THE THOUSAND POST SPRINT — One person’s extreme challenge to test the power of connections on social media [Part 1 of 2]
Last December I undertook a gargantuan social media challenge partly to learn more about human behaviours and the algorithm that sits behind LinkedIn and partly because he was bored; in this first part of a 2 part blog series that was originally commissioned by Training Journal, 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 7th December 2024.
I had woken up that morning and decided to challenge myself to comment on 1000 different people’s LinkedIn posts.
Why do this?
Well, I wanted to test some hypotheses around relation building through social media whilst learning about the algorithm and human behaviours all whilst challenging myself [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 I was to be.
The rules I had set myself were that:
- It had to be 1000 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 (so no simple “Nice post”)
- I couldn’t use AI, it had to all be me
The Challenges faced
Now, genuinely reading 1000 posts and coming up with an original comment (my average comment was 39 words in length but some stretched to over 250 words) is taxing enough but there were the added complications of finding 1000 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) and then keeping track on whose posts I had written on and how many I had completed was tricky (I used good, old fashioned pen and paper for that).
To put it into context to complete the task in 48 hours, I couldn’t spend more than 3 minutes per post so every conversation I got into slowed me down and taking time away from commenting also left me with less time.
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.
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 6 hours across the weekend).
I had to forsake 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 couldn’t be distracted so I turned the TV off (after attempting to have something on in the background) 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.
The closest thing to the 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 4 strategies to find my 1000 people to comment on:
1. 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
2. Instead I switched to using my feed to provide the 1000 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 6 minutes to get a new person)
3. I then embarked upon my third strategy: Posting on LinkedIn and in WhatsApp groups asking for posts to comment on
4. This unearthed quite a few but it still wasn’t enough, so 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 1000 post target and what amazing things I discovered about the algorithm and human behaviour as a result.
Find out more in part 2 of the blog series and you can find out more by following the hashtag #1000PostsChallenge on LinkedIn.
Faris
Faris is the CEO and Founder of Shiageto Consulting, an innovative consultancy that helps firms and individuals sharpen their effectiveness. Connect with him here
Success = IQ x EQ x FQ
