Show notes.
Being away for a week in Milan did wonders for people asking me questions for the show!
Postbag.
Richard G Abrahams: As a fiction author, given that time learning and using social media is time not spent writing and editing fiction, and given that LinkedIn is a business platform, is there really any value for me to go through the learning curve to promote my novels? Will I really get return for the effort?
Ashley Leeds: How are LinkedIn group recommendation emails generated? How is your Espresso+ podcast on Apple?
Kate Clarke: What’s your view on LinkedIn events?
Caryn Yuen: Some experts recommend posting daily to build your personal brand, and some even suggest posting multiple times a day. What posting frequency would you recommend on LinkedIn, and why?
Other updates in this episode:
- Updates on my speaking gig in Milan, with slides for Espressians.
- Banner image safe zone tip
- Saves and sends – how to access what you’ve saved
- Link click analytics
- MS earnings call FY26Q2 – see also my LinkedIn membership tracker
- Open Profile Premium messaging
- Top Voices UK
- UpLift Live price rise to £299 on 14 February. Get your tickets for our third annual conference in Birmingham on 26 March soon!
Full transcript.
It turns out that the best way to get listener questions on your podcast is to go away for a week. This is episode 477 of the Informed podcast.
Hi, everyone, I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast all about LinkedIn best practice. And yes, I was away for a few days last week, so I couldn’t do an episode then. I’ve been speaking at a conference called Inspire Day in Milan.
We’re going to start this episode with a bumper crop of listener questions in the Postbag.
OK, first question comes from Richard G Abrahams, who writes, as a fiction author given that time learning and using social media is time not spent writing and editing fiction, and given that LinkedIn is a business platform, is there really any value for me to go through the learning curve to promote my novels? Will I really get return for the effort?
Well, Richard, this speaks to me about the bigger topic of marketing in general.
Back in 2016, when I was still doing technical copywriting for a living, I was so busy that I just gave up on my marketing. I was just focusing on the work itself. At the end of that year, I basically reported my worst financial results ever because my new leads dried up, and I realised at the time that I needed to do something to get out there and be seen and be talked about, and that’s when I really dived into LinkedIn.
Now, LinkedIn maybe isn’t the best channel for promoting every single type of business, but there’s no doubt that it can help to improve your visibility and lead to real human conversations. And if that’s something that you think will help people be interested in your work, there’s no reason why not to get involved.
I mean, where else are you marketing your book? We haven’t actually spoken one to one, so I don’t know this, but if you’re not investing time and effort to tell the world about the good works that you’re doing, then just expecting to be found on a bookshelf, either physically or digitally, is probably a bit naive.
I find that LinkedIn still gives you good visibility. It lets your content be seen by real people as opposed to bots, which you tend to find on other platforms.
One of the compelling reasons why I got into LinkedIn is because I found that people were more willing to spend more money with me if they found me via LinkedIn than if they just found me through a Google search, where things were a bit more transactional.
So, I’m probably biased on this one, given that I spend all of my time training people on LinkedIn best practice, but I do think there’s a niche for promoting pretty much every product- and service-based business on this platform. I wish you good luck with it. I hope we can keep in touch and you can show me some examples of how you promote your fiction writing. Good luck with it and we’ll speak soon.
OK, next question comes from an Espresso+ member and LinkedIn trainer, Ashley Leeds, and he’s asking a couple of questions about LinkedIn groups. So, firstly, how are group recommendation emails generated?
OK, so the admin of a group is allowed to recommend up to 3 posts per week within a group, and those posts will be put into a kind of digest, a summary email that goes out to the people who are in that group.
Some people have turned off all of their notifications and so they won’t receive emails from LinkedIn, but a good proportion of them will, and given that the visibility of group content on LinkedIn isn’t brilliant, having this route as an extra way of getting important, valuable content into people’s inboxes is useful.
So, the answer is, it comes via the Recommendation feature inside the group and only group admins have access to that.
The second question relates to the fact that I’m actually running two podcasts. It’s again from Ashley and he says, how is your Espresso+ podcast on Apple?
So, Espresso+ is my private community and I offer for a private podcast for people to listen to our premium content, but you have to be a member of the community to be able to unlock that podcast. And yet it’s listed on Apple, if you know where to look. And the answer is it’s a private stream and it’s set up, podcasts can be set up either as a public stream, so this one is a public stream. Anyone can look up this podcast and listen to Informed completely free.
But private streams can also be distributed on the common podcast platforms, but you can’t actually play any of the episodes unless you have an invitation code.
So, I’ve got another podcast that I pay for and again I can’t access it until I confirm my subscription and get an invitation code and then that unlocks the content. Once it’s unlocked, it looks like any other podcast on a podcast player. So, that’s how it works.
I use a system called Hello Audio for my Espresso+ podcast, but the Informed podcast, the one you’re listening to now, runs on probably a more modern platform called Captivate FM, which I signed up to when I took over from Mark Williams at episode 466. And Captivate has worked really well. That also offers public and private podcast streaming.
I’m not a podcast expert by any means. I’ve got plenty of recommendations I can make if you’re ever interested in starting your own. But yeah, that’s the answer. And that’s how I can run two separate podcasts. One of them public, this one, and the Espresso+ one, which is private.
