Among other topics, this week’s show is about LinkedIn voice notes. I love them!
Postbag.
Mark Lee voice note on spam comments.
- Niraj Kapur has sent a voice note about AI, based on the content of last week’s episode.
- I’ll be sending more voice notes from now on – see my guide on LinkedIn voice notes
- My average post length based on 5 years of data
- I want to do more guest podcasts! See my past appearances on other podcasts
- LinkedIn’s weekly sharing tracker now gone. There are more than 10 such updates coming in the next LinkedIn Roundup for Espresso+ members.
- LinkedIn Local in Birmingham: join us on 6 March.
- There’s now a “living” LinkedIn newsletter that links to all my episodes of this podcast and that I will update each week.
Full transcript.
Who here is a fan of voice notes? I am and I’m going to be using them a lot more in the future. Welcome to episode 480 of the Informed podcast.
Hi, everyone. I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, and this is a show all about LinkedIn best practice. As usual, we’re going to start with listener questions in the Postbag.
OK, our question this week comes from listener Mark Lee. Let’s go over to Mark, who sent us a voice note on this topic.
I love what you’re doing with the podcast. My question relates to what may be a bot posting comments on my posts. I’ll send you a link so you can see the personal concern. They’re not a 1st-level connection. They comment in almost every post I put up. Their comment is relevant, but so short that I don’t think it’s genuine, and I suspect it’s AI created. They’re a salesperson that I shouldn’t be of interest to them. They’re definitely not of interest to me, and I’m wondering whether I should just delete their comments and block them. On the other hand, the more comments the better. So, I’d be interested in your view because I’m probably not the only person that this sort of thing affects.
Well, thanks for your question, Mark. I would say that if someone is leaving low-value or spammy or automated comments on your posts, then that’s not going to be doing your visibility any good. And also the optics aren’t good.
If someone is looking at your post and seeing automated comments on your post, then they might mistakenly think that you have encouraged that kind of practice from others, and that might discourage them from leaving a genuine organic comment. So, you do want to try and get rid of this if you can.
And if you’ve got no connection with the person at all, the easiest way really is to block that person. That’s easily done by visiting their profile. If you did want to leave the comments there, I suppose potentially you could, in your notifications you could click the 3-dot … symbol next to the notification that pops up whenever they comment on your stuff and say change notification preferences and then just turn off the notifications coming from that specific person.
But in this case it does sound like they’re so low value that you wouldn’t want them on your post, in which case you would go and block them.
If you happen to know the person, it would be different. I don’t think that’s your case here, Mark, but if you did, you might just want to try and have a quiet word in their ear and say, you know, maybe you don’t leave those comments on my posts please, but that’s a bit of an awkward conversation to have. But yes, go for block and don’t think about it too much. I think is the best way forward. So, good luck with that Mark, and thanks for your question.
I’ve also received another voice note. This isn’t a question, but rather a bit of commentary really based on the content of last week’s show which was about AI and whether it’s coming to take our jobs. So, our former UpLift Live 25 speaker Niraj Kapur has sent in this voice note. Let’s listen to Niraj now.
Hey John, it’s Niraj here. So, AI has had a terrifying effect on LinkedIn coaching industry over the last few months. Many LinkedIn coaches I know have taken on part time jobs.
Some LinkedIn coaches I know are actually looking for full-time work and some LinkedIn coaches are unfortunately dipping into limited savings. These are really trying times right now in the coaching industry.
In February, my entire pipeline disappeared and I followed up with all the prospects to try to understand why this is happening. And many of them ghost to me, which is frustrating. But you know, it’s part of business. And the two most common answers I got were things are currently on hold or putting the training budget we had planned for LinkedIn into AI. Other coaches I’ve spoken to have gone through similar challenges.
And here’s the thing. Look, I use AI. I find AI very helpful in terms of research and I certainly found it very helpful in terms of note taking and other things as well. But AI doesn’t care about your career like a great coach will. AI cannot coach you like a great coach will. AI doesn’t keep you accountable like a great coach will. AI will not be there for you in bad days like a great coach will. And AI cannot celebrate with you on great days like a great coach will.
So, what can you do? I’ve started doing some things now like partnering up with people outside my industry to run LinkedIn masterclasses.
That way we’re leveraging off each other’s audiences. And you know what? That’s been great for revenue generation so far and I’m grateful for that.
The second thing is I’ve done is I’ve created a new lead magnet. Obviously I won’t really know until the next few months how well that does in terms of downloads and meetings.
I’ve hired a video editor to improve my speaking trailer. Again, I’ll find out over the next few months how good that has been. And I’ve started sending LinkedIn video DMs.
I find DMs and voice notes very effective. I find it a very good way of prospecting.
