What I learned from my first viral post on Linkedin (Parts 1 & 2)

May 6

Part 1

Answers and insights

As a fractional CMO, part of my job is to help companies craft the right message for their sales and marketing teams.

So the intent behind my post was to provide my opinion that if a company must pass on some or all of the tariff costs, creating a separate line item is an option to raise prices.

There were a lot of comments. I read them all.

A note about the results.

This was a post, not a poll.
I don’t think you can even call it an opinion poll; and it's definitely not a scientific poll.
I had to make judgement calls on many of the comments and others might categorize the comments differently.

That being said, here is how people answered in their comments.

Show tariff as a line item: 56%
Raise prices: 17%

Wait! That doesn’t add up to 100%.

Correct.

27% of the comments didn’t “vote" one way or another or I could not make a decision on which way the commenter leaned.

So, yeah, these numbers are NOT a good representative of how the general population feels about this topic.

But, the comments were surely interesting.

Politics

I wrote the post from a business perspective but the politics around tariffs cannot be ignored.

I won’t bore you with some of the more…let’s say “colorful” comments. There were plenty from both sides which probably explains why many were motivated to post a comment.

Probably the most productive political comment was pointing out that if you display tariffs, you may turn away some customers because you are not sourcing from US suppliers.

Fair. And judging by some of the comments, accurate.

And I’m not gonna lie.

Some of the comments, again from both sides, were so passive-aggressive, argumentative or non-productive that my finger was itching to press the reply button.

But thank you Mom for teaching me:

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Business Insights

This is the reason I post and am active on LinkedIn..

Here are the ones I found interesting, provided a fair counter point or gave me reasons to stop and think.

Displaying tariff costs could provide your competitors insight into your cost structure.
Creating a separate line item allows the accounting to have a separate line in their GL, like taxes.
A separate line for traffic will not be calculated as part of sales tax.
Some companies already require a breakout of tariffs on the purchase order. (There was a screenshot of this!)
There are legal implications and limits to creating a separate line item for tariffs.
And of course…display tariffs could make some consumers choose not to buy from you, depending on how strong their political views are.

I don’t know how accurate some of these comments, especially when it comes to accounting or legal.

But these additional insights show why it’s important to get input from different departments before taking action.

If I could rewrite the last sentence of my post it would change to:

If your company must pass on tariff costs to your customers, there are a lot of considerations to take into account when deciding to increase prices or create a separate line item.

Part 2

The marketing lesson.

I’m a CMO, so just like every sales and marketing executive, I make choices on where to spend my limited time and resources for business development.

LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms for B2B marketing.

So like most B2B marketers, I don't post on LinkedIn to get on my soapbox and let the world know my political views or argue about government policy. There are other platforms for that.

I spend time and effort writing LinkedIn posts to develop new meaningful connections by providing insights based on my experience and expertise.

So, how did this post do?

Let’s take a look at the numbers for the first three days.

34,000 impressions
113 reactions
364 comments

Reactions:

3rd degree: 72%
2nd degree: 19%
1st degree: 9%

Any marketer would be happy with the reach (impressions) and engagement of this single post. Especially the 3rd degree reactions.

But remember, companies invest time and resources into social media for business results, not to improve vanity metrics.

But one viral post does not make or break your business.

it’s too early for me to say what impact this post had on my business.

But, here are my thoughts about what this viral post taught me.

Going viral does not necessarily mean you reach your target audience.

My target audience is manufacturing companies.

The industry this post reached the most?

Transportation, logistics and supply chain, followed by trucking.

Are these related? Sure. But not my target or the industry that the majority of my connections are in.

Going viral doesn’t mean you auto-magically get more business connections.

This post got me 3 new connection requests.

Thich means that….

You need to capitalize on the new audience.

Most of the comments were also 3rd degree connections - people well outside my immediate network.

So, I read every comment and for those who had thoughtful comments I replied and sent a connection request.

I also looked up every reaction and if i though we could be helpful to each other, i sent a connection request.

Key take away:

This is a good reminder that social media is not a fire and forget marketing tactic.

In fact I can’t think of one marketing tactic that doesn’t require hard work.

Yet, on LinkedIn, I see too many companies just post on their company account and then sometimes their sales and executive team just click the repost button on their personal account.

That is not enough to make LinkedIn worthwhile.

After all LinkedIn is a social network.

People connect and people do business with with people, not companies.

This means that individuals from sales, marketing and the executive team need to be commenting, connecting and engaging with people.

Like my Dad told me:

You get out, what you put in.

David Lee