Informed 475

Show notes.

Main topic is how others can be your marketing department via their recommendations and video testimonials.

Postbag

Do off-topic posts work?

Dates and times on posts

Recommendations and video testimonials

Full transcript.

How can you get other people to be your marketing department? We’re going to take a look in this episode 475 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone. I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast all about LinkedIn best practice. And as usual, we’re going to get started with listener questions in the Postbag.

OK, here’s a question from Mark Lee. I’m wondering what would happen if I choose to start another newsletter on a different topic, potentially of interest to a different subset of my connections. Do all my connections get notified of the newsletter? Does it have an impact on what happens with the other newsletter? And do all new connections get notified that I have two newsletters?

OK, so for those who don’t know, a newsletter is another name for a longform piece of content on LinkedIn where you have subscribers that are associated with that set of content. So, Mark has got one newsletter that he started already and he’s wondering about starting a second one.

Well, not all of your connections will be notified when you start a newsletter.

When newsletters launched on LinkedIn a few years ago, there was a massive number of notifications going out because every time a newsletter was started, almost everyone in your network would get a notification about it, and therefore it was a bit of a goldrush for getting new subscribers to that newsletter.

That doesn’t seem to happen as much since, partly because LinkedIn has, I think, dampened the visibility of those newsletters, but also because people will have opted out of receiving notifications about them.

So, when you start a first newsletter, or in your case, Mark, a second one, you shouldn’t expect most of your network to receive notifications about it. There won’t be any negative impact on your existing newsletter. Those two things can exist side by side.

Relatively recently, LinkedIn allowed the ability for personal accounts to start up to 5 newsletters, although I don’t think many people are going to have time to, well, to run one very well, let alone five. But certainly, you know, you can run two if you wish to.

A new connection may be invited to subscribe to your newsletter, but they won’t be invited to subscribe to two. So, it’s most likely that they’ll be invited to subscribe to the most recent one.

My overriding advice for everything to do with newsletters is always to make sure that the first episode, the first item in that newsletter, is packed with as much information as you can, because if anyone in your network is going to get a notification about it’s really going to be on that first time of release, and that’s your chance to grab those subscribers. So, just put as much effort as you can in your newsletter to try and get people to subscribe.

Once they have subscribed, they ought to then receive notifications about future episodes, and some of those people will also receive emails with the contents of your newsletter as well. So, good luck with that, Mark. Let me know how you get on.

This week, I did a test post which attracted quite a few comments. So, I wrote the first line of my post. I’ll read it out to you.

I wrote TEST in all capital letters and then I wrote posting something off topic should not get lots of views. Let’s see, colon and then I left a couple of blank lines.

And what that will have done is that it made sure that people saw that first line, but they didn’t see anything else of the post until people click the More link to expand the post. And the rest of the post is just made up of something that I had actually written out for my daughter. She’s always interested in film and TV stuff.

So, I wrote out the list of the Golden Globes winners that had happened the night before and I just pasted that into this LinkedIn post. It was deliberately off topic, and I did that just because I was interested in whether, well, people would click the More button to see what else I was talking about, but also whether LinkedIn would promote that content, given that the new algorithm is kind of meant to be set up so that you get visibility or you get relevant visibility if you stay in your lane and talk about your topic of expertise.

So, if you jump around lots of different topics, that’s not meant to be so good for the algorithm, and therefore going off topic is probably not the smartest business idea. Except that that doesn’t really seem to match the experience that I’ve had.

When I’m browsing my LinkedIn feed, I often see posts that are nothing to do with products or services performing really well, because, you know, the platform is still made up of human beings who want to interact on topics they just find inherently more interesting. And that’s the way it played out on this one. A lot of people did take a look at the list and they did comment, and also because it was set up to look like a bit of an experiment, it wasn’t really a scientific experiment, but I did put TEST at the start of the post and that seems to get often get people’s interest piqued. And that post currently, as I’m reading this now on Friday afternoon, it’s received 130 comments and 40 likes.

But in the old days, a post of mine that would have got that many comments would have had many, many thousands of impressions. And in this case it’s still under 2000 impressions: 1971 at the moment.

So, that kind of backs up a switch that I’ve been seeing in the algorithm in that, you know, posts can appear to do well but not get quite so many impressions. That could be something to do with the way that the impressions are actually counted and logged, but I think we need to get used to those numbers maybe being lower.

But so long as the comments and the kind of follow on discussion that comes from your posts is still good, that’s what really matters.

I thought that was an interesting one. I’m going to compare those numbers to the next post I’m going to talk about. You see what you think about the difference.

So, the other post I’m talking about is one that actually is on topic and it was talking about why I put the date and time at the bottom of my LinkedIn posts, which I started doing probably a couple of years ago. And in the main, it’s a bit of a protest against LinkedIn really, because LinkedIn does not currently show an absolute date and time on posts.

So, if you look at a post, you will see a relative date or time. You know, it’ll show how many hours ago or how many days ago or how many weeks ago, and you’ve got to try and work out what that actually means.

And I think that really LinkedIn, because it has the data, it should just be showing the exact date and time of when a post goes out and they don’t do that. So, my post was really about that topic and I’ll link to it in the shownotes.

