Copycat Content

Imagine you're on another social media site and you see a great video post - it's the ideal content for LinkedIn and especially your audience! You quickly check whether the author has posted it on LinkedIn and they haven't. What do you do next?

Plagiarism is rife on LinkedIn and LinkedIn don't seem to be doing much about it. Can we help?

That plus:

• Feedback from the last LinkedInformed regarding the prevalence of LinkedIn ads in our feed plus some more thoughts on that strange data from Social Insider.
• You can now specify that a job application on LinkedIn is one of your 'Top choices' but do Recruiters really care?
• Did Fiverr game the algorithm by changing the job titles of their staff?
• LinkedIn cut 716 jobs, discontinue InCareer in China and close their graduate training program.
• LinkedIn starts to test AI-generated posts
• A technique for getting great results from Chat GPT
• The dangers of AI - humanity could be at risk!
• A royal post of the week.

The full podcast version of this can be downloaded for free (with no ads) using your podcast app of choice including Spotify where you can also listen via the link below.

LinkedIn ads. Last week I asked listeners to check how many ads they were seeing in their feed. The average appears be 1 every 4/5 posts but listener John Jocham got in touch to say that he was only getting about 1-2 every 50 posts! Interestingly John has been religiously hiding/reporting ads in his feed, a strategy which didn't appear to be working for him initially but these results suggest otherwise now!

I'm starting to remove ads this way now as well on the hope that I get the same success.

Nobody got in touch to explain those odd data charts from the Social Insider article I covered last week. I can only assume it made no sense to everyone else...which is pretty staggering given that they gave a presentation on that data at Social Media Marketing World conference this year! I've often wondered about the speaker selection process for SMMW.

Top Choice Jobs. Rachel Kanarowski got in touch about a new feature that has appeared on Job postings on LinkedIn. When you apply to some easy apply via LinkedIn jobs you are now able to select that it is one of your 'top' jobs. Only 3 jobs per month can be categorised in this way. Maybe this is a way of showing Recruiters that you actually interested in the job, rather than applying because you need to prove you have for unemployment benefits. I'm not convinced that this feature would really be of any use at all. Recruiters: What do you think, would this influence you in any way?

Fiverr game the algorithm. I enjoyed reading this article about how Fiverr improved their response rate to job ads on LinkedIn by inventing unusual and amusing job titles.

The really interesting section is where they refer to the company asking their staff to change their job titles in the same manner, this triggered a job change announcement post which resulted in generating ~2.6 million views!

I have some experience of this myself when a client I was working with and helping with their LinkedIn content, got much better results than normal from this type of job change post...it would seem that LinkedIn push these types of posts to significantly more followers.

My only concern is that I couldn't find any trace of these job ads on LinkedIn nor could I find the above Zak Murillo, either as a current or past employee of Fiverr so that all seems a little suspicious.

Job cuts at LinkedIn. 716 employees have been laid off plus they have scrapped their Business Leadership Program which is their graduate trainee scheme and closed InCareer, the Chinese job app.

This seems like a clear indication of tough times for LinkedIn, the reorganisation has also created 250 jobs as mentioned in this message from CEO Ryan Roslansky. I might be wrong but this feels like something that has happened as a result of pressure from parent company Microsoft...similar to the increase in ads and the trialling of sponsored personal posts.

Another sign of Microsofts increasing influence is the amount of AI being adopted by LinkedIn. This week they have started a beta test of an AI content posting assistant as revealed in posts from Matt Navarra including the below screenshot from Nima Owji and Kevin D.Turner

I have mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, I can see this giving reluctant content creators the extra hand they need to share their knowledge and experience which might benefit others, on the other hand I suspect these drafts will be extremely low quality and this may result in more poor quality content in our feeds...that said, the algorithm favours popular content so maybe these AI generated posts will be seen by very few, unless the human behind them uses the AI to help them get started but makes enough amendments to result in a good quality post.

On the subject of AI, the more I learn about it, the more worried I get. This video below is well worth a watch;

This includes the following sobering fact;

"50% of AI researchers believe there is a greater than 10% chance that humans go extinct from our inability to control AI"

On a more positive note, I enjoyed this excellent article from "Dr. Scott" Dell, CPA, CMC, FFAC, MBA, DBA on his R-STAR? Method for Effectively Generating Prompts for YOUR ChatGPT-3.5/GPT-4 Queries.

Copycat Content

Plagiarism is not OK, it's frustrating for the original author and misleading to an audience. It's also the easiest way to destroy your reputation on a platform like LinkedIn!

Copying is not necessarily bad per se. In reality, very few things are truly original and there might be occasions where we see content outside of LinkedIn that we feel should be on LinkedIn and that we believe our audience would benefit from. Taking inspiration from elsewhere or sharing something we have learnt from others is absolutely fine but only if we always credit the original source.

Listener Andrew Moss has highlighted several content copying examples he has come across recently in this post.

One example he gave is a TikTok video post from Farizat Tabora that she posted last year and has been downloaded (using software that removes the TokTok branding) and posted by Ravi Mishra (since removed) and this one from Alvin Foo .

No credit was given to Farizat in either video, despite the fact that she appeared in the video. It's an Excel hack and so clearly very suitable for a LinkedIn audience. Originally Farizat hadn't posted it on LinkedIn (she has since) so I understand why both might have felt it was worth posting but doing so without giving her any credit is frankly unethical! Instead they could have;

• Downloaded the video without removing the TikTok branding and her username and posted it on LinkedIn tagging her with a link to the TikTok post.
• Create their own version of the video, bringing their own commentary and personal angle to the technique and maybe even adding more value by applying it directly to their audience and adding a note to make it clear that they learnt about the technique from Farizat, tagging her in the post.

What should we do when we see this sort of plagiarism?

LinkedIn do provide a facility to report posts but disappointingly they do not provide specific options to report plagiarism.

Clicking on the 3 dots provides us with the opportunity to report the post

Selecting that gives us the following options

As you can see, none of the options are really aimed at copyright infringement or plagiarism, despite the fact that LinkedIn has a set of copyright rules https://bit.ly/3M14HYH!

Selecting the 'Tell us what you don't like' option only gives us the following options;

UPDATE! It turns out that copyright infringement reporting is under the 'infringement or defamation' option shown above, I missed this originally - my bad but I do think it can be easily missed in this new format.

To make matters worse, any post flagged this way is screened by bots and inevitably rejected. You can, and should content the initial ruling as this will bring it to the attention of real LinkedIn employees. Overall however, this is an unecessarily elongated process and it's not surprising that the likes of Ravi and Alvin continue to get away with it.

LinkedIn need to do a lot better but until they do, I would suggest that when you see obvious copycat posts on LinkedIn, contact the original author and make them aware of it.

Post of the week

This is a very special winner with a regal theme on the week King Charles was crowned. I love the way Stella Morrissey is able use her deafness to provide us with an insight we would have missed and with it, make a great point about kindness.

What makes this really special though is the fact that is was preceded by a very brave video post from someone who had been previously trolled for sounding like a foghorn - an especially cruel comment about someone who is deaf.

The best comeback is to post something as good as the above, which is why it's the winner but the aforementioned video post is also well worth a watch.

Well done Stella, I'm now a new follower and I suggest you do the same!

That's all for this week. My mum is in hospital for an operation next week so I doubt there will be a LinkedInformed but I will be back soon.

Take care