Informed 466

Show notes

This is the new-look Informed podcast, all about LinkedIn best practice, hosted for the first time by John Espirian. 

There’s a quick backstory of the handover from the show’s creator, Mark Williams, to John, and then on to listener questions in the Postbag.

Postbag questions

• Can you deactivate a company page without closing your personal profile?
• Can you talk about visibility being down on LinkedIn?
• Should we invest time in making newsletters, livestreams and videos on LinkedIn?
• How are comment impressions gauged and are they a useful metric?
• Is post boosting a good idea?

Generative AI data training: how to turn it off if you don’t want to give your data to LinkedIn for free.

Microsoft’s 2026 Q1 results are out, with some nuggets about LinkedIn growth.

Links

• Growth stalling post 1
• Growth stalling post 2
• LinkedIn membership growth tracker
• Ryan Roslansky on LinkedIn’s results
• Book a consultation with John
• Espresso+ community

Full transcript

Hello and welcome to a new voice fronting this show. Well, a new voice to some. This is the new-look Informed podcast, episode 466.

So, you’ve probably worked out that I am not Mark Williams, who is the original creator and longtime host of this show. I am John Espirian and I’m taking over the show from Mark, who is now retired.

That intro music, if you’ve listened to this show before, should sound familiar. It’s a revamp, a remix of the original tune that Mark used, ably done by music whizz Ryan Anderson. So, thanks Ryan, for your work on that tune.

Now, I do like to get to the point, but it would be remiss of me to leap into this episode without actually talking about Mark who’s handed over the reins to me.

So, he created this show in December 2013. I think I discovered him at some point during 2017. Went back and listened to back episodes of what was then called Linkedinformed. And since then I’ve listened to every single episode that Mark has put out. He put out 465 episodes in total.

So, it’s safe to say that I’ve listened to more than 8 years’ worth of Mark’s content on this show. So, every week I would tune in, listen to Mark’s wisdom about LinkedIn best practice.

That’s what this show is about, in case you didn’t already know. And for a long time, he was one of the sole people I was learning from.

Every week as I was trying to up my game on LinkedIn, he became a real trusted voice and he became a regular part of my life actually, because every Saturday he’d be publishing an episode of his, I’d get my earphones in, learn something cool about LinkedIn, listen to this guy that I liked, and really enjoyed the experience of listening to the podcast as it was.

Fast forward to more recent times, Mark has decided that he’s going to just move on from the LinkedIn world and move into retirement, and he contacted me and said, look, I’m about to close down this show. I’m going to do my last episode. I think you’re probably too busy to take it over, but would you be interested?

That cuts out a lot of the story because we’ve come to know each other over the years. I did think this probably would be my only chance to really do a public podcast. I didn’t think I wanted to start something from scratch.

So, when he offered me the chance to take over a show about a topic that I care about and that I’ve been listening to for the better part of 10 years, and that has an existing audience of thousands of people and he didn’t want to effort it to anyone else other than me, I felt really honoured by that. And I didn’t feel as though I could say no.

So, thank you to Mark, if you listen to this episode, which I’m sure you will at some point, for giving me the chance to keep the dream alive as an independently run LinkedIn-focused podcast on best practice on this platform. And I suppose it’s only right that I should say something about me because some of you are just tuning in, expecting to hear Mark and not hear from me. And maybe you don’t even know who I am.

So, my name is John Espirian, and I used to be a software and hardware tester, and then I became a copywriter, and I used LinkedIn to try and get myself leads for my copywriting business. And when I was doing that in 2017, I needed to learn how LinkedIn worked so that I could be most effective with my time.

That’s kind of how Mark came into my life. And I started posting content about LinkedIn as a way of demonstrating that I could explain how stuff works.

Because that’s what I was being hired for, to write website content to explain how stuff works. And because I was under non-disclosure agreements for all the clients I worked for, I couldn’t really talk about their specifics.

So, instead I decided to write about a topic I was learning about and that I could explain without getting into any trouble. And that turned into LinkedIn and people started knowing me for those LinkedIn tips.

