Informed 504

Voice note questions from Steve Bruce, Hanne Møller, Ashley Leeds, Mary Wu, Darren Millings, and Mic Adam. The questions cover these topics: endorsements, languages, percentage of content creators on the platform, batch tagging, licenses and certifications, About sections, connection strategy, and profile updates – plenty!

Tips for feed relevance:

• Unfollow or even disconnect with the people you’re not interested in.
• Use the “not interested” option where appropriate.
• Mark posts and comments as AI slop if appropriate.
• Create a custom content search for topics by a named group of creators.
• Use the new Network tab at the top of the feed to show updates from only your 1st connections and people you follow (I don’t have this yet but it’s coming soon).
• Send more comments and DMs in the direction of people you *do* want to hear from, as this is a strong algorithmic signal of what and who you care about.

Full transcript

What steps can we take to improve the relevance of our LinkedIn feed? We’re going to take a look. It’s episode 504 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone, I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, an independent show all about LinkedIn best practice.

I wasn’t here last week, as I had a couple of events at the tail end of the week, which is when I normally record. But I’m back now, and let’s get cracking with a bumper version of the Postbag.

Regular listeners of the show will know that the Postbag is where we take feedback and questions from listeners. And let’s get started with a voice note from LinkedIn trainer Steve Bruce.

Steve Bruce 00:53 – 01:26

I was just looking at your LinkedIn profile and I just went through to endorse you for all your skills, and I was stunned to see that you just don’t have loads of endorsements.

What’s your view about them? I normally push it quite hard for people to endorse me for my skills.

But I mean, if someone like you is not even bothering about them, then that means that maybe they’re just not important at all.

I always thought that they were like SEO gold, that the reason to put them in was to help you show up in clients and searches. What’s your view on this? I’d love to know.

John Espirian 01:27 – 02:29

Thanks for that question, Steve. I’ve never really been convinced about the value of skills endorsements. There was a period some years ago where there was a lot of mutual back-scratching going on in the thought that getting loads of these would boost your profile on LinkedIn.

If that was ever true, I don’t really think it is anymore, and I’d much rather focus on gathering more recommendations. I think they do a lot more heavy lifting for your brand and your visibility.

I do ask people for recommendations. I don’t bother to ask them about skills endorsements and I’ve actually turned off the notifications about skills endorsements.

If anyone wants to go to my profile and endorse me for a skill, I won’t even hear about it. It’s very nice action for you to do, but don’t think it helps me that much, and if you’ve liked my work, I’d rather you spend a few more seconds writing a sentence or two in a recommendation. I think that does a lot more work for me. (Look here if you’d like to recommend me!)

OK, next item comes from a regular listener, Hanne Møller.

Hanne Møller 02:30 – 02:54

When you have a profile and you choose to have it in two languages, like I’m Danish, so I have a Danish one.

If I also choose to have an English one, will my followers be on two separate platforms or will they get both my Danish and my English?

Hope you can help me. Thanks a lot for a great podcast. I’m a big fan, but you already know that.

John Espirian 02:55 – 03:51

Thanks for that, Hanne. Yeah, I don’t think this makes any difference in terms of what gets served to people. There’s no limit really on you having multiple language profiles. And in this case, if someone had their default language set to Danish and they go to your profile, they would see the Danish version of your profile.

But that doesn’t relate to what they would see in their main LinkedIn feed. I mean, if they’re used to seeing Danish posts, then maybe the algorithm would be more likely to serve them Danish content, but there’s no bucketing of groups. It doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t see potentially most or all of someone’s content, regardless of which language they put it in, because remember that LinkedIn’s posts have an auto-translate feature. So, no, there’s no grouping like that. And if someone is looking at your profile in Danish, doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t also see posts in English.

OK, next question comes from Ashley Leeds.

Ashley Leeds 03:52 – 03:54

I talk to people and say that less than 5% of people create content on LinkedIn. Other people say it’s less than 1%. Do you know actual figures? And then from those actual figures, how many of those are actually video?

Keep up the good work. Love your show, as always. All the best. Bye, John.

