Informed 476

This week we look at audio pronunciation on your profile.

Postbag.

• Is your security certificate valid?
• Recording an audio pronunciation
• Mystery speaker for UpLift Live 26 – who is it?

Illiya Vjestica is running a bonus UpLift Live 26 webinar on Thursday 5 February at 4pm, on the topic of presentation best practice. This one’s free for all ticket-holders to the 2026 conference.

Full transcript.

Have you taken this 30-second action to improve your LinkedIn profile? Welcome to the Informed podcast. Hi, everyone. I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, all about LinkedIn best practice, and as usual, we’ll get started with the Postbag section.

This week’s question comes from an Espresso+ community member. It’s Sara Gallagher, and she asks an interesting question. I need to set this up a little bit.

So, she wrote, in our community:

Well, isn’t that a good question? Thank you, Sara, for submitting that into the Espresso+ community.

I think you are certainly right to pick up on the point about echo chambers. That can be a problem.

And I’ll go back to what I always say really, it’s important for you to test and learn what works for you and for your audience. And don’t just take as gospel what a LinkedIn expert or supposed expert is telling you will work.

Of course, what we have to keep in mind is that it’s reasonable for people to get some advice from LinkedIn specialists because we don’t all have time or, you know, the aptitude to actually do the testing ourselves. And therefore, you know, we need some rules of thumb and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But it does speak to a bigger issue for me, which is how do you know whom to trust? And that’s always the question I keep coming back to because a lot of people play a good game. They look like they’re setting themselves up to be an expert, but you don’t really know until you get your chequebook out and work with them. And then that’s the point where you get a chance to see whether they genuinely know what they’re talking about.

So, I suppose I would say that there are some things that we can be fairly sure about.

So, you know, most people who spend time giving advice on this platform would tell you, for example, that putting a link on a post probably isn’t going to be great for your visibility. You know, you might get some more conversions from doing so. So, it might still be a good idea, but if you’re trying to optimise for those numbers of impressions, then links in posts probably won’t help you achieve that.

Another thing that most people would agree on is that the way you start your post is important, because that’s the thing that is likely to determine whether people click the “see more” link and therefore see the rest of the post.

And then LinkedIn picks up on how many people are clicking that link and that they help to work out whether that content is of worth and whether it’s worth, you know, expanding that, the reach of that content to other people in your network.

So, there are some things that we can be reasonably sure are right, but there are so many tips out there, it’s very hard to say all of this is going to be right and I can just, you know, take it in its entirety and apply it to a business that is nothing to do with just pure LinkedIn training and LinkedIn expertise.

So, again, I will say go back and do your own testing.

You know, try testing at different times of day in case your audience responds to that differently. Try posting text-based posts, try posting image posts, try doing videos, try doing document posts.

It’s a lot of effort to go through that roster and try everything, but you won’t really know until you understand what feels right for you and what feels right for your audience.

I know that we’re going to talk a bit more about this at our next Espresso+ Live Q&A. But I think it’s a really interesting topic about how much you listen to others and how much you have to try and do for yourself. So, thanks again, Sara, for that interesting question.

Now, website security certificates aren’t directly linked to LinkedIn, but if you don’t have yours up to date, it could still harm your professional brand.

I’m mentioning this because I worked with a client last week on his LinkedIn profile, and as part of that I looked at his contact details and I noticed that in there he had one of his websites listed, clicked through to that and I saw a warning in my browser saying that the website had an out-of-date security certificate.

And what most browsers do these days is they stop you from going to the site until you click the button that says yes, I’m aware that this site is insecure and I’d like to continue anyway. That’s obviously not a good look. And I informed the client of this and he was unaware that his security certificate had expired.

So, as we’re still relatively early in the year, it’s a good time to maybe set a reminder in your calendar so that you can know when your website security certificate needs to be renewed.

You might have a person to do this for you, but if you’re a small business owner, if you’re a solo operator, chances are that responsibility might well fall on you. So, it’s one of those tasks that we usually need to do once a year.

If you go to your website in whichever desktop browser you prefer, you can usually either click the padlock symbol that’s in the address bar, or if you’re on Safari on the Mac like me, it’s in the Safari menu. You can see the security details option in there, and that will show you first of all whether you actually have a security certificate, and then also when it expires.

So, put that into your calendar to make sure that you’re not caught out in an embarrassing way and potentially driving away customers just because of a small oversight like that.

I wonder whether you have an audio pronunciation recorded on your LinkedIn profile?

See my LinkedIn audio pronunciation guide

This is one of those one-and-done tasks that I recommend to all of my clients. Very often when I’m browsing LinkedIn profiles, I don’t see that there is an audio pronunciation recorded.

You can tell if you look at profiles that have an audio pronunciation, you’ll see a little grey speaker symbol to the right of the person’s name.

So, if I look at my own profile, I’ll see my name and I’ll see a little shield with a tick in it, which represents that I have a verified LinkedIn profile. And to the right of that I have a speaker symbol.

And if you click on that, on desktop, you need to click on it twice, annoyingly, but you will hear up to 10 seconds of that person’s voice where they pronounce their name.

