How to Get Your Ideal Reader’s Attention on LinkedIn
Apr 01, 2025
Even when they're busy & distracted.
“I scroll LinkedIn at red lights while I’m driving.”
I heard this from a client recently, and while it made me raise my eyebrows a bit, it also reveals something really important about the way people use social media:
Users are distracted.
Especially those users who aren’t actively using the platform to find clients.
The professionals, the managers, the entrepreneurs who are scrolling their feed at a stoplight…
They’re not using their entire brain.
So catching - and keeping - their attention isn’t just difficult… It’s practically impossible sometimes.
Yet for all that, these social media platforms are one of the best ways to get & keep a client’s attention… If you approach it the right way.
So here are 3 ways you can use your social media content to grab a reader’s attention, keep that attention, and then move them into your sales process sooner or later.
- Speak their language, not yours
- Don’t post stuff they could Google
- Provide active proof
Let’s get into it.
Speak their language, not yours
I want to buy a truck.
I’ve outgrown my Subaru Outback (had 1 dog when we bought the thing… somehow there are 3 now, and they all love camping) so I’m always daydreaming about which 4x4 I’m gonna buy.
My girlfriend, however, doesn’t care about trucks at all.
When we’re driving down the road I’m clocking every make, model, lift kit, and rooftop tent.
And she… Doesn’t. They’re just a bunch of colorful shapes in between her and the scenery.
Same thing is happening on social media.
There’s a ton of noise. A ton of colors, shapes, and words words words.
And we tune most of it out. Because it’s just not important to us, and we’d get zero done if we focused on even 1% of the ads, hot takes, and “8 ways to ____” articles that we have to scroll past.
Your ideal hiring manager is doing it, too.
They run a manufacturing plant, or lead a team of nurses, or manage 15 accountants.
So a recruiter’s post about candidates, talent, hiring managers, or the hiring process becomes just another blur in the background of their social feed.
They don’t care about those terms… because they don’t use those terms in their day-to-day.
But you already know the words they use. They don’t say “candidate.” They say “pediatric RN.”
They don’t call themselves “hiring manager.” Because even though they are a hiring manager, their job title is “VP of IT”
So here’s what you do: take all your posts, dms, emails, and stories…
And find every time you use recruiter-centric terms like “candidate,” “hiring manager,” “client,” and “talent.”
And replace those terms with the exact words that *they would use.*
If that’s all you did, you’d be doing a lot.
But you could go further…
Don’t post stuff they could Google
“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” - Albert Einstein.
Apparently, like most quotes that get shared a lot on social, this might not have actually been Einstein who said it, but it’s a good point so there it is.
And in 2025 you don’t even need to know where the library is… We all just look stuff up online.
In seconds, people can find the answer (or an answer, at least) to just about any question.
But social media is different.
People aren’t really going on their social feeds to learn… They’re basically…
Looking to kill some time.
(And yes, this even applies to LinkedIn, the work platform)
They’re not scrolling looking for hard-hitting, value-packed answers to their difficult questions.
No, they’re looking to kill some time in a way that feels work-adjacent.
Interesting stories. News. Opinions. Updates from colleagues.
That’s what really gets attention.
And why those value-packed “11-Step Interview Process” never seem to get noticed.
It’s not that content like that isn’t useful, or that your audience wouldn’t like it… It’s just in the wrong place.
If they want information, they’ll look it up.
If they want info-tainment (where you can sneak a lesson into a story or case study) they’ll go to their social feed.
So here’s what you do: look at your old posts (or your drafts for your next posts)
And ask. “Is this the answer to a question someone would google?”
If so, maybe save that for an article on your website, and instead tell a story that illustrates one of the points you’d like to make.
Which brings us to our final hiring-manager-attracting-post-technique…
Provide active proof
Anybody who’s going to pay for recruiting needs to believe that you can find them the person they want to hire.
And every hiring manager you’d like to work with has already been hit up by dozens of recruiters.
They may have even worked with some recruiters who brought them nothing but bunk resumes from Indeed.
Trust is low.
You can’t just say you can find the right people… You have to prove it.
And there’s an easy way to do that on LinkedIn.
Talk about the people you place.
Every single placement is a case study.
And you don’t have to stress over the format much. Just tell us what happened.
- Who did the business need to hire?
- Why weren’t they getting it done on their own/what made the search tricky?
- What did you do?
- What was the result?
I see recruiters who post nothing but 2-3 of these stories a week staying busy. Because these are what hiring managers want to read about, and what actually makes them believe you can help them.
Conclusion
Getting attention on LinkedIn is tough.
Anybody who’s spent 30 minutes writing a post only to see it get like 213 impressions knows what I’m talking about.
But it’s also not that hard to stand out from all the noise.
Just do these 3 things:
- Speak their language, not yours
- Don’t post stuff they could Google
- Provide active proof
No go forth and post!
