Informed 497

• Voice note from Gillian Whitney on out-of-network content viewers
• Voice note from Mary Wu on profile URLs, plus some feedback on limiting posts
• Get your ticket to UpLift Live Nano Bristol for Thursday 17 September
• Collaborative posts

Full transcript.

Collaborative posts are on their way to LinkedIn. Are you going to try them? It’s episode 497 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone. I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, a show that is all about LinkedIn best practice, run by me, an independent LinkedIn consultant based in South Wales. A quick start by saying thank you for all the messages of condolence I’ve had in the past week.

We’re going to get started with the show – it’s another quick show – this time with the Postbag section. OK, the Postbag section is where we answer listener questions and take feedback on past shows.

First question comes to us this week from Espresso+ member Gillian Whitney.

OK, thanks for that question, Gillian.

I’m pretty sure that the majority of out-of-network viewers, so that’s people who are not connected or following you, they’re going to be seeing that content in their feed as a result of someone else in with your content.

So, usually if you look at your feed now, you’ll see posts that are referred into there and what you get is at the top of the post you’ll see what’s known as the “viral header” bar. And it will say so-and-so liked this post or so-and-so commented on this post. And that will be the main reason why a post is referred into your feed.

Sometimes LinkedIn suggests a post. So, there’s no specific reason why a piece of content is shown to you other than LinkedIn’s algorithms think you’ll like it, but it’s not because of a single person.

And there are other times where you might see a piece of content because you’ve done a search for a keyword and then perhaps that comes up in the list of results. But I think the most likely cause is that other people who are connected with you or who are following you are regularly seeing your stuff.

They’re interacting and that helps to spread the message to more people.

OK, the other contribution for this week comes from another Espresso+ member, Mary Wu. And this is in two parts.

The first bit is some feedback and then the second is a question. Let’s look at the feedback first.

Yeah, it does seem to be the case that the panel is favouring people who don’t restrict their posts. So, you never know who you might reach by letting potentially the whole world see your content. So, I agree with you there, Mary.

And let’s move on to Mary’s question as well.

Thanks for that question, Mary. That’s kind of interesting feedback there. I don’t have my original LinkedIn profile URL either. I didn’t make a note of it when I changed.

It’s one of the very first things I did when I set up LinkedIn many years ago and I didn’t think to make a note of the old username.

So, I’m sure most people listening to this will know that whenever you have a LinkedIn profile, it will have a username associated with it, which by default is your real name, followed by a string of letters and numbers.

And you’re allowed to customise that to change it, make it shorter, make it neater, make it more appealing when it’s on a business card or in an email.

My understanding was that whenever you make a change to that username, only the most recent version of that username would work as well as the original username, but any intermediate stages. So, let’s say you change, for some reason, you change your username 3 or 4 times.

It would only be the very first username that you had and the most recent username that you now have that would work and that everything else would be decommissioned. But what you’re saying here, Mary, is that in this case it’s not true for you. A previous version of your username is still working.

Now, I don’t really want to test this by trying to change my LinkedIn username. Mine’s been the same since I started, so I don’t really want to play around with that.

But that’s interesting that old versions of the usernames perhaps do persist, which is good, because it means that you avoid broken links. If someone for some reason has got an old profile URL in an old email from years ago and you’ve subsequently changed it, maybe it will work.

If you’ve got evidence to the contrary, I would like to see that, just so I can confirm what I originally thought was going to be the case. But there you go. Hopefully it means that you can change your LinkedIn username and not be penalised for having done so.

Just before I continue with the main topic, a quick reminder:

We have our UpLift Live Nano event in Bristol in the southwest of England on Thursday 17 September. It runs from 11am to 2pm it’s going to be at The Watershed.

You’ll have a bite to eat with me, network with others, ask your LinkedIn questions. You can even have your LinkedIn profile reviewed live in the room. If you’re interested, you can grab your ticket at jesp.me/nanobristol

I’ll put that link in the show notes. Love to see you there. If we haven’t met before, come to Bristol. Let’s have a great chat that’s coming just after the summer holidays in the UK finish Thursday 17 September. See you there.

You might remember a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the arrival of the Creator Marketplace according to LinkedIn’s help, and since then LinkedIn have posted about the advent of something called collaborative posts.

So, this would be the ability for multiple people to come together and effectively co-author a piece of content so that when that piece of content goes out, it goes out on LinkedIn in more than one person’s name. It goes out on more than one person’s feed. Sounds good in principle, if you’re trying to do some partnership work, perhaps between a personal page and a company page, you know you’re doing some work together and you want to put some content out at the same time. Although I do think I suspect this might get abused when it officially rolls out. I’ve seen a GIF of how it works so you can see the screens involved. I’ll link to that in the show notes.

But I wonder whether people who are currently in engagement pods and just trying to break the rules to try and get more visibility on LinkedIn will end up, you know, co creating content with their peers just so that everyone maximises their visibility, even though there’s no real value in that content. I’m just, perhaps I’m being overly cynical there. I don’t yet have the feature.

I’ve been doing a couple of low-key posts in the last week or so and I still don’t have any new options when creating a post, so I’m not able to invite collaborators at this stage.

But as soon as I’m able to do that I’m going to be trying it with any volunteers who are up for the for doing the same thing inside the Espresso+community.

I wonder whether if, let’s say I get the feature to create a collaborative post, then the person I’m inviting to collaborate also needs the feature before I can invite them.

I don’t know whether it’s a one-way street so that if the other person doesn’t have the feature I can still invite them to collaborate and it’ll just somehow magically work. Not quite sure. As usual, LinkedIn doesn’t explain these things in any great detail, so we’ll have to see what happens when it rolls out.

Anyway, it’s one to look out for collaborative posts as a way of partnering with others to share content on LinkedIn.

I’m going to keep it short and brief again this week. I’m wondering whether people have already started their summer holidays here in the UK because LinkedIn has felt really quite quiet for me in the past few weeks.

I’m going to be away at the You Are The Media summer party next week, so there won’t be an episode then, but I’ll keep building my notes and keep taking your questions.

So, if there’s anything that you want to ask about with regards to LinkedIn best practice or any feedback you’ve got on previous episodes, please do let me know. Enjoy the warm weather. It’s still hot here in the UK. And I’ll catch you again soon.