The new video feed criteria

"It must be less than 45 secs"

"Captions are critical"

"LinkedIn?? favour advice/helpful videos"

"A headline is essential"

There is lot's of well meant advice out there about how to get your videos featured in the new mobile feed but most people are just making educated guesses.

I've crunched the data and can reveal a detailed analysis of what features are most likely to land your video in the new feed.

More of that later, the other topics covered in this episode are;

• Another job scam DM that could easily be prevented.
• New: Share a quote from articles
• Sneaky LinkedIn have quietly added a new data privacy setting
• Premium 'Leads' in Services
• Post of the week

Informed is a weekly podcast which you can listen to and subscribe to for free on any podcast app. These notes are merely brief overview of what I covered in the podcast so do listen to the full show on Spotify below or simply search for LinkedInformed on your podcast app of choice.

Job Scam

Matt Navarra posted this week about a scam message he received;

These types of scams are not new, they have been in circulation for years and LinkedIn?? are very aware of them. Despite the push for employees to verify their profile with their employer, it has had no impact on these scammers at all.

I've said if before and here I go again...

MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO STATE WHO YOU WORK FOR WITHOUT A REGISTERED CORPORATE EMAIL ADDRESS!

There are easy workarounds for smaller organisations who don't use corporate emails but the problem is that scammers can easily create a profile, state they work for a big name company, connect to loads of people (within and outside the company) and then approach unsuspecting job seekers in the way shown above.

It's a total disgrace that LinkedIn have refused to act and deal with this for years. They clearly have other motives other than protecting their members!

New Feature

You can now share a quote from an article and create a post that links to the full article.

Just simply highlight some relevant text, this will form the text of your post, then click on 'Share quote'

This creates a new post with a link to the main article.

Why not give it a try and highlight something from this article! ??

Sneaky new data privacy setting

I think most of us realise that our content is likely to be used to feed LinkedIn?? generative AI. This is especially obvious with collaborative articles but now LinkedIn?? have quietly added a new setting that has been set to on by default.

I think it's pretty poor that they have added this without telling us and set it on by default but I'm not sure this is as horrendous as some people are making out. In this day and age, all our public content is open to be used by anyone to feed their AI so adding a setting to deny LinkedIn?? the opportunity to do so could be viewed as a positive thing.

It's worth thinking about the consequences of being outraged by this...I can imagine those involved with putting this together at LinkedIn?? thinking 'We'd have been better off just not adding the setting and taking the data anyway!'

This does bring up another question: Are there any advantages to having this enabled? Will it enhance the visibility of our content on LinkedIn??? Whilst this is theoretically possible I suspect not otherwise they would probably gives us that incentive (although they may be surprised that we have found it).

The concept of feeding generative AI from UGC is interesting, collaborative articles are clearly designed for that purpose and they are working pretty hard to give us plenty of reasons to play that game but using other types of content will be much more hit and miss.

It strikes me that abandoning the, once popular, Q&A section many years ago has now proved to be a big mistake as this would be perfect for this purpose!

My final thought is that a development of this idea could be attribution of some kind. Suggested AI answers and suggestions could have a link to the contributing content and authors.

If that became the case it might be worth reconsidering this setting but as things stand, I can see no good reason to have it enabled.

UPDATE: This setting disappeared after recording the podcast, at least on my account and others in the UK! So what does this mean? Can we take it that they won't use our content for generative AI or can we just not switch it off? More to the point, how on earth would we ever know what they are doing with our content and information anyway, setting or no setting!!

The whole thing has been a bit of a PR disaster for LinkedIn??.

Premium 'Leads'

If you are using the Services feature you may have noticed an increase in the notifications of services opportunities. I don't believe anything has changed as such, just that people have started to use the 'find an expert' request more, I suspect some 'guru' somewhere has decided it's a good way to increase visibility!

The services marketplace has been a pretty useless feature from the get go, poorly designed and implemented, I know of very few who are gaining exciting opportunities from it.

