretty good. I'll run it through Claude. I mostly use Claude. Hey, this person asked me this question. Here is my answer. I want to make a full guide on this. A one pager, right? Or infographic. I use one pagers a lot. But I'll run that through Claude and it'll help me make a little infographic. Then I'll take that infographic and just upload it to LinkedIn. Hey, guys, today in office hours, X person asked this really great question. I wanted to lay out my entire answer here. You'll find it below. And I will attach an infographic or A1 pager, something that looks like a little screenshot of a Google document. I'll attach something like that. And again, it just pattern interrupts my icp. They see what looks like a screenshot of a Google Doc and they're like, oh, my gosh, you must have, like, leaked something important. Or I'm looking at, you know, one of your sops. Right? Um, and so it just has that sort of like, pattern interrupt. And we also, again, use those for infographics.

A

What about a picture of your computer screen with that on it? Do you think something like that could work?

B

Yes, that. And another thing that I've done. I have a TV here in my office. I'll pull up the, like, infographic or whatever on the tv, TV screen, and I'll include my face in it and I'll point to it.

A

There you go.

B

Hybrid, right? Like, hey, I just created this. Do you want it? Right.

A

I love it.

B

The worst thing that you can do, though, when it comes to infographics, you know, maybe I have an infographic about the framework we're about to talk about today. And what I see all the time is people just kind of have some sort of graphic that says Framework for winning on LinkedIn. And that's it. Like, that's the graphic, right? Instead of just having the full framework with all the information. And so if you are just uploading an infographic or a graphic and not a selfie, make sure that graphic is packed with value.

A

You know what most marketers are doing manually? Ad creative, writing the copy, coordinating with the designer for the images, waiting on video Edits, managing revisions, every campaign, every cycle. I wanted to fix that for our members. So on July 16th, I'm bringing Caleb Cruz to teach inside the AI Business Society. He's going to show members how to build personalized AI pipelines using Claude code that runs the entire creative process on its own. Copy, images, video, revisions, all customized to your brand. And you don't need to be a coder to do it. I'll be in the room for the entire session. I'm in every session. And I can tell you members are going to walk away with a clear, buildable system that they can put to work that very same week. If you can't make it live, the full recording and resource kit will be waiting for you. Transcripts, slides, key takeaways, the whole shebang. This is what we do every month inside the AI Business Society. Come and see for yourself. And don't miss this training. Join@social mediaexaminer.com AI Again, social mediaexaminer.com AI let's get back to the hook. The first two lines, which I think we're calling the hook. How many words on average do we have before that Seymour or whatever shows up? I mean, like, talk to us a little bit about how we can do that hook and make that work with that graphic.

B

So you have about three lines, right? I like to use line breaks, so that takes away one of my lines. So you have around like two lines or two sentences per se. Right. And again, our main job with these two words, or, excuse me, these two sentences in the photo is actually to obviously, yes, get somebody to stop. When they do stop, I need them to click see more like, then that's my next job, right? So first job, and we really leverage the photo to get them to stop or the graphic to get them to stop. And then along with that text and the pairing of the photo, I want to get them to click see more. Now, how do I do this? Within the text part and a little bit of the photo, I want to have the reader feeling one of the five Cs. Now, the five Cs is really some sort of tool that we came up with. I learned it just in copy. We used it for videos. But really the five Cs just stand for curiosity, contrast, contradiction, controversy, confusion. Right. I'll use the last one for an example. Maybe the pairing of my two lines plus the photo. I want the reader to be a little bit confused, right? Or I want them to rest in a state now of curiosity. Right. I'll share an example here in A second. But I want them to feel something. I use the five Cs to help simplify it. And what I usually say is a good hook, meaning the two lines and the photo pairing kind of will force a reader to feel or have at least two to three of the five Cs. So there will be a little mix of confusion, curiosity, contradiction, right? But the best posts we've published have A, have two to three of the five Cs. An example of this in play, right? I'll. I'll say this out loud so everybody can visualize this. I had a friend that posted a photo there on vacation in Bali, right? So they'll post a little photo, great scenery. They, they take all of my advice. They go 0.5. You could see the beach. You see the ocean in the background, you see their kids playing. And the first text or the text that they've included there is like on vacation in Bali having a great summer, right? They click, upload. That's what most people do. Hey, I'm in Bali with the kids, having fun, work, life, balance, yada, yada yada. That really doesn't give me any of the five Cs, right? I'm not really confused. There's no controversy in there. There's no contra fiction in there. It's just you posting on vacation, right? That's almost a self serving post. How we can change this a bit to even have more of those five Cs is something like this. 2021, I was at a job I hated. 2026, line break. 2026, I just spent 30k to come here, right? Two lines and the photo of you on this beautiful beach. I'm curious, where are you, right? There's some contradiction there. What happened between 2021 and 2026? Like what's going on? Right? There is some confusion. There might even be to some folks, there might be some controversy. Why would you spend $30,000 to go to the beach, right? And so that's what I mean by literally same photo, but that's how now we can use the text to make you feel something and make the brain, the consumer's brain, the reader's brain need to click see more.

