Informed 474

Show notes.

What is real and what is fake on LinkedIn? We’re looking at some fake accounts this week.

Postbag.

LinkedIn security fake account

Update on fake LinkedIn security accounts via Guy Strijbosch

Where did all the Top Voices go?

Keep your headline short: check out some tips on the importance of making a quick impact with your profile headline.

UpLift Live conference discount.

Our most recent LaunchPad call went well, and now we’re offering a conference discount to Informed listeners.

Use INFORMED to get 20% off an in-person ticket to UpLift Live 26. That offer is valid until 11.55pm UK time on Saturday 17 January, and then it’s a 10% discount after that.

Full transcript.

What is real and what is fake on LinkedIn? We’re going to take a look in this episode 474 of the Informed podcast.

Welcome back to the Informed podcast. My name is John Espirian. I’m your host and we’re going to get started with this show all about LinkedIn best practice with the Postbag section.

I think it’s been a slow start to the year because I’ve only received one question for inclusion since last week’s short episode. So, this one comes from Gillian Whitney, and she has sent me a voice note. So, let’s listen to Gillian now.

It is a decent question, Gillian, and I don’t really think there’s a good answer for this. I’ve not been able to find a way of reliably replicating the problem where you send someone a recommendation on LinkedIn and then all of a sudden you see that has generated a separate DM thread from what you might have discussed with that person before.

This kind of thing used to happen a lot a few years ago and sometimes you could have more than two DM threads for a person, and that can be certainly be very confusing.

I think if it does happen to you again when you send recommendations for people, which is a lovely thing to do by the way, and well done to you for making time to do that, I think we should all consider doing more recommendations for others that we believe in and trust. But if it does happen, I probably would maybe go back to that person and say, look, anything in here, we’re not going to keep discussing and I’m going to shut down this little mini thread and then you can delete it at your end and go back to the bigger thread. It’s not really a solution, and also it doesn’t actually determine what the experience is at the other end. So, at your end it might look like you’ve got one conversation going on. At the other person’s end that you can’t see, there might be two threads and you can’t really control that. So, not quite sure why it happens, but I haven’t seen it, to be honest with you, for quite a while.

So, it’s entirely possible that LinkedIn has finally got around to fixing that problem, in which case it’s not anything major to worry about. But again, good idea to send recommendations, and doing it at the start of the year is a lovely gift to others. So, use this as a reminder. If you’ve worked with someone and you can genuinely vouch for that person’s skills and competence, give them a boost on LinkedIn, go to someone’s profile, hit that More button, hit Recommend, and write something that is honest and relevant and that will hopefully get them more business throughout the rest of the year.

OK, that’s the Postbag done. I’ve noticed a lot of people have been asking about what looks like some worrying comments coming in from something that appears to be a LinkedIn account under the name of LinkedIn Security. And actually these are fake accounts which are sharing links, dodgy links, so that you know, in the hope that some people will click on them and perhaps give up information on compromised websites. So, to me, as someone who’s looked at lots of fake accounts in the past, I think that there are telltale signs that things like this are not real.

So, if you see an account that’s commenting on a post and it says LinkedIn Security, you will probably see that account has got no followers at all. So, it’s a company page with no followers purporting to be LinkedIn. That should raise some red flags, I think.

I wouldn’t actually bother with reporting accounts like this because LinkedIn by now must have received loads of such reports. And the problem is systemic. You know, it should not be possible for anyone to create a LinkedIn account with the word “LinkedIn” in the name and pretend to be LinkedIn and reuse their logo and so forth. So, LinkedIn need to sort that problem out, and hopefully by the time you listen to this, they will be taking some action.

But if you’re ever in doubt, don’t respond to something that purports to be LinkedIn Security. That is almost certainly a fake account. There is actually a real account called LinkedIn Help, which used to be more useful than it is now.

Whenever I tag LinkedIn Help in posts and comments, I don’t actually get a response from the LinkedIn support team. The only real way of getting help from them is to go and raise a support ticket.

But at least LinkedIn Help is a real account, and I believe that they’ve got quite a lot of followers, although they don’t really directly engage with anyone anymore. But certainly LinkedIn Security isn’t.

I suppose that kind of raises the bigger question of whom can you trust? Very easy for me to sit here on my podcast and say, you can trust me. But that’s coming from me. It needs to come from others. And that’s going back to what I said, back to Gillian, this is why recommendations help, because you can’t write your own recommendation. They have to have come from other people. So, that at least is a signal that someone is at least a little bit trustworthy.

And I’m kind of staying on this topic. I’ve noticed a lot of people have been complaining in the past couple of weeks because they had the LinkedIn blue Top Voice badge, and those, a lot of them, have kind of disappeared overnight without very much justification. I’ve seen a lot of complaints from people saying, where did my badge go? Why am I not a Top Voice anymore?

