Sponsored personal posts

On April 3rd I published my newsletter 'The beginning of the end for LinkedIn?' and the opening line was;

"This is probably the worst move LinkedIn have made in the 15 years I've been closely following them!"

I have calmed down somewhat since then, especially since I gained the perspective of the ever positive 'Mr LinkedIn Ads' himself AJ Wilcox . In this episode I chat with AJ and find out why he is excited about sponsored personal posts.

That plus

• New call to action button on profiles
• Why your follower numbers may have dropped
• LinkedIn Stats from 2022 - if you can make any sense of them!
• A positive change to hashtags
• LinkedIn reveals a little more about how the feed algorithm works
• A unique first for post of the week

Podcast interviews can only really be summarised in written form so I strongly suggest you listen to this one.

The full podcast version of this can be downloaded for free (with no ads) using your podcast app of choice including Spotify where you can also listen via the link below.

A new custom button for personal profiles is being tested by LinkedIn. Lynnaire Johnston amongst others has been invited to add this new type of link to her profile.

You won't see it on a profile unless you also have the feature.

I'm assuming this is for premium members who have not enabled creator mode because with that you can just add your own text to a website link in exactly the same spot on your profile. That would make sense to me as the custom web link feature never really seemed like a 'creator' specific feature to me. What isn't clear is why LinkedIn though it required a completely different design, without the ability to add custom text!

Follower numbers have dropped for many people, this is as a result of a cleaning up cull by LinkedIn who are removing hibernated and restricted accounts.

I assume the motivation for doing this is to give those who have amassed the max 30,000 connections to clear out those fake accounts they mistakenly connected with (or bought in some cases!). It does beg the question "why haven't they always done this at least a couple of times every year!"

AJ Wilcox sent me this link to some data he came across at the recent Social Media Marketing World conference from Socialinsider . I'm always interested in seeing some useful activity benchmark data for LinkedIn but these are just very confusing!

Firstly we have no information on how many profiles/accounts were included in the data. There are also no explanations as to what they mean by 'views' but I'm assuming it's profile views and it's a percentage number, the 'profile size' refers to the number of followers. So the highest profile views as a percentage of followers is from those with between 5-10,000 followers but 13% of 100,000 is significantly more views than 18% of 10,000 so I'm not sure how this is useful? Maybe I've completely misunderstood the data...can you see any other explanation or useful interpretation?

Here's another one...what do you make of this?

A median of 5 comments per post for 50-100,000 followers?

Text posts?

I'm really pleased to see that the Chrome extension 'Hashtag Analytics' by Engage AI is now providing hashtag follower numbers when you construct a post!

This does not appear to happen when you select or hover over suggested hashtags but when you type a # manually as above, the number shows. This is really useful because using highly followed hashtags has a much greater impact than using unpopular ones because of the 'double impact' factor which I explain more about in the podcast.

Unfortunately it doesn't work in articles and it also doesn't work on the mobile app but at least it's a start!

Correction to the podcast - I originally thought this was a native feature as it looks that way and the extension didn't used to act this way. Apologies for those who listened only to discover they didn't have the feature! You can get it if you download the Chrome extension.

A LinkedIn engineering blog post recently confirmed some information we have always suspected...that early detection signals for the virality of a given post are 'tested' prior to the full distribution of content.

It's an interesting, if somewhat nerdy read but well worth consuming if this is your thing.

Viral spam content detection at LinkedIn

Sponsored personal posts - a different perspective with AJ Wilcox

As mentioned earlier, interviews are much better listened to on the podcast , that way you can really pick all the nuances of our conversation but if you don't wish to listen, this is a brief summary.

• AJ Wilcox has been aware that this was coming for some time and sees it as a very exciting and positive development.On average he sees about 1 ad for every 5 posts in his feed although recently this has increased, I checked this after our chat and both my mobile and desktop feeds were twice that amount! He believes personal sponsored posts will merely take the place of the company page ones we currently see, not in addition.
• The fear AJ has is that LinkedIn will increase the ads in our feed (and this appears to be happening already), in the same way Facebook has, making it a much less valuable networking tool. This will negatively impact all of us, including advertisers!
• The interesting thing is that I was surprised how many ads are in my feed because I never actually see them! The thing about sponsored posts is that we actually zone out from them and so they have less impact on our enjoyment of our feed. This is primarily because ad content is typically very poor quality and very obviously an ad...personal posts, even when a 'promoted' label is added to them might not be so easy to ignore.
• AJ explained that they way sponsored posts are priced, a personal post that fails to engage will end up being a very expensive form of advertising!
• On the positive side though, the ability to be able to ensure that a post lands on the home page of a very targeted audience can only be a really good thing...provided the content is of value to that audience.
• I have noticed a trend amongst corporates towards encouraging their key staff to develop their own personal brands and visibility on LinkedIn. Companies are realising that we don't want to see information about their products and services, we want to find out more about their people! I think this might be LinkedIn's response to that - offering advertisers the opportunity to turbo boost the visibility of their key people on LinkedIn.
• If the content is crap however, the process will be an expensive waste of time and energy. I suggested that the right way to conduct this would be to encourage executives to post content and equip them with the support and skills to do so and then when a post is seen to succeed organically, sponsor it! This would dramatically increase the quality of the ads we see in our feed and provide good value for money for the advertisers. AJ even thought that it would be a great idea if LinkedIn insisted that only posts that have achieved a certain level of engagement can be sponsored!
• If (and it's a big if) LinkedIn resist the temptation to increase the number of sponsored posts in our feeds, then there is nothing to suggest that organic reach will be harmed.

I'm still concerned about sponsored personal posts but AJ definitely helped to give the topic some positive perspectives and I can now see a way of this becoming a positive development for LinkedIn, provided they don't fill our feeds with dreadful ads, from brands or their people!

Post of the week

This is a first for LinkedInformed! This weeks winner is not a post written in English! It's also German and therefore only likely to be seen and engaged with by German speakers, for context, the DACH region accounts for about 2% of LinkedIn members!

Given that most people reading, like me, this won't be able to read the above I have copied the translation below;

Whilst most winners usually have much higher engagement numbers, 4000 reactions, almost 300 reposts and 260 comments is pretty impressive given the limited German speaking audience (plus a few who, like me clicked on the translation!).

It's a deserving winner for that alone but it's also interesting, relevant to some businesses specifically and relevant to most of us regarding the 'Bureaucracies live forever' paragraph and also amusing...a story to share at dinner party or networking event. Well done Markus Milz

That's it for this week. Get in touch if you have any nominations for post of the week, you spot any new features or have any suggestions for future topics.

Take care