Newsletters Revisited

With the demise of Creator mode, or the opening of creator mode to everyone (however you wish to view it!) imminent, it probably opens up the possibility of all LinkedIn?? users having the opportunity to create their own newsletters.

So it seems a good time to have a new look at this feature so that you can decide whether you will be be going down that track.

That plus;

• A new mysterious 'Who viewed your profile' filter.
• Your comment doesn't comply with our policies!
• AI enhancements drive an increase in LinkedIn?? Premium subscriptions.
• A sneaky way to get 3 months premium free.
• How AI features are being assessed
• Native AI post generation. Is it any good?
• Post of the week

LinkedInformed 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.

Who Viewed Your profile.

Whilst this is generally a popular feature on LinkedIn??, it's not one I pay much attention to these days but whilst demonstrating it this week to a client, I noticed an intriguing addition to the 'Interesting viewers' filter.

The latest feature, the 'Influencers' filter, promises to shed light on the most influential figures in your network. But what exactly qualifies someone as an 'influencer'? They keep the criteria close to their chest, as always! I checked out my 'influential' viewers...

I have added the follower account in red to give some context to these viewers.

None of them had recently posted content that had attracted high levels of engagement.

They appear to be a range of levels of seniority.

So I'm somewhat confused! To my mind an 'influencer' would be someone who has at least 10,000 followers and has a proven track record in recently posting content that attracts a high level of engagement.

How often do you check the detail of your profile viewers?

Comments that don't 'comply'

Jacob Elton recently sent me this screenshot sent to him from one of their community members.

He was puzzled, as am I as to what is so offensive about this comment, which I have confirmed was not repeated on any other posts and was not AI generated.

It's a good thing that LinkedIn?? are trying to weed out AI and spammy comments but clearly they have some way to go with their automated systems and this type of error is only likely to annoy users.

Premium Subscriptions amount to $1.7B!

Reuters recently published this article stating that LinkedIn Corp had announced that Sales of Career and Business premium accounts had increased by 25% to an impressive $1.7 billion!

They are suggesting that much of this came from the introduction of premium AI features but I would also imagine that the new policy of introducing many other new features as premium only had a significant impact, I'm certainly finding that I'm having to add the line "oh this is only for premium" to many of the topics covered in my training sessions.

Sales of Recruiter and Sales Navigator are in addition to this with the former still being the largest contributor to revenue ($7B).

I still think Premium is unbelievably expensive at ￡50/month if you pay monthly... that is an Enterprise level monthly cost yet Premium accounts are designed for job seekers and small businesses!

That said, you can get 14 months for the price of 12 with this sneaky trick.

• Take your free month (if available on your account)
• Cancel it immediately

You will then be given this offer;

This might not be available to everyone and is probably only temporary but if you were going to subscribe anyway, it's worth adding that extra free month to the one you get.

Footnote: If you know someone with Premium, they might be able to refer you and provide a 2 months free trial.

You might also find it interesting to understand how they are assessing the effectiveness of their AI features in this article from the engineering blog

Evaluating the success of consumer generative AI products

My Evaluation

I recently had the opportunity to test out the new AI post creator tool (Premium).

I took this recent post that I published;

and then asked the AI tool to rewrite it, this is the result...

I have to say, I think it's done a pretty good job! I don't like is as much as the original but it's much better than I expected.

My next experiment will be to find a post that I think it really poorly written and get it to rewrite that, I'm not expecting much from that!

Newsletters

I've always said that long form articles are for credibility and short form posts are for visibility and this has largely remained true but with the introduction of Newsletters that has changed over the intervening years.

Articles were great but very hard to find. Articles when attached to a newsletter become much more visible.

c3 years ago I applied to have a newsletter and on the second attempt I managed to get accepted to what was an exclusive club.

At that time I had about 9000 or so followers and when you start a newsletter an invitation is sent out to all your followers...in my case about a third of them subscribed.

These subscribers would all get notified when a new article was published, they might also see the post about it in their feed and they would also receive the article embedded into an email.

This was a game changer for me...a way of actually getting content in front of a good % of followers without being at the behest of the algorithm!

Since then I have published over 120 articles and the subscribers have grown to nearly 12,000.

When Creator mode was introduced there was a deluge of new newsletters and, from what I can gather, initial subscription rates dropped.

Now, with Creator mode features becoming available to everyone, I suspect the same will happen but that doesn't mean you shouldn't seriously consider starting one.

