The First CAP Class

LinkedIn have announced the first cohort of 100 creators to benefit from funding and guidance support. This week I take a look at who they have selected and whether they are deserving of this support or not!

More of that later but first…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Not a lot to report this week but this piece from the marketing solutions team at LinkedIn was very interesting;

The Fastest-Growing Audience Demographic on LinkedIn. This is an article about the Gen Z population (under 25 yrs) on LinkedIn which is, not surprisingly, their fastest-growing demographic. Not only are they signing up early straight from high school but they are becoming increasingly active - the report shows 2.7x higher activity than the start of 2020.

The Gen Z population by country largely reflects the whole population apart from the UK not being in the top 4 where France ranks instead. The report also appears to suggest that they learn online but via desktop in favour of mobile - does this suggest they use desktop more in other ways too?

This is a very interesting group of users who have literally never known a world without social media and it seems to me that LinkedIn are increasingly interested in them. Watch out for more Gen Z friendly features in the future!

A heavily pregnant woman defended herself this week against some appalling homophobic comments on her post…and LinkedIn suspended her account! Carley Jones posted a lovely picture of her and her partner to announce that she was going on maternity leave and this clearly offended some idiots who posted comments expressing their disapproval. Here is the post from Carleys partner explaining what happened.

I can only assume that Carleys reply to these comments contravened the user agreement and LinkedIn (or the algorithm) suspended her account as a result. This shows that either the people who make these decisions at LinkedIn or the algorithm are unable to make a judgement based on the full context of what happened. The right solution would be to remove any offensive comments made in Carleys replies and ask her to reword them (assuming they were offensive). As for the homophobes, they should at least have received a suspension themselves.

All in all a stupid and completely avoidable PR disaster from LinkedIn!

Feedback

I love to receive feedback from listeners to the LinkedInformed podcast. Good or bad, if it’s constructive, I love it and it really helps me to improve the content. This week I received this fantastic message from Fredrick Fornes;

“Hi Mark. Just a (not so) quick message of appreciation. Last summer I decided to test LinkedIn, and published my first post on here. I had 200 followers and didn’t know anything about this platform. It was super scary for an introverted guy like me, and it was impossible to find any good sources on LinkedIn learning here in Norway. So I had to look abroad. That’s how I, among some other things, discovered your podcast.

Fast forward a year and a half (and 1825 minutes of listening to your voice ??) I now have:

- 6.500+ new followers (I’ve only added two or three of these myself).

- Almost 1,5 million views on my posts, with only two posts a week.

- I got promoted after six month of using LinkedIn.

- Invited to a lot of podcasts and interviews.

- Awarded ?Talent of the year? during Social Media Days 2021 in Norway.

- I’ve held LinkedIn lectures for multiple big companies in Norway.

- And last but not least: The ability to start my own LinkedIn and communications company here in Norway, due to almost daily sales enquiries in my DMs from people wanting to learn how I did this.

Credit where credit is due. You’ve played a major part in turning my career upside down. A big thanks from the other side of the North Sea ????”

— Fredrick Fornes

I’m being interviewed on a LinkedIn live stream this coming week so if you happen to see this in time, sign up and join me and Ashley Leeds. Alternatively, you will be able to see the ‘previously live’ if you sign up for it. I’m really looking forward to it…Ashley’s live sessions are great fun!

Creator Accelerator Program - The First Class

LinkedIn announced their new Accelerator Program earlier this year and invited content creators from the US to apply for a $15,000 grant and the promise of support and guidance to assist with the quality and effectiveness of their content. I covered my thoughts on this in episode 337 and especially my wishes for who would be selected.

This week, LinkedIn announced the 100 lucky people who had been selected;

Meet the first class of LinkedIn’s Creator Accelerator Program

My thoughts were that they should be selecting creators who show potential but have less than 10,000 followers (min half of which are connections) rather than those who already have a huge following. Looking at the list, the majority of creators selected do seem to fall into that category.

A hundred is a lot of profiles to look at and I would probably get a temporary ban by viewing all of them in one day so I selectively looked at about 40 of them plus a few names that I recognised.

Here are five examples that I think fit with the sort of people who will benefit most from this program;

Alexander Gonzalez - With just 585 followers he is clearly at the beginning of his LinkedIn content journey but he is an experienced filmmaker who has the potential to bring a lot of value to LinkedIn. Excellent choice!