A

I love it.

B

Right?

A

And as I said earlier, folks, this is just as valid on some of the other social platforms like Facebook and also on X, because you can do the exact same thing with the long form content there. Love it. Okay, so we've talked about the five Cs which I think are curiosity, controversy, contrast, contradiction and confusion. It sounds like I got them all there and then the photo, right? We got to get that down. We spent a lot of time on the image and then those first couple lines. So this is just to stop the scroll. So this is the beginning, right? This is not the end of the story. So what happens next? Because this is stage one of two more steps here. What's next?

B

So after we've done our job and we've at least gotten the stop, this is the hardest job, right? The 80% of the performance or the impressions that we get is going to just be really optimizing the stop. So once we've done the hard part and we've gotten somebody to stop, we now have to earn the right to keep their attention. Or what I also call. We have to get them to stay. So stop. The second letter is. Or the second S is stay, right? Stop. Second letter is S. Stay. So now we need to get them to stay. Couple things that we need to do here. First thing that we need to do is rehook them. So the third line, once they click, see more. We have to confirm the click. People say this a lot on YouTube. We would talk about this a lot when we would do YouTube videos and things like that. But we now have to confirm the click, right? So we now have to show them with this third line. This is going to be an interesting story, or you're about to learn something here, right? We want to just give them a little recap. Hook with that third line.

A

Give us an example of this. Because I don't think everybody in my audience understands the confirm the click concept.

B

Yeah. So confirming the click, right, with this rehook, what I tell our team, our writers, our clients all the time is that this third line, we still want to have some tension, right? And so if we think about this in the movies or a really good Instagram reel or a YouTube video, you might be brought in because of the hook on a YouTube video. You might be brought in because of the thumbnail and the title. But within those first kind of like 60 seconds of a YouTube video, you're confirming if you want to watch this thing all the way through, right? And so the best creators, they know what to do kind of 60 seconds into a long form video or 3 seconds into a short form video, or the third line on a written post, it's to create some more tension, a rehook. So example, back to this Bali example. 2021, I hated my job. 2026, I just spent 30k to come here. Third line, I want to create some More attention instead of just giving away the whole story. So the wrong way to do this would be as soon as they click. Seymour. It's like, hey, I'm here in Bali. You know, like just something pretty boring. Hey, I'm here in Bali with the family and friends. I took five weeks off of my business. It's thriving without me. Right. Instead of just kind of giving away the story or just cutting to the chase there, we want to do some build up. So 20, 26, I spent 30k to be here. Click. See more. It was a wild dream that I had last February. I never thought I could actually leave my business and spend this amount of money to come here. Especially when I had so many fires going on in the business and it felt like everything was going to fall apart. But somehow I made it right. There's three more lines of tension just continuing to bring you into the story.

