A Catch-up

Welcome to this weeks dose of all things LinkedIn.

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

I've struggled through the heatwave that has hit the UK this week to bring you this episode, I hope you appreciate it!

Having missed last week, I have a number of things to cover but no one topic that dominates this edition, hence why I’m calling it a catch up!

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn Safety Series: What is scraping? Amidst all the controversy over the recent ‘hacking’ stories that have been everywhere (including episode 328) over the last few weeks, LinkedIn have responded with this which is also timed to somewhat explain their position in the HiQ legal case that is still ongoing (covered in episode 327). It also might explain why people are getting their accounts banned for viewing too many profiles and appearing to be ‘non-human’ in their actions. It’s a good article and well worth a read.

MI5 chief warns public of growing cyber espionage threat. I don’t have much more to say on this than I’ve already covered many times! We need to be careful about who we connect to, the right approach to LinkedIn is to connect with people you are confident are trustworthy and relevant to your business/industry and build a larger, more diverse number of followers. LinkedIn however make it so much easier for these crooks to connect with people by allowing anyone to say they work for any company they pick, without any form of ratification - I still think this is grossly irresponsible of LinkedIn.

Amazing Stories Behind Fake LinkedIn Company Pages. My buddy Greg Cooper published this excellent article this week exposing a company page that is getting great results from its posts but appears to be staffed by fake employees. The weird thing is that it’s pretty difficult to know exactly what their game is!

Maybe by posting content that gains great engagement they are giving their fake employees credibility that they can use to connect with bad intentions? The content on the page was interesting to observe and demonstrates what the LinkedIn community clearly likes to see - you can’t see it now because, following several of us reporting the page, LinkedIn have taken it down.

What on earth is this?!

Many of you will have seen this Group invite suddenly appear at the top of your feed this week. If you perform a search for the ‘The Break Room’ Group you will not find it because it’s a private group and even then people are reporting that accepting the invite did nothing! I did hear that some got in though and the group already had 122k members...LinkedIn have subsequently taken it down,

I doubt this is something from a bad actor on this occasion, the only way this could happen is that LinkedIn did it. They must be testing something or maybe it’s a new form of advert. Group invites currently appear on your network page under invitations but I reckon that LinkedIn are thinking about trying to make them more prominent - another desperate attempt to revitalize groups?

LinkedIn Live sessions must now be a LinkedIn Event.

Some interesting developments here that are no surprise really. It’s unclear how this will work if you just want to launch an impromptu event, perhaps it still allows you to do so and you just create an event that starts in a few minutes’ time.

Organising a live stream more than 7 days in the future is a really positive move, this way people who deliver regular weekly Live streams can make it easier for their audience to schedule them into their diary.

The 3rd point is long overdue and essential for this to work. I never understood why ‘Previously Live’ was only available to all via Impromptu broadcasts rather than scheduled ones which could only be viewed by those that had registered, I'm glad they have finally realised the error.

Feedback

I love it when listeners get in touch to add their views or experiences to a topic I have covered on the podcast. One such person is Charlotte Steggall, A talent acquisition professional from Cambridge, UK. She listened to episode 326 about diversity and wanted to share the following story regarding profile pronouns;

“A few months ago a colleague suddenly put her pronouns in her email signature, linked to a blog post on why it was important. I read it but was still dubious, like you, of how much good someone who is clearly the gender they appear to be (like myself and like my colleague) if they state their obvious pronouns. I decided to try it for a couple of weeks.

My job is that I recruit and look after our young employees globally. I have monthly catch-up calls with them and a week or so after I’d changed my signature, one of my young people asked me to stay on the call. He told me that he had something to tell me… that he was gender fluid and wants to be referred to as “they” eventually… but no one beside me knew.

They said that the pronouns in my profile signaled to them that I was a safe space for them to come out to. Now…by this point I was in a panic over the pressure - with this knowledge I should be supporting them should they want to come out to their manager and so on… what about bathrooms?!?!

But at the end of the day, I was so honoured that they had felt safe enough with me to open up and tell me about who they really are.

I don’t think that everyone should feel pressured to use pronouns, and actually, I think what you have is really a nice answer to it. You’re showing respect, but at the same time I don’t think anyone would single you out to come out to as they would someone displaying themselves to be an active ally.”

