Clickbait!

Welcome to this weeks LinkedInformed.

A Sensational headline tricks you into opening a full post or article and rather than presenting the intended purpose the headline promises, the accuracy and quality are questionable. This is commonly known as Clickbait but do we get it on LinkedIn and is it always a bad thing?

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

But before we get to that…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

5 Annoying and Ineffective Things to Stop Doing on LinkedIn A listener sent me this article which I enjoyed reading. The author Hillel Fuld, named Israel’s top marketer, seems to be giving his opinion rather than anything based on factual research but I do agree with all of his points;

• If you just connected, breathe before you pitch. This has to be one of the most annoying behaviors on LinkedIn…if it happens, I just simply disconnect.
• Stop mass tagging people in posts. Tagging 2-3 highly relevant and active people is good practice, provided you don’t use the same people every time!
• Your name should be your name (don’t add keywords in this field). It’s not clever and it’s a myth that people find you via a Google search, I also think it looks tacky and the user agreement states you should only use your real name but it can’t be denied that it does increase your chances of appearing in the suggested results of a keyword search, LinkedIn needs to fix this if they want people to stick by their rules!

• A ninja never identifies as a ninja! So true…let others recognize your knowledge, pronouncing your own expert status lacks credibility.
• Use the site to expand your existing network. I’m still amazed that people believe that only connecting with people you already know is effective. This is an online network and you should use it to get to know more people and that includes connecting with them. That said, the days of LIONs and 20k+ connections are dead, there is no advantage in connecting en mass these days.

What do you think, do you agree with all five points?

Good news! LinkedIn confirm they are working on ‘true’ employee verification. I’ve been rattling on about this issue for years and finally it seems LinkedIn are going to make it harder for fake accounts to give their profile credibility by claiming to work for anyone they wish. I’m not talking about the recent employee verification feature that is only relevant to the My Company tab or to post a job on LinkedIn on behalf of your company, whilst a useful feature it was not what I have been calling for. This comment however, suggests they are soon to fix the problem.

Scammers have for years used fake profiles that are given credibility by claiming to work for well-known organisations. A technique used recently as reported in this article -?THE VIRUS USES WINDOWS AND LINKEDIN WEAKNESSES, GOOGLE SAYS

Can the work-based social network have it all? Can it keep its old users while gaining new ones and continuing to avoid the backlash that’s hit other networks? This is a quote from an excellent article in the Guardian recently discussing the challenge LinkedIn face in attracting the attention of Gen Z. It also includes the following brilliant quote;

“There is a chance of LinkedIn becoming the first social network to be used in the same way by four different generations, perhaps giving it the most certain prospect of long-term success. That would make LinkedIn the tortoise to Facebook’s hare”

— James Ball, The Guardian

It’s well worth a read. I think LinkedIn’s focus on Gen Z is the right thing to do but they do also risk alienating older generations. I wish I was more confident of their ability to get that balance right…let’s hope I’m wrong.

LinkedIn Spark Summit

I recently attended this LinkedIn online event for sales professionals and thought I would share my thoughts.

Alyssa Merwin Henderson LinkedIn. Nothing groundbreaking here, mostly repeating stats regarding social selling that we have heard before as an intro to the whole event.

Takeaway - The ‘great reshuffle’ is causing significant challenges to business development professionals because people are moving jobs so much now (36% increase and 70% for gen x!). Apparently their research showed a 20% increase in sales wins when you have 4 or more connections in a target organisation.

Chris Scotney - Kallidus. Chris talked about some impressive things that his organisation had been doing with Sales Navigator but this session did feel a bit like a sales pitch for Sales Navigator.

Takeaways - Use the Accounts Growth Insights section in Sales Navigator, especially the employee headcount stats to monitor potential targets as well as keep an eye on their job openings to see if they are recruiting relevant new decision-makers.

This is a very useful feature of Sales Navigator, I would however add that you can perform and save search alerts for headcount growth (or even department headcount growth) on Sales Navigator, which when combined with other filters can give you some interesting results.