A

Yeah, I love this. What I'm hearing you say here is that you should address some things in this particular part of the story. It was like, I didn't believe this was possible. Possible for me, or I didn't think I could pull this off, given all the new obligations that I have. Right. So that is something that is really strategic because this goes back to that ideal customer profile. Right. You're probably going to be very strategic about picking something that you know is also one of their fears and concerns. Right?

B

Yes. I always say we want our content to feel like a greeting card. You know, when you receive a greeting card, it might even just say, happy Birthday, Michael, but it means something to you because of who it's from. You're like, wow, like, thank you, you. That card would mean nothing else to me. Right. I want my content to feel like, oh, my gosh, you're talking right to me. Like, this is how I'm feeling. And to your point, we were able to do that with that rehook.

A

Okay, cool.

B

After we have a pretty good rehook and some tension right now. We just want to make sure structurally, our post is set up where they can consume the whole thing. This is where I will leverage AI as a tool to kind of help me here. I think AI is like a sparring partner, a thought partner, not the thought leader. And so this is my. Where I take my first draft and I'll throw it into AI and say, hey, you know, remove any words or sentences that don't move this story forward. Because I want to keep the person's attention. Right. I want to earn their attention with each line. And so just A little keyword there. Remove any fillers or sentences that do not move the story forward. And the other prompt I'll sometimes give AI, or if it's just myself, I'll analyze the post like this. And put yourself in the shoes of the average LinkedIn user. They're on the train, going home. They're just consuming some LinkedIn, you know, before their next meeting. Is this post optimized to get them to read the entire thing? Right. And one of the things I will add sometimes in the prompt is grade my post on the stay out of 10. What are the chances somebody reads this entire post on a scale of 1 to 10? And so I also leverage AI to kind of just like, help me clean it up and help me make sure the structure is, Is. Is optimized in a way that the average LinkedIn person who's just scanning. Right, we're all just scanning, is able to consume the entire thing.

A

What have you learned from the criticism that Claude has been giving you about your content? Like, have you learned some tips on how to kind of like, progress the story along?

B

So a couple of things. I'm a yapper. So Claude likes to rip my. Rip my content to pieces and give me back a very short version, like, here you go. But a couple of things that I do try to optimize for. I try to optimize for rhythm. And this is what we also do. We ghostwrite for some clients as well. And this is the thing that I always have to reinforce with our teams. I will say AI will really shorten the heck out of everything. But I believe that humans actually start progressing through stories with some rhythm. What does rhythm look like and mean? That might mean like, hey, four just sentences, right? And then on the fifth block of text, maybe there's three or four sentences instead of just line breaks after every sentence. And so we like to give the posts some rhythm. I think right now, too, it has become a signal of like, oh, AI must have just wrote this whole thing if there's just tons of line breaks. And so we like to mix it up, maybe three or four one liners, and then we get to, you know, three sentences in a block, then maybe two sentences, then maybe back to one sentence. So we give it some rhythm. The other little tidbit I'll give here that I've learned by going back and forth as a sparring partner with Claude is that the best posts that continue to. To have a 10 out of 10 or at least a 9 out of 10 on the stay metric, these posts are at a 4th to 7th grade reading level. 4th to 7th grade reading Level. And so another thing that I'll do before, I'm pretty savvy with it now for my own writing, but before I go upload, maybe for others, I'll run it through Hemingway and just make sure that the grade level is at fourth to seventh grade.

A

Explain what that is. I don't know if everybody knows what Hemingway is.

B

Yep. So Hemingway, if you just go to type in Hemingway, it's a like a web platform and you can just copy and paste in your actual. Right. So if you're even doing an email, a Slack message, what have you, you can just copy and paste it in and then it will grade it and tell you what reading level this piece of content is. So it'll analyze the post.

A

Can AI do that too?

B

AI can do it. I've had more success for some reason with Hemingway doing it.