OK, next question is from Kate Clarke and she asks for my view on LinkedIn events and she says, I’ve been doing webinars as LinkedIn Live events for over a year and have decided to switch to a YouTube podcast. The main reasons being events are difficult to find on LinkedIn. I have to pay to use another platform such as Streamyard to stream them. And getting people to sign up is stressful. The plan is just to share snippets from my podcast, still in video form, as posts on LinkedIn. Do you think I’ve made the right decision?
Well, I actually decided to go to one of my Espresso+ members who is a bit of a LinkedIn livestreaming legend, Gillian Whitney, for her thoughts on this. And she’s very kindly replied with a voice note. So, let’s listen to what Gillian’s got to say right now.
Hi John. Wanted to give you an answer to your question. Yes, I still like LinkedIn Live events. I think they’re really good. And here’s the pros.
LinkedIn Live events are really good for growing your network because every time somebody comes to an event that’s a brand new person who’s engaged and leaving comments and that’s a potential person that you could get to know and include in your network. So, if you follow up, it’s a really great way to expand, grow your network.
It also provides you with lots of great content to repurpose, and I do that. I take every LinkedIn Live, I transcribe it and then I like to either turn it into an article or turn it into a lead magnet. I’ve turn some into a book. So, it’s great for repurposing content.
And what I found is that scheduled events, not on the fly, but scheduled events with a guest seem to be the sweet spot, because you’re expanding the reach by also getting to know somebody else’s network. So, definitely having a guest is, I get more views and better attendance when I have a guest versus a solo live.
Now, as for the cons of events, they’re draining. They take a lot of energy and a lot of work. I did weekly live events for 4 years and I got burnt out. So, I have scaled back and I now do one live event a month and I find that is much better for me. So, that just was a much better way to go.
In terms of events getting people, the best thing to do is to use the invites and invite people to attend events, and whether people receive those or not, it’s hit or miss.
But using the Invite feature, write a compelling post, but also too, post reminders and link back to the original event because people don’t see it and they need those reminders and encourage people to sign up so they get the replay.
Very kind of you to send that, Gillian. And she also followed up in text by saying that there’s a lot of value in doing live events, but you must be very strategic and one thing people often get wrong is ignoring live event comments. I continue to monitor comments well after a live is over. And that chimes with what other people have said to me. Often people aren’t actually there in the moment to watch the content. So, the vast majority of the people who actually see the content are going to be ones who watch it as a replay and then they might comment after the fact. So, you’ve got to be mindful of those things coming in.
I haven’t done much in the way of live events on LinkedIn myself. The ones I have done invariably have been with Gillian’s help, actually.
I prefer to produce shortform content and just get out of your way, and this is why this podcast tends to be a lot shorter than most that you might listen to.
So, this isn’t my area of expertise. I think putting things on YouTube and then sharing short clips of them on LinkedIn, that actually does make sense, because it means that you can upload a native video to LinkedIn, which LinkedIn prefers to a direct link out to YouTube. But you’ve also got then the search capabilities of YouTube so that you can be found by an external audience as well. So, good luck, Kate, with your new approach to LinkedIn events.
Last question for this week’s Postbag comes from Caryn Yuen, and she’s asking, some experts recommend posting daily to build your personal brand and some even suggest posting multiple times a day. What posting frequency do you recommend on LinkedIn and why?
This question actually came up during my talk in Milan at Inspire Day. So, I’ll tell you the same as what I told that audience, which is that I track my own stats and I know how many times I’ve been posting over the last 8 years. It works out at about 4 to 4.5 per week.
But then I’m a LinkedIn specialist, you would expect me to post quite a lot. Actually, for visibility purposes, posting once or twice a week will put you way ahead of about 95% of the people on LinkedIn. So, you need to do whatever is sustainable, I think. Having a sudden burst of posting one week and then going a few weeks without saying anything, that’s probably not going to work for you. So, I’d suggest finding a cadence that you can actually stick to.
But the most important thing really is to maximise the number of comments you leave on other people’s posts in relevant spots, because that will get you more visibility with new audiences, rather than just speaking to the same audience over and over again.
So, my golden ratio there is, for every one post you do should do at least 10 comments. So, if I were to recommend that you did one or two posts a week, I would then also be saying try to do at least 10 or 20 comments per week as a way of improving your visibility for new audiences. So, good luck with that, Caryn.
So, as I said, I’ve just come back from speaking at Inspire Day in Milan. That came about because one of our conference attendees at UpLift Live last year, Alessandro Gini, he invited me to go over to speak. I’m not really a good traveler and I’ve never been invited to speak outside of the UK, so it was a bit of a challenge for me to go ahead with this, and I don’t speak any Italian either, so all of my content was delivered in English.
But the event went well. I think they had 300 people on day one, and then they had more focused workshops, which is where I was speaking on day two. So, about 100 people or so there.
I’ve released all of the slides from my talk for people in the Espresso+ community, so you can see what went down.
It was great to meet some people. I think we might have a few people coming over to Birmingham for UpLift Live next month as a result of me making the effort to go to Milan, and we had much nicer weather and certainly much better food there as well, so it was a good trip overall.
