Informed 467

Show notes

The first episode of the new-look show took me 6 hours to record, edit and produce last week.

Postbag

• How do you manage lots of ongoing DMs?
• How much should we care about algorithms?
• Downgrading desktop features

Why not refresh your About statement with some icebreakers? Pick 3–5 conversation starters and drop them into your profile so that people doing their research can say something interesting to you.

Free LinkedIn members can now send only 3 free personalised invitations per month – there are 5 quick tips in the show for how to get around this very annoying limitation.

Full transcript

Welcome back to the new-look Informed podcast, and this is episode 467. Hi, everyone, it’s me, John Espirian, and I’m the new host of the Informed podcast, now with shorter introduction music.

I hope you enjoyed the full version last week. I thought I’d shorten it up so that we could get on with things this week.

Thanks a lot as well to everyone who has provided lots of kind feedback on last week’s first show of mine for the podcast, and I hope you enjoy the content of this one. So, the first episode took me a bit longer to record and edit and produce than I thought: about 6 hours in total. So, I’m aiming to get my timings down and I’m aiming to produce shorter episodes that let you get on with your day a bit more quickly. So, without any further ado, we’re going to jump straight into the Postbag.

The first listener question for the Postbag comes from Jeremy Freeman, and he asks: how do you manage lots of ongoing direct messages? A lot of people don’t spend a lot of time on direct messages on LinkedIn. I do, because that’s where so much of my business from LinkedIn comes.

I think it’s worthwhile investing time and effort on these things. But what happens if you’re running lots and lots of these conversations at once?

I don’t really have a magic answer for that, but we can at least go over some of the features that you could use to try and manage your conversation. So, by default, all of your direct messages on LinkedIn, or almost all of them, will fit into LinkedIn’s labeled folder, which is Focused.

So, everything goes into your Focused inbox of direct messages.

So, for any given direct message, once you are done with the conversation, or at least you’re pausing the conversation, perhaps you could move it out of sight. This is all about managing conversations, so you don’t want to be having too many things on screen at once.

So, let’s say, for example, you have sent back a response to someone and you don’t have an outstanding action on that direct message thread. You could just move it out of sight. And there are a couple of other folders in direct messages that you can move those things to. One of them is called Other. Another one is Archived.

So, hitting the 3-dot menu on any given message gives you a chance to move that out of sight so that you can focus on what’s left.

Each direct message also has a hollow star icon on it, and if you tap that icon that marks the thing as a starred item, and then you can filter your view of direct Messages to show you only starred things.

So, sometimes if a message is really important, I’ll mark it with a star so that I don’t forget to go back to it.

Also, I’ve got a kind of my own policy, which is that if I’m in a group chat situation – so a chat with more than two people – I’ll put that in my Other folder so that I know I’m always looking there for any group chats that are ongoing.

It would be great if direct messages had a full labeling system where you could maybe make folders and subfolders and set your own colours and type out your own labels so that things made sense to you kind of in the same way that Outlook and Gmail and so forth do. But there’s no sign of that coming to direct messages.

So, it’s a tough one to manage, if I’m honest, and there’s no magic solution. But those are a couple of things for you to think about. And if you’re not making good use of direct messages, I really do think it’s worth taking another look at, because as I said, it’s the place where I transact so much of my business. So, give them a spin.

And if you need a guinea-pig to test your direct message game with, feel free to message me at any time.

I’ve got an Open Profile as I’m a LinkedIn Premium member, so anyone can message me even if we’re not connected. So, give that a try.

Next question is from Nigel Cliffe, who was one of our speakers at the first UpLift Live conference, and he says, how much should we care about algorithms? And my answer to that is probably less than most of us do.

Those who pay attention to LinkedIn often have one eye on the numbers that our posts and our comments achieve. And sometimes it can be a bit depressing when we think that the algorithms are working against us. You know, for example, we talk about impressions going down on posts, but I think whatever we do, we should try and focus on making ourselves algorithm proof as much as possible. And what I mean by that is, if we can conduct conversations in a way that we’re not a slave to the algorithm, so, for example, if you have a conversation with someone and move that conversation into your direct messages, or if you move it into email or you move it to a Zoom call, the algorithms can’t really touch you, because you are guaranteed to get those messages.

