Engage more on LinkedIn, get more views – Faris Aranki really took that advice to heart and shares his epic adventure

I recently undertook a gargantuan social media challenge; partly to learn more about human behaviours and the algorithm that sits behind LinkedIn and partly because I was bored. In this first of a two part blog series I explain what I did and why.

“You don’t have to do this Faris, just stop now!”

But I didn’t stop…

Have you ever set yourself a challenge and then began to regret it half way through? That was me on the weekend of 7^th December 2024. I had woken up that morning and decided to challenge myself to comment on 1,000 different people’s LinkedIn posts.

Why do this?

Well, I wanted to test some hypotheses around relation building through social media and learn about human behaviours – all whilst challenging myself as I have a habit of doing physical and mental challenges. Plus I didn’t have anything else to do that weekend.

It begins

So, at 8:32am on the Saturday morning I started with enthusiasm. I rattled through the first 25 posts; “This will be easy I thought” How wrong could I be…

The rules I had set myself were that:

• The comment had to be 1,000 different people (preferably that I was connected to)
  
  
• I had to read their entire post (if there was an article attached I read it, if there was a video I watched it)
  
  
• I had to write something positive and additive (no simple “Nice post”)
  
  
• I couldn’t use AI, it had to all be me

The challenges faced

Now, genuinely reading 1,000 posts and coming up with an original comment is taxing – my average comment was 39 words in length but some stretched to over 250 words. There were the added complications of finding 1,000 different people’s posts: 98% of people haven’t posted in the last year on LinkedIn, plus the algorithm keeps wanting to show you the same ads and the same people. I had to keep track on whose posts I had written on and how many I had completed. It was tricky but I used good, old fashioned pen and paper for that.

To complete the task in 48 hours I couldn’t spend more than three minutes per post. So every conversation I got into slowed me down and took time away from commenting. I was not helped by the fact that LinkedIn twice thought I was a bot (apparently you are not allowed to make more than 300 comments in a day) so locked me out both times as well as slowing down my feed.

The closest thing to this experience was the one time I ran an ultramarathon

With time at a premium, I forsook showers and social activities over the weekend. I also simplified my meals (eating a lot of tea and toast) and cut sleep to a minimum (only six hours across the weekend). I had to sacrifice conversations, be they online (such as all the people who responded to a comment with a question) or with people who were checking in or just curious as to what I was doing. I turned the TV off as even having it on in the background was distracting and instead just had music playing all weekend.

I was undertaking the whole challenge purely on my mobile phone, so there were periods where my thumbs began to hurt, my eyes throbbed and my back and neck became sore from being hunched over a screening typing for so long (Ok if it wasn’t already crazy, it is now! -Ed).

The closest thing to this experience was the one time I ran an ultramarathon – in both cases my mind wanted to quit multiple times but I stuck with it, breaking the task into batches of 10s… and I’m so glad that I did.

My hypothesis and strategies

Like many people, I have a love-hate relationship with social media and therefore I wanted to test whether writing heartfelt comments on people’s posts could genuinely restart previously lost relationships and/or deepen existing ones.

As a secondary hypothesis, I wanted to discover if commenting did make any material difference to my LinkedIn vanity stats (such as impressions, views, engagements and followers)

With this in mind, I eventually had to deploy four strategies to find my 1,000 people to comment on:

• My first strategy was to intentionally pick people whose posts I wanted to write on; this is where I discovered that most people don’t post, only repost other people’s content or haven’t posted in over a year

• Instead I switched to using my feed to provide the 1,000 people but after a while this ran out of steam as LinkedIn kept showing me the same people (at one point I had to scroll for six minutes to get a new person)

• I then embarked upon my third strategy: Posting on LinkedIn and in WhatsApp groups asking for posts to comment on. This unearthed quite a few but it still wasn’t enough

• My final strategy was to look for popular posts and then write comments on the posts of people from my network who had commented (this sort of highlighted to me that the person was likely to be an active user of LinkedIn so likely to have posted themselves)

It was through a combination of these that I eventually reached my 1,000 post target and what amazing things I discovered about the algorithm and human behaviour as a result!

We need to talk about posts

I learnt some fascinating things and felt like I got to know some people much better (such as the in-depth blog about 90s boy bands one lady wrote).