John Espirian 04:12 – 06:27

Thanks, Ashley. This question comes up every now and again, and I don’t have any firm stats to point you in the direction of.

When I was researching my book Content DNA – the research phase was 2019, I published it in 2020 – the best stats I could find at the time suggested that about 1% of the user base was creating content.

More recently, I’ve seen reports from the likes of Richard van der Blom that suggest that content creators might make up something in the order of 5% of the user base.

I don’t think the numbers would have changed significantly since reports like that would have come out. So, those are the kind of proportions we’re talking about, and I don’t think LinkedIn says anything about what proportion of the content that gets created is video. I don’t tend to see very much of it in either my desktop or mobile feeds.

If anyone does have any good research on this, I’d be interested to know, because it’s always a useful thing to be able to quote during training sessions, but I haven’t seen anything definitive myself.

Ashley also got in touch with a text question on a different topic, and he asked whether tagging lots of names on a post could reduce or harm your reach in any way.

Well, I would say potentially yes, because if a post contains loads of tagged names and none of those people or very few of those people respond, I think that does send a signal to the algorithm that might have been some kind of spam attempt: a low-value piece of content that no one was interested in.

And on the flipside of that, if you tag lots of people and all of them do respond, well, maybe that topic was of interest, although keeping in mind that potentially someone might be doing that as a kind of engagement pod where everyone has agreed ahead of time that they’re going to be tagged on a post so that they can respond and kind of artificially boost the numbers.

I’m not quite sure how the algorithm treats all of that, but I would say to tag people or mention people only when it’s really super relevant to them. So, for example, you did a project together, you did an interview together, or something like that, rather than just randomly trying to bring people in to try and drum up your engagement.

OK, next voice note, this time from Mary Wu.

Mary A Wu 06:28 – 07:01

Hi, John. Mary A Wu from Nashville, Tennessee. I was doing some LinkedIn training today and we actually were wondering how important licenses and certifications are, either ones that have expired or ones that were earned by many years ago and may or may not still be relevant.

How do we determine not only the relevance of other people’s certifications, but of our own? Just thought I’d throw that out there and see what the LinkedIn world thinks. Thanks so much, John. Loving the show.

John Espirian 07:02 – 08:23

Yeah, fair question there, Mary. A lot of people don’t even know that there is a licenses and certifications section of your LinkedIn profile, but if there’s anything that could go in there to showcase your professional credentials, you know, you’ve done a certain course, something from LinkedIn, could be a whole host of different things, I suppose.

I don’t look at these things that often, but if I did want to do my due diligence on someone, I’d want to see whether that thing is relevant to the thing I would prospectively be hiring them for and also how recent that license or certification was, because everything is dated and shown in date order on LinkedIn.

In terms of you treating your own licenses and certifications, I suppose if it’s something that you would be proud to mention during a business conversation, then by all means you should leave it there.

If it’s something that kind of makes you cringe or is just not at all relevant to the thing you want to be known for now, you might possibly want to take it out.

Most people don’t even have one of these sections populated because they don’t know it exists, so it’s not that common to see them. But it might be a chance for you to go and look at your profile again, see whether there’s something that you could add, or if there’s something that’s ancient that you never refer to anymore, perhaps it’s something that you could remove.

OK, let’s keep things going. And this is a voice note from Darren Millings.

Darren Millings 08:24 – 08:54

I’ve got a quick question for you and it’s from a coaching angle. I work with quants who are stuck in their careers, and I’m looking at how well the LinkedIn About section actually works.

I noticed yours and I was curious whether it’s generally brought you traffic and enquiries for your business. Do people reach out to you because of what they read in there?

I’m asking because if it does work, I’d love to help my clients use theirs more effectively. Would you be open to sharing your experience? Thanks in advance.

John Espirian 08:55 – 11:05

Nice one there, Darren. Thank you. Yes, definitely the About section is a really important part of your LinkedIn profile, and it’s probably the second most important text field after your headline, and so it’s valuable to get it right just for pure on-LinkedIn search purposes.

If you start putting relevant keywords, phrases, and sentences into your About statement, then your profile is more likely to be surfaced in searches from your prospective customers. So, it’s definitely important to get it right from that point of view, but also the substance of what goes in that About statement, if it’s well enough written, will hopefully start more conversations, and it certainly has for me.