A

Awesome. What about shorter sentences? I have a background as a copywriter, so short sentences are like my buddy, my friend, you know what I mean? Because it just makes it easier for the brain to consume it. Like really short sentences sometimes, like taking a really long compound sentence and break them into shorter sentences. Have you found that that works for the content that you're creating?

B

I have found that it works well. Right. Humans, most of us are just scanning right as we, as we go through it. I have learned that it works best, as I said, even with some rhythm within that post. So if every line is just super short. Right. People will kind of get bored of that. And so what I like to do is the points that I really want to emphasize or the points that I really want, want my ICP to take away. I do. I will use those really short sentences to really make them stand out.

A

Okay. You mentioned that you wanted this thing optimized for a stay for someone who might be just on a train or in a taxi or doom scrolling for lack of better words. How do we do that? I mean, like, is there anything other than what we just talked about that involves optimizing this for the mobile reader?

B

Yeah. So one thing that you can do, or the biggest thing is removing any filler words, any sentences that again, do not move the source story forward. I think that's, that's 90% of the stay. One thing that I do as well is I always upload on mobile. And so I'll type everything out on LinkedIn or, excuse me, here on my desktop and maybe Even in the LinkedIn platform, I'll save it as a draft and Then I open up my phone to just scan it on mobile. Right. Sometimes the short sentences here on your desktop look pretty large, like large blocks of text on mobile.

A

Oh, so you'll like, paste it in, like, as a draft on LinkedIn on the mobile app.

B

Exactly.

A

Okay.

B

Exactly.

A

Yeah. Because then you'll realize, oh, that is a huge paragraph. Right. That's probably too big. Right?

B

Okay, exactly. And then there's other tools that you can use to kind of like preview it before it goes live. We use a tool called Authored up to do that. And it'll also show you, like, the mobile, what it looks like on mobile. But again, I want to optimize mostly for mobile. Right. 70% of folks are scrolling on LinkedIn on mobile. So I do want to optimize to make sure that. That they're able to scan and kind of stay if they're on their mobiles as well.

A

Let's talk a little bit about story. A little bit. And story arcs and stuff like that. Because we spent a lot of time talking about the hook. We didn't we. And we spent a lot of time talking about little hacks and tips, for lack of better words. You did mention that we should progress through a story. I feel like I heard you say that. Do you have any sense of how long of a story we should tell? Some people are going to say as long as it takes, but maybe that's not ideal for mobile. So talk to me a little bit about, like, you know, especially if you said you're a yapper, you probably like to tell really long stories. Stories, and maybe that doesn't work, you know?

B

Yes. You know, you hear about this on short form a lot. Like, find a series, right. Find a format that really works and you start to become, like, identified or synonymous with, I think a format or a series or a structure. Style that I've become synonymous with is pretty long post. And so a lot of the things that I put out there are pretty long. They're pretty heavy with data. I love numbers, I love research. And so a lot of my posts tends to lean that way. Way if you go look at somebody. I was actually just breaking this down. I was working with a group of doctors last night, and so I was breaking down a few profiles. One of the profiles we started to analyze was Adam Grant. Probably like 70% of what he's posting on LinkedIn. He has around 5 million followers on LinkedIn are these things that look like little tweets, right? They're the things you probably just make them in canva.

A

Oh yeah, like a screenshot of a tweet or something.

B

Okay, a screenshot of a tweet, right? And he's putting those things out. And maybe max, there, there's 12 sentences on that, right? Because it's supposed to look like a tweet, you know, maybe some of them have five sentences on there. He also posts these on Instagram. That's a format that he's become synonymous with. He's able to take these peer reviewed research articles and papers and he distills them for the average person to understand and take away. And so when it comes to like, hey, what's the best length? Or what are some tips for like long or short? Like, what should I do? I always tell people, again, who's our icp? What transformation are we trying to have for them? And once we answer that, the answers around length or structure start to appear. And I also believe that the length and the structure and the format start to become synonymous with, with who we are and start standing out almost like a short form video series on Instagram or TikTok.