And some years later, here we are, I am now actually a LinkedIn trainer, a consultant. I’ve written my own personal branding book, which is called Content DNA. I run a conference, which is all about LinkedIn best practice. That’s called UpLift Live, which is going into its third year, this coming March 2026.

And I run my own private members community called Espresso+, which is really for people, small business owners in the main, who need a bit of help trying to get themselves more visibility and create better content and build a better brand online without any sneaky tricks.

So, that’s me. And now adding to my kind of tool belt is being a public podcast host.

As part of Espresso+, I’ve already actually run a private podcast for almost 4 years now. So, the mechanics of running a podcast aren’t alien to me, but this is the first time I’ve done something publicly.

So, we’ll see how it goes. And as I said, my aim is to try and keep the dream alive and to produce something that gives you value in learning how LinkedIn works.

I’m not going to bore you by trying to do that intro every single time, but this is the first episode that I’m doing.

So, I hope you’ll forgive me talking about myself. But we’ll move on shortly and we’ll get into the meat and potatoes of this episode.

So, a little bit about what the show is and how it’s going to work. Well, it’s about LinkedIn best practice. You already know that.

Mark never had any adverts or any sponsored slots on this podcast. And frankly, I’m not a fan of ads.

I do listen to a lot of podcasts and whenever an ad break comes on, I’m always pressing the fast forward button to skip forward 30 seconds or a minute.

So, I don’t listen to them myself, and I don’t want really want to foist adverts on you.

So, we’re not going to be doing that.

I’m going to just keep it as the pure content, trying not to make it salesy at all, as best I can.

My focus is really on ethical marketing.

So, I’m going to try to teach some LinkedIn tips and tricks and best practice, whatever you want to call it, but doing it from the ethical point of view.

So, there are certain things that you can do to get ahead on LinkedIn, but they’re not in keeping with the rules and they’re definitely not in keeping with the spirit of the rules either. And so I won’t be covering those things.

So, if you’re coming here looking for some clever hack that’s going to get you 10 times as many views because you’re doing something that somehow is spamming people or breaking rules and you don’t really care, I’m afraid this show is not going to be for you.

So, if that’s what you’re looking for, you probably better not listen to any more of this.

So, I’m all about trying to do things the ethical way and also thinking about what it means to be ethical with our marketing as well.

So, maybe there’ll be some discussion around that. And I’m particularly interested in the topic of what makes an expert, because I think a lot of times I look at LinkedIn and you see loads of people who seem to be making hand over fist and claim to be experts.

But for me it doesn’t often stand up to a lot of scrutiny. And so I’m kind of interested in that topic as well.

I used to love the old Clubhouse platform that we had in the height of lockdown where people could join audio rooms and receive questions and provide answers immediately. And only an expert really can do that.

Someone who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about would often flounder on those subjects.

An audio podcast, I suppose, isn’t the right analogue of that because I could very easily pause my recording and go off and look up a load of answers and sound like I know what I’m talking about.

So, but that general topic of how do you work out who to trust on LinkedIn is something I’m fascinated by.

I’m going to see if I can try and bring that into the show wherever I can.

I’ve got to say actually before we move on as well, there’s a lot of these I’m afraid, to say thank you to Neal Veglio who has helped me understand how to set up this public podcast and move it over from Mark’s old host.

So, couldn’t really have done this without Neal’s guidance behind the scenes.

So, thanks to Neal and thanks again to Ryan for that lovely intro music.

I wanted to make this as human a show as I could without sounding too fluffy.

So, there’s no AI in any of the generation of this content.

It’s all my ideas.

And, you know, music’s created by a real human being, podcast’s set up with the guidance of a real human being, and that, that’s very much the way we’re going to be moving forward.

I’ve set up a company page to support the Informed podcast.

I did a post asking for people to follow the company page because here maybe is the first tip that I’m going to be providing on this show, which is that if you want to create a newsletter for a company page, you need to have at least 150 followers before you can do that.

So, I’d set this company page up about a week ago or so, and I thought, OK, I want to set up a newsletter.

I don’t have any followers on this brand-new page.