Brian Fung - A Pharmicist with 3294 followers who has posted some good content with modest but encouraging engagement levels. For me, Brian looks like the perfect candidate for CAP.

Brittani Hunter - With over 116,000 followers, she doesn’t look like a good candidate at first glance but on closer examination, her content is just not engaging those followers. So here is someone who doesn’t have to build a following, all she needs to do is improve her content and she should get some great results. This makes her an ideal candidate for some coaching from someone who knows how to engage an audience.

Giovanna González-Chávez - An experienced content creator but not on LinkedIn. Giovanna has become an influencer on TikTok and will be able to bring those skills to LinkedIn. Hopefully, the support she receives from CAP will allow her to adjust her content to this new audience. An unlikely candidate in some respects but because of her inexperience on LinkedIn and only having 721 followers, it makes her an excellent choice.

Taylor Long - An excellent choice for CAP because with only 288 followers and zero content so far, she is literally starting from scratch on LinkedIn. A plus-size model and swimwear company founder she currently posts on Instagram but all her posts are promotional. It will be really interesting to see what sort of content she is advised to put out from now.

The great thing about LinkedIn publishing these names is that we can now follow them and see how their content is changing with the guidance they are given…maybe we can also learn a thing or two from their growth and development?

Unfortunately, not all successful applicants are such good examples. If I was an applicant who really needed the sort of help this program could provide and I had unsuccessfully applied, I would be fuming to see these already successful content creators benefitting from guidance and financial support.

Here are five that should not be on the program! I’m not criticizing them personally, they had every right to apply, and good luck to them but I think it’s a disgrace that LinkedIn have selected them in favor of much more deserving applicants.

Austin Belcak - An experienced LinkedIn creator operating in the job search field. He has over 1 million followers and currently averages about 150 comments and 1300 reactions per post! I’m sure Austin is delighted to have been selected but surely there had to be more worthy applicants in the job search space?

Ashley Rowland - A less extreme example but here is someone who has a decent following of 7835 and has been posting successfully for some time. Her engagement numbers are pretty decent compared to her followers and she is doing a good job. I’m sure she will benefit from CAP and we will see improvements but is she in need of help to the same degree as many other content creators out there?

Elizabeth Leiba - Not only does she have over 100,000 followers (achieved in under a year) and very strong engagement levels on her posts but the most outrageous thing is that she is already a LinkedIn Top Voice!! She writes about black culture and black lives matter which is a very important topic but why on earth does she need $15,000 and coaching support when she clearly already benefits from being a Top Voice?

Jahmaal Marshall - A fantastic content creator already with over 26,000 followers. Jahmaal is well worth following but is he deserving of CAP support? - surely not!

Quentin Michael Allums - Quentin has been around for years on LinkedIn and was one of the first great exponents of native video content. He has over 72,000 followers plus 34,000 subscribers to his newsletter and I know he has coached some of the most successful content producers that LinkedIn has ever seen! I could totally understand them selecting him as a coach for CAP…but as a participant, are you serious LinkedIn? I believe he has had some business issues and challenges since the pandemic but seriously, that doesn’t mean he should benefit from this program…he will probably end up coaching the coaches on how to do video better on LinkedIn! No offence Quentin, you are an inspiration to many of us lesser LinkedIn mortals but you are not the right choice for this program!

All that said, I will be glued to his feed to see what great stuff he now comes out with. Here’s a sneak peak of what he is working on from a recent TikTok post

Post Of The Week

Finding a way to increase the visibility of your brand without posting promotional posts that everyone ignores is a big challenge for most marketing professionals. Occasionally however someone provides you with a perfect opportunity like this below. The clever thing is to spot the opportunity and this is what Noel has does superbly here.

I guess some cynics might think that Gymshark put her up to producing this TikTok video…maybe but I prefer to believe it’s genuine and Noel has cleverly posted this funny video with a short but brilliant headline. He’s also right about the comments thread…well worth a read!

If you see a post that you think is deserving of a post of the week, drop me a line with a link to the post. It doesn’t have to have gone viral but it does need to have attracted at least 50 comments to qualify.

That’s all for this week…I will be back soon