Who Are Your Posts For?

Are you posting the content you want your audience to see or what they really want to see?

This week, I tackle this issue plus;

• An update on LinkedIn competitors
• Why multi-image posts are awful!
• What to do when you see a typo in someones content
• New creator analytics?
• New products search
• 41 Big Ideas that will change our world in 2023
• Are ads killing your feed?
• New SEO for Articles / Newsletters
• Why has date connected been 'de-ramped'?
• Do LinkedIn Pods Work?
• Post of the week

LinkedIn in Germany

You may recall that I covered the situation for LinkedIn in the DACH region in a previous edition of LinkedInformed. A podcast listener Tim Burnett ? got in touch with the following information;

In doing some research for a client on the German Edtech market. I collected some data about how many organisations use Xing and or LinkedIn.

Looking back at my data from earlier this year, of the 234 companies I found which operate in the learning and assessment technology sectors in Germany, 47% only had LinkedIn company accounts, 49% used both LinkedIn and Xing, and only 8% just used Xing.

My research on France was a little more interesting as similar businesses to those in Germany seemed to be either on Facebook, or LinkedIn, but rarely both. Viadeo, which I think is the French version of LinkedIn, was never mentioned on a company page.

So it seems that LinkedIn are indeed making great progress in the DACH region (even better in France) because that 8% figure that only use Xing is much lower than I remember it being many years ago.

Multi-image posts

LinkedIn really have made a complete hash of image posts that contain several images. The evidence suggests that they actually perform quite well but I have to say they look terrible! Surely the UI designers can do better than this mess as seen below, incidentally on a post that was featured by LinkedIn recently! There was talk of a carousel/pages format similar to doc posts being introduced but I haven't seen that yet and I'm not sure it's the answer, they just need to correct the formatting so that images don't get butchered in this way!

Content Typos

You are scrolling through your feed and notice an interesting post from someone you follow. As you read it you notice that they have made a typo, even worse you notice that it is part of an image or document (harder to fix). What do you do?

I noticed someone commenting publicly on a post recently;

What?!!

Why would you publicly call out someone for a typo? Surely the right thing would be to send them a quick DM to alert them. The person that wrote this comment might argue that it would help the author as viewers would be more likely to scroll through the post to try to spot the typo but I very much doubt too many people would bother and it just makes the commenter look like a childish smarty pants!

Let's try and help each other out here, we can all make typos and it doesn't take a second to send someone a quick DM.

Creator Analytics

LinkedIn have improved the analytics for those on creator mode. Firstly under posts you now get to see a list of your top performing posts for your chosen time period.

In addition you now have an 'audience' page where you can see your follower growth over a chosen time span.

Whilst these are welcome additions, the information provided still needs to be significantly more granular to be of any real use.

More here from LinkedIn about this.

What do you think, are these likely to be useful to you?

New Product Search

LinkedIn have added the ability to search company page products. At the moment very few companies have products so it's not much use but I'm hoping this feature will be expanded to most industries and that the product categories are made extensive (currently very limited)

41 Big Ideas

41 seems an odd number doesn't it? Anyway, LinkedIn have released this article predicting the big things that will happen/continue to develop in 2023. It's actually a pretty interesting read, especially number 21 'Social media users will turn their back on the algorithm'. Have a read of that one and let me know what you think...could this be a motivation for LinkedIn to have another good hard look at re-vamping groups?

Too many ads?

Someone reached out to me this week saying that several of their team had analysed their feeds and found that about 50% of their content were sponsored posts (ads).

I was surprised that this figure was so high, so I checked mine on desktop and mobile and it wasn't quite that bad - about 35-40% on both platforms. Is this too much? Are LinkedIn playing with fire here and allowing greed to potentially ruin our feeds?

Personally, I'm pretty adept at ignoring ads these days. I would prefer there to be less but in truth, I rarely see them as a scroll so I'm not sure LinkedIn are overdoing it at 35-40% but if it did get to 50% then I might feel differently.

Are you noticing more ads these days?

Incidentally, I would highly recommend AJ Wilcox 's newsletter and podcast on LinkedIn ads, especially this recent episode focussing on ads for small businesses.

SEO for Articles

If you write articles and are lucky enough to have a newsletter then LinkedIn have now added the ability to add some targeted keywords into a new section as seen in this video post;

Articles have always been indexed by Google and other search engines (unlike posts) so it will be interesting to see if this makes them more likely to be found from outside LinkedIn. I'm not convinced it's worth retrospectively editing all articles as I show here but it's pretty easy to do it for new ones.