So, I asked my audience very kindly 230 people within the first 24 hours followed that company page. And we’re now up to just under 300.

So, it means that I should without too much more delay, set up a newsletter so that I can provide the longform thinking behind each episode and provide transcripts and embedded audio and stuff.

Because you might well be listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, but some people might just want to stay within the confines of LinkedIn and consume the audio there.

So, perhaps some future audiences listening to this through an embed that’s in a newsletter.

I want to encourage as many questions as I can.

I always love the Q&A part of any training I run on LinkedIn or any in-person stuff that I do.

So, your questions are kind of vital to me to try and keep this going.

I mean, I’ve got years’ worth of back catalogue content that I’ve put out, which I could go back and inspect and make the main topic of the show.

I wouldn’t really have difficulty finding a topic for the show, but I do think it’s just much more interesting when I’m answering real questions from real people.

Hopefully, it keeps you more engaged and maybe if you hear other people’s questions being aired and answered then that’ll encourage you to get in touch.

Now, I think the best way for you to get in touch actually is via LinkedIn.

So, if you go to the Informed podcast company page, so you’d need to search for Informed podcast.

You can follow that page if you want, but even if you don’t, you can just message me through there.

I’m the only person who runs the company page.

The first message came through from Mindy Stern.

So, thank you, Mindy, for being the very first person to DM me on that company page.

Ask your questions there.

I can’t guarantee that I’ll answer absolutely everything, but what I’m going to do is the only absolute guarantee of a regular slot within this show is what I’m going to be calling the Postbag. And in there I’ll take your questions and I’ll provide good answers if I can. And then we’ll probably move on to maybe one or two main topics from the show and then we’ll round up.

So, these shows won’t be as long.

I’m not intending them to be as long as Mark’s episodes were.

He often ran to 45 minutes, sometimes even an hour.

I don’t think I can talk that long.

I’d rather talk for 5 minutes and get out of your way, to be honest.

I sense that this episode is going to be longer than future ones, but we’ll see what happens.

Obviously, if there’s demand for me to go on and on, then I will, but otherwise I’ll try and get out of your way. And on that note, let’s get on with the Postbag section.

OK, so very first question comes in from Patrick Malmsteen.

He asked whether you can deactivate a company page without closing your personal profile.

I thought, this’ll be nice and easy.

Yes, of course you can. And I told him how and then he said, well, I don’t have that screen. And I thought, oh, that’s odd. And what I realised then was that actually he wasn’t using a desktop computer: he was using a mobile device, and you can’t deactivate a company page via your mobile device.

So, if you’re on a desktop, it’s easy enough to do, you go to your company page, you can get there via the Me menu in the top-right corner and going to the settings of the company page when you’re logged in there as an admin. And there’s an option at the bottom that is Deactivate.

If you don’t have a computer, if you don’t have a desktop or a laptop, the only other way I’ve found to do this is to use something like a tablet, an iPad for example, and instead of using the LinkedIn mobile app, you can go to linkedin.com via your web browser on your tablet.

So, whether you use something like Safari or Chrome and log into LinkedIn through there, and then you can follow the same process to go and deactivate your company page.

So, yes, you can do it, but it’s a bit more tricky if you’ve got a mobile device.

The next item was from Joanne Parker, who was just asking a general question about my thoughts on the fact that most people’s visibility on LinkedIn seems to be down.

This is very much true.

It echoes what almost everyone in the Espresso+ community is telling me, and I can’t sit here and say that I’ve got a silver bullet for you.

It does mean I think that you need to invest a bit more time in fostering conversations through things like comments and direct messages.

I sense I’m going to be saying that a lot on this podcast, but if that message eventually lands with you out there in podcast listener land, then it will have been worth it because actually that’s how I build my relationships and that’s how I’ve ended up transacting as much business as I have on LinkedIn.

It’s not really just about posting and visibility, it’s more about how many conversations you can start and keep going through comments in public and through direct messages in private.

Now, very recently there’s been a lot of hoo-ha about the new AI-powered LinkedIn algorithm called Brew360.

I don’t really want to say too much about it yet because I want this podcast to be not just pure speculation about what’s coming and this thing is really quite new.

