Informed 489

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Postbag.

• Richard G Abrahams on post impressions.
• Steve Messenger on comments being turned off on every post.
• Lynnaire Johnston on verification concerns.

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• LinkedIn member results via Microsoft.
• I signed up for Premium All-in-One.
• Comments reduced from 1250 to 1000 characters.

Full transcript.

LinkedIn’s latest membership figures are out and it’s time for us to take a look at their stats for this quarter. This is the Informed podcast, episode 489.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Informed podcast, your show about LinkedIn best practice, and I’m your host, John Espirian. And as usual, we’re going to kick things off with listener questions in the Postbag section.

OK, our first digital caller is someone who’s been on the show before and it is Richard G Abrahams.

Thanks for your questions, Richard. I’m not used to seeing one post doing well and that having an immediate effect on everything else that you’ve put out. So, that I would probably say is a bit unusual.

More generally, if you have a really successful post, it tends to have a little bit of a halo effect on other stuff that follows. But if you’re saying that you’ve posted something, it’s done fantastically well, and all of a sudden loads of people are now seemingly going through your back catalogue, I would say that’s a bit rarer, but certainly a good sign. And if you can capitalise on whatever it was that you wrote the first time, then absolutely do more of that stuff.

High impression counts are, well, good for our egos. They don’t necessarily translate into business. What matters most is the engagement piece. So, that’s the public comments that you’re engaging in and the private direct message conversations that you’re having as well.

So, writing your content in a way that stimulates people to come out from behind the velvet rope and actually say something so that you can speak to them publicly and then speak to them privately, that’s the thing you want to encourage, and that’s far more important than a raw impression count.

So, I’d rather have a tiny impression count but have loads of fruitful conversations rather than the other way around where you can boast that every post you do has got 20,000 impressions, but you’re not actually turning that into any real conversations that lead to people wanting to buy your books.

It’s the conversations you need to focus on, and that means that you probably need to have a very compelling hook at the start of your posts. This is something I talked about at UpLift Live 25, and also to prompt people to get involved via a good question at the end of each of your posts as well. And then also to seek out other people who are producing content and get involved in the comments on their posts so that you’re not just broadcasting stuff into the world without being a good LinkedIn citizen of going and finding other people’s content and getting involved there too.

All of that is quite a lot of effort, but that’s kind of what it takes to get those conversations started. So, good luck with that.

The next item wasn’t technically a Postbag submission, although I’ve turned it into one because someone asked a question, and I was tagged in the comments to take a look and provide an answer.

This is from Steve Messenger, who wrote that all of his posts were being created with comments off as a default setting, which was understandably a pain. So, I suggested a change for him and that seemed to work. So, when you start a new post, I’m looking at desktop at the moment, when you look at the top of that post, by default, it should say that the visibility is set to “Anyone”, and if you click on that in there’s a default comment control setting. And so I suspect what’s happened in Steve’s case is that has been turned off, and I suggested that he go in and turn it on on that screen.

If that hadn’t worked, I believe it did then immediately start working for him. If it hadn’t worked, when it’s a settings change like that, sometimes there can be some strange things going on with your LinkedIn cookies, in which case maybe clearing your browser cookies for LinkedIn would reset that, although it does reset all of your other similar LinkedIn customisations. So, it’s not something I would recommend as the first port of call, but as a kind of emergency measure, that one can work pretty well.

So, I’m glad that worked for Steve. So, if you find that you’re posting and your comments are turned off, that is how to fix it.

The final Postbag item for this week comes from Espresso+ member Lynnaire Johnston.

Well, thank you for that, Lynnaire, and I believe since you posed that question, that the issue has now been sorted for you. Although there’s nothing to say that it might not happen again. I’m not quite sure why it would have happened in the first instance. It sounded like you hit some kind of limit, but I know from talking to you that you didn’t think that was the case.

More broadly, this question about verifications, it does keep coming up, and in fact I’ve been looking at something today in relation to it in a conversation I was having with a different Espresso+ member.

So, I think there’s a lot of concern about the amount of data that’s being handed over, and also how much can you trust the third-party providers who are dealing with your data?

It’s all very well and good having things like a privacy policy, but it’s kind of, it’s not really worth the paper it’s written on, the digital paper it’s written on if you don’t feel as though you can trust that organisation. So, that’s something always to keep in mind whenever you’re doing anything online.

Anyway, I’m going to read back to you what I said in the comments back to Ella, who was the latest person to post this question to me in the comments today.

So, I’ve said that I’ve seen more knowledgeable people express what looked like legitimate concerns about the scope of data collection via the likes of Persona. That’s the third-party system that is used by LinkedIn in the UK, certainly, and in other parts of the world, too.

And the problem is always that unless you’re an expert, you never quite know whom to trust. So, caution is probably the best approach for anyone who feels a bit concerned about handing over their data when verifying their LinkedIn account.

Now, I’m personally of the opinion that we don’t really have anything like the level of privacy online that we think we do, or that most of us think we do. And I’m not personally that fussed about my information being sucked up and used by AI to do whatever.

As a LinkedIn trainer, an independent LinkedIn trainer, you know, I’ve got a vested interest in understanding what the process looks like because if I’m advising people and they say, well, you know, how do you verify your account? And I say, well, I don’t trust the process, so I can’t tell you anything about how it actually works, that wouldn’t really make sense for my business. So, as soon as the feature became available in the UK, which was December 2023, I believe, I went ahead and verified my account. And that means that I can take screenshots and show people how these things work.

But to truly understand actually what’s going on behind, you know, beneath the surface, if you like, then as I said to Ella, I’d need to become a full-on investigative computer scientist and that’s not going to be my role right now.

I suppose I could put my trust into other people who are investigating this more carefully and kind of take my lead from them. I did say as well that verification doesn’t actually offer any real benefits right now.

If you’re weighing it up in terms of, well, it’s a risk with my personal data, but look at all this positive stuff I get from verifying, well, there isn’t any real positive stuff from verifying. So, it’s been two and a half years since I verified my account. I can’t say that anything really has changed.

I haven’t suddenly had an influx of followers or more business or anything like that I could tie to having this grey shield on my LinkedIn profile.

And so looking at it through that lens, if the upside is effectively nothing, then I suppose you could say, well, what’s the point in bothering? You might as well just hold back your driver’s license or your passport or whatever and don’t bother giving it over because there’s no real benefit to doing so.

Now, that could change in a heartbeat because LinkedIn do change stuff quite a lot and they never tell us when they do. So, it’s up to people like me to discover these things and then tell you about it.

But for example, and this is the example I gave back to Ella, if LinkedIn were to really want to drive up the number of verifications from the current 100 million or so accounts that are verified, they could do something like, well, you can’t send any direct messages on LinkedIn unless your personal profile or your company is verified, under the heading of, well, we want human only communications here. We don’t want people sending AI spam in the direct messages, and so we need to make sure that you’re verified.

If they did that, you know, a lot of people who use DMs to try and move people off LinkedIn and start Zoom calls and so forth and transact their business that way, those people probably would have to change their minds pretty quickly and get themselves verified, otherwise they’d lose access to a really valuable feature.

I don’t think LinkedIn would take such a big gamble because, you know, if people didn’t buy into that, then you might suddenly lose a load of users and that obviously would be disastrous for the business. But right now there’s no compelling case to do the verification.

I’ve done it and haven’t experienced any benefit, and so I suspect the number of people who are verifying isn’t going to rapidly increase anytime soon. So, yeah, so if you’re listening to all of that and thinking, yeah, why should I bother? That’s probably fair for now.

But again, keep in mind that things could change at any time, and if you are really concerned about your data, then don’t do it until that compelling case arrives, if indeed it does.

One other thing to note is that LinkedIn systems have become a little bit more forgiving in terms of names. This has been a problem in the past where, for example, if you know, you’ve got your maiden name on LinkedIn, but you’ve got your married name on your passport or vice versa, then you wouldn’t have been able to verify. But the system does now accommodate for that on LinkedIn.

You would then need to display not only your preferred name, but you’d also have to display your legal name, which might look like a bit of a mouthful. It’s not something you really want to do, but it is kind of possible to get around that hurdle if needs be. But thank you for the question, Lynnaire.

It’s becoming more and more common that people are asking about verification and I hope that helps a little bit.

OK, that was a longer Postbag than usual, but I thought it was an interesting set of questions.

And let’s move on to the main topic. Microsoft have released their quarterly earnings. So, this is for the financial year 2026, quarter 3. That’s because of the way that Microsoft set up their financial year, and Microsoft own LinkedIn, so when they release their earnings call information, that includes stats about LinkedIn.

So, LinkedIn still has 1.3 billion+ members, so it’s been the same for a couple of quarters now.

There’s been a 14% increase in original posts, and that includes an 11% year-on-year increase in knowledge-oriented comments. This is according to LinkedIn’s new CEO, Dan Shapero.

There’s been a 30% growth in paid video ads. I don’t feel as though I’m seeing more video ads in my feed, but I’m probably blind to them by now.

Microsoft said that there’s been a 12% increase in LinkedIn’s revenue, which is 9% in constant currency. I’m not sure I really know what constant currency is without looking it up.

Apparently, according to the Pressroom page on LinkedIn’s website, there are 1.7 million feed updates viewed every minute on LinkedIn. That’s insane.

There are 18,000 connections made every minute and there are 132 hours of learning content consumed every minute.

So, the top countries on LinkedIn: 256 million accounts in the USA. 179 million now in India. That is really increasing. It feels like it won’t be long before India overtakes the USA.

There are 98 million accounts in Brazil, 47 million in the UK and 38 million each in France and Indonesia. So, all of which looks like LinkedIn is continuing to grow.

I’ve got a membership tracker on my website because every time these quarterly results come out, I log the data and then compare it and I save all of LinkedIn’s membership maps as well so you can see how things change over time. So, I’ll put that in the show notes as well.

Based on previous calculations I found that although yes, there are 1.3 billion accounts on LinkedIn, that doesn’t mean that number of people are actually active. And based on some other disclosures that LinkedIn have had to make in the EU, I think I’ve previously calculated that there are approximately 440 million active users on the platform, which is still loads and loads of people, but a very small proportion of people are actually active posters. So, most people who are on the platform are very much passive consumers.

If you’re in that passive consumer territory and you’re thinking about making a splash on LinkedIn, then getting posting and especially getting commenting is a really good thing to do. So, I’ll link to the membership tracker. You go and take a look and I hope you found that useful.

This past week I have upgraded my Premium Business account to LinkedIn’s new All-in-One package, which is something that sits between the classic Premium Business and Sales Navigator.

It’s more expensive than Premium Business, not as expensive as Sales Navigator, and you get a kind of mix of features. Some interesting things there. I’ve done a deep dive for members of the Espresso+ community, so I’ll link to that in the show notes.

If you are a member of the community, then you can read the whole thing, and if you’re not, then I’m afraid you’ll only be able to see a tiny proportion of it. But I will tell you that in the UK, the pricing for me showed up as £71.99 per month or a much more reasonable £539.88 per year.

I never quite know what other people are seeing in terms of pricing, so if you go and take a look at All-in-One, I’d be interested to see whether those prices match what you get. And then of course, if you’re not in the UK, you’ll get a currency conversion kind of thing going on, so it might be a totally different price that you see.

But again, for Espresso+ members, the deep dive is there. If I find something really revelatory about my All-in-One experience, then I’ll probably cover it on a future episode of the show.

So far, it’s been quite interesting, but it’s been less than a week, so I can’t really judge, but I’m hopeful that it’s going to help my LinkedIn presence and we’ll see what happens.

I’ll quickly finish on a change that I realised when I was trying to do my replies to Ella about that verification question earlier, which is that LinkedIn’s comments are now limited to only a 1000 characters long.

Previously comments could be 1250 characters. That limit has been in place since April 2018. I looked back at my records to see what was going on there before then, it was actually even higher still: 1750 characters.

So, I’m not sure why LinkedIn is reducing the number of characters that you can put into a comment, but it’s probably academic because most people never get close to that. I mean, 1000 characters works out at roughly 160 words.

Most people aren’t doing even half of that when they write a comment, but maybe LinkedIn is protecting the database so that they don’t allow too much data to go in there. So, lower limits I guess make sense.

If you hit that character limit for any reason, you could of course just take the bits that are missed out and then put it into a secondary comment. So, any kind of limits are arbitrary anyway, because there’s no limit on the number of comments that you could put in. But yeah, there’s a little change for you on LinkedIn.

OK, that will do for this week. I normally record on a Friday. In fact, I’m recording this on the Friday before you’d be hearing it on a Saturday morning. Saturday mornings is always my release time.

Next Friday is 8 May and that is my birthday, so I haven’t quite decided whether I’m going to do a show.

I would suspect I’ll probably skip a week, but I will be working throughout the week so I’ll still be gathering anything that is new or weird or different or any kind of public news about LinkedIn. And if you have any questions then please do keep them coming.

I always love hearing from the audience, especially via voice notes from around the world, and I will include them in the next show, episode 490, whenever that is. It’s either going to be next week or would be the week after. Thank you for listening, and I’ll speak to you all soon. Take care.