What I found interesting though is that this post has had certainly fewer comments than the previous off topic one that I mentioned. Only 89 comments this time. It did have more likes, but the impression count is much higher on this one. So, 7873.

So, to the outside observer who doesn’t get to see the impression count, you might have thought that Something that had 130 comments would certainly have more impressions than one that had 89. And yet that isn’t backed up by what I’m seeing in my dashboard at all. So, I thought that was interesting.

Like I say, I’m linking to that post so you might want to see a bit more detail about it by taking a look.

And something positive might well have come of that because one of my connections who works at LinkedIn has tagged in someone else who works at LinkedIn, and I’ve now connected with her and she’s told me that LinkedIn actually is experimenting with bringing different types of timestamps to LinkedIn posts. I don’t know when that’s going to happen or what it’s going to work like, but I’ll be on the lookout for that. So, if my post has in some way crystallised LinkedIn’s thinking on that, then that’s a fantastic result. So, I’ll look out for that and let you know if it happens.

The main topic I wanted to talk to you about was LinkedIn recommendations and also video testimonials. And I kind of titled that piece that I wrote about it to show that, you know, other people can act as your marketing department. And in fact, I would say that your best marketing probably comes out of the mouths of others, not from what you put on your website or what you write yourself in your LinkedIn posts.

So, it’s the start of a new year and it’s, you know, now is the time, I think, to just, if we’re going to try and steel ourselves and push forward on LinkedIn, you need to do the things that will help you be seen. And definitely recommendations on LinkedIn are one of those things.

Most people don’t have that many recommendations and yet, you know, they’re out there working hard and trying to deliver a good product or a good service. So, the newsletter that I’ve written mentions LinkedIn recommendations and how you can ask for more of them. So, I would encourage you to go and take a look at that.

It really stands to reason that someone who’s got a recommendations, you know, all things being equal, someone who’s got lots of recommendations is going to be surfaced higher on LinkedIn than someone who’s got almost no recommendations. And therefore that person with lots of recommendations will probably snowball and get even more work as a result of it.

Now, I’ve tried to do something moderately clever with my recommendation approach, which is that I’ve got the special link that lets people jump straight to the screen where they can recommend me, and I’ve turned it into a nice short URL of my own making, and then I include that URL on my email signature and my invoices to try and drum up even more interest in leaving recommendations. And again, the article, the newsletter does talk about this in a bit more depth. So, go and take a look at that and see what you think.

But if you don’t have as many recommendations as you deserve, now might be the time to try and do things that will maximise that number on your profile.

And the same newsletter also talks about video testimonials. Now, you can’t do, there’s no kind of built-in way of doing a video testimonial on LinkedIn. You can’t just go on LinkedIn and press a button and record a video and that will associate itself with someone else’s profile. That doesn’t happen.

But there’s no reason why you couldn’t go and speak to, you know, existing and former clients and colleagues and ask them whether perhaps they would record something short on their mobile phone and send it to you, or whether they’d be willing to hop on a quick video call with you where you could record, and I think that works particularly well if you’re just having a kind of catch-up as opposed to something that has been booked in the diary for the specific reason of giving you a shout. But if it’s more of a catch up and a, you know, how are you doing and how’s business, and then in a short little bit of that call, maybe the other person says something relevant and helpful about your business. And if you can capture that, sharing authentic clips like that doesn’t need to cost you any money.

You know, it’s free to set up a video call, it’s free to have a YouTube channel. You could put these videos up on social media like LinkedIn and elsewhere, and it just gives people a bit of an insight into, you know, what it is that you do.

And of course, you know, I do say as well in the piece that I’ve written that you’ve always got to be a little bit hesitant about whether, you know, written recommendation is real, for example, but, and a video recommendation could be made up, but it’s less likely to be. It’s much less likely that someone’s gone off and hired a load of actors to say nice things about their business. You know, more often than not these things probably are real.

And because LinkedIn is inherently a platform where people’s identities can be seen and checked, people aren’t going to just make up that a service is really good when it’s not because that will just completely damage their reputation.

And so in that newsletter I have, just as an example, I’ve embedded some very kind words said about the UpLift Live conference by people who’ve come to previous iterations of that. A quick reminder that conference is taking place for the third time on 26 March in Birmingham, so we’d love to see you there if you can make it, that would be fantastic.

But anyway, do take a look at this newsletter because it will give you some ideas perhaps on how you can improve your online presence by getting more recommendations and perhaps moving into the field of video testimonials as well.

That’s about all for now. A quick thank you to my colleague Kevin Turner in the US who’s done a 20-minute demo video about the AI-powered People search that some people in the US have got.

I’m not sure when that’s going to roll out, but that demo is available now for Espresso+ subscribers, so you can take a look at that in our members area.

I will be doing an episode next week. The week after that I’m going to be traveling to Italy. I’m going to be speaking at a conference in Milan at the end of that week and so it’s probably unlikely that I’ll have an episode out then, but certainly next week there will be one. If you have any questions that like featured on the show, please let me know. And until next time, I’ll catch you soon.