I’d rather kind of let things percolate for a while and then do some testing and give it some real thought before I come up with my opinions on things.

But safe to say there is a new algorithm, it does look as though it is treating LinkedIn substantially differently from what we have been used to before. And the upshot of that is perhaps we are not going to get the same kinds of visibility as we’ve been used to.

But the hope is that the reduced visibility is kind of made up for by the fact that the visibility is going to be coming from more relevant members of your audience. And that’s interesting.

Another thing I want to say on just kind of related to this topic is I’ve noticed that my growth in terms of my, the visibility of my profile, my content and my following in particular has really stalled since about 2023. And I’ve done a couple of posts on this topic, so I don’t want to go on into details about that here.

You can read those posts to see the details, but in essence, my following actually has declined a little bit since 2023, whereas before then it was just growing and not quite hand over fist, but it was growing quite healthily and it just isn’t anymore.

So, I kind of find that interesting.

Maybe there’s a topping out of the growth that you can expect here.

So, in the show notes of this post of this podcast, then I will, I’ll link to those posts that I’ve just mentioned and hopefully you’ll find that interesting.

OK, next question. And I’m getting to the swing of things now.

This comes from John Ball.

He’d like to know more about whether it’s worth investing time in things like newsletters, lives – that is livestream videos – and normal videos on LinkedIn. And any strategy recommendations for these? I suppose I’m going to give you the consultant’s answer here, which is, it depends on what you want to try to achieve and what you feel that you’re good at and what you think that your audience knows about.

I do like newsletters on LinkedIn which are the longform pieces of content.

They used to be just articles on LinkedIn, but newsletters are, I suppose a slight evolution of articles where you can have people subscribe directly to your newsletter so that they receive notifications when you publish a new longform bit of thinking on your LinkedIn profile. And the reason I like them is because I suppose a because they’re potentially so much bigger than the shortform posts that you tend to see on LinkedIn, they give you a chance to really show that you know what you’re talking about, because you can go at length on any given topic you want, and they get ranked on search engines such as Google.

So, I think there have been plenty of occasions where someone has been googling something and I’ve written a longform piece about something on LinkedIn and they found me on Google because of that and they wouldn’t have found me on Google because of some shortform post that I’d written about LinkedIn. And so it can be a gateway to new audience members, and who knows, some of those might turn into clients.

So, if I was to invest in any of those things that John was asking about, I probably would make it, a LinkedIn newsletter. And I know some people who’ve made kind of had real success with investing in longform content.

Livestreams I’ve never really got on with to be honest.

I have been a guest on many shows.

It’s nice as a guest you don’t need to do anything other than you know, brush your hair and turn up and, you know, plug your mic in, and that’s, you know, that’s lovely.

But in terms of the effort required to set up and run a livestream and for the number of viewers you seem to get from that, I’m not convinced that’s worth it for me.

But I guess it comes back to what do your audience want? You know, maybe your audience wants to see you go live once a week at a regular time slot and build trust with seeing your face on a regular basis.

Some audiences just would not tune into that.

So, I can’t say that it’s right or wrong.

All I know is it feels wrong for me and my audience.

I don’t think they need to see me live. And as for videos, I mean normal recorded something you record on your phone, for example, or a short video you record on your desktop and then just upload directly to the LinkedIn platform, LinkedIn themselves are really pushing that.

Their recent results, they say, you know, look, we’ve seen loads of growth in the video field.

Loads of people are pressing the play button.

I’m not really seeing a lot of evidence of that. And whenever I’ve posted a video on LinkedIn recently, it hasn’t really got very many views at all. And I don’t notice it having a lot of impact.

Although I would say in defence of videos, when I go and meet people in person at events, conferences, wherever I go, they often say that they’ve seen me on a video giving a tip and, and that was memorable to them.

So, there’s a certain value in just having your face out there, but I suppose you could argue that you could do that through a still image.

I mean, I think it’s always a bit more convincing if you can see someone’s body language and you know, they convey what their accent is and how enthusiastic they are. And you can’t really get that from a photo.