One of the tips I gave during my conference talk was about banner images, and I’ve done a post about that, which I’ll link to in the show notes here, because I’ve seen a lot of people not using their banner image properly. That’s the bit of real estate that sits at the very top of your profile.
So, anyone who looks at your profile can’t help but see that banner image. It’s right in their face. And a lot of people either don’t use the banner properly or at all even, or they put content on there that’s very hard to read and sometimes the content is obscured because your profile photo sits over the top of it. So, I’ve shared an image that shows where the safe zones in the banner are, which is at the top and on the far right. So, I will link to that post in the show notes. Take a look. That’s just a little taster of what I did during my talks in Milan.
Last week, I got access to a feature that some people have had actually for a few months, which is in the individual post analytics. I can now see how many times someone has saved one of my posts and also how many times someone has sent one of my posts to other people via direct messages. So, that’s interesting. And then following on from that, I’ve also got access now to the analytics that shows how many times my links were clicked in a post.
So, that’s a brand new feature as far as I’m aware, although someone in my comments when I posted about this said that they’d actually had that for months, which I found weird because normally as soon as a new feature arrives, someone in my network will be in my DMs telling me about it the same day. And so I hadn’t heard anyone talk about this. I found that interesting. So, one to look out for and I will link to this in the show notes again.
Microsoft have released their latest earnings results for the financial year 2026 quarter 2 as they’re in for their business. Not much interesting here. They’ve reported a 30% growth in paid video ads, which I thought was a little strange. I don’t ever see very many videos at all, let alone video ads in my feed, but there we go. That’s what they’re saying. There’s still 1.3+ billion members on the platform with 100 million verified accounts.
I did some calculations based on EU disclosures a little while ago that showed, that estimates at least, a projected rate of about 442 million active members. So, 1.3 billion being the headline number of members, but maybe about 442 million active members.
They don’t make a point about reporting anything where numbers drop, but comparing this quarter’s results with last quarter’s results, they’re now saying that fewer connections are being made per minute and also less LinkedIn Learning content is being consumed per minute, but they won’t ever admit that in public. So, there we go. I’ve done a post about this and I’ve got a membership tracker on my blog as well if you want to see the progression of how these stats have changed over the years.
I put out a reminder recently that people with the Premium Business account with a gold badge on their profile, almost all of those people are able to receive incoming messages for free. So, it’s a good way of getting around the limit for free accounts where you can only send 3 personalised invitations per month.
So, if you come across someone who has got a gold badge and you want to connect with them, you don’t actually have to use up one of those personalised invitations. You can just hit the Message button and send them a note which might include something like, you know, “I’m about to invite you,” and that way you don’t use up one of those credits.
So, a lot of people don’t seem to know about this Open profile feature, and almost everyone with a Premium account will have this enabled, because it’s turned on by default. And that means that anyone with a gold badge will be able to receive incoming messages completely for free, and it’s a good way of establishing why you want to connect with someone.
I mean, this is particularly relevant to me just now. Because I’ve been away for a few days, I’ve got a load of invitations waiting for me to accept, and almost all of them are completely empty, and that puts the onus on me to go and work out, you know, is this person a spammer or a bot? Are they completely irrelevant to what I’m trying to achieve?
You know, a note that gives a little bit of context really helps people who are busy on LinkedIn to work out whether that’s someone that you want to connect with. So, use this Open profile feature, send people a message and feel free to try it on me if we’re not already connected. And remember, I’m welcoming questions for the show, so feel free to drop me a line anytime with a question for the Postbag.
LinkedIn have released a list of their Top Voices in the UK for January 2026. So, I took a look. I don’t actually recognise any of the names in the list other than BBC News tech editor Zoe Kleinman, who I was already following. I don’t know the names of the rest of the people in this list. So, that gives me someone to, a few people to go and investigate. So, I’ll link to that in the show notes. You can go and check them out yourself.
Last thing I’ll say for this episode is just a reminder that the UpLift Live conference is coming next month and our prices are going to be going up. So, if you’re listening to this before 14 February, please do grab your ticket for Birmingham.
The event is going to be on 26 March, and on 14 February the prices are going to be going up to £299 for an in-person ticket.
Just the other day we hosted a webinar for ticket holders with Illiya Vjestica, who was giving us a masterclass over an hour about presentation skills. So, that’s the kind of exclusive content that we’re offering for ticket-holders. So, we’re about to put that on our private website for the benefit of those who are going to be attending the conference either in person or online, and we’ve got another one of these premium webinars coming up very soon, too.
I would love to see you in Birmingham. If you’ve been listening to the show and you’d like to meet me in person and you’re in the UK, Birmingham is a relatively easy place to get to and it’s a really fun event with no spammy sales stuff. It’s all about learning and networking. It’s going to be a great day.
It’s on 26 March in Birmingham and you can grab your ticket uplift-live.com
OK, that will do. Felt like a bumper episode just because I’ve been away for a few days as usual. Keep your questions coming in. Thanks for listening and for all of your support. Look out for me on LinkedIn, and I’ll catch you again next time.