Some points about Newsletters;

• All new followers, including connections are automatically invited to subscribe.
• All other subscribers automatically become followers and are therefore able to see my posts and engagement activity.
• You can have up to 5 newsletters plus another 5 for your company page. This can be useful for different market segments but be careful not to annoy your followers with a new newsletter invite every week for 5 weeks!
• You will likely gain subscribers who are not connections (or followers before they subscribe)
• The credibility of long form content allows you to establish better thought leadership and as a result convert subscribers into customers.
• Due to the initial invitation to subscribe process, it's really important to ensure two things. Firstly the name needs to be clear and informative, any ambiguity will result in less subscribers. Secondly you really want to ensure that your first edition is high quality and impactful as this will potentially be influential on their decision.

Company Page Newsletters.

I don't post from my company page so I am not able to start a newsletter but Tony Restell does and he assists clients with theirs so here is what he had to say...

We have launched and run newsletters for lots of clients too, so have quite wide experience of using them. Key points I would highlight: - for companies that have large follower counts (as happens with any business that's run lots of job ads on LinkedIn), it's a very effective means of reaching that audience in a way that company page posts don't - open rates tend to be superb. 60%+ isn't at all unusual, which is 2x to 3x what you would typically get from an opt-in email newsletter list being sent by a Mailchimp type provider - the ability to now have multiple newsletters is useful for some users, as you can have different newsletters for different segments of your audience rather than trying to create one that will be of interest to all.

That is great insight from Tony. I would add that a 60% open rate (views) is very unusual in my experience, this is perhaps unique to the recruitment industry where newsletters are often a list of job opportunities or advice for jobseekers. Everyone else I have spoken to is getting nearer to 25% views, i.e. a quarter of subscribers actually open the newsletter although the actual views maybe higher because the newsletter is embedded into the email that is sent.

Either way, the point about reaching company page followers, without having to pay for sponsorship, is a good one. Company page content has such poor reach and can be very demoralising so a newsletter is a positive alternative or addition for those wishing to improve the visibility of their corporate brand.

The Challenges with Newsletters.

Whilst I'm a fan and would encourage you to seriously consider starting a newsletter, it's important to highlight some of the downsides.

1. Long form content is time-consuming. Articles don't have to be long but to gain thought leadership and credibility, they really ought to be at least 500 words and ideally a 5 mins+ read.
2. Discoverability. It's actually not that easy for people to find your newsletter. There is no dedicated search for newsletters and no 'newsletter' filter on a posts search. You will find posts for articles in a search and the name of the Newsletter (with link) is across the top of the post but searching for newsletters is nothing like as good as it could be. There is a a Newsletter that LinkedIn?? publish that will highlight other newsletters but it's very hit and miss. The fact remains that if I want to find a newsletter on a specific topic, I can't do that easily.
3. Popularity. There is a chance that your followers will become tired of receiving invitations to subscribe to newsletters. This definitely happened when Creator mode was introduced and it may well happen again now that newsletters are available to everyone.

Summary.

LinkedIn?? have spoken recently about newsletters and long form content having a bright future. It's an antidote to less business orientated 'light' topics covered in many posts and this is something we know LinkedIn?? want to encourage.

That, combined with all the points covered above, make it a compelling argument to seriously consider launching your own newsletter.

If you want to start one, just create an article first and under the 'manage' menu you will see the option to create a newsletter.

I am in debt to several experts who helped me with valuable information and tips for this so a big thanks to contributions from;

Lynnaire Johnston Newsletter - LinkedIn? with Lynnaire

John Espirian Newsletter - Relentlessly helpful?

Karen Tisdell Newsletter - LinkedIn Top Tisdell Tips

Tony Restell Newsletter - Winning business on LinkedIn

Post of the week

I had five brilliant nominations this week so I was spoilt for choice however this one got the most comments and who could deny Bill winning with this fantastic uplifting post!

It's authentic, inspiring and has a big feel good factor about it. Congratulations to Bill who is, by some margin, the oldest ever winner of post of the week!

Thanks to Nicola Porter, PhD for the nomination.

If you see a great post this week, either tag me in the comments of it or send me the link via DM.

That's it for this week. I'm off to UpLift Live next week (can't wait) so there won't be an edition next week but I'm hoping to get the chance to meet some of you fact to face in Birmingham!