I don’t think LinkedIn has given any kind of formal justification about that. But one thing I do know is that getting a Top Voice badge isn’t really anything to do with the number of posts you put out or your consistency. I saw someone complaining that they’d taken a little holiday and that’s why they thought they’d lost their blue badge. And I just don’t think that that’s right, because some people who’ve got Top Voices haven’t really posted very much at all.

So, from LinkedIn’s point of view, I don’t know what LinkedIn’s criteria are for choosing Top Voices. But, you know, pure volume of posts or even consistency, that’s not necessarily going to get the job done.

You know, I know loads of people who’ve been posting consistently for many years. No sign at all that they’re getting the LinkedIn Top Voice badge. I don’t have one. I never have had one either, and I’ve been fairly consistent in posting since 2017.

So, it remains to be seen who the kind of new tranche of Top Voices are going to be, if indeed any new badges have been issued.

LinkedIn used to publish lists of, you know, here are all the new Top Voices in marketing in the UK, for example, and you could go and look at loads of different articles to go and piece together who all those people were. They don’t announce it anymore.

So, it’s hard to know how many Top Voices are really out there and to try and have an insight as to what is driving that programme. You know, who gets the badge, and maybe they’re not really giving them out anymore. I really don’t know.

If you see a whole load of Top Voices or if you see any kind of list of new Top Voices, I’d be interested in taking a look to try and work things out if you can. So, feel free to share that with me anytime.

I posted earlier this week to remind people about the importance of your headline on LinkedIn. And I said in my post that there are only 3 bits of data that follow you on every surface of LinkedIn, and that’s your name, your photo, and your professional headline. Now, we’ll assume that your name is not going to change very often, so we’ll take that off the table.

And your photo can of course be updated from time to time and does often, if it’s a good one, will do a good job of grabbing attention in the feed. But the thing that you can really control a lot better is your headline.

It’s the thing that needs to grab people’s attention and try and get them to click through to your profile, because that’s the thing that actually leads to more people making connections with you and more doors opening for new conversation.

So, the headline is important, and I would argue it’s becoming even more important than it was before because of the prevalence of comments being shown in the feed. So, why does that matter? Well, comment impressions are being shown on comments now, and you can see that they are often getting a lot of visibility, and when someone sees a comment from you, let’s say that they don’t know who you are, they’re going to see those 3 bits of data, your name, your photo and your headline. But because of space considerations, only maybe the first 40 characters or so of your headline is going to be shown.

So, that initial bit of text in your headline could be the difference between someone going, that’s an interesting comment. Who wrote that? Let’s click through to their profile. And something, you know, a comment that potentially gets ignored.

And therefore it’s really important that you spend a bit of time just thinking, look, it’s the start of 2026. Is my headline really representing what I want people to know about me, to try and get people to click through and check out my full profile?

So, I encourage you all to think about the first, let’s say 40 characters of your headline.

People will see more than that if they’re looking at LinkedIn on the desktop, but we know that most sessions on LinkedIn happen on mobile, so you’ve got to kind of optimise for that space. And you’ve got to in those 40 characters, which is might only be 5 or 6 words, you’ve got to try to be as clear as possible, but also say something that’s maybe a little bit different so that you can grab people’s attention. And I often tell people to “make the biggest promise that you can keep.” So, just have a think about what that could be.

And if you want a bit more information about that, I’ve got a whole book that was inspired by my change of my headline back in 2017. So, my book is Content DNA and I’ll link to a resource that lets you read or listen to the first 6 chapters of that book just to give you an idea of what that book is like and perhaps that could give you some inspiration for improving your headline.

It really can make a lot of difference. My relentlessly helpful phrase has done a lot of heavy lifting for me, and my wish would be for you to have something that does that kind of heavy lifting for your LinkedIn profile.

I also do consultations as well. So, if you wanted to dig deeper about your LinkedIn presence, how your profile is represented, then you can always book time with me and we can have a proper chat about how to get that working for you.

Last thing to say for this week is that we are continuing to approach the UpLift Live 26 conference. And just this week we had our third LaunchPad Zoom call. So, more than 30 people on the call. A really good, great way of meeting others who are going to be in Birmingham on 26 March.

We ran a prize draw as well to give away a free ticket to the conference and other prizes like consultations and business books, and we had 130 entrants and 16 prizes that we gave out, so not everyone won something.

But I would like to offer listeners to this show a discount to the conference if you’d like to come along to Birmingham.

So, if you sign up for the conference, an in-person ticket, you can use the discount code INFORMED, all in capital letters, and that will get you a 20% discount to come to the conference.

That offer is going to be valid until 11.55pm on Saturday 17 January, so that will reward early listeners of this show, but it drops down to 10% discount after that. So, feel free to save a bit of money, come and join us in Birmingham for a whole day of learning about LinkedIn best practice.

OK, that will do for now. Thank you for listening. If you have any questions for the show, please drop me a line at any time and I’ll catch you all again next week.