Informed 472

Show notes.

What’s in your LinkedIn Year in Review? This is LinkedIn’s version of Spotify Wrapped.

Postbag.

My LinkedIn Year in Review.

• Joined in 2008 (but I wasn’t active until 2017)
• Active for 344 days (most of us got the same)
• Top 5% (again, most of us got the same)
• Peak times 10am–7pm (yawn)
• 1 certificate
• 634 new connections
• 1382 connections “on the move”
• 10K+ profile views
• 1708 searches completed
• Most used Premium feature: InMail (no way)
• 192 posts (public posts only – I’ve done way more private posts)
• 9173 reactions
• 7076 comments
• 3796 new followers
• 3300 comments on others’ posts
• 1025 reactions on others’ posts (must be more!)
• 18 reposts
• Support was my most used reaction after likes
• I was a “Catalyst” (I’ve heard of a couple of people with “Amplifier”)
• Gus Bhandal was the person I kept up with most

Some bonus info about Year in Review that I learned after recording the episode, via this official Year in Review FAQ:

• Available only via the LinkedIn mobile app.
• Available only to those with a preferred language of English, Spanish or Portuguese.
• Access ends on 31 January 2026.

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Make sure you back up your LinkedIn data from time to time. See Mic Adam’s analysis of how he uses his data with AI: part 1 and part 2.

Full transcript.

What’s in your LinkedIn Year in Review summary? Let’s find out. It’s episode 472 of the Informed podcast. Hi, everyone. I’m your host John Espirian and this is the Informed podcast, and let’s get started straight away with this week’s Postbag.

First question this week comes to us from Caryn Yuen, who asks whether a call to action should be included in our LinkedIn profile headline.

I would normally recommend that a headline is written in 3 parts. I’ve talked about this before. It’s the Interesting, Informative and Intriguing method.

A call to action could be part of that, but I think it’s wise to use one only if it’s very short and part of a reasonably short overall headline, because otherwise your headline is going to read like a paragraph, and a call to action could be lost in that. And also you don’t want to come across as being a bit too salesy.

At the same time, it’s really important to make clear what it is that you offer as a product or, more likely, a service. So, focus on getting that across and making it as different from everything else as you can so that it really stands out and grabs people’s attention.

Doesn’t need to be a call to action to do that. You can just say what you do in an interesting, informative and intriguing way.

I don’t know whether the changes to the algorithm that have happened recently will mean that things that are written in a more direct call-to-action style will get more visibility in the search on LinkedIn, but my approach has always been to optimise for the human reader first and think about search algorithms and so forth very much as a secondary thing. So, good luck if you make a change to your headline, Caryn.

One other thing I would say is that LinkedIn doesn’t seem to like it when you make too many changes to your headline on a regular basis. I’ve seen people who change their headline almost once a week and to me that doesn’t give the platform enough time, I think, to understand what you’re trying to be in the world and therefore to match you with relevant people.

So, if you are going to test a different headline, I’d recommend leaving it in place for maybe at least a month to see whether anyone really responds to that content and eventually, hopefully you get to a point where you settle on a headline that you are really quite happy with and that becomes your long-term approach going forward.

The other question this week comes to us via Famey Lockwood who asks about how best to share achievements.

So, she wrote: LinkedIn has a new template for an individual to announce an achievement, a degree, certification, award, and so on. While the post is flashy and eye catching, the question I have and don’t understand is where does an individual show the actual document for the achievement? If the document is posted as a comment, the document isn’t always viewed in the feed.

In addition, a person can say they have an achievement without actually having the evidence. I’ve seen an individual post that she had a certification from an organisation that I belonged to, so I knew the certification did not exist.

So, does LinkedIn want us to say we have an achievement without showing the evidence? There’s too much room for errors.

Well, I’m not a fan of LinkedIn’s templated approach to announcing achievements. That kind of content doesn’t really get very good visibility, and it almost never gets good engagement either.

So, I would rather use the relevant profile sections that you can add to your LinkedIn profile and then do a manual post about that if you want to try to highlight it to people who are in your network or following you. So, when you go and look at your own profile, there is a button that says Add Profile section. And there are lots of places in there where you could potentially put these things that you’re asking about.

