Show notes.
Thanks to Mark Williams for his kind farewell newsletter.
Postbag.
- Profile verification: to verify or not? (see more)
- Post timing: when is best to post?
- Recommendations: should they be up to date?
Other topics.
Everyone is talking about algorithmic bias against women. I’m going to investigate. For now, see this LinkedIn Engineering blog post (20 November 2025) for the company’s response.
A couple of text-plus-image posts:
Starting a post with a short bit of quoted text often seems to get me good engagement, as per the second example.
Why put a date and time stamp on posts? I wish LinkedIn would do something about this.
This feels a bit meta but here are some things related to the development and marketing of the podcast:
- There’s a new page at espirian.co.uk/informed
- There’s a new banner image as part of my rotating Premium banner
- I’ve invited 250 people (the monthly limit) to follow the company page
- There were ~1000 downloads for episodes 466 & 467 – thanks!
Transcript.
This is the podcast that talks all about LinkedIn best practice. It’s Informed episode 468. Welcome back to the show. I’m John Espirian, your new host of the Informed podcast.
A quick thank you again to Mark Williams who handed the show over to me. He is back from his long safari holiday to Africa and he posted a very kind farewell newsletter just to announce that he was retiring and handing over the show to me. So, I’ll link to that in the show notes.
And without any further ado, let’s get on with the show, and the first section, as always, is the Postbag.
OK, first item in the Postbag is from Clare Marshall who asks: to verify or not to verify? I’m reluctant to send LinkedIn proof of who I am.
OK, so this is a very common question in all training that I do now, is it a good idea to verify your LinkedIn account?
I’ve done this myself. It took me only a few minutes, but I know a lot of people have struggled with the process of verifying and moreover, people have a lack of trust in LinkedIn and the third-party partners they would use to do the verification. Because it’s not just a case of clicking a box to verify your account on LinkedIn.
Certainly in the UK, the default method would involve you showing some biometric data via your passport and using the LinkedIn app to kind of sync those things up so that you get a little verification check on your profile.
Now, I’m a LinkedIn trainer and I’m happy to be a guinea pig for any kind of testing on LinkedIn. So, I didn’t hesitate to add this to my profile when it launched in the UK, which I think was at the end of 2023, and it was nice and painless for me. I think I got my verification sorted within a few minutes. But I know some people have had some technical difficulties with it.
And really, to answer the question about whether or not you should, it doesn’t really add a lot to your profile at the moment. You’ll get a little grey shield mark next to your name and that shield will also appear in the LinkedIn feed, but it doesn’t appear in a very prominent way. There’s no evidence at all that the LinkedIn feed algorithms will boost your content just because you’re verified.
And I’m not even sure if you know the random person scrolling their feed looking at posts is going to treat your post as any more important just because you’ve got a little grey shield next to your name. So, from that point of view, it’s not really going to add any benefit to you.
It may well be down the line that some other features come online that you can’t access unless you are verified, in which case that would make a difference. But right now it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. LinkedIn’s last set of records suggested that only 80 million accounts were verified. That’s not a lot really. They recently said that they have 1.3 billion member accounts, so 80 million of them are verified. So, it’s a fairly small pool of people, so don’t feel that you have to join that pool in order to get visibility on LinkedIn. Simply not true.
If you want to do it, then you will need to use your mobile app. You can’t do this direct from LinkedIn desktop, and I did think I had a quite nice workaround which is verifying via your company page so that you wouldn’t have to show your passport. But since that workaround came in, LinkedIn have made things more complicated because company pages doesn’t look like they can verify at the moment unless they’re on Premium Company Page, which you’ve got to pay quite a lot of money for each month. So, I’m not going to recommend that route anymore.
I’ll point in the show notes to the LinkedIn newsletter I’ve written on this topic so you can see a bit more about this. But in short, if you don’t feel comfortable with verifying, don’t feel as though you have to. It probably won’t change your LinkedIn experience at the moment.
Next item is from Andy Gomm who says: curious to hear your thoughts about timing of posts. I sometimes have more time on a Friday to sit down and write a post, and it’s hard not to want to post right away, but thinking it’s better to post on a Monday or Tuesday morning. What are your thoughts?