So, in that respect, videos are probably quite a powerful tool, but it doesn’t mean that you need to make loads and loads of them. And in fact, you maybe you only make 2 or 3 of them and they get featured on your LinkedIn profile so that anyone looking at your profile can go and see those videos.

Doesn’t mean you need to be cracking out videos, you know, every week or even every month, just a few so that the interested people can go and check out what does this person sound like? Do I think I’d want to, you know, go for a coffee with them? And that could make all the difference.

So, a little bit of video is helpful, but personally I wouldn’t go all in on it because it’s a lot of effort and I haven’t seen loads of evidence that it’s worked brilliantly.

OK, next question.

This is from Sarah MacKinlay and she’s asking about comment impressions.

Are they at all reliable? How are they gauged? They seem to have no relation to the number of engagements or replies.

I had one recently that performed 10x better than usual.

I regularly comment on this person’s content.

Could not see anything different about this one, to be honest.

I think impressions are becoming a bit of an odd metric, be they for comments or posts.

That’s an interesting one.

So, as some of you will know, when you make a post one of the analytics that is revealed with that post is how many impressions that post got.

In other words, how many times did that post appear in the feeds of other people where that person has at least quickly scrolled past that content and could have read what was there.

So, that’s an impression.

It doesn’t mean that something has been read, it just means that it was put on someone’s screen and it could have been read. And that number, that impression count, now also applies for comments.

So, you go and comment on, let’s say Sarah’s post, you leave a comment.

If you go back to that comment in the future, there’ll be a number next to the comment that says, this comment received 464 impressions. And you know that number of people have had that comment on their screen.

Again, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they read that content, but they could have.

Now, there’s no way of knowing whether the numbers that are being shown by LinkedIn are accurate because unless your LinkedIn you, you don’t know whether your counting system is robust.

So, I suppose we have to take on faith that if it says a number, it actually means that number.

I think it’s kind of interesting that I’ve noticed that my comments seem to be getting better impression counts than I would’ve expected versus my main posts. And very often it’s easier mentally for me to think about what would make a good comment on someone else’s post than it would for me to look at a blank screen and go, right, what am I going to write about today? So, going back to what I said earlier, I think it’s a worthwhile thing to invest more of your time and energy on comments. And if you can leave them in strategically important places, like for example, if you’ve identified someone who’s active on LinkedIn, who has a relatively large and engaged following and they’re saying something that you know something about, maybe a well-timed comment on that post will get the attention of that person who’s posting, but also get the attention of the people who pay attention to them, who might also be ideal clients of yours. And the numbers on some of these comment impressions would suggest, if they’re accurate, that some of your thoughts are getting out into the wider universe of LinkedIn.

So, I think it’s worth investing your time and energy in making those comments.

Don’t be too seduced by the numbers associated with the comments.

So, the comment impression count itself doesn’t matter too much, but what does matter is, are people replying to your comments? Are those comments moving into your direct messages so that you can actually start building relationships with people? That’s the thing to pay attention to. And, of course, LinkedIn doesn’t put those stats on any dashboard.

There’s no dashboard on LinkedIn that says, you left 400 comments this month and 200 of them have subsequently led to direct messages and 3 of them have turned into confirmed business.

It’d be lovely if it did break things down like that.

That’s your responsibility to track those things. And if you did, I would guess that the more effort you put into the comments and the more effort you put into moving those conversations into direct messages, the more business you are going to get.

Last one for this episode’s very first Postbag comes from both Courtney Addy and Febronia Ruocco, who both said the same sort of thing. And they were talking about boosting posts and LinkedIn visibility in general. And again, this is another thing that I probably need to spend some time experimenting with before I give my kind of definitive view on whether this is a good thing or not.

But certainly the introduction of personal post boosting, which is now possible on LinkedIn posts, does make the platform look and feel more like a pay to play model.

When I started on LinkedIn properly, which was 2017, you know, you made a post and it was good, relevant, interesting, helpful, whatever you want to call it, it would get views and it would get engagement and that was great and you had a chance to get great visibility.

