Say cheese!

By Steve Moran

I have a cousin who is a pastor and I admire him greatly for many things. One of those things is sort of super trivial, but that trivial thing is where the lesson is.  

He is one of the most gregarious people I know. He can make friends with strangers in a moment and seems to have a unique ability to even talk religion and not offend . . . at least most of the time. But here is the thing he does that I needed to learn from him. He takes pictures, either selfies or just pictures of almost everyone he meets and puts them on Facebook.

This is Huge

He inspired me to try the same at the SMASH conference. I took 20-30 photos, most of which have been posted on LinkedIn (some are still to come) and the results have been phenomenal.  

Three posts each with 8 photos (LinkedIn’s max per post) with these stats. For each set of photo, I am showing just the thumbnail photo, which I am going to talk more specifically about in a minute.

Here is What I Learned

I learned a bunch of things with this experience. Here they are:

  1. The first and maybe most important is that the thumbnail image is hugely important. It turns out the scrabble letters photo is unusual and grabs peoples attention. So that post has close to double the number of views as the next two. I would also note, it is the first one to post. But the delta between #2 and #3 posting is just over 100 views even though they were posted 30 hours or so apart.

  1. My LinkedIn following is just a bit under 21,000 and so for the first post more than one-third of my followers took a look. That is amazing. You can do this too and I expect you will find similar proportional results . . . or maybe you will do better than me.

  1. It is not that hard to do, though at first I was a little nervous about asking people to get in photos with me.

  1. Anything visual is king. We are getting pretty amazing results with video as well. And, in case you are wondering, we are proud masters of low production value video. Don’t get me wrong, you can’t do sucky video. You have to be able to have decent lighting and sound, but you can do pretty good stuff with your iPhone and inexpensive lighting and microphones.  

Finally, in the next few weeks I will be at:

  • NIC
  • Georgia ALFA
  • LeadingAge

Let’s take a picture together!