My LinkedIn Audio Experiment (Oct 11th 2023-Mar 19th 2024)

Half way through last year LinkedIn content creators experienced a considerable reduction in reach (by up to 40%), which obviously impacted engagement. When less people are shown your posts, fewer people engage, but you can always count on those hardcore, platform-savvy fans who don’t rely on the algo (Feed) who utilize content-following strategies like using web browser tabs to literally… keep tabs on their fave LinkedIn authors.?

You essentially had 3 choices after LinkedIn cut your content distribution significantly.?

(1) You could plough on and do the same thing you always did.

(2) You could try something different (other than creating posts).

(3) You could jack it in and do something more productive with your time.

I went with (2). I was ready for a change anyway after becoming terminally bored with the samey stuff I’d seen in the short-form content space and the algo tweak crimping reach signaled a perfect time for me to pivot.?

I jumped into Clubhouse when that became a thing during the Pandemic and had also played in the audio networking space years before (with 'blab' April 2015-Aug 2016). I was pretty excited when LinkedIn finally launched its own version of Clubhouse, which seemed inevitable after witnessing how many LinkedIn staffers were visibly kicking the tires on Clubhouse.

INTERVIEW PROMISED & DENIED

I wrote a few posts tracking my experience with LinkedIn Audio and I guess this caught the attention of the LinkedIn Audio team’s Director. He invited me to join a virtual team meeting where I basically laid out what I felt were multiple effective ways to improve on the LinkedIn Audio product for 60 mins. Lots of smiles and nodding heads. The Director told me how helpful I had been again afterwards via messenger and offered me free Premium for a year which I graciously declined, explaining that since I was grandfathered on a Premium plan, I didn’t want to lose it because of the considerable cost savings I’d enjoyed over the years. I asked him for an interview instead which I could then post about and he immediately agreed. He later told me that the interview idea would have to be sanctioned by LinkedIn’s PR Dept. Subsequently denied. LinkedIn HQ evidently didn’t much like the idea of a random LinkedIn user quizzing one of their senior staffers about a new product. 12 months later and that Director had exited LinkedIn and though I’ve tried to find out who is now in charge of Linkedin Audio, I’ve been unable to identify that person, no one has returned my calls/responded to my messages.

LURKERS & THE LONG GAME / ARTICLES & NEWSLETTERS

Incidentally, if you did (1) and decided to stick with writing posts on LinkedIn, despite the drop in engagement, bravo! A reduction in post visibility definitely means that fewer lurkers will see your posts (unless they are stalker-lurkers) but it only takes one lurker to convert into a client and then tell his/her pals how f-----g wonderful you and your work is. Many people I know who write on LinkedIn for a living, understand that though algo juice is nice, it’s not strictly necessary, your content is always working for you, regardless of whether people are publicly commenting on it. And if you're not writing LinkedIn articles or putting them out as a Newsletter series, you absolutely should, because not only do you get a way to access your followers (many of whom become your Newsletter subscribers) you also get to harness the power of the World Wide Web, where your content goes on to live a very long life, being endlessly discovered by folks outside of LinkedIn's walled garden.

INFUSING PERSONALITY INTO POSTS

I want to salute those of you who did (3) and decided to call it a day. But only if you decided to pack it in after writing LinkedIn posts for years. If one algo tweak broke your resolve after only months of trying, you should have wasted your time elsewhere I'm afraid. This platform is not for people with low stamina and no game. LinkedIn's Editor-in-Chief went on record about the tweak saying that LinkedIn wanted to encourage “more posts based on knowledge and advice” and by implication less of the purely social stuff (i.e facebooky). LinkedIn's COO, Daniel Shapero recently suggested in a walk 'n' talk video that users should not write personal posts but should strive to "infuse personality into their content" instead. Do let me know if/how this affected you. Friends who run a hybrid content strategy (a mix of purely social and knowledge based content) are still doing the mix, none of them have felt the need to do more of one category, less of the other since the big algo tweak.