Now, this was put in to help people with maybe difficult to say names to convey that to the audience, but LinkedIn gives you 10 seconds, and that’s actually quite a long time. It might only take you a second and a half to say your name, and therefore the remaining time can be used for something else.

You could make it a marketing message, just talk generally about what you’re up to at the moment, but it’s a way of conveying your tone of voice, your accent, your maybe a little bit of enthusiasm or humour or something to just humanise your LinkedIn profile, because there are not that many places where a profile can come to life.

And whenever I see an audio pronunciation speaker symbol next to someone’s name, I do always click it. And I’m always surprised at how many people are not aware that this is a thing.

So, you can record only via your mobile app. So, if you want to record your own pronunciation, you would visit your profile from the mobile app, and then if you tap the second pen symbol down from the top of the page, that will let you edit the top card of your profile.

And about halfway down the panel that pops up will be an option to record an audio pronunciation. If you already have recorded one in the past, you can re-record one if you wish.

I tried to do that recently and got into a bit of a pickle with it because there was obviously some kind of glitch going on and I couldn’t record a new version of my pronunciation. But that glitch is fixed and I’ve recorded a new one now. In fact, let’s just listen to that for a second.

So, what you’ve just heard there is what happens when you currently click the speaker symbol on my profile.

That comes in at 9 seconds. So, I’m using almost all of my space, but you can see there that I’ve packed in quite a few words, so you could do something similar and display a bit of personality for your network to see.

So, once you’ve recorded an audio pronunciation, it’ll be accessible to you and everyone else, either through the mobile app or through the desktop.

You just can’t record a new one from the desktop. So, give that a try. There’s every chance if you get this right, it might be something you do once and never have to return to, but it’s just a small way of leveling up your LinkedIn profile. So, why not do it to humanise your approach to LinkedIn?

This past week I posted to say that we would be having a mystery speaker joining us on stage at the UpLift Live 26 conference in Birmingham, and I can now reveal who that person is. So, thank you for everyone who has made a guess at who’s going to be joining us.

I gave a little clue in the post that I put out, because I used the colour system that he uses on his podcast graphics, and that person is the host of the Nudge podcast, Phill Agnew.

I found out about Phill through my colleague Mark Masters, who runs the You Are The Media community And I’ve met Phill because of that and I’ve listened to Phill’s Nudge podcast. I’ve even actually paid for Phill’s private teaching as well. He really knows his stuff about marketing psychology and consumer behaviour.

And the Nudge podcast I think might well be the number one marketing podcast in the UK. Not sure how many listeners Phill has got, but it’s certainly many more than the people who listen to this podcast.

But he truly knows his stuff, a really nice guy and I’m fascinated by the topic of consumer behaviour and psychology and how we can use that in ethical ways.

So, he’s going to be bringing his years of experience to the stage to join us and it’s just going to make what was going to be an amazing day even better. It’s going to be a real honour to host someone of Phill’s profile. So, if you want to come and see Phill in action, then where to get your tickets?

Go to uplift-live.com – you can buy an in-person ticket to come to Birmingham. Our event is on 26 March 2026 at Millennium Point in Birmingham.

If you can’t make it there on the day, we do also have a livestream ticket that offers access to recordings after the fact as well, which is only £99. The in-person tickets are about to go up in price, so if you can hop onboard soon, it’d be great to see you in Birmingham.

We’ve also got some other bonus events that are happening for ticket-holders, so the sooner you get your ticket the better. But there we are, that’s our secret speaker, Phill Agnew. Can’t wait to see you in action, Phill.

So, while I’m at it, I might as well mention that one of those bonus items that we’ve got coming up for ticket holders is a webinar that’s all about best practices in presentation online.

And that’s going to be run for us by Illiya Vjestica, who came to the last UpLift Live conference and he actually made the slides for one of our speakers, Michelle J Raymond, who came all the way over from Australia and she entrusted Illiya with sorting out some professional slides for her and he did a fantastic job.

So, he’s demonstrated to us that he knows what he’s talking about, and now he’s giving an hour of his time to show us the best practices that we need to know about and there’ll be a chance to ask him questions as well. So, ticket-holders for the conference get access to that webinar for free. And that webinar is happening on 5 February. That’s a Thursday at 4pm UK time. So, if you’re listening to this in time, make sure you get your ticket so you’ve got a pass to get into that webinar as well.

There’ll be more bonus stuff coming soon, but thanks to Illiya for offering his time up and we can’t wait to see him in action.

OK, that will do for this week. As I told you last time, I’m going to be speaking at the Inspire Day conference next week in Milan, so that’s going to move my normal time schedule around and I probably won’t have the time or capability to record an episode next week, but I will be back the week after that with hopefully a bumper episode with all of the stuff that you’ve missed in the past couple of weeks on LinkedIn.

In the meantime, I’ll never be that far away from LinkedIn, so if you have any questions about LinkedIn best practice, please drop me a line. I’d love to hear your voice notes. Thanks again for all of your support on the show and I’ll speak to you soon. Take care.