So, there’s a section called Licenses and Certifications, there’s one called Projects, there’s one called Courses, there’s one called Publications, and there’s one called Honours and Awards. And potentially you might find yourself using all of those things to highlight different elements that you want to promote.

And some of those items give you the chance to attach media where you can show that evidence that you were asking about, and then once you’ve done that, you could potentially take a screenshot of that part of your profile and post about it in a brand new item that isn’t using a template. It’s just you talking about that thing.

Anything that looks more human generated rather than template generated I think will likely get you more visibility and hopefully your profile will be just that much more likely to be found because you’ve filled it out with that relevant content.

In terms of people making up achievements and how do you get around that, I don’t think there’s a magic bullet for that, unfortunately. There’s a lot of bluff and bluster on LinkedIn about what people have achieved. So, yeah, I don’t think there’s any real way around that.

Some of those profile sections let you link back to something that has been verified by a third-party to show that, for example, your certification is really valid because there’s a certifying authority that has, you know, generated a code that shows that they really did issue that certification to you. But most things are not like that.

And I guess it’s caveat emptor, you know, just go and do your own research to try and work out whether something is someone, is everything they claim to be.

OK, that’s the Postbag done. The main topic of this week’s show is the LinkedIn Year in Review. It’s a summary that LinkedIn is sending its most active users.

And if you’ve ever used things like Spotify, where they do a “Wrapped” series of showing you the highlights of the year of what you’ve consumed, LinkedIn has now jumped on that bandwagon and is sending their Year in Review, not to everyone. It looks like it’s to the top 10% of most active users. So, not everyone listening to this podcast might receive their own Year in Review, but I did and I shared this within the Espresso+ community so that they could people in the community could see the video that I got of my activity. And we started very quickly noticing that people had got very similar stats.

So, I’m going to read out what my stats are and I can show you where I think they’ll be very similar to yours if you’ve got one of these Year in Review. So, I joined in 2008. I wasn’t active really on LinkedIn until 2017.

LinkedIn tells me that I was active for 344 days. I think that just correlates with that’s where they took their kind of measuring point in the year to gather these stats, because I have pretty much been active on LinkedIn every day. And when I checked this with others, everyone else has got 344 days as well.

I was in the top 5% of active LinkedIn users. I’ve heard of a couple of people being told that they’re in the top 10%. Nothing really surprising then. It makes sense that LinkedIn would be sending these summaries only to the most active users. So, no surprise that we’re in the top 5%.

It said that my peak times of activity were 10am to 7pm, and everyone I’ve spoken to has got the same periods of activity. Such a broad range. I mean, 9 hours. I don’t think that tells you anything of any great insight at all.

I picked up or added one certificate to my profile in the year. I’ve made 634 new connections. I learned that 1382 of my connections were what LinkedIn calls “on the move”. So, either changing job or probably more likely adding a new Experience item to their profile. So, that’s quite a lot. You know, that’s probably about 15% of my network actually. So, that’s more than I would expect to be changing jobs in the period of a year.

I’ve had more than 10,000 profile views. I’ve done 1708 searches. I’m surprised it’s that low actually. I feel like I’m using LinkedIn search all the time. As a Premium member, I was told that my most used Premium feature was InMail. I don’t really buy that because I almost never send InMails.

So, that makes me wonder what other Premium features I could have used that would have ousted that one. I mean I’m using the Premium search feature all the time, so. But I guess that doesn’t count in this summary.

I’ve made 192 posts, it says. I’ve looked at my own stats and I think that can only relate to public posts because I’ve made a lot more posts than that in my private Espresso+ group and other private groups as well. So, I think that post count, if you see it on yours, can only relate to public posts.

I’ve had 9173 reactions and 7076 comments, 3796 new followers and 3300 comments on others posts. I would have thought that might be a bit higher actually, but I’ll take that one on face value and apparently 1025 reactions on others’ posts.

Now, that one definitely doesn’t make sense because as a habit I will always, if I see something that’s worth commenting on, I will comment on it first and then choose a reaction. So, there should be a near enough one to one ratio between comments and reactions.