And I’ve gone back to people I work with in 2021–2024 and I’ve done very specific LinkedIn videos to say, look, here are the challenges your industry is currently facing right now, and here are some of the solutions I can provide instead. And I’ve sent 14 of those out and I’ve got 6 meetings so far. Again, time will tell what happens in those meetings and how much business I win.
But I do know from experience of going through, you know, 3 decades of work, there’s a lot of ups and downs and I’d rather do something than nothing.
So, thanks there, Niraj, for your contribution. And Niraj is great with his sales coaching and LinkedIn coaching, and he does a lot of effort behind the scenes to keep relationships going. He sends out notes, he goes to meetings, he does all the stuff in the offline world that keeps him relevant. And I wonder how many of us are doing as much we can to do that, to try and buffer against what AI might be coming for in the jobs pie, if you will.
He mentioned there voice notes and I wanted to make that actually the topic that I talk about in this episode. So, I’ve always been a fan of voice notes. I’ve mentioned them on several episodes of the show already, but I’ve decided now, actually I’m going to send them to a lot more of my new and existing connections as a kind of human way of keeping in touch with people.
I appreciate that not everyone likes them, but as has been pointed out to me recently, if someone doesn’t like them, and I really do, then, you know, we’re probably not going to have the best working relationship because we’ve just got different modes of communication.
So, I’m happy with text, but I think there’s nothing quite like just hearing someone’s real voice, their enthusiasm, you know, they’re just their accent even. It’s just a lovely way of reminding ourselves that there’s a real person behind each other and every LinkedIn profile.
So, voice notes, if you haven’t used them before. I mean, a lot of people I talk to don’t even realise that this is possible. You know, they’re familiar with the idea of voice notes from things like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, but you can actually do them on LinkedIn as well, so long as you’re connected with the other person.
So, if it’s a 1st-level connection, you can send them a voice note. You can do so only via the mobile app.
If you use the LinkedIn mobile app and you go into the direct messages and you open up a new thread with someone, you’ll see that there’s a microphone button. So, that’s not the microphone that’s on the keyboard section of the screen, but it’s just above that. And that’s a chance for you to hold down that button and record your voice.
You can record up to 60 seconds of audio in a voice note on LinkedIn. So, that’s a hard limit that LinkedIn puts in, but there’s no limit to the number of those messages you do. So, you could actually send a longer message in multiple parts if you want to.
There are sadly no transcriptions of the text and I think that’s the big down point for people is that they be busy or they might be in a place where they can’t listen to the voice note, or maybe they’ve got an accessibility need that means that they can’t actually hear the content of the message and they would just want to read what’s in there anyway. And LinkedIn doesn’t currently offer transcription and there’s no sign that they’re probably going to, which is a shame because on WhatsApp that transcription feature does exist and it can be quite handy at times.
But that aside, I do think that they’re a really human way of keeping in touch with people, so long as you’re not saying anything inappropriate, because that’s just never a good idea anywhere, let alone on LinkedIn, and you’re not using them for some kind of overtly salesy tactic. I suppose you could argue that everything that you do on LinkedIn is in some way related to pushing your business forward, but I think just focusing on showing that you’re there for the other individual, because if you send a voice note to someone, that voice note is not going to be exactly the same thing that you send to someone else.
It’s a one-to-one communication that means that you’ve invested a little bit of your time in messaging someone and it can really brighten someone’s day to receive a voice note out of the blue sometimes. So, I recommend doing them and I’m going to bite the bullet and send more of them myself to see where that gets me.
I also send video notes as well. They’re a bit more of an effort to create – a voice note you could send while you’re out on a walk, for example, and I often do. A video note takes a bit more time and effort.
But yes, I’m a big fan and always very happy when listeners of the show send me voice notes with their questions. So, just a reminder that please do that if you have anything that you’d like to see covered on the show, any suggestions, any questions like that, a voice note is probably my preferred method, and if you’ve never sent one before and you want a guinea-pig with whom to practice, then by all means, so long as we’re connected, you’ll be able to send me one.
I have written a guide to using LinkedIn voice notes, so I’ll link to that in the show notes to go with this episode as well.
This past week I have been doing some analysis of my LinkedIn data in service of a new version of my LinkedIn starter guide, which I haven’t updated for some time, so it needed a bit of a refresh. And I’ve looked at some other pieces I’ve written and tried to amalgamate a few things, and as part of that work I did take a look at how long my average post is, because I’ve heard some people questioning whether they should be just filling all of the available space, which is never sounds like a good idea. But I thought to myself, well, how long are my posts actually? And I didn’t know. So, I went and took a look at that.
So, I looked at the last 5 years’ worth of data and I went back only 5 years, even though I’ve been posting on LinkedIn for longer than that. But 5 years was relevant because that’s the period when the post count changed on LinkedIn.
The character count went from 1300 characters all the way up to 3000. So, I analysed the period since that change was made, and I found that my posts on average are only 570 characters long.
Now, that’s not a recommendation to you at all, and it wasn’t even something I was consciously thinking about while I was writing my content, because as I say, I didn’t know what my average was until I went and actually checked it. But the point is, I think that you should write only as much as you need to try and get your message across.
You don’t need to write War and Peace every time you show up on LinkedIn, and my content has been moderately successful on LinkedIn. It’s opened a lot of doors for me, certainly, and I’m using not very many characters at all to do that.
So, 570 on average is what things have worked out for me as over the past 5 years. You might want to go and check your own if you’re so inclined. You can if you go and do an archive of your LinkedIn data.
So, into the Settings and Privacy section and download a complete archive of your data, you’ll see all of your posts that you’ve ever made is in the shares.csv file.
And if you use a little bit of tech trickery, you can extract the text content from that data and then just work out some averages to see how long your average posts are. But yes, I always favour brevity over length wherever possible, and that’s why this show isn’t particularly long either. I like to get to the point and get out of the way. And on that topic, let’s move on to the next item.
I was talking to a colleague recently about podcasting and being a guest on podcasts, and I looked back at my Spotify public playlist of guest appearances, because I started logging where all of these guest appearances were for anyone who is interested in listening to more of me. This was actually I started that before I took on this podcast, so you can now hear me every week. But at the time I didn’t have my own podcast, but I wanted an easy way of sharing a list so that people can go and check that out. That is on Spotify, and I’ll link to that in the show notes.
But I realised from looking back at that list that it’s been several months since I’ve been a guest on anyone’s podcast. So, since I’ve got my own platform to talk about it now, I can say that I would like to do a bit more guesting.
It’s a good way of unlocking new audiences who might not know about my work or my podcast. So, putting myself out there to be interviewed by people who have hopefully similar outlooks to me.
So, I’m available for that kind of appearance now and looking forward to hearing from you. If you’re interested in interviewing me about for your show, I’ve now written my own personal branding book, I run my own private community, I created a conference. I’m an experienced LinkedIn trainer. So, I’ve done bits of lots of different things all around building your presence online and developing a LinkedIn presence too. So, let’s see where that goes.
I noticed recently that the LinkedIn weekly sharing tracker, which is a component of LinkedIn’s post analytics, that’s now gone. It frustrates me that LinkedIn will remove a feature without saying anything about it. It’ll just disappear one day. Thankfully, I’m pretty well connected in the LinkedIn space with lots of other independent trainers from around the world.
So, invariably when one person mentions something like that, notices something like that, they’ll tell the other LinkedIn trainers and then we all kind of learn together because of it. So, that’s one of the more than a more than 10 or so changes that have happened to LinkedIn in the past month. So, I’m going to be covering those in the next bit of recording that I do, which is the LinkedIn Roundup, which is for my Espresso+ members.
So, I do that at the end of each month for the start of the next one, so that people can keep track of what’s changed and what’s moving on LinkedIn because it’s ever changing, it’s a fast-moving platform. So, if you’re an Espresso+ member, look out for the LinkedIn Roundup coming to you in the next day or two.
I’ve been on my travels this week, actually. I’ve went to the You Are The Media local group meeting in Bristol, which was really fab – a lovely place I haven’t been to before, and we had good food and good chat and I’m going to another similar kind of event next week, which is LinkedIn Local Birmingham.
So, if you’re an early listener to the show and you’ve got time to make it to Birmingham, it’s on 6 March, which is a Friday, and it’s running from 11.30am till 2.30pm and it’s only £20, so it would be a great chance to meet. It’ll be a relatively small meetup and it’s being run by my friends Gus Bhandal and Marianne Avery. So, come along, it’s always good. I’ve attended every single one of these meetups that have happened over the past few years. Always worth going to. I’m taking the train up from South Wales to go to Birmingham for a few hours. It’ll be good fun. So, if you’re in the area, come along, it’d be great to meet you. And again, link to the event page will be in the show notes.
Last thing to mention this week and it’s a bit of a meta item really is that I’ve now created a what I’m calling a living LinkedIn newsletter that covers this particular podcast so that if you don’t want to look up the details of each episode in your podcast player, there’s an item that you could bookmark or subscribe to that will just cover when each episode launched and what the main topic of focus was, with a link to the relevant newsletter that expands more details and you can see the full transcript. So, that now exists and I’ll put that in the show notes.
And that’ll do for now. So, as ever, if you’ve got any comments, if you’ve got any questions for the show, please send them over. If you’d like to see the show change at all in any way or you’ve got any ideas for improvement, I’m always open to that stuff, especially so if you decide to send me a voice note, I really love receiving those, but for now, I’ll leave it at that. Thanks for listening, thanks for all of your support, and I’ll catch you again next week.