My best answer here is really to test it and see what works for your audience. You can’t really tell what’s going to fly. The traditional received wisdom is that you should post on LinkedIn when people are most likely to be in the office and in work mode.
But these days, with more and more people consuming LinkedIn on mobile devices, they might be scrolling the feed on their way to work, or during a lunchtime or maybe even after work sometimes or on a weekend. People work different shifts. Not everyone is in the office anymore.
People work from home a lot, so you can’t necessarily tell where your ideal audience is going to be unless you test to see what works. If you decide to write something and then schedule it, that’s fine, because there’s no algorithmic penalty for not posting in the moment.
If you’ve written something and scheduled it and it goes out in a day or two, or even in a week or two, that’s not going to harm the visibility of that content, so long as you don’t ignore the content once it goes out. You still need to engage with the people who are leaving you feedback through comments, but the idea that you have to stick to a specific time just to beat the algorithm, I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot in that.
I’ve been tracking my own stats over several years since about 2018. So, about we’ve got 7 or 8 years worth of data, and in that time I can see that my posts seem to be most popular in terms of visibility on a Wednesday and a Sunday. But I always hesitate before telling people that because that’s just for me and that’s the way things seem to have played out.
I’m not quite sure why that is, but there’s nothing to say that just because those two days seem to work better for me on average than other days doesn’t mean the same will be true for you. You’ve got to test it for yourself and see what works. So, give that a try, Andy, and good luck.
Last question for this week’s Postbag comes from Bruce Segall, who says: I’m wondering about how important LinkedIn recommendations are these days. It seems that they get less visibility within the profile and among LinkedIn experts, though I still try to keep my profile fresh with at least one new recommendation a year.
I must admit I don’t really look too much at dates whenever I look at recommendations. But then, to be honest, I don’t really look at recommendations that much. So, for me, they’re of more use in terms of strengthening the profile so that, you know, the profile is more likely to be found, as I’ve often said before, two profiles that are otherwise identical, where one profile has got 5 recommendations and the other profile has got 50 recommendations.
Well, it’s natural that LinkedIn’s search algorithms are going to favour the second one because more people have kind of lent their support to that profile. So, those numbers are all well and good. It doesn’t actually mean that people are reading all the recommendations.
They will probably have a quick look at the first one or two that are shown when the profile loads. So, if those two are out of date, then that’s not a good look you can’t reorder your recommendations, annoyingly.
So, that might mean that something you’ve received in the past that was really good gets kind of bumped off the page because you see the first two recommendations and then beneath it you’ll see a link that looks like “show all 17 received”. So, that killer recommendation might be hidden away, but there’s nothing you can really do about that apart from featuring a recommendation in your Featured section, which is a different matter altogether.
So, I think it is probably a good idea to keep an eye on your Recommendations section and see what you can do to get people to recommend you maybe once or twice a year to keep it fresh. But it’s not a massive consideration. The actual brute force number of recommendations you’ve received probably does more in terms of making your profile more visible to other people.
OK, that’s the Postbag done with for another week. And as usual, if you have any questions or feedback about the show, please drop me a line and get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. And if you ask a question that I think is relevant for the whole audience, then I will include it in a future episode.
The hottest topic of the week has definitely been lots of posts I’ve seen about a possible algorithmic suppression of posts by women in the LinkedIn feed.
I don’t want to say anything much more about that right now because I’m trying to gather some examples of this happening, doing some of my own research, speaking to people behind the scenes, and I’ll put together my thoughts and share them probably in 3 or 4 weeks from now rather than just doing some kind of knee-jerk reaction post about this.
I’d like to kind of really properly research what’s going on, what the reasons might be behind this, and then we’ll have a bigger discussion about that when I’m ready.
Just wanted to make sure that was recorded because a few people have been asking me behind the scenes what’s going on with this and I didn’t want to just ignore it completely for the podcast. So, I am working on that behind the scenes and I’ll have something to share with you when I’m ready.