I’ve structured my About statement to be information-heavy in the first half of the About statement, so it talks about what I do and who I serve and how my services are laid out, and then the second half of it is really more personality-led so that the people who are actually spending more than a couple of seconds looking at a profile get to know a little bit more about me and what I might be interested in.

That in turn starts more connection requests and conversations off the back of some of those personal things, and before you know it, someone remembers you when they wouldn’t otherwise have done so, and maybe a few weeks or months or even years down the line, that can lead to business.

It’s not a direct kind of “I’ve read your About statement and I want to hire you now.” It’s rarely as straight-line transactional as that, but it is a really good place to showcase your skills, showcase a bit of personality, and start a conversation. That’s what it’s all about.

You’ve got 2600 characters to play within the About statement. It’s a really good chance for you to be found through LinkedIn search, a really good chance for you to make an impact. So, use that space. I would use as much of that space as you can, and this is what I train all of my clients on and it seems to work pretty well for them.

If you want to discuss that a little bit further, get in touch again and perhaps we can have a chat.

OK, we’ll end this bumper Postbag with a couple of voice notes, both from Mic Adam and on two separate topics. Let’s go to Mic right now.

Mic Adam 11:06 – 11:15

How often do you need to change your LinkedIn profile? And more importantly, does it do anything for your visibility?

John Espirian 11:16 – 12:16

So, I suppose that one is in some way related to what I just said in response to Darren’s voice note. I review my profile all the time, so I’m not a typical case.

I would say to the average client, I would say that you want to, once everything is set up and working the way you want it to do, I think you should do a proper review of your LinkedIn profile maybe a couple of times per year.

One mistake I see people making quite frequently is that they change their headline a lot. And if you do that, then you don’t really give enough time for people to notice that difference and respond to it and see whether it’s actually working for you.

Something has to be out there and being tested for a while before you can really get a proper feel for whether it works, so don’t fall into that mistake of just changing constantly and constantly.

But yes, you shouldn’t just set it up once and forget it forever unless absolutely nothing about your job role ever changes, which is probably not the case these days.

OK, let’s move on to the other voice note, also from Mic.

Mic Adam 12:17 – 12:33

Now, that the message that you can press when somebody sends you an impersonal connection request is gone, how do you ask this person to explain why they want to connect with you?

John Espirian 12:33 – 20:54

OK, so thanks for that one as well, Mic. And yes, you’re right. When you look at your My Network tab to see all of the incoming invitations, it used to be possible to view all of those in one page and then have a little message button next to each person who’d sent you an invitation so that you could maybe pre qualify them and ask, why is it that you want to join my network, because invariably most of these invitations have no message attached to them, so you’re left scratching your head a little bit. That feature is now gone, sadly.

What I would do is usually just look at the person’s profile and try and take a quick sort of 5-second assessment of whether I’d ever likely to do business with them or want to have a conversation with them.

If I’m not sure, I might just accept anyway, because I’ve got a standard bit of text that tends to go back to new connections to thank them so for inviting me and ask them how they came across me, and to say, I’m asking you this because I just want to check that you’re a human being and not some robot who’s dialing up their numbers or anything like that. And that sometimes leads to a nice conversation.

But if that were to lead to nothing at all, well, I might just leave that connection dormant there because maybe I think they might be of use to me in the future, but I could also just go and then disconnect. There’s no harm in doing that. It just adds a little bit of admin burden.

I’m not one of those who really used that messaging people back before accepting because I just felt that was just too much effort because most people never really responded.

So, I gave up doing that and I’d rather just either ignore the invitation up front, or accept and then hit a standard message afterwards and then I can make a choice about disconnecting if I want to. Not ideal. I’m not sure why LinkedIn removed that feature. It was quite useful. Some people are really quite upset by the way that’s changed. But there we go: LinkedIn doing LinkedIn things yet again.

OK, that’s the Postbag done and that was a long section. One of the benefits of being away for a couple of weeks, I guess, is that these questions build up and it feels a bit more substantial to cover them in one block. So, I quite like that.

Loads of changes that I’ve been documenting recently for the Espresso+ community, so as it stands, I’m recording this on 1 October and I’ve just released the latest round of changes for the past month to my Espresso+ community: another 12 changes that I’ve logged there. That takes us to 101 for the year. Just always stuff seems to be going on on LinkedIn.

I’m not going to detail that on this episode because we’ve already done quite a lot of content here for the Postbag, but if you’re interested in really getting to grips with LinkedIn and getting the inside knowledge about what’s moving and shaking, do drop me online. Let’s have a chat about the Espresso+ community, because I want to see more people in there who are interested in best practice and need a bit of support in running their small business so they can be seen for doing good things online.

Anyway, the main topic this week is about feed relevance. The question came up not that long ago.

What do you do to make your LinkedIn feed a kind of a happier place and more relevant to you so that you’re not just scrolling through stuff that you think is rubbish?

So, a few quick tips for you on that note that you can unfollow or disconnect with people whose content doesn’t interest you. A lot of people think, you make a connection and that’s it. You’re kind of duty-bound to see their stuff, and that’s just not true at all.

If you’ve elected to follow someone in the past and you see some content from them that you don’t really like, you can hit the 3 dots on a post and unfollow that person.

You can, if you’re connected with that person, which means that you can see each other’s networks and you can send direct messages to each other, you don’t have to follow their content, so you can stay connected, but unfollow their content so that you can still DM each other and they’ll still see your stuff. It’s just that you won’t see theirs.

So, you could visit their profile, unfollow them. And that’s a basic tip for you.

If you see a piece of content from someone who maybe you don’t know, you can always say that you’re “not interested” in that content. Again via the 3 dots, you can just close that post out and LinkedIn’s algorithm starts to learn what topics you’re interested in and what you’re not.

A relatively new feature is the ability to mark things as AI slop, so if you see content that you think has been generated by a computer and doesn’t have much or any human involvement at all, either if it’s a post or if it’s a comment, you can again hit the 3 dots and say “Seems like AI slop”, and that will take that post or that comment out of your view. And over time, LinkedIn starts to learn what looks like generated content and hopefully shows you less of that.

I think I’ve said on a previous show that I’m not really seeing very much in the way of what I would call AI slop in my feed. I’m more likely to see AI-generated comments, and so I’ve been using that feature a couple of times, but even then not that much. Most things do look reasonably human generated. Doesn’t mean the content itself is any good, but it does look at least as though a person was involved in creating it. But that option is there now for you and should have rolled out to you by now.

Another approach to this is that you could create yourself a custom content search just for specific groups of creators. So, rather than letting the LinkedIn feed just show you what it thinks is appropriate for you, if there’s a topic you’re interested in, you could go and do a search by content, and you could type in the topic that you care about, and then you can further filter that search by naming a list of creators that you want to hear from.

Once you’ve done that, if you do this on your desktop, you’ll be able to create a bookmark that searches for that topic with the content being created by your named group of creators.

There’s no limit to how many of these custom searches you could make, which means that you could have a custom search for digital marketing with your favourite 5 digital marketers bookmarked, and then go and do a comparable search for whatever other topic you’re interested in, architecture or whatever, by a different group of creators, and have those bookmarked in your browser so that you can see only their content rather than whatever LinkedIn might be showing you. So, that’s another option you can do.

There is a new feature, which I don’t have yet, annoyingly, but a few people in the Espresso+ community do, which is that your main feed is going to be split between a “For you” tab, which is kind of like the standard, existing experience, and a “Network” tab, which shows you updates only from your 1st connections and from people you follow.

So, that will hopefully radically reduce the noise that you see in your feed, because you know that they are either connections or people that you’ve opted to follow. I haven’t been able to test that yet because I don’t have the feature, but I do think that’s a very good idea. So, I’m looking out for that one.

And one other tip is that you’ll get more of what you engage with. So, if you leave more comments and send more direct messages in the direction of the people that you do want to hear from, that’s a pretty strong algorithmic signal, and it says to LinkedIn, this person has a connection with that other person: let’s show them more