A

Now, as a guy that's a really long form writer, because I've written books, there is a limit to how long your LinkedIn posts can be. And I'm sure you've hit it and I've hit it. You probably know it better than I do. What is it? A certain number of words or something like that? Do you have any sense of it?

B

Yeah, I think it's 3,000 characters or something like that. There's this funny thing that I started to do because I was very long winded. I've shortened it up again with some of these AI tools. But if I had something really good and I was like, I'm getting it out there, I would just take the rest of it and just continue it in the comments section.

A

Oh, there you go. Okay.

B

Yeah. And I actually saw I might get back to it. I actually think that we are in this habit as consumers to go look in the comments section. Right when we're consuming. We're very used to clicking on comments and to the point around stay. I want somebody to stay on my post as long as, you know, as long as possible. And so I think even having some more details in the comments was allowing people to stay more. And I actually saw them engaging a lot with that second half of that post in the comments. So a little tactic there.

A

Okay, so so far, step one is to stop the scroll and step two is stay. Get them to stay. We have one more step, which is another s so what is it?

B

Yes. Triple s. Triple S. So first s get the stop. Hardest thing that we gotta do. Second s get the stay. Second, hardest thing that we have to do. Earn the right for that person and keep consuming your content. Right. And lastly, we want to optimize for the share. The third S is share. Stop, stay, share. Right, and share. A lot of people talk about impressions or views or even likes or comments, right? To me, shares is. It's a lagging indicator, but it's an indicator of impact. And for the folks that we work with, right, they're not just trying to be influencers or get a bunch of brand deals. They're experts in what they do and they're trying to maintain their authority in this field. Right. And so the biggest indicator that we're trying to optimize for is impact. And how do we measure impact on socials? I like to measure it through shares because if somebody is sharing or on LinkedIn, we call it a repost. That just didn't fit in my framework. Stop, stay, repost. So stop say share. But if somebody's reposting my work or sharing even an Instagram video with somebody, something in that piece of content must have been impactful, right? In some way, if we're not on the entertainment side of the house, it must have been pretty impactful piece of content. And so what we like to analyze, to just measure, like, how are we doing when it comes to posting isn't the views, it's not the comments. It's mostly the shares to impressions ratio. And shares to impressions ratio is really just looking at how many shares. Or again, repost, whatever that platform calls it, how many shares do we get divided by how many impressions? And that gives us a good gauge on, on, hey, was this a pretty impactful piece of content? And if not, what can we change to optimize this a bit more where more people would share it?

A

Okay, this seems like the hardest thing to achieve. You know, getting the stay is hard, but getting a share is really, really, really, really hard. Right. And obviously I don't think there's an actual metric you're going to find in the analytics and social platforms. This is a metric you've made up that we're going to have to calculate ourselves. Right. So do you have some tips on how we can actually get more shares? Because I would imagine because we're doing the written word, we can signal that this is something that people ought to do. So any tips on how to do this?

