Informed 490

Should you change your posting schedule and topics on LinkedIn? What happens when you need to change your plans?

Postbag.

Lionel Guerraz: commenting and its effects on topic authority.

Judith Rafferty: how do we deal with birthdays on LinkedIn?

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The main topic is about changing your schedule on LinkedIn and whether it’s OK to post about different topics.

About statement previews are now 6 lines long on mobile. Desktop previews are still 4 lines long.

UpLift Live Nano Bristol: our conference’s little brother event is on Thursday 17 September 2026 at The Watershed in Bristol. Come to learn about LinkedIn and network. You get lunch and if you’re brave I’ll review your LinkedIn profile in front of the room. Use code EARLY10 for a £10 discount until the end of May. Standard price is £59.

I’m off to Creator Day in Poole this week. See you there?

Off-topic food post

Full transcript.

Should you change your posting schedule and topics on LinkedIn? That’s the topic today. It’s episode 490 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Informed podcast, your show about LinkedIn best practice. I’m your host, John Espirian, and as usual, we’re going to get started with the Postbag section.

OK, the first Postbag item for this week is from Lionel Guerraz, and he is asking about commenting and its effects on topic authority. Lionel writes:

Yes, it’s a decent question, Lionel. Thank you for sending that in. I mean, the current gearing of the LinkedIn feed algorithms do seem to reward people who stay on topic as much as possible, but it’s interesting to think about whether that really applies to things like commenting as well.

I would say in the main, I probably would try to stay on topic, so I would be commenting on people whose opinions I’d like to influence because maybe they’ll turn into a referral partner or maybe they’ll turn into a client for me in the future. But also, I like to support my friends on their content. And that means that you can’t always stay on topic because not all of your close connections on LinkedIn will necessarily be remotely interested in what you do for a living.

I think it’s OK to show a bit of personality and show that you’re a bit more of a rounded human being who has some other interests. And maybe, one of those extracurricular interests might get someone’s attention and they might just think, well, that looks like a good guy. I might want to just have a chat with him. And who knows, maybe we’ll end up working together. And the reason that you ended up working together is not to do with your core competency. It’s just because the other person saw something that you were saying and decided that they just like you.

And that goes a long way in business still these days. It always has done. So, I wouldn’t necessarily limit yourself, but don’t go completely off topic with absolutely everything you write, otherwise LinkedIn doesn’t really know how to categorise you and match you with other people.

So, in short, keep your posts on topic as much as possible. But there’s a looser rein you can have with your comments and good luck.

The other question this week comes from Espresso+ member Judith Rafferty, and she sent us a voice note. So, let’s listen to Judith right now.

Always lovely to hear from you, Judith. Thank you for that question.

Yeah, I turned off the visibility of my birthday on LinkedIn years ago, frankly, because all I used to get on my birthday was loads of just generic messages, and you’d see them coming in one after the other, and invariably it was from someone who I’d never been in touch with before, or all I’d ever received from them was the same birthday message from a year before.

And you think, that’s no kind of relationship. If you’re using that as a trigger point to start a conversation, at least try to personalise it a bit instead of sending a generic happy birthday.

I think the people who would really care about me would know it’s my birthday through other means and we’d have a proper conversation. And I love hearing from those people on LinkedIn and also on WhatsApp and other places. So, that’s fine. I’m happy for those people to know my birthday and for us to have a chat, but in general, you know, those generic messages are just noise. So, don’t partake in that. If you are going to wish someone a happy birthday, make it meaningful.

Just this past week, I’ve received a custom video from another one of our Espresso+ members, Mic Adam. And he’d taken some time to create a video. He put it up as a private link on YouTube so that only I could see it. And he spent, it was about a minute and a half long, but it was definitely just for me, customised for me. And that’s just a lovely gesture that someone does.

I’m not saying that you would do that for everyone that you see it’s a birthday for, because you’d spend all of your time doing that. That’s over the top, but sometimes making a little bit more effort than everyone else does is just enough to get you noticed.

But generally speaking, find other ways of starting conversations and keeping conversations going. Don’t just go for the lazy button of it’s so-and-so’s birthday. I’ll send them a happy birthday message. I think you already knew that to true, Judith. And you know, copywriters are well placed to write some clever words that are custom for the audience and not go for the generic stuff.

So, yes, I think more people should probably take their birthdays off LinkedIn and stick to more old-fashioned ways of just chatting with each other and keeping relationships going.

OK, onto the main topic of whether you should be changing your posting schedule and even what you talk about. Well, on the schedule point, I’ve changed my schedule for the podcast for the past couple of weeks, because I was taking some time off for my own birthday, as alluded to by Judith earlier. But is that a good idea and should you stick to a fixed schedule?

I think if you’ve been doing something long enough, then people will notice if you change your schedule. But most of us haven’t achieved that level of consistency yet, so it probably doesn’t really matter a whole lot.

I’ve had people asking about my Friday Shout series. It was a posting series that I did for more than 6 years, and I’ve stopped that in the past year just because my personal and business schedules were busy and something had to give, and I’m instead using that time that I was spending on that to record this podcast instead.

So, although the Friday Shout series was good fun to do, and I think it helped to make me a bit more memorable on LinkedIn, I guess the long-term value of running a helpful podcast beats that. And this is also a lot of fun to do. Obviously, if I had infinite time and energy then I’d be doing a lot more than I’m doing right now. But that’s just not the way life works out.

And by the way, let’s not forget that about 95% of people on LinkedIn aren’t even putting out content in the first instance. So, if you’re publishing anything at all, then you’re already ahead of those people in terms of visibility.

I think it should be seen as a privilege if your work can fit around your life. And as I’m speaking here mostly to solo operators and small business owners, I think if you have that level of control then you should be quite happy and not have to be a slave to putting out content on LinkedIn. And of course, these things aren’t always in our control.