Whereas if you rely solely on visibility through making posts in your LinkedIn feed, then you are at the whim of the algorithm. Maybe it doesn’t like your content too much and therefore doesn’t show it to too many people.

So, I’m trying not to care too much about what’s happening in the public feed and focusing more on the conversation that’s happening in comments and especially the stuff that’s happening in direct messages. The direct messages piece is difficult to demonstrate because it’s kind of, it’s private, isn’t it? That’s the whole point of direct messages is other people don’t get to see them, only the people who are in the conversation.

So, if you’re someone who hasn’t had great success with them or hasn’t even bothered trying them, it’s hard to convey the value without showing you the real thing. And that is exactly what I’m intending to do at the next UpLift Live conference in March 2026 with some real examples of how to do direct message as well.

So, my overriding advice here is try not to care too much about the algorithms, focus on providing helpful content, certainly, and try to make yourself algorithm proof by moving conversations out of the feed into direct messages and emails and one to one calls if possible.

And the last item for this week’s Postbag is from Lynnaire Johnston in New Zealand and she’s asking about downgrading desktop features.

So, she’s written, you mentioned last week about a company page feature that’s available on desktop but not mobile. Given that the majority of members access LinkedIn via the app, will LinkedIn likely move to downgrade desktop features in favour of mobile? For example, voice notes can’t be sent via desktop, only the app. Will we see more of that, do you think? And for the record, I detest working on the app, she says.

This is an interesting one, because the desktop version of LinkedIn and the mobile version of LinkedIn aren’t actually made by the same development team and therefore, you know, something that appears in one version won’t necessarily make its way onto the other version.

It does make sense that, given that so many people use the mobile version of LinkedIn, a few years ago LinkedIn themselves said it was 70% of all sessions happening on the mobile app. It would make sense that that gets the bulk of the development because that’s where most of the users are.

I did find this week, by the way, that voice notes on company pages can’t be played back on desktop. I was not aware of that before. So, you might recall that I’ve asked people to send me voice notes so that I can play them on the show, and I did encourage people to do that via the LinkedIn company page for this podcast, the Informed podcast page. Well, first of all, I realised that you can’t actually send a voice note to a company page as your first message.

So, the first message you send to a company page has to be text or text plus image. But you can’t record a voice note. So, that’s a bit of a pain. You can only do it from your second message onwards.

And secondly, when I did respond to some people with a voice note of my own, I found that I couldn’t actually see that voice note when I looked at the desktop version of my LinkedIn profile. I could only see and play back those voice notes on my mobile app, and I found that a bit of a pain.

And I did check this with LinkedIn support and they confirmed that voice notes can’t be played back on the desktop version of LinkedIn if it’s through a company page. They can be played back on the desktop if it’s a normal personal profile. I’ve been using that for years, but they can’t be played back through company pages on desktop. And I think that’s a bit of a pain.

So, yeah, it’s quite possible that, you know, desktop features will not get the same kind of priority as mobile ones, given that there are so many people using the mobile app.

But at the same time, the desktop does provide you a lot more space, like physically on your screen, you’ve got a bigger screen, and therefore there are some things that just simply work better on a desktop environment than they do on the app. So, I don’t think we’re going to totally go for an app-first approach, but only time will tell. We’ll have to wait and see actually what happens.

But if you do come across anything that you think you ought to be able to access on desktop and you can’t, or similarly that you ought to be able to access on mobile and you can’t, please do let me know because I’d like to keep an eye on how that feature set changes over time.

That’s the Postbag done. If you’ve got any feedback, any questions that you’d like to ask for the show, please drop me a line either through my personal profile or through the Informed podcast company page, and if I think it’s interesting enough to include on the show, then I will. And I’ll give you credit as well.

Let’s move on to a couple of other topics before we round up. The first of those is something I do on a semi-regular basis which is to update my about statement.