The introduction of boosting personal posts suggests that, you know, if you really want to be seen, if you really want to get your numbers up and get your message far and wide, you might need to boost your post.

In other words, you might need to press a button and press a few more buttons that will mean that you pay some money to get extra visibility. And that’s for me that feels like the route that platforms like Facebook have gone down, and I don’t really use Facebook for posting because unless you’re going to boost your content very few potential business clients are likely to see that content.

So, I’ll have to do a bit more thinking about whether I think this is really a good idea, and there’s some talk about, you know, why LinkedIn might be introducing this now, what it all means.

Could this be linked to the fact that our reach has been just naturally declining for the past couple of years? To this end, I am actually going to be testing very, very shortly with a post I did about our UpLift Live conference next year.

So, I’m going to test boosting that and seeing how many more impressions it led to and whether it’s led to anyone that I can tell buying a ticket as a result of seeing that particular post.

I do think attribution is a difficult subject, you know, just because someone has seen one post, does that immediately turn into someone going off and buying a ticket or buying a book or taking a course or booking a consultation call? It’s rarely as simple as that.

Often, it’s a more of a cumulative effect of having seen lots and lots of things from a person or an organisation before you eventually get to the point where you’re opening your chequebook and buying something.

But you can’t say that it was one particular thing along that journey that actually made someone do something.

It’s more a collective.

So, it’s hard to work out whether boosting a post is kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back and someone goes, OK, yes, I will go and buy that ticket now.

I’m not quite sure.

I need to do some experimentation, see how much money I’m going to spend on boosting a post and see what the results are.

So, I’ll do that analysis and maybe I will talk more about that in a future episode.

I should say as well that doing experiments is kind of, it’s just absolutely at the heart of my approach to LinkedIn.

I don’t really believe when other people share their best practices, I always think, well, maybe I could test that.

Maybe that doesn’t work for me.

Maybe it’ll work even better for me.

I won’t know until I test it. And that’s kind of that’s my watchword for everything is just check that, you know, so, and I would tell you to follow that advice when you are listening to me as well.

Don’t just take what I say as gospel because what works for me won’t necessarily work for you.

So, post boosting is here, I’m going to be testing it, I’ll see what my results are.

But even if my results are wildly positive, doesn’t mean that it will work for you. And similarly, my test might fall flat on its face.

Again, it might work brilliantly for you.

I would always recommend that you go and try and check it for yourself, but look out for more updates on that in a future episode.

OK, so that’s a chunky Postbag section done.

I actually received more questions than that, but I’ll save a couple of those for the next episode and I’ll remind you again to please use the Informed podcast company page to send your questions through to me.

If we’re connected in a personal capacity, by all means just send me a direct message on LinkedIn.

I’m especially interested in receiving voice notes because I want to get some other voices on the show.

I’m not intending to make this an interview podcast but it’s nice to hear other people’s voices on the show.

So, if you want to ask your question in voice form then feel free to send me a voice note on LinkedIn.

You can send up to a minute at a time and if it’s appropriate, then I’ll pipe that into the show and we’ll get your questions answered next time.

But for now, we’ll move on from the Postbag, and another topic I wanted to mention, something that’s been top of mind recently is the popups.

You might have seen saying that from 3 November, which has already passed now, that LinkedIn was going to start using your content to train its generative AI models, but that you had an option to opt out of that.

I think people are opted in by default.

So, if you take no action, that means that your profile content, the posts that you put out, presumably articles, newsletters, and probably any actions that you take to create something on LinkedIn could be used to train LinkedIn’s generative AI models.

The jury might be out on whether it’s a good idea that you should, you know, should you be part of that training data? If you’re not part of it, maybe you become a bit less relevant to LinkedIn.

I would say LinkedIn hasn’t got a great track record with its AI to date, and I don’t think we should just blindly give up our content for no obvious reward to train LinkedIn’s machine.

So, you can opt out of this data-training exercise and if you want to do so, it’s actually quite easy.

So, if you’re on the desktop, you go into your Me menu in the top-right corner and go down to Settings & Privacy, and then there’s a Data privacy section in there and then there’s a section in that screen called Data for Generative AI Improvement, which may well be turned on and you can choose to turn it off.