B

Yep. And it really comes back to what we Talked about at the front half of this. Right? Again, if I understand who I'm talking to and make sure at least 90% of posts have some sort of transformation for them, there will be some sort of share activity. Share activity. Even looks like, hey, I'm sharing this to myself to read later because it was so good. This was so impactful. Right? And so it is hard. Well, I should say it's simple, but it's not easy, right? The more that we can have concrete takeaways within our post for somebody to actually go share with a team member or share with a friend or again, share with themselves to read later, that's when I again, I know that we're making impactful content. An example here that I can give for everyone too. And I'll also break down if you do this calculation, I'll break down what is a good shares to impressions ratio. But we can take this Bali post the same post that we've been talking about, right? So we have a good hook in the front half. We've structured it in a nice way that the folks are consuming it. It's a good story arc here, right? There's some good rhythm with the sentence structure. And now we're at the end of our post. We want to make sure there's a transformation. We want to make sure there's some sort of takeaway, right? So again, the average person that's on vacation, they could post the selfie ham on vacation with the family. Somebody that's optimizing for the share. They're going to have some sort of structure of like, you know, here's how I did it to this point around, hey, in 2021, I hated my life. In 2026, I just spent 30k to be here. After I kind of take them through the story, the ending of this post is going to be. And here's how you can go do it. Step one, go, you know, audit your time. Step three, like whatever that is. But the ending of a really good post is going to have a takeaway for the, for the reader. Again, how did I come up with this? You just put yourself in the average human. We're all thinking about ourselves. And so if the ending of that post, you've sucked me, you brought me in, excuse me, with the story and you've given me then something that I can go take back. That's like a goodie bag when you leave apart, right? It's like, wow, thank you. There's some transformation here for me when we do something like that. Then I am Sharing it with my friend who's at their job that they hate. I am sharing it with my network like wow, this is such a great read. I am sharing it to myself to hey go read this later to make sure I got all the steps here and maybe even commenting to say to capture the lead magnet to get this resource that you might be promoting. And so it's simple, but it's not easy. But if we can make sure at least 90% of our post posts end with some exact takeaway and transformation for our consumer, for our reader, then we are optimizing for the share.

A

Can we count tagging in of a friend as a share?

B

You can. There are some tactics for that, right? Of like hey tag, you know, a friend that needs to see this. Hey, share this with a friend that needs to see this. Sometimes little tactic that we may use is like share this with your network if it was valuable, right. So there's some little tactics that we can do there, there. But those tactics only work again if the actual takeaway and transformation is pretty solid and pretty good.

A

So what's a good metric?

B

So good metrics. So you take your shares or again if we're talking just LinkedIn your repost and the analytics will show you this. So you take that number divided by your impressions or if it's another platform divided by your views and 0.3 is what we want to see. 0.3, right. So 0.3 is pretty, pretty good.

A

So 1/3 of 1% basically.

B

Exactly. 0.3 is what we want to see.

A

Like that.

B

That's pretty solid. That's solid. Now if we see 0.5 or above. 0.5 or above that thing is great. That's great. And that's actually a little, little trick here. That's actually something that will repost every 60 to 90 days. So we will post that exact piece of content if it's at a 0.5. We repost that same text, same photo every 60 to 90 days. Days again, wow. Shares to impression is showing us impact. I'm here on these platforms to make impact. I believe income follows impact. And so whenever I find something that oh, this must be have been pretty good, a lot of people share this. I'm going to repost that every 60 to 90 days. If we see anything around a 0.02. Absolute garbage. Absolute garbage X that out, we never want to post that again. Right? Or at least in that, in that framework.

A

Or maybe we just need to take another stab at it, right? And make sure it's exactly it's accomplishing all the the things we've talked about today. Kasey Brown for those that cannot see you have a hat on that says creative and this has been a very creative discussion. I know there's going to be people that want a lot more of you. So where can they find you? And if they're interested in possibly working with you, where should they go?

B

Yeah, so obviously you can find me on LinkedIn. I am there. Casey Brown I think YouTube is where you're going to get the most valuable content. YouTube is not a platform I'm trying to optimize for anything. So I just love to go on there and yap and just share exactly what we're doing. So you can go search Kasey Brown K A S E y Brown on YouTube and also there you also find different ways to work with us, work with our team. So YouTube is probably the best place to connect and learn more.

A

Casey thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us today.

B

Thank you, Michael hey, if you missed

A

anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 727. And if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us on whatever app you're listening to us on. And if you've been a listener for a little while, we would love a review. And also please do share this with your friends. You can tag me on Facebook, LinkedIn and or X. And do check out my other show, the AI Explored Podcast. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Before you go, if you want to stop grinding through the ad creative process manually, the AI Business Society can help. Caleb Cruz is teaching members how to automate the entire process on July 16th. Full recordings and all the resources are included with your membership. Join@socialmediaexaminer.com AI again Social Media Examiner.com AI.