Charlotte Steggall (She/her)

Listener Candyce Edelen also got in touch having listened to episode 327 ‘Getting Results with LinkedIn DMs with Kim Arnold’ Candyce enjoyed the episode but had a differing view on my point about understanding that a message needs to be about the lead's interest, not you or your product.

She has got some great results - 72% of those she approaches about arranging a meeting accept! She does this by setting up a conversation that establishes equality through an exchange of ideas. This often starts with engagement on LinkedIn but that is not always possible so she often approaches directly via an invitation to connect. Here are three examples she sent me;

Candyce goes on to say;

“Basically, I'm trying to treat networking on LinkedIn the same way I might network at a conference. Try to talk about topics that are of interest to both the other person and me and get a conversation going. Build a relationship first, establish some trust, and later probe for needs. All of this is pretty aligned with what you're talking about in that episode and across your other episodes too...it's about being human on LinkedIn”

I have to say that her approach in those examples does feel a little bit direct to me but you can’t deny the results she is getting and I would definitely encourage you to give her methods a try.

Post Feedback

Following on from a previous review of a listener's LinkedIn posts in episode 323 John Dalgarno got in touch and has been brave enough to ask me to appraise the following post. John is aiming to promote his son’s video production business.

Feedback. With 2 comments (one is a reply from John) and zero reactions, it’s fair to say that this post has low visibility - so how could it be improved?

Firstly there are some mitigating circumstances. You will note that John is linking to his LinkedIn Article in this post and that means that this post is effectively repeated content (the original did much better). When you publish an article you complete the process by posting the article to your followers' feeds - the difference is that any comments on that post actually show in the article, the initial post is a sort of blend of a post and an article. This post however is just a post with a link, the comments do not show in the article. In addition, it’s likely that repeated content is picked up by the algorithm and distribution is limited.

The Article itself is probably too short to justify being an article as the main content is a link to a YouTube video. My first piece of advice would be that he would have a better opportunity to gain visibility if he had originally posted this as a post, not an article. My second tip would be to upload the video directly to Linkedin in the post, as a native video it would be treated much more favorably by the algorithm.

As for the post itself, I would advise taking some of the content covered in the video to add a narrative to the post to motivate a discussion - remember that when posting you should always be trying to start a discussion, that way you gain more comments which are what put your post in front of more eyes! In the video people who work for the organisation being promoted ask questions such as “Who handles planning appeals?” and “Who considers how to protect endangered species when considering hedges and landscape in planning applications?” - Could these be points for discussion in a post?

The video uses a technique where employees are used as the ‘stars’ of the video. Each one of them could be tagged in the post as well as the organisations company page.

A different angle to the post might be to start a discussion about the merits and disadvantages of using inexperienced presenters (employees) in such corporate videos. After all the post is designed to promote the video production company, not the client!

Summary;

• Create a native video post
• Tag those who feature in the video
• The aim of the post is to create a discussion either about what the client does (as explained in the video) or the technique of using staff members in a corporate video.
• There is no need to expressly promote the video service here, the video does that very effectively. The aim is to get as many eyes on it and to do that you need engagement.
• Thanks again to John for volunteering his post for this analysis. If you want me to do the same for you, get in touch.

Post of the Week

Firstly I wanted to show you a very successful post that was nominated but didn’t win…because it’s a fake copy!

This was originally posted on Facebook by someone called Wilson Curtis who, to be fair, was credited by Kimberley and she uses #repost but that doesn’t mean it’s not plagiarism. By all means, use the picture but starting the text with ‘I pulled up at the hardware store’ and changing the copy to make it more in line with how she communicates (dropping 'Dude' for instance) is just disingenuous.

She wasn’t the only one to do it on LinkedIn though, a quick keyword search produced many other examples, some posted a week before Kimberleys’ (see below)

So this weeks real winner is a genuine, feel-good post by a police officer. Khurram doesn’t post much on LinkedIn and only has 363 followers but this sort of content is very popular with the LinkedIn community. We tend to enjoy positive stories but add a diversity angle and a mental health-related topic and you have the right ingredients for success.

It’s definitely a more ‘Likeable’ post than comment-worthy but despite that, he still manages to amass over 3000 comments and admirably, he makes a good effort at replying to them (no easy task!).

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

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