Let’s be honest though, there are a lot of terrible posts out there. So many are self-indulgent and/or badly written with too many tags. When they were like this, it was really difficult to find something meaningful to comment. Two tips to all the posters out there:

1. Think about what is the key message you want to impart
   
   
2. Use less words.

Although I read a lot of blogs and watched a lot of videos; 85% of posts lacked any visuals and were all about the words.

Then there are the vast amount of posts written by AI (and supported by bots); we all know these ones, usually some leadership tip supported by a quote or infographic. It turns out that a lot of these do the rounds as I saw multiple identical copies of the same post over the weekend.

The other thing that became clear was the number of LinkedIn pods that exist with the same people liking and commenting on each other’s posts. It was also clear how reactive people are; the weekend I did the experiment there was a fake news story about a company that sacked all their employees that had reported feeling stressed. You would have thought the news was real based on the amount of outrage that was expressed by certain people on LinkedIn.

Throw in all the boasting and sob stories and it is important to take everything you read on social media with a pinch of salt.

We need to talk about the algorithm and vanity metrics

In part 1 of my blog, I talked about how the algorithm mistook me for a bot at several points, locking me out of LinkedIn and throttling the reach of my posts. That said, the massive upsurge in commenting did impact my metrics. Compared to my baseline, it increased impressions and profile views by 25%, engagements by 200% and daily followers gained by 250%.

However this effect merely lasted for 4 days before each of those metrics returned to their natural levels. This really showed that, unless you are commenting everyday (which is what LinkedIn want you to do), the impact you have is marginal and temporary.

How people responded was by far and away the most interesting thing

Within the first week of the experiment, the stats were shocking:

• 65% of people whose posts I commented on did not respond or acknowledge my comment
  
  
• 20% responded with a simple thumbs up or “Thanks”

10% of people did respond with heartfelt messages (either publicly or privately), letting me know how much they appreciated the comment. In some cases they shared lovely things like how my comment had brought much more exposure to their post or how it was the first time they had ever been seen on social media.

I had people who sent me 20 blogs or long videos and then got annoyed when I refused to comment on them

Then there was the final 5% of people and they responded in what I would call a negative manner. Because I had publicised on different channels that I was doing this, these people generally fell into this group; they became task-focused and had an expectation.

I had people who sent me 20 blogs or long videos and then got annoyed when I refused to comment on them. And there were people who were unhappy with the comment I wrote (asking for rewrites). I had other people complain about the timing of my comment (“What use is a 4am comment?” they said) or the length (“Can it be longer?”).

It was fascinating not just that this happened but how belligerent some of these people became – realistically there are people like this in all aspects of life but I didn’t expect it when doing the challenge.

My takeaways a couple of weeks later

Despite all the headwinds, I managed to achieve my goal and I’ve had time to reflect on all I learnt; there are five key takeaways:

1. It’s easy to forget that social media (LinkedIn in this case) is a bubble; it’s important to remember that most people don’t post and that you tend to get shown the same people with the same views all the time. Now that I completed the challenge, my feed is quite different with many forgotten contacts reappearing
   
   
2. It’s hard to fight the algorithm; it really does show you what it wants to show you
   
   
3. Commenting will do little for your long-term vanity metrics; unless you do it all the time, real engagement can only come from interesting content
   
   
4. A nice comment can make a massive impact on relationship building; that said most comments will be ignored so be strategic with your comments and think about alternative ways to reinforce relationships (like just picking up the phone)
   
   
5. It is not easy to write comments on 1,000 posts and everyone thinks you are crazy for doing it; people really want to know why you are doing it, they don’t believe you are not cheating and even if they do, they do not believe your results apply to them and diminish your efforts (I got asked so many times: “What’s next?”, as if this was a regular thing)

Would I do it again?

“Hell no”, is my simple answer.

Aside from the learnings, it really makes little impact and if you were to do it then a considerably lower volume of comments placed strategically on people’s posts that you know will see them would be best.

The experiment gave me confidence to spend less time scrolling and commenting on social media and to index more towards genuine relationship building activities like speaking with people.

Still I did it, so none of you need to.

No need to thank me 😉

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Faris Aranki is CEO of Shiageto Consulting

You can find out more by following the hashtag #1000PostsChallenge on LinkedIn.