So, LinkedIn is telling me that I’ve had more than 3 times as many comments on others’ posts as I have had reactions. So, I simply think that’s false data. Not sure where they’re getting that from.

And I’ve reposted only 18 times. I can certainly believe that because I don’t really like reposts. I don’t think they get you great visibility. I’d rather do a brand new post about something than repost an existing piece of content.

The Support reaction was my most commonly used one after likes and I was categorised as a “Catalyst”.

Now, I’ve heard a couple of people have said that they were “Amplifier”, but almost everyone I’ve spoken to, so dozens and dozens of people have said that they were also a Catalyst. So, again, I’m not really sure how useful this stuff is. It’s nice as a bit of a distraction, and it’s certainly got lots of people talking about it.

Some people hate the idea that LinkedIn is trying to copy Spotify. Loads of posts in my feed has been about this topic. So, I guess if LinkedIn’s secret aim was to increase their engagement on the platform, then they’ve done that.

Although given that these reports seem to have been sent only to the most active users, those people were already engaging in the platform and therefore all we’re doing maybe is adding a bit of noise. And after you’ve seen a few posts about this topic, it does start to get a bit boring.

And I realise that I’m probably contributing to that by mentioning it on the podcast in the first instance, but there we go. And the last bit of information from that review was that the person I kept up with most was my Mission Control colleague, Gus Bhandal.

So, that doesn’t surprise me at all. Although I do tend to keep up with Gus most actually on WhatsApp, not on LinkedIn, but there we go. That’s the summary of my Year in Review. Bit of fun as a bit of a distraction, but I don’t think the data really tells us anything particularly insightful.

I have said this before, but I would recommend that if you really want to get a handle on what matters to you, well, first of all, decide what which stats do matter to you, and then build your own system for tracking those things yourself, rather than relying on LinkedIn’s own data.

And speaking of data, I’ll finish off by saying that it’s a good idea to back up your data from LinkedIn, and I’ve got a post that goes into detail about how to do that via the Settings and Privacy panel. And you can download all sorts of information about your account, the posts you’ve made, the comments you’ve made, the direct messages you’ve sent, the list of your connections.

All of that is useful stuff because if anything were to happen to your LinkedIn account and you didn’t back up your data, you’re kind of starting from scratch. So, having this content on hand, and it’s your data, you’re allowed to download it. You just need to go to LinkedIn and request it, I recommend doing that a couple of times a year and I’ve recently done mine and posted about it as well. So, I’ll point to my blog post about this so you can see how to do it yourself.

And I also saw this week that there was an interesting analysis from Espresso+ member Mic Adam, who’s also going to be speaking at our UpLift Live 26 conference next year, and he showed an AI-powered analysis of his own data.

So, in this case he downloaded his data from LinkedIn and then uploaded bits of that to his own chosen AI tool and then started interrogating it by asking it questions about, you know, how many comments did I leave and what was my average length of my comments and things like that.

So, if you wanted to get really nerdy about what all of this data could be put to use for, to look for some insights, you might want to follow his method. And he’s got a couple of interesting posts on this and I’ll link to that as well in the show notes.

OK, I think that will do for now. It’s the week before Christmas, so I’m not sure that I will be recording another episode at the end of next week, but I will be around for much of the coming week and I’m more than happy to field your questions. There might be something that I save up for a future episode of the show.

If it’s something that’s quick and easy, then I’m happy to answer it via direct message. So, please do keep your questions coming.

I love receiving voice notes from people. I’m not one of those who doesn’t listen to voice notes: I absolutely do, and I love sending them back as well. So, if you’ve got anything you’d like to contribute via voice note, please go ahead and do that.

And just a quick thank you really for everyone who has supported these first 6 or so episodes I’ve done since taking over the podcast. It’s been an interesting learning experience.

I said in a post a couple of days ago that I didn’t realise before that you can replace automatic transcripts in the podcast player with one that you’ve written yourself. And I know that works for me in Apple Podcasts.

So, if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, the transcript option in there will show the one that I have edited myself. So, it should be quite accurate and I hope you find that useful. Anyway, thanks again for listening and I will catch you again soon.