In addition, once you have refined your filters to give you the most targeted result, you can save the search and have LinkedIn email you weekly with any new results… i.e. likely new target accounts!

Natasha Vilaseca. A new name to me in the LinkedIn training space but clearly one who must be well connected with LinkedIn. I noted that she prefers not to show her surname in the name field in her profile - an unusual move that makes me wonder if she has attracted some negativity associated with her Russian ancestry recently!

She came across well and had a very friendly communication style - her advice was very basic but that was probably requested by LinkedIn (I know from experience that they don’t like it when LinkedIn experts share clever tricks or hacks!).

Takeaway - Use friendly ‘Whatsapp’ type language when communicating with your prospects. This is a good point that didn’t quite land in her presentation because I think there was an image missing (probably not her fault) on screen when she told a story to support this point.

Ryan Reynolds. The headline speaker had little to offer in terms of takeaways but it was interesting to hear him talk about his background and experiences in business and filmmaking. Ryan is a fabulous communicator but the substance of his interview was rather like listening to a sales training seminar from 20-30 years ago!

"Pitch what you are excited about!"

"Our successes grow in the fertilizer of our failures"

"Don't waste your mistakes."

Clearly booked for his ability to attract an audience and not for his knowledge of sales!

Can Clickbait Be A Good Thing?

I was recently sent this post as a nomination for the post of the week.

Is this an example of Clickbait on LinkedIn?

Clickbait headlines get extensive negative connotations. Most often, clickbait is associated with fake news and those spam sites that only want traffic and ad revenue without giving value. So what constitutes clickbait on LinkedIn?

I think Tim’s post is clickbait, the first five lines are all we see on a text post so all we see of this in the feed is up to ‘They took time off to have children’, and then we have to click on ‘see more’ to read the rest. At five lines in, the post seems unreasonable and highly controversial, it’s designed to get a reaction…some people may even comment expressing their disgust without reading more but most will click to read the full post, once they fully read it they realise the point Tim is making.

This is good content!

Does he give value? Yes because he is making an important point.

Does he trick us into clicking? Yes but it’s entirely justified to get the message across.

Clicks and dwell time (taking the time to read the full text) are significant signals to the algorithm that the post is popular and interesting and it will therefore distribute the post to more people. Isn’t that the point of posting…to get the message out to a wider audience?

If the post started with a headline that was completely unrelated or misleading to the main message of the post, that would be true clickbait, and whilst this does exist on LinkedIn, it’s very rare in my experience (if you have any examples, please send them to me)

Tim is very skilled at writing good clickbait, or at least he gives the impression he is but I do wonder if he actually writes this stuff himself! All I see from Tim is post after post with zero engagement from Tim other than the below comment on most of his posts.

If all you are prepared to do is ‘light the torch paper’ and walk away then I’m calling you out!

In fact, I strongly suspect that Tim has very little knowledge of what is being posted by his team and I very much doubt he spends any time on LinkedIn, the many people who comment on his posts might believe they are replying to him but in truth, he is highly unlikely to see it.

That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t, commenting is a great way to increase your visibility, especially on posts as popular as Tims.

Whilst I’m not a fan of the way Tim uses LinkedIn, I still think his posts are great examples of good clickbait and we can learn a lot from following his techniques, if we then add a commitment to engage with the comments our clickbait posts attract, we have a winning formula!

Writing great clickbait headlines is not easy for most of us so I’m going to focus a future edition of LinkedInformed on this as I think I’ve found a tool that helps…stay tuned for me on that.

Post Of The Week

I thought it would be appropriate to select a post this week with a strong opening line or PSM (pre-’see more’) and this text post fits the bill nicely.

It’s a positive topic that many can relate to and makes an important point - well done to Jon for this weeks winner.

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

That’s all for this week.

Have a fantastic week and I look forward to catching up with you again soon.