The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of LinkedIn AI, Paid For Engagement and Fake Profiles
Tony Restell
Transforming your firm's social media to become a source of real business wins | Founder of Social-Hire.com, a B2B social selling agency | Social media marketing is like a Rubik's Cube. I'll help your business solve it!
The user experience on LinkedIn has undergone a dramatic shift over the last couple of years. AI use has become pervasive, gaming of the algorithm is on steroids and fake profiles are rife.
So, in today's newsletter edition, let's take a quick tour of the good, the bad and the ugly of how the platform has evolved.
The Good: Using A.I. To Make Yourself More Productive on LinkedIn
One of the things we covered in my conversation with Mark Williams was to look at the ways A.I. can be put to good use on LinkedIn.
Mark's advice is to think of A.I. like working with an intern. If you give them really clear instructions on what you want produced, then they can be a great time-saver. But if you don't give them the right steer, the results are likely to disappoint.
And, just as you wouldn't expect an intern to immediately be able to work on the most challenging aspects of your business, so it makes sense to also use A.I. for the more mainstream and repetitive activities you undertake on LinkedIn.
One simple example is to use A.I. to summarise the key points from a report or lengthy blog you want to create a post about. This is a great use of A.I., as it saves a lot of time but produces a similar quality of output to what you'd have produced if you'd sat down and done this yourself.
Have a listen to Mark's thoughts here - and any other similar uses you'd recommend people try out with A.I., please feel free to add those in the comments.
The Bad: Paid For Engagement and Automated Engagement Pods
Unfortunately, my conversation with Bruce Johnston unearthed the fact that pretty much everything on LinkedIn can now be bought:
Followers, reposts, comments, likes, connections... services delivering each of these in an automated fashion are now being widely used. What's more, engagement pods deploying automated A.I.- written comments have put this distortion of engagement levels on steroids.
Where previously we might have viewed it as a sign of credibility that a person or business had a large audience, or lots of engagement, now this can all be bought or traded. Put simply:
领英推荐
Large numbers ≠ trustworthy expert anymore.
Do you have suspicions that some of what you're seeing in your feed is there because of artificially inflated engagement levels? Here's more of what Bruce and I had to say on the topic:
The Ugly: Fake Profiles Are Everywhere
While LinkedIn has been trying to tackle fake profiles - and has taken aim at businesses that are creating and selling fake profiles on an industrial scale - it's nonetheless still the case that fake profiles on LinkedIn are rife.
In their least harmful form, fake profiles are being used to spam users and inflate engagement on posts. In more sinister cases, they can put you at risk of being defrauded.
Our conversation with Judi Hays provided 3 things you can check for, to try and spot if a profile is fake:
1) Look at their profile (most people don't do this, they accept a connection request purely on the basis of the connection request message). Look to see if the profile is fully filled out. Look for dates that don't make sense or jobs / companies that look out of place.
2) Don't connect with "pretty faces" without doing a reverse lookup of the profile photo on Google. And look to see if they are posting or commenting - and, if they are, what kind of things are they saying?
3) Lastly, look at who else they are connected to and whether they have some credible recommendations. If you don't have mutual connections and they don't have quality recommendations, the odds of them being a fake profile just got way higher!!
Listen below for more insights on this - and let us know if you have any other tips you'd add for spotting and avoiding fake profiles...
That's all for this edition. I hope it's provided some great actionable insights. As always, if you'd like to chat through any aspect of how you and your business are using LinkedIn (and social media more broadly), you're welcome to book in a for a chat - link is on my profile.
* Community Architect * Digital Storyteller * "Pay Per Call" Affiliate Marketer * Tribe Builder of Virtual Assistants * Content Creator/Distributor * Think T.E.A.M. (Together Everyone Achieves More) *
4 周One of the most important things to realize about A.I., besides the fact it is not human - has no conscience, no feeling, no emotion, - is that it really can think. I know that Microsoft's Copilot AI bots can answer just about any question you bother to ask - whether the question be about Linkedin or almost anything. Copilot bots make great teachers, too. They can tell you how to collaborate the use of Microsoft and Google software products. But, one thing I think every serious AI bot user should do, is build an AI "community" with the AI bots you use. How else can you keep track of them, let alone give them individual assignments using Microsoft Teams, Google Sheets and Power Automate? Your goal in this new and expansive AI world of innovation should be to make AI bots business companions.
Linked In marketing services that start conversations that convert. ?? Lumpy Mailer that gets sticky doors opened
1 个月I see AI as the Cyrano de Bergerac of the day. We are using someone else’s words to capture the love of our prospect, Roxane, who then falls for the wrong person. When we turn up as ourselves we will always come off badly if we rely on AI to write our words.
Partnering with Trade Show Exhibitors and Their Teams to Ensure a Significant ROI | Generate More Targeted Traffic | Convert More Conversations into Tangible Business Outcomes | Rescue Dog ?? Momma
1 个月Well done, Tony! I really like how you pulled together three videos to create such a strong message in this article. This is how you do it peeps!!!! And it’s also an honor to be included alongside LinkedIn experts I respect like Mark and Bruce. You made my day ??!
Versatile Software Engineer and Technology Industry Champion
1 个月For a time, I was getting lots of invitations to connect from suspicious profiles, which I chalked up in part to where I work. Invariably they would be from out of the country (provably 90 percent of them), and their profiles would have minimal info, last update would be years ago even if they had a profile picture, and something about their experience and why they would want to connect with me made me question it. It's not happening nearly as often now, although I still don't blindly accept any invitations. As we speak I have about a hundred sitting there.
Your LinkedIn? strategist for practical advice so you can cut through the cringey AI babble & propel your B2B business like a real, caring human ?? Your personal trainer & accountability partner ?? DM me for info??
1 个月Thanks for this, Tony! I've thought of AI as an "assistant," but your "intern" analogy is much more precise. AI is eager and has knowledge, but it doesn't have wisdom (yet). And to your point, it needs super clear instructions. :-)