A couple of posts I put out myself in the feed this week, both text plus image, both quite conversation worthy, I think.
The first of them was about changing the skin tone colour in some emojis I’d seen elsewhere that people were complaining a bit about changing the default yellow skin tone in some emojis like the thumbs up and the wave and other symbols like that and how that might be inappropriate or even offensive, and I’d never even considered that it could be taken that way. So, I put out a post about that and that got pretty good engagement.
So, you might find it interesting to reflect on your own behaviour and thoughts about this. So, take a look at that one.
And the other post I had in mind was the one labeled “Quiet Piggy”, which is a response to the incident with Donald Trump and a reporter this week, which really kind of got under my skin. And I thought I’d put something out about that.
I don’t really want to make this a political point, but the point about the LinkedIn post I found is that when you start with a relatively short bit of text, especially one that’s surrounded by quotation marks, as this post was, and then leave a bit of a space before you explain what you’re getting at, that can be good for engagement. You shouldn’t use it to clickbait people, you know, bait and switch, give them one idea and then sell them a totally different idea.
The whole post in this case, I think, was consistent, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how that worked. That did get good engagement, although nowhere near as good as the one about the skin tones in emojis.
Now, it wasn’t really a Postbag item, but often people look at posts of mine and they will say: why are you adding dates and times to the bottom of your post? And I’ve been doing that for a while now. It’s because LinkedIn really ought to be doing that for us.
It’s for my own records, so I can keep accurate records about when stuff went out without having to go back and look things up every time.
And also on the off-chance that anyone ever wants to check something I’ve written or maybe even quote something I’ve written, they will know when they look at my post exactly when it went out. So, that’s the only reason. And I’ve set it up as a kind of text shortcut through an app called TextExpander that I’ve been using for years. So, dead easy for me to do. And I find it quite handy. And it doesn’t really obscure a lot of space in the post. It doesn’t take up a lot of space, I should say. And sometimes it starts a conversation. So, that in itself is quite interesting, I find. But that’s why I’m adding date and timestamps to my own posts.
I’ll round off with a little bit about how I’m promoting the show, which is a little bit meta, I suppose, but I’m sure some of you will be interested in some of this stuff. So, I’ve now created a new page about the show on my website. So, that’s espirian.co.uk/informed
So, people who are new to the podcast, I’m going to send them in that direction so they can listen to the latest episode. I’ve worked out how to embed just the latest episode in that I’m still creating the show notes and the newsletters that accompany the show as well.
So, I was already doing that for the first couple of episodes. I’ve created a new banner image for the Informed podcast as well. So, that’s now part of my rotating banner, which is on my personal profile.
So, if you have a Premium account, you can have a rotating banner. It’s the digital real estate that sits at the top of the screen and it kind of rotates every couple of seconds, so you can put multiple images in there. To be honest, I think it. It rotates too quickly. I don’t really like that you can’t control the speed of these things.
So, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone upgrades to Premium just so they can get a rotating banner. If you’ve got a free account, you. You only get a single static image. But I think that’s more than enough, frankly. So, what else have I done?
I’ve also invited people to follow the company page. So, you get up to 250 invitations to follow a company page per month. So, I actually have been using those.
Someone told me this week that they started a new company page and was only allowed to invite 50 people to follow, which is the old limit, and that’s gone away ages ago. So, I’m not quite sure why some people would be limited to only 50 company invitations and people like me are able to get 250. I’m not quite sure about that.
And the last thing to mention, actually, is that we’ve had now almost 1000 downloads across the last two episodes.
So, 466 and 467, the two other episodes I’ve done before this one, have now achieved about 1000 downloads. So, thank you to everyone who has listened to the show. Some people have said, “I listened, but I didn’t download.” But in terms of the stats, a listen counts as a download. You can’t listen to something unless you’re pulling down data from the internet, so it still counts as a download.
So, that means somewhere approaching 1000 people have downloaded and listened to the show. So, that’s fab to hear. If you’ve got any feedback, as I’ve said before, please let me know.
If you’ve got any questions for the Postbag, also, please let me know. And until next time, I’ll see you soon. Thanks for listening.
