Finding Time For Content

The single biggest factor that holds people back from using LinkedIn is time…or the lack of it and this is especially true for content creation.

Your job involves many other activities, LinkedIn is, for most people, a small part of it. This a massive challenge for everyone…some people give the appearance of having nothing else to do than spend all day on LinkedIn!

But is that true??

How do they manage to make so much time for Linkedin?

I will share my thoughts and ideas on that this week plus;

• Is the BBC stuck in a time warp?
• The new LinkedIn Content Academy
• Employee verification advances
• A useful Hashtag tool
• The great GIF mystery
• Improvements to collaborative articles

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.

Is the BBC stuck in a time warp? This article is about the issue of there being too much personal content on LinkedIn.

Don’t get me wrong all those interviewed have made good points but this should have been published as a relevant topic maybe 2 years ago!

Surely we have moved on and there are far more interesting things to discuss about LinkedIn? To be fair, the BBC are not alone - most journalists have a blind spot when it comes to LinkedIn. Twitter has always been the preferred social media channel for journalists and in my experience, they spend very little time on LinkedIn.

The discussion of what appears in your feed should have been put to bed some time ago…your feed is heavily influenced by your actions. If you do nothing however, LinkedIn will be forced to guess what you want to see and inevitably that means giving you broadly popular content.

A more relevant and interesting fact is the increasing amount of ads we are seeing as demonstrated in this post from Richard van der Blom ?

And that is before personal sponsored posts become widespread!

I am going to return to that topic soon…watch this space!

LinkedIn are going to be launching a new Content Academy.?

I was surprised to see this as I thought this was covered by the Creator Accelerator program? Maybe this is a watered down version of the CAP or perhaps is just a renaming. Anyway, if you want to benefit from LinkedIn's coaching, recognition and resources to produce content that they want you to publish <sarcasm folks> then you can apply here

There are now three types of employee verification as explained in more detail here.

1. Work Email verification (global; available for select companies)
2. ID verification (US; available to members with a valid government-issued ID and a U.S. phone number)
3. Workplace verification (global; available for pilot companies)

At the moment 1 & 3 are only being piloted for a very limited number of employers with the 3rd one being run through Microsoft Entra, so your company would have to be using MS Azure to have free access to Entra

The second one, whilst only applicable to US citizens is an encouraging development.?

It remains to be seen whether other countries will allow such a process to happen, I can imagine Europe will be much more sensitive about privacy than the US but I hope it becomes more widespread.

Don’t get too excited though as there is still no verification badge on profiles, the information is still hidden 2 clicks away under the more menu and ‘about this profile’.

I suspect Recruiter licence holders will be able to filter searches by this but for the vast majority of us, verification will be pretty useless.?

They do however hint that the feature may become more visible in the future so it’s possible that this could be the beginning of the end of fake profiles.

Hashtag Tool. Hashtags can be helpful in making your content more visible but only if you use those that are widely followed. This means that you need to know how many followers a # has before using it, thus requiring you to conduct a # search to reveal the number.

To make life slightly easier a Chrome extension can allow you to quickly see the number of followers plus the most likes etc that have ever been generated by a post using that #.

I have covered this before on the podcast, it’s a handy free tool but not exactly a game changer!

Collaborative articles continue to develop with notifications now appearing telling that our connection has contributed and therefore allowing us (provided we have access) to contribute to the same article. I have also now seen a couple of people who are proudly displaying their ‘Community top voice’ badge on their profile a as result of many people upvoting their contribution as ‘insightful’.

From what I can gather, you really have to contribute to a lot of articles for this to happen and for what?…a somewhat pointless badge that suggests you have little better to do with your time than add something ‘insightful’ to dreadful AI generated articles…not something to be proud of at all!

Collaborative articles were a nice idea but poorly thought through and will likely be ‘retired’ along with those crappy badges!

The mystery of the GIFs. ??Eric Cook, MBA spotted that he could add a gif to most DM messages but occasionally found a recipient where it was not possible on desktop yet the same people could be sent a Gif on the mobile app… It doesn’t appear to be a setting so what is exactly going on here?

I found exactly the same, just one person is my inbox did not have the GIF option yet it was showing on the mobile app.

Is this just one of those weird LinkedIn mysteries caused by a glitch or is there a more sensible explanation to this?

Finding time to post

I will be honest…it’s my biggest challenge!

I don’t mean finding the time to post myself (although I’m not immune to that either) but rather encouraging my clients to post more and coming up against the “I just don’t have the time” barrier.

It’s tough…I know.

Sometimes its an excuse and the real barrier is something else, this is what sales people call an ‘insincere objection’ but I do believe that most people genuinely struggle to find the time to post on LinkedIn.

So what can we do about it?

Firstly we need to be clear about why we want to post in the first place.

Great content can be an amazing way to increase your visibility but it’s not the only way and if you genuinely have limited time to dedicate to LinkedIn you might be better off focussing your time to engaging with other peoples content. Commenting on a regular basis is critical if you want to achieve any success with your content so you will need to start there anyway and I know people that have achieved great success purely through commenting on a regular basis.

Having fresh content on your profile, especially with the new ‘All activity’ design feature, is a good way to differentiate your profile from the masses but that content doesn’t have to be especially engaging or great quality… if this is your objective then content can be pretty simple, either using AI tools or simply reposting relevant content from others.

If you are still convinced that you need to post content then it’s much better to focus on quality rather than quantity.

You will gain much more benefit from 2000 impressions from one post rather that 500 impressions on each of 4 posts in a week.

This is because those 2000 impressions from one post will penetrate the network more deeply and provide you with significantly better visibility than the 4 posts that may have been seen by the same people 4 times! This will be a time saver as well as being more impactful.

Quality will however require a commitment to learning and improvement and that does involve time commitment, in the short term at least.

You will also find that building the habit of constantly seeking ideas for content and noting them down becomes a huge time saver when it comes to the posting process. We often waste so much time painstakingly fretting over what topics to post about, having a depository of ideas can be really helpful.

I’m not suggesting that there are any magic solutions to the time issue but it really does help to get your priorities right

1. Consume content?
2. Engage with content
3. Post
4. Review the outcome and adjust

The go back and repeat from 1-4.

What things have you found helpful regarding content creation?

Post of the week

I’ve had quite a few really good nominations since the last episode but this one from Roei Samuel was the clear winner. it’s not just the phenomenal numbers - c178,000 reactions and over 10,000 comments but the image is powerful, innovative and unique.

It’s also surprisingly divisive…many in the comment thread are disagreeing that it is a game changer for people with ADHD. The polarising nature of the post adds an extra layer and makes it more interesting and especially engaging.

The only negative for me is the use of the Tweet screenshot technique. I find this unnecessary - why not make a bit of an effort and post the image in its original form and add credit to the Twitter user with a link to the tweet and tag Forest Van Slyke here?

It works like a dream for me and i don’t have ADHD…at least I don’t think so, maybe i need to get tested!!

That's all for this week. There won't be a LinkedInformed next week but I will be back in a couple of weeks.