And one of the things I do to try to generate some more conversation is to add some Icebreakers into my About statement so that people who read my profile have something to talk to me about that’s not just pure business. Because often people will feel bit self conscious about approaching me or indeed anyone else of it’s only business that they can talk about, it will just feel like a sales pitch incoming straight away.

Whereas if you give them something maybe non-contentious to talk about, it’s kind of an easy route in to open the door because you can see some similarity between yourself and the other person. So, near the end of my about statement I’ve got a section called Icebreakers you can talk to me about.

I recommend all of my clients to create a section like this towards the end of their About statement and you can do the same. And I every few months just mix it up a bit to list things that are relevant to me right now that are nothing to do with work at all.

And as I record this in mid November, I will tell you what’s in my Icebreakers section. So, there’s 3 things. One of them says Boxers, the best dog breed. The second one is Liverpool Football Club, and the third one is Pluribus, which is a new Apple TV show. If you’ve got Apple TV you definitely ought to watch that show. It’s very good.

So, the reason I put those there is that it gives people something to talk about when they’re inviting me to connect. That proves to me that the person has actually read my profile and it could be something we have a little bit of fun about and perhaps makes me more relevant and memorable, importantly to the other person.

You know, there are loads of LinkedIn trainers out there, but maybe if you see that I support the same football club that you do, or maybe I support the football club that you hate, you might be more likely to remember me. And that’s what it’s all about really.

It’s hard to be the very best in the category and stand out because of that, but it’s much easier to be memorable for something else that no one else has got.

So, think about maybe between 3 and 5 items that you could mention towards the tail end of your About statement so that anyone who is actually doing their research on you can have a talking point. And it’s something that you could reference in the future and keep that up to date. I update mine usually 2 or 3 times a year. So, keep that in mind, too.

Last thing for this week is a real annoyance that I’ve discovered, which is that for free members using LinkedIn, the number of personalised invitations you can use per month is gone, has gone down from 5, down to just 3. And I really think that’s a bad move from LinkedIn. It’s.

It’s something that restricts networking, which is weird because LinkedIn is a networking platform, and it makes things feel a lot more impersonal to me.

So, if someone is saying hello to me and wanting to connect to me, I don’t just want to see their name and a little fragment of their headline and try to work out whether they would be a good fit for my network. I would love to receive a personalised note from that person.

And with recent changes, you know, that number of personalised invitations that free members can send has gone down now to 3. I mean, 5 was bad enough, but 3 is becoming ridiculous. And some people are speculating that they will just get rid of the personalised invitations feature for free users altogether, so that there’s just no way that you can send a note with your invitation, thereby forcing some people to upgrade to one of the Premium plans for the honour of being able to write a note with their invitation.

I don’t know if that’s actually going to force many people’s hands. It probably won’t. In which case, you know, almost all invitations that you receive from free members in the future will be completely empty, and that puts the onus on you, the person receiving that message to go back through your list and try and work out who you think might be a good fit and who might not. Or you might just say, OK, well, I’m going to accept everything that comes into me now and then try and start a conversation back. Going back to what I said earlier about the power of those direct messages, and then trying to work out if there are any time wasters there going and disconnecting from them.

It all feels like a bit of a waste of time to me, and it does feel like a really greedy move from LinkedIn to basically restrict this in full knowledge that you’re offering unlimited personalised notes to people who pay for a Premium and therefore this is effectively an upsell for the Premium service.

I’m fully aware that there are different schools of thought about whether a personalised note is a good idea, but a lot of the people who aren’t a fan of them say that they always end up being really salesy. And to me, that’s not a criticism of the technology: it’s a criticism of the people who don’t know how to write good introduction messages.

So, I think if we were to take this into the networking realm in the real world, it would be like, you know, handing someone a business card and not saying hello and just walking off and hoping that the other person kind of wants to get back to you.

Whereas if you say hello at a few words and give them the reason why you are giving them that business card, maybe you’re more likely to be memorable. So, for me, the human thing to do is to send a personalised note.