De-ramped!

Have you noticed that the 'date connected' information has disappeared from the contact info section of a connections profile? LinkedIn state this feature has been 'de-ramped'..that's a new term, replacing 'retired' and sunsetted I guess!

I can't say I used it much but it was handy to know it was there. I really can't think of a good reason to get rid of it but to suggest (as they have) that you can still find this information under your list of connections is complete hogwash! This is only visible when you scroll through your connections, if you search them, the date connected information disappears!

Please stop doing silly things like this LinkedIn and concentrate of the long list of features you should be adding or fixing such as these in John Espirian 's fix list

Do LinkedIn Pods Work?

This is an interesting question because I know they can work in the right circumstances but most of the big automated pods are just an embarrassment for those using them who kid themselves they are a winning but all they really achieve is some pointless vanity metrics!

I really enjoyed reading this very thorough piece from Hannah Macready written for Hootsuite. It's well worth a read but please steer clear of large, transactional pods as they really are a bad idea (and against the rules).

Who are your posts for?

Someone recently said to me "So to be successful on LinkedIn I need an audience in my network that is interested in what I have to say"

My reply was "Actually you should deliver content that is of interest to your audience"

To some people this may seem to be pedantic, to my mind those two statements are polar opposites!

This interaction got me thinking about this issue, which is very common in my experience.

Many people post the content that they want others to see, without considering if that is what the audience wants! If you want to grow and sustain a high level of visibility, you need to post for your audience, not for you!

I needed to examine how I can better help my clients by tackling this issue in a way that makes sense and is easy to implement?

So here is my advice on this important matter.

• Start with understanding who you want to reach. Ask yourself who is it that you want your post to be viewed by. This is your end goal - by becoming more visible to these people, you are likely to generate more opportunities on LinkedIn.
• Who are these people likely to be connected to and following? If you are connected to some of the above, perform a people search adding the filter (under all filters) 'Connections of' and add the names of those you are connected to.
• View the profiles of both the above types of LinkedIn users and examine their 'all activity' in their profiles to see what type of posts they engage with - comments are of most interest but reactions are often all you have to go by.
• From the above activity look for other authors who have a high number of followers, follow them and set alerts (the bell) and then perform a people search using the filter (under all filters) 'Followers of' adding those authors and find others who maybe interesting to you.
• Look for the topics that appear to resonate the most with these people plus their favourite type of post (video, document, image etc). This gives you a clearer idea of what to post about and how to deliver that content.
• This process will be trial and error, but this technique will ensure you are posting in a way that is likely to eventually gain better visibility. If you try a topic several times and it doesn't appear to resonate with your followers, move onto another topic. Keep experimenting until you find a shortlist of topics and post types that works for you.

So what happens if you discover that your target audience shows no interest in the type of content that you need to post in order for you to effectively promote your business?

The answer to that is simple - you're aiming for the wrong thing!

Your content needs to be visible to the right people and that allows you to open the door to connecting, building a relationship and achieving trust. Only then will you start promoting what you do.

Post Of The Week

This is an unusual choice, it's from an official LinkedIn Influencer who is very famous in the UK but only has c8300 followers on LinkedIn, I guess it's not his main platform. In addition this post only just qualifies with just over 50 comments (although plenty of reactions) but it wins because it is a brilliant example of someone being genuinely vulnerable and authentic. It was brought to my attention by my buddy Marcus Boswell who re-shared the post.

Marcus, who has a way with words, describes it far better than I ever could;

There are so many times when I sit on LinkedIn, reading various heartfelt posts, and then become deflated by the comments section, where people share the most unbelievably self-righteous and sometimes ignorant comments that nobody seemingly asked for.

There are other times like this one where I don’t care what the comment section has to say.

What a moving display of gratitude and personal growth.

I had never heard of this guy until I saw him jumping up and down during lockdown as I watched my kids engaging in exercise on the television. I remember thinking… “Cool idea”.

Of course, I’ve seen many an interview now and gotten to know a little bit more about Joe Wicks, and the more I understand his story, the more moving it makes it.

If you’re having one of those days where you need the motivation to keep pushing on, this one is for you.

It just goes to show that you never know quite what is around the corner and you have to keep on pushing forward.

Have a great day.

Here it is;

I hope you enjoyed watching that video, I found it very moving.

That's it for this week.

One more LinkedInformed and it will be Christmas!!