Recently I have been receiving notifications of a 'new lead' only to find that these are not requests for proposals from people who have identified me but rather general requests, most of which (actually all in my case) are very unsuitable.

If you are wondering where these indirect requests are coming from they are a type of post.

My guess is that this process is very hit and miss and unlikely to yield results for either party but maybe I'm wrong. Does anyone have any positive experiences of this?

Mobile Video Feed Analysis

It seems that everyone is talking about the new TikTok style video feed on mobile and many are providing, often conflicting, advice on how to get your videos into that feed.

I posted 3 videos recently which I was hoping might make it into the new mobile feed. I don't believe any of them did although when I viewed the videos on my mobile app, a scroll down did revert to the feed but I'm not aware of anyone discovering them in the feed and the engagement and impressions results were what I would normally expect.

So where was I going wrong? Maybe I just need to persist and eventually I will get lucky but in an attempt to shortcut the process, I decided to analyse 100 videos from my mobile feed.

Here are the results;

Most videos I saw appear to be doing very well with 70% achieving over 10 comments and 20% had over 50 comments and 95% of them had received over 100 Likes. I obviously can't see the impressions although interestingly someone contacted me this week to report that a short TikTok style video they posted had gained 105,000 impressions with only 18 Likes, 2 reposts and zero comments. I don't entirely trust impression stats but if we can believe the numbers, that one would appear to have landed in the new feed.

Here are the results of my analysis of the 100 videos I observed in my mobile feed (across 3 days);

Video length - The longest was 4 minutes and 6 seconds, the shortest was 31 seconds. The average duration was a surprising 1:14 but that may have been impacted by a small number of extra long videos so a better guide would be a median length of 57.5 seconds.

Captions - 90% of the videos had captions and the majority of those were using a much larger font than the native LinkedIn?? captions, in fact I only saw 3 videos that appeared to be using native captions.

Topic - 45% were providing advice/help, 50% were news related and 45% were job/career related.

Format - 90% were recorded in portrait format

Headline - Only 20% had a prominent headline or summary points in the video

Company page content - only 10% yet these appeared to have a lower threshold to get into the feed, many of them didn't fit the above criteria and most attracted very little engagement.

Publishers - 20% of posts were from recognised publishers. I don't follow any of them and the topics were not related to me. They did however appear to meet most of the above criteria.

So 70% of the posts were from individuals but it appears to be easier for publishers and companies to get into this feed (given the number of individuals creating content vs the other two).

It's also notable that only 2 posts were from people/companies/publishers that I follow.

Conclusion

This is by no means definitive as I only had time to analyse 100 videos but it seems that any video 'could' appear in this feed, there are no black and white rules at play but to give yourself the best chance of receiving the clear benefits of appearing in this feed your video should be;

• Less than a minute long
• Have large font captions that are created via a 3rd party app.
• Recorded in portrait mode
• The topic is less relevant to getting into the feed so make sure you stick to topics that are of real interest to your target audience.
• Every video content producer seems to be working hard to get into this feed so persistence and patience are likely to be required as well!

Post of the week

It's encouraging to see that a good, innovative idea for content can still gain traction, despite all the challenges of algorithm changes, automation and pods.

I had two such nominations this week. a 'mention is dispatches' has to go to this excellent idea from Amanda Nielsen but the winner, due to higher levels of engagement goes to this brilliant image post from Courtney Summer Myers ????

The open to work banner has always been controversial with some people considering it to 'look desperate' which in my view is pathetic...why is looking for a job something to be ashamed about?!!

Anyway, I love Courtneys take on this giving a strong finger up to all those sceptics who criticise people who use the opentowork feature.

I have checked with D A N I E L H. and he hasn't been able to find her as a member in any pods (although he is suspicious as she hasn't previously had this level of success) so these fantastic engagement numbers are, in my view, genuine.

Well done Courtney

That's all for this week, I won't be able to put together an episode for next week but I will be back again soon after.

Take care

Mark.