I know it takes a bit longer that way, but you’re much more likely to start a conversation, and conversations are what turn, you know, LinkedIn into a business platform for me. So, I think this is a bad move. I fully understand that people, you know, a lot of people can’t afford to upgrade to Premium, and so you’re left wondering, well, is there anything I can do to counteract this change by LinkedIn?

I suppose there are a few things you can do.

So, if you’re a free user, you want to remain a free user, but you don’t like the fact that your invitations have been restricted, you could, let’s say, if you’re doing your research on people you want to connect with, if they are creating any content either through their personal page or through their company page, you can go and get some attention to yourself by adding comments to their content, so that when you then go and invite them to connect, you’ll be a little bit more recognisable. You won’t be coming in as a complete stranger, if you do it often enough, certainly. They might recognise your name and therefore they’re more likely to accept. And then you’re more likely to be able to start a conversation with that person off the back of making that connection.

Bear in mind as well, if you spot someone who has a gold LinkedIn badge on their profile, there’s a very good chance that they will have the Open Profile feature turned on, which is something I mentioned at the top of the show. People who’ve got the Open Profile feature turned on, they can receive incoming messages from anyone.

So, you don’t sort of need to use up one of your 3 monthly credits for personalised invitations, because you can just send a direct message to that person with a Premium profile and say, you know, I really like your stuff. I’d like to connect, but I can’t send you a personalised note. So, I’m sending it here as a separate direct message first. Hope that’s OK. I’m going to send you an invitation now, so that’s a way of not using up one of those credits.

By the way, I did see one person asking this week whether those 3 credits that you get, those 3 personalised invitations per month, whether you get one of those back each time someone accepts one of your invitations. No, it doesn’t work like a credit. It’s a kind of use it and if someone accepts, you know, you’ve still used that item so you don’t get those things back.

What are some other workarounds?

Well, if you see that someone has a mutual connection with you, and you want to connect with this person, you don’t want to use up one of your personalised invitations, or maybe you don’t have any left, but you do have a mutual connection. You could, if this person is important enough to you could go and message your mutual connection and you could do that for free, you’re already connected to the other person, and ask them to do an introductory direct message between you and them and the other person that you’re kind of targeting to connect with. And any kind of mutual direct message group like that is free to message in. And then at least that’s a way of introducing yourself.

And then you can move on to send them an empty invitation, but they already know who you are. A couple of other things to mention on this.

If you’re in LinkedIn groups, and there’s been a lot of talk about LinkedIn groups and how they don’t tend to work that well. I’ve got a lot to say on that subject because I do run my own LinkedIn group and it works pretty well. But if you are in a LinkedIn group, you can message other people in that group without connecting to them.

So, that’s a way of, you know, again, avoiding using a personalised invitation, if you go into a specific group. And maybe you’re targeting to connect with those people.

You can view the list of members in that group you’re in and there’ll be a message button next to each one.

I do think LinkedIn now limits the number of those messages that you can send, but last time I checked it’s certainly more generous than 3 per month. So, that’s another route that you can use.

And I suppose the last thing I’ve been made aware of is that some people are choosing to go kind of bit old-school and emailing prospective connections to say, you know, I found your details online. I would like to connect with you on LinkedIn. I can’t send you a note there, so I’m sending you an email first.

I guess that might work, depending on how it’s worded. It might feel a bit spammy if someone were to do that to me, but it comes back to the quality of the message being sent.

That will do for this week’s topics. I still haven’t been able to set up a newsletter on my Informed podcast company page, but I have published last week’s episode with its transcript on my personal newsletter on LinkedIn and also on the blog that’s on the Espirian website.

So, along with the show notes that appear inside your podcast player, there are other places where you can see the full transcript and see all the topics that are covered in this episode. Hopefully that one comes in a bit shorter than last week’s.

As I said earlier, if you’ve got any questions, then please drop me a line any way you see fit, either through my personal profile or through the company page, and I’ll do my best to feature those things. And thanks for listening and I’ll speak to you next time. Cheers.