BETTER ANALYTICS

It would be nice if LinkedIn gave the kind of constructive advice they give for Profile pages for draft posts “Do you want to reach more people in X profession with this post? Write about Y, go deeper on Z. See the posts linked below for inspiration and ideas for your post”.? LinkedIn - we desperately need analytics that provide actionable insights, instead of patently useless stuff like "Interesting viewers" and "Search appearances" based on "Job titles you were found for". LinkedIn - please give people who create content for a living, meaningful data on what's happening after we click on publish. We need clicks, not impressions. We want dwell time, heatmaps and bounce rate. The analytics provided for LinkedIn Audio are basic, confusing and useless, unfortunately. I had to crunch the data myself in a spreadsheet.

LINKEDIN AUDIO

LinkedIn Audio has had zero changes since it arrived. It is essentially the same product, with no additions, no improvements, after launch, which is baffling to me. At first I thought this was because LinkedIn decision makers wanted to evaluate usage, before committing further time/resources to this product. But it is now 4 years old and you’d think that they’ve had more than enough time (and data) to decide its future. So weird. Maybe they think that it can’t be improved upon? I don’t share that view. The current method to discover new audio sessions (shows) is terrible, there’s no way to subscribe to shows or creators, which seems like an obvious feature to provide. Forcing event organizers to post each time they schedule an event is unhelpful and a great example, I think, of LinkedIn making poor decisions - because they evidently don't use their own products. There are so many ways that LinkedIn Audio can be improved, I've got a medium-sized list, if you're at all interested, whoever is currently in charge of Audio.

MY LINKEDIN AUDIO EXPERIMENT

I ran?95 shows (Oct 11th 2023-Mar 19th 2024), 7,460 attendees, on average 78 attendees per show, smallest attendance was 9 listeners, biggest was 259. I had 212 speakers (64% female).

I tabulated everything I thought would be useful in a spreadsheet and I was hoping to detect trends. For example could I find a relationship between followers, speakers and audience? Unfortunately I couldn't. Did speakers with a big follower count bring a bigger audience than average? Kinda. But that wasn't consistent. I was also hoping to find a connection between posts and events; would a post advertising a show that generated a lot of buzz (engagement) result in more engagement for the show? Again, no clear indication of any linkage. It appeared to be random, a show that got people talking in the post didn't translate to the audio session itself.

I did however discover that one day of the week stuck out. When I added all metrics (attendees, post views, reposts, comments, reactions) and looked at them individually, Wednesday was the clear winner. Thursday also did comparatively well.

I'm in the process of planning a new series of the Curious AF Show and will be building on what I learnt from doing them the first time.?So, yeah, Wednesdays could be a good call :)

AUTHENTICITY IN AN AI WORLD

LinkedIn Audio has multiple benefits - it encourages real (i.e human) interaction, gives talented people the opportunity to quickly shine and doesn't require fancy equipment or a visual component (no need to be 'camera ready'). I think one of the big advantages audio has over text is that many people are kind of exhausted by AI and wary of the potential for people to act/be fake/inauthentic. Logically, there will come a time when AI becomes good enough to fool listeners into thinking that they're having a real (i.e human) interaction with another human - for the time being though, there are LinkedIn Audio shows which are actually run by me - engaging with a bunch of actually fab and unique humans.

SHOWS COMING SOON 2024/25 (all audio):

Bluvian Social Club - a discussion around a LinkedIn theme/topic - TUE 11 Central/5 GMT

The Curious AF Show - a news centric informal chat - COMING SOON

16 Questions - a light hearted exploration of personality/outlook etc. - COMING SOON

Blinkety Blank - a very silly quiz show, with very bad score keeping - COMING SOON

Do reach out to me here in comments, or via DM if you want to speak at or be a guest for any of my shows. Smart applicants will send me a VOICE message...

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