l4l f4f e4e — you’re doing it wrong - Adi Pineapple - Medium

When people take part in like 4 like or follow 4 follow they’re using the right strategy in the wrong way.

I got a message yesterday from a total stranger requesting that I add him as a connection on LinkedIn and take part in the latest epic fail of the flawed l4l strategy. He wanted to do endorsement 4 endorsement.

“But XYZ wrote an article on Forbes saying _____”

He lied.

There are two types of marketing:

1. The tactics that marketers are really using, behind closed doors, these are most likely black hat.
2. The tactics that marketers claim they are using, when asked on public forums how to achieve _____ growth.

This poor soul fell for type #2. I hate seeing hard working individuals fall for #2 so here’s the truth.

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

There are two reasons to like, follow and endorse others on social media. Neither of which is to force them into a quid-pro-quo.

1. The first reason is to win favor with the social media algorithms by working your a$$ off to be noticed by the social media algorithms and ideally have your content exposure boosted for free (ex: Instagram’s explore tab, the news feeds of Facebook & LinkedIn‘s and the suggested posts tab provided by Medium).
2. The second reason is to make the person you’re engaging with feel listened to, acknowledged and appreciated so that they may be politely made aware of your existence and choose to pause to listen to what you have to say in another dimension (ideally by going to your webpage). The affinity someone may develop for you after you engage with their social media content may not translate to a follow back or like back… sometimes it comes back to you as something WAY BETTER, the power of influence.

If your goal is to become influential on social media: join a pod, engage with the community, don’t unfollow people just because they didn’t follow you back. Follow people because they either have interesting content, or you want to give them a polite nudge aka a brand impression.

“That’s great, but right now I just want to boost my LinkedIn endorsements.”

If that’s your goal, this is how to achieve it using “ethical” black hat tactics aka a bot:

1. Download the Chrome extension LinkedIn Helper
2. Set it to scrape together a list of everyone in your alumni network (people you went to uni / b-school with & previous co-workers).
3. Once you have this list, set the bot to endorse 60–80 people per day from this list.
4. Sit back and watch as the endorsement flood back, from people who actually know you & have worked with you.

Asking people who don’t know you to endorse you is a horrible idea. You could accidentally end up asking someone who would’ve been a future boss, but because they now know that your endorsements are fake, you now miss the opportunity.

… have a different marketing question? Ask me on quora or as a response to this post & I’ll do my best to answer within 72 hours.