Show notes.
Postbag
via Beth Kirk: Loving the informed podcast! I have a question around the proactive use of DMs to build relationships on LinkedIn. Do you have any top tips for people with established audiences please?
— Look for opportunities to start conversations: birthdays, job changes
— Look through your network to find key referral partners and potential clients, then scour their profiles and content for anything that could start a conversation
— Don’t jump in out of the blue with a sales message. That will look like a campaign. Be more human!
— If there’s any sign that the other party might be open to it, use a voice note or even a video note to further humanise. I get great response rates.
via Espresso+: Does anyone get high levels of impressions with comments as a company page?
via Espresso+: How to be found through ChatGPT?
via Espresso+: Does an emoji in the Name field lead to spending one day in LinkedIn jail?
Engagement pods
Pods are unholy alliances of LinkedIn users who are trying to artificially boost their posts’ visibility in the LinkedIn feed. LinkedIn are trying to crack down, with a new video about this by Gyanda Sachdeva, a VP of Product Management at LinkedIn.
Thanks to an update from Tony Restell, UpLift Live26 speaker, who got this direct from LinkedIn:
Any profiles or companies you come across that are selling fake engagement services, please report directly via email to [email protected]
Full transcript.
This is the show all about LinkedIn best practice. It’s Informed episode 469. Hi, everyone and welcome back to the Informed podcast.
I’m John Espirian, your host, and, as usual, we’re going to kick off straight away with the Postbag section.
OK, first item for the Postbag comes from Beth Kirk, an Espresso+ member who says: loving the Informed podcast! Thank you, Beth. I have a question around the proactive use of DMs to build relationships on LinkedIn. Do you have any top tips for people with established audiences, please?
Good question. I’m a big fan of DMs. As I’ve said in previous episodes of the show, I would probably start by looking for the really easy opportunities to start conversations, and those come through your network signals.
When you see things like birthdays and job changes, it’s a chance to just remind people that you exist and to say hello and to look for a chance to start a conversation. But that’s really basic table stakes.
Beyond that, I probably would look at my network and look for key referral partners and potential clients and then go and scour their profiles, particularly the About statement, and any posts that they’ve recently put out looking for something that opens the door to start a non-salesy conversation.
It’s really important that it is non-salesy because if you jump in out of the blue with something that obviously looks like a sales message, that’s going to look like a campaign, you need to be a bit more human than that.
Once you’ve found those people, just keep a track of them and just look for any chance to start a conversation. And if there’s any sign that the other person wants to might be open to this, then I found that using a voice Note on the LinkedIn mobile app, or a video note also via the LinkedIn mobile app, or you can record one via desktop, too. Those are chances to really humanise your communications.
I get great response rates when I’ve tracked this in the past. Voice notes tend to get something like a 95% response rate and video notes get a 99% response rate. So, those things show that you’re not sending something at scale to thousands of people. You’re recording something for one specific person.
So, that’s the best way of getting a response. It does take a bit more effort, but DMs are really the way that I transact so much of my business on LinkedIn. It’s worthwhile investing some time on this.
I’m going to be talking more about this subject in depth with some good examples at the UpLift Live 26 conference. So, look out for that one in March in Birmingham.
The other items I’m going to cover this week have all come up in discussion in the Espresso+ community, so I haven’t actually asked for permission to use these. So, I’m not going to name the Espresso+ members who have submitted these questions, but I think they were interesting to discuss all the same.
So, the first one of those via the community was: does anyone get high levels of impressions with comments as a company page?
I’m a big fan of commenting. I tend to comment almost exclusively via my personal profile. That tends to get my best engagement, but I don’t tend to see very good engagement when I switch to a company page and comment as that.
So, if you’ve never done that before, when you scroll your LinkedIn feed next to the Like button, to the left of the Reaction option, you will see a little picture of your face and if you click the little downwards triangle symbol next to that, you get a chance to switch to react or comment as any of the company pages that you’re an administrator of. So, I might switch to for example my Espresso+ page or the Informed podcast or my Espirian page and I can interact as that entity.
But I do find that when I do that it doesn’t get great levels of responses or engagement.
Still, if you’re trying to build a company page, then commenting as your company is a very good way of getting different eyeballs other than those who are already following you to see that content. So, it’s probably still worth doing, but I wouldn’t expect that really high levels of impressions from those comments.
It does seem to be the case, I think, that if a company page has a lot of followers – because that follower count is shown with your company page comment – that’s more likely to get more visibility and more engagement. But it’s a bit of a chicken and egg. You know, you want to build your company page visibility through commenting, but you’re probably not going to get much attention from those comments until you’ve got a lot of followers. So, it’s a bit of a difficult one.
I think it’s probably worth doing a little bit of an experiment with commenting as your company and see how that goes for you.
Next question is, again via the Espresso+ community: how to be found through ChatGPT?
I think this is going to become a big topic in the future. We’ve talked for many years about search engine optimisation and how you get found through things like Google, but now with more and more people turning to chatbots such as ChatGPT, people naturally want their name to appear in ChatGPT search results.
I don’t really have a magic bullet on this. It’s still probably too new a field to understand fully, but it’s certainly the case that tools such as ChatGPT are going to be trained on publicly available information that’s on the internet.
So, if you’ve ever been publishing content on your website, blog or on other places that get indexed by classic Google searches, then it stands to reason that ChatGPT and other tools like that are going to be using that as a source of authority.
And if that content has been on the internet for years and has had lots of links from other places, it makes sense that it would be of more value to Large Language Models that are trying to work out a source of truth.
I’ve got a case in point here, which is some years ago I published a list of recommended LinkedIn trainers around the UK and around the world. And often if you do a search of who the top LinkedIn trainers are, people who are on that list will get cited in the search results and sometimes you’ll see, you know, the source accreditation going back to that page.
I suppose what I’m really saying here is if you’re not already publishing longform content either on your blog, in LinkedIn newsletters, maybe in Substack or other places, then you’re reducing your chances of tools such as ChatGPT finding you, and maybe recommending you as the person of interest when someone does a search for a service provider. So, think about that.
Last question for this week’s Postbag again via the Espresso+ community: does an emoji in the LinkedIn Name field lead to spending a day in LinkedIn jail?
I thought that was a really interesting question. So, a couple of high-profile people have previously been banned temporarily on LinkedIn for changing their Name field to include an emoji symbol. And once people were aware that kind of thing happened, a lot of people stopped adding emojis to their Name fields.
I still see it quite a lot actually, but technically it’s against LinkedIn’s rules to write anything other than your real name in the Name field. So, I would strongly advise against putting emojis in there.
I don’t know of any evidence that if you do it, you’ll get a single day in LinkedIn jail. In other words, that you’ll be just stopped from using the platform for 24 hours. It may well if you are caught and banned, it may well be a lot longer than that, because LinkedIn support isn’t always the quickest in reversing such decisions.
I would just say don’t take the risk. If you’ve got any special characters or emojis in your Name field, just go and take them out now. There are other ways of expressing your identity, your personality on LinkedIn. Don’t mess with the Name field. Let’s keep that nice and simple.
OK, that’s the Postbag done and as usual I’m inviting questions either via the Informed podcast company page or sending me a direct message, John Espirian on LinkedIn, and if it’s something I think is interesting, I’ll include it in next week’s Postbag.
Main topic for today is going to be a quick chat about engagement pods. Now, I feel as though I’ve talked about this topic to death, but since I’m new to running this podcast, I don’t think I’ve talked about it here.
So, some of you may not have heard of an engagement pod. An engagement pod is an agreement between a group of people that they will support each other’s posts with the express view of getting those posts more visibility. And this goes against LinkedIn’s rules.
And often these engagement pod agreements are between people who have no real relation to each other and no real knowledge of what each other does.
So, for example, if you join into one of these engagement pod groups, you’re agreeing to support someone else’s content, regardless of what that content is about, regardless of whether you know anything about that industry that they work in.
It’s just a case of when they post something, you’re agreeing that you’ll immediately, or as quickly as you can, go and hit the like button and leave a comment, usually of just a few words, maybe even repost that content in the hope that those people who are in the pod will do the same for you and thereby all of you increase your visibility.
Kind of sounds good in theory, but it definitely goes against the rules of LinkedIn.
It means that low-quality content on the platform gets boosted and we don’t want to see that. We would much rather see content succeed because it is interesting and relevant and conversation worthy. And inevitably stuff that is piped into engagement pods for boosting isn’t that good.
And people have gone into those agreements in the first instance maybe because their content wasn’t getting good visibility and they’re trying to kind of hack the system. There are services that you can pay to be part of that will push your content into pods and get it boosted for you. Sadly, some of those services are still listed on page one of Google if you if you search this topic.
But thankfully we’ve heard recently from one of the VPs of Product Management at LinkedIn saying that LinkedIn are taking renewed efforts to stop pod-like behaviour and detect posts that are coming from pods and to deprioritise those in the LinkedIn feed. Now, they have said this before. Whether they really follow through with it this time, we’re not quite sure.
But given that there is a new kind of AI powered 360Brew algorithm at play, maybe that will be better at detecting pod-sourced posts and just cutting them out at source. In which case if that happens, then people will be less likely to want to be in a pod because they’ll see no obvious benefit from being in one.
And to add to all of this, one of our colleagues in Espresso+, also an UpLift Live 26 conference speaker next year, Tony Restell, has been in touch with LinkedIn and has heard back officially from them.
And I’ll say the quote that he got back:
Any profiles or companies you come across that are selling fake engagement services, please report directly via email to [email protected]
So, there’s an email address where if you see people selling sort of engagement pod services, you can report those companies or those individuals to that email address:
… and LinkedIn will investigate them. So, really interesting.
I wonder whether they’re really going to take the action that they’re saying they will. I hope so, because I’m all about trying to create human, organic content that isn’t falsely boosted in any way, and I hope that everyone listening to this show feels the same and that organic real content should win on LinkedIn.
OK, there we go. We’re done for another week and it’s another shortish episode. I did have a cold last week and I’m not fully recovered from it. So, trying to keep things as brief as possible and cutting out the fluff wherever I can so that I just give you what you need to know.
Again, if you have any questions, any observations on LinkedIn that you’d like to share as feedback or any general feedback about the show, please drop me a line. I’m easy to reach. Even if you’re not connected, you can send me a free DM on LinkedIn.
And until next time, have a great week. Speak to you soon. Cheers.