It’s a very similar process on mobile.

So, everything comes from tapping your face that’s in the top-left corner of the mobile app. And then Settings, Data privacy, Data for Generative AI Improvement. And again, you can turn that off if you want to, if you feel as though you want to give over your data for absolutely nothing to LinkedIn, feel free to take no action at all, in which case that setting will almost certainly stay on.

There’s a related point about this, which is there’s a LinkedIn help page that talks about how you can become an AI trainer for LinkedIn, which really means that you can kind of nominate your area of expertise and follow some tasks that LinkedIn give you so that you can train its AI systems with your specific expertise so that it’s not just pulling in lots of random stuff, but it’s being guided by an expert in each field. And LinkedIn are offering payment for people who take up that role.

I don’t yet know how much payment or how much effort is involved, but it feels that if you are going to train the machine as it were, you should be rewarded.

So, that route is fair enough, but just giving up your data to the machine with no reward whatsoever doesn’t seem to make any sense to me.

I think probably the last thing I’ll mention for this episode is that Microsoft have recently announced their quarterly results.

So, they do this 4 times a year, and because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, there are often some LinkedIn nuggets hiding in their quarterly results. And I’ve got a membership tracker blog on my website that sort of keeps track of how the growth of LinkedIn has changed over the years.

Microsoft say that LinkedIn is up to almost 1.3 billion accounts.

It’s worth taking that with a pinch of salt because what I’ve done is, I’ve done some calculations in the past based on disclosures that Microsoft and LinkedIn have had to make in the EU because of various compliance rules, and what it works out as if you extrapolate the figures for the EU to all the way around the world is that there may be around 350 million active accounts on a monthly basis on the platform.

So, while 1.3 billion accounts is the headline figure the actual number of active accounts is more like 350 million last time I checked.

That’s still a lot of people, you know, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that, you know, it’s nowhere near as many as well over a billion.

So, that’s one to take with a pinch of salt.

Ryan Roslansky, who is the CEO of LinkedIn, has said that there’s been a 24% growth in comments.

So, that’s one of the headline figures that’s come out of this quarter’s results. And that’s quite that is quite impressive, although the cynic in me would say, well, what proportion of those comments were written by AI tools or bots or some other kind of, you know, fake engagement signal as opposed to a real human being.

It’s great if that’s 24% more comments by real human beings, I’m just not at all convinced that it is.

So, that’s kind of an interesting one. And he did also say that there’s been 3 straight quarters of double-digit growth in video uploads.

So, I’ve got to take his word for that.

There’s no way I can really dispute it, but it does seem as though if loads more video is being uploaded, why am I not seeing much more video in my feed? You know, when I’m scrolling LinkedIn, I’m not seeing loads of video, I’m seeing some, but I wouldn’t say that, you know, there’s ever more because what he’s saying in 3 straight quarters of double-digit growth, I should be seeing quite a lot more videos and I’m not.

Now, maybe that’s because I don’t engage in that many videos and therefore the algorithms are not showing them to me.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on that. And actually to that end, let me just remind you one more time that if you’ve got any feedback, any questions, you know, this show is to help you get better at LinkedIn.

So, if you’ve got questions or thoughts or something that I could use as a main topic, then please do get in touch via the company page and let me know.

OK, I think that’ll pretty much do for my first episode of the new-look Informed podcast.

I hope you found that interesting and helpful.

If you want to get more hands-on help from me, I am a LinkedIn trainer and a consultant.

So, I do 20-minute and 60-minute consultation sessions if you want to ask your questions direct to me, and I also do regular calls in the Espresso+ community where we all kind of share our questions together and answer collectively, and that’s kind of a good community atmosphere if you want real kind of in-depth insight into LinkedIn best practice.

But I am going to try and use this public podcast to answer as many questions as I can and try and give you my honest take on the state of LinkedIn, tips for using it as well as you can and where we might be going in the future and some of the kind of marketing ethics behind ethical marketing.

So, drop me a line if you have any questions via the company page. And until next time, I’ll see you all soon. Thanks.