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Postbag.
- Nigel Cliffe voice note on limiting your post visibility
- Ashley Leeds voice note on automation tools
- Lionel Guerraz on connecting with your company’s CEO
- Caryn Yuen on link display in comments
To see what proportion of your network is seeing your posts, go to the Content performance panel in your profile analytics. I’ve reached about a quarter of a million people in the past year, but only 38% of them are 1st connections or followers.
WhatsApp usernames are now available to reserve
Open the app, go to Settings | Account | Username to reserve yours.
Full transcript.
This week we’re going to look again at post visibility on LinkedIn. It’s episode 496 of the Informed podcast.
Hi, everyone, I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, an independent weekly show about LinkedIn best practice. You’ll have noticed that I didn’t put out an episode last week, been on a bit of a go slow. It’s been my mum’s funeral this week as well, so I just thought I’d take a bit of time away from work, away from LinkedIn. But I’m kind of back at it now. And we have some items for this week’s Postbag, so let’s jump straight in.
So, the Postbag is a chance for listeners to send in questions and the first of these is a voice note. In fact, it’s feedback on a previous show. And this one comes from LinkedIn trainer and Espresso+ member Nigel Cliffe.
Hi John. I responded to last week’s episode where you put the question to us about limiting your reach of posts to only 1st-degree connections. Really interesting topic. I’ve thought about it a number of times.
Some things to consider before making that decision would be how relevant are the opportunities to your present network? Does it include the people who are going to improve your chances? How large is your network?
Because if you’ve got a really small network, then you really are limiting your reach across. And lastly, how active is that network?
Because if you’re in a community which is generally inactive, then your lack of engagement with your content relative to other networks could really begin to limit your reach, whatever happens. So, on balance I think I’m not in favour. I’d rather let the algorithm determine its cost. Hope that helps. Cheers.
Yes, thank you for that contribution, Nigel. Always sensible stuff from you and yeah, I’m inclined to agree. I don’t see a good reason for restricting your visibility by showing your content only to your 1st-level network.
OK, next item is another voice note, and this one comes from another LinkedIn trainer and again an Espresso+ member. This is Ashley Leeds.
Hey John. It’s Ashley Leeds, the 15-minute guy. Listening to your show again reminded me that I need to ask you another question. There’s all these different products out there that use automation to scrape LinkedIn, do automation, send DMs and all of that sort of malarkey and you go onto their websites and they’ve got loads of big logos on their website showing who they work with. The bottom line is LinkedIn does not allow you to use these automation tools.
So, what do you say to people that are using these automation tools or people that want you to help them use the automation tools, because they’re breaking the law and they could get their LinkedIn banned and there’s nothing like that on their marketing that says, “beware, you could lose LinkedIn.” So, looking forward to your thoughts on this. Thank you.
Thank you for that, Ashley. Yeah, it’s a tricky one because these tools often go against LinkedIn’s rules. To use some of them, you would need to give up access to your LinkedIn cookie, and that puts your account at threat. And LinkedIn doesn’t approve of very many tools at all.
They do have some approved partners here and there, but for the vast majority of stuff that’s out there, I wouldn’t personally take the risk.
I guess a lot of these people who are at the edges and happily using automation tools without trying to convey the risks, they must be aware to some extent that they’re taking their own personal risks. And I guess they’ve decided that it’s worth it, maybe because they can see the broader picture of how little LinkedIn tends to crack down on these things.
Like if you knew, for example, that LinkedIn said that tool X, Y and Z were not to be used, and then 100% of the time anyone who used them got their account permanently suspended, I think that would change people’s attitudes very quickly. But actually plenty of evidence that people are able to get on by using tools that LinkedIn don’t approve of and don’t always get shut down.
But, yes, it is a risk. I’ve seen plenty of examples of people who have been kicked off LinkedIn for using things like this. So, if any client of mine were to try and go down that route, I would just say, look, the responsibility is 100% on you and the people that you work with as well, because you might be putting other people’s accounts possibly at risk. Don’t do it. I don’t do it myself. Play a clean game and try and avoid these things if you can.
OK, that’s us done for voice notes this week, but we still got a couple of written submissions. So, the first of these comes from Lionel Guerraz, and he was asking about the idea of connecting with your own company’s CEO. So, Lionel said that he left a comment on a post from his CEO. The CEO visited Lionel’s profile, and Lionel’s asking:
Should I send my CEO a connection request? I’m totally comfortable with doing it with prospects and clients, but with my CEO, it looks so different. How would you approach this?
I guess this might be a cultural issue. I mean, here in the UK, if I were working in that kind of classic organisational environment where I’m working under a CEO and I’m on LinkedIn and I see that a CEO has looked at my profile, I would have absolutely no issue whatsoever in trying to make a connection there. You never know when you get spotted what doors might open for you. So, for me, it would be a no-brainer to make that connection. Absolutely, because you know, you’ve got some positive feedback that someone has responded to your comment by looking at your profile.
I just don’t know whether that’s actually true in other countries. It might be completely not the done thing to do to send an invitation to connect to someone who’s at the top of the business. So, I guess this is more of a cultural question than anything. But certainly for me, no problem with that. And good luck if you do it, Lionel.
OK, last question for the Postbag this week comes from Caryn Yuen and she’s asking about links being displayed in comments. This is a topic that’s come up more than once actually on the show in recent times. So, Caryn asks:
I’ve been told that LinkedIn no longer displays links in comments. Apparently the poster can view it, but their followers can’t. I had a post where someone couldn’t view the link I shared in the comments section, even after they changed the dropdown from most relevant to most recent. But when I asked two other people in my network to take a look at my comment section, they could see the link.
So, Caryn’s asking what to do in this situation. Well, I haven’t heard that feedback of people not being able to view links. Often, as many of you will know, LinkedIn doesn’t prioritise showing comments that contain the links, but that would be a case of just hiding the comment altogether from the list of comments, as opposed to what it looks as though Caryn’s implying here, which is that you can get to see a comment, but you don’t get to see the link that has been placed within the comment unless you were the person who made the comment. So, you can see your own links but not others.
That feels like a major change if that’s really what’s happened. I haven’t seen any evidence of that. If you’ve seen anything like this, please let me know. And please, you know, maybe you might want to send me some examples of comments with links that you’ve posted yourself and I can go and check to see whether I could see them. I guess it’s possible that they might be doing something like this, but it feels like a very odd step for LinkedIn to take, which isn’t to say that it’s not happening, but I haven’t heard any noise about this at all, Caryn, and I think people would be quite rightly upset if they were sharing links thinking that people were going to be clicking on them, only to find out that there’s no chance that anyone else could ever see those links in comments.
Just to repeat what I’ve said many times before, I don’t favour putting links in comments anyway. I think if you if you’ve got to use one, put it in the post so that people are guaranteed to see it rather than burying it in the comments where people might miss it. But that’s a different issue to what you’re actually asking about, whether the links are there and clickable at all.
So, if anyone listening to this has any feedback on that, please let me know and perhaps I can revisit this topic on a future episode.
That’s the Postbag done, and a couple of the topics there were about post visibility. So, the topic I’m just going to mention for this week is that it is now possible to see what proportion of your network is seeing your posts via the content performance panel, which is in your profile analytics. So, I’ll put a direct link to the panel in question in the show notes that accompany this episode.
If you go to your profile, you’ll see near the top a set of analytics, and if you click through to that, you can see the number of impressions that your posts are generating and then you can break that down by how many post impressions you’ve had in the last 7 days, in the last 90 days, and so forth. And you can go all the way out to the past year.
So, I’ve actually looked at that myself, and in the past year I’ve reached almost a quarter of a million people with my content on LinkedIn. But only 38% of that quarter of a million people were people who are either 1st connections of mine or followers, which means that 62% of those people who are seeing my post in the past year are people I’m not connected with or who weren’t already following me. I think that’s a reasonably good proportion of people who have never seen me before, but hopefully are getting something useful from my content.
You might want to go and check your own stats. So, again, look in the show notes for that link that will take you straight there and you can see what your proportions look like.
OK, last item for this week actually isn’t related to LinkedIn at all, but this has been a popular post and it’s the news that WhatsApp is now allowing people to reserve usernames on the platform. So, until now, if you wanted to communicate with someone else on WhatsApp, you’d have to give out your telephone number.
And it’s understandable that people are a little bit nervous to do that because of course, once you’ve got someone’s phone number, there’s nothing to stop you, for example, anonymously calling someone, that feels like a bit of a security risk. So, WhatsApp are introducing usernames.
They haven’t rolled out yet, but the ability to reserve them is now rolling out.
So, if you go into your WhatsApp app on your phone, if you go into Settings and Account, there should be a new item there that says Username and then you can reserve a username. And it works the same other usernames. If someone else has already got that name, you can’t have it, but if you’re quick, you might have a chance of reserving quite a nice username. And then in the future, when this feature properly rolls out, instead of giving out your number to people, you’ll be able to give out a username and that masks your identity and restores a bit of privacy. I think it’s a good idea on balance. So, go and check that out if you’re using what WhatsApp.
OK, that will do for now. As usual, if you have any questions, please drop them into me either Direct message me on LinkedIn. You can send me an email if you like. I love hearing my listeners voices, so please send me a voice note if you’re able to and I’ll catch you again next time.