You know, sometimes we have various family emergencies or other stuff going on that just necessarily keeps us away, and we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about that too much.

I’m kind of in that position myself because my mum’s in a care home and I’m visiting her almost every day, and that just puts a strain on the amount of time that I can dedicate to my business.

So, anyway, in the current case, it was my birthday last week and I just didn’t feel like sitting in my studio to record this podcast back then. I thought I’d take a break until this week.

And then, of course, I remembered that I was going to Creator Day this week which is the You Are The Media event that’s put on every year by Mark Masters. I’ve been to every one of those conferences since it started in 2018, so that’s going to put another dent in my schedule.

And so instead of sticking to my normal recording on a Friday and publishing on a Saturday, I’m instead recording this on a Tuesday. So, it’ll go out at a different time than my normal podcasts do. And I think that’s fine. Will you think any less of me because I’m not posting on my regular day? I would hope not. We worry about these things more than our consumers do, I think.

And the point is that the content should still be helpful and valuable regardless of when it drops. And so long as I’m not going away for an extended period so that you completely forget who I am, then I don’t see that there’s a problem here at all.

Some people have claimed that if you do take a lot of time off on LinkedIn, then you’re basically starting from scratch when you come back. But I’ve seen enough examples where that hasn’t really been true. Someone does a sort of comeback post and it doesn’t quite go viral, but it gets a lot more engagement than they used to get before. So, I can’t fully recommend having massive patches of inactivity on the platform – that wouldn’t be fair to say – but I don’t think it’s the worst thing when it happens.

And then to round that off about actually what you’re posting about, it’s like I said to Lionel, LinkedIn’s algorithm does seem now to be rewarding more than ever, people who stay on topic.

But I don’t necessarily think that always has to be the case when it comes to things like commenting, and certainly not when it comes to things like direct messaging people. If all I did in my direct messages, for example, was only ever talk about LinkedIn tips, I mean, that would just make me so boring. I think people wouldn’t remember me or want to talk to me. So, you’ve got to show yourself as a bit of more of a broader human.

It was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek post really, but since my partner took some lovely photos of the meal that we went out for on my birthday last week, I just thought, well, let me just annoy the algorithm by putting that out, knowing that it shouldn’t really get that much engagement, but then also thinking, actually people are people on the platform, it probably will.

So, I’ll link to that off-topic food post if you want to salivate a little bit because the food was fantastic. Sure enough, it has actually got quite good levels of engagement. I only posted that yesterday as I’m recording this, and it’s already got loads and loads of comments and people drooling over Michelin-star food. So, yes, a bit of off-topic stuff can just sometimes show that you’re a rounded human being.

So, that’s OK. I mean, it probably would confuse the algorithm if you were doing a lot of that, because it doesn’t really know then how to pigeonhole you and how to match you to potential business partners, which is kind of what the whole point of LinkedIn is. So, I wouldn’t recommend doing it too much.

But if you just stick in one lane all the time without making any changes, then you’re probably going to come across as a bit boring and who wants to be seen as that?

One change I found this past week, which was shared in the Espresso+ community by my UpLift Live Mission Control colleague Gus Bhandal, was that there has been a change to the way that About statements are shown on LinkedIn profiles.

So, until now, for quite a while, About statements show a 4-line preview before there’s a button that lets you expand to see the rest of what’s in the About statement. That’s now changed.

So, on desktop the preview is still 4 lines long, but on mobile, which is where most people are now consuming LinkedIn, the preview is now up to 6 lines long.

So, if you’re one of those people who wants to try and squeeze every drop out of LinkedIn, you might want to think about how that About statement is going to present itself to people if it’s 6 lines long rather than 4 lines.

Go and check it yourself in your LinkedIn mobile app. You’ll see that change seems to have happened for everyone.

So, that means that more characters are now being displayed on the mobile view and therefore you can pack more value in and hopefully encourage even more people to click to expand to read the rest of what your profile is all about.

I’m pleased to be able to announce that the UpLift Live Nano event in Bristol is all set now. It’s going to happen in Bristol in the southwest of England on Thursday 17 September 2026, and it’s going to be at The Watershed, a lovely venue that I checked out recently.

Lots of people in my network in Bristol recommended The Watershed. I went to take a look. The food looks fantastic, the staff were very welcoming.

It looks like a really good space for us to have a nice networking and learning session over lunch together. So, if you come along, it’s a 3-hour event. There’ll be some networking, there’ll be some learning about LinkedIn best practice, a Q&A with me and I’ll also even going to be reviewing people’s LinkedIn profiles live in the room.

So, if you’re a brave volunteer, you can put yourself forward for that and I’ll take a look for you if you want to come along and get an early bird ticket. If you use the code EARLY10, that will get you £10 off your ticket until the end of May.

Standard price is £59. With the early-bird discount, it comes down to £49. I think it’s a really good value price for the ticket for what you’re going to get on the day.

I will link to that in the show notes so you can go and sign up. It’ll be fantastic to meet you if we haven’t met before in Bristol. It’s going to be a great day and I’ll see you in September.

OK, I’ll leave it at that for now. As I said, I’m off to Creator Day. I’m leaving tomorrow as I record this and I’ll be away for a few days, so really looking forward to that.

Lots of people who listen to the show will be there, so I’m looking forward to seeing you again for what’s going to be another fun day of learning. So, that means no podcast this coming weekend, but then I’ll be back on my normal schedule the week after.

As ever, if you have any questions for the show, please drop me a line. I prefer voice notes if possible, but any written questions as well. More than welcome.

Go and grab your ticket to UpLift Live Nano in Bristol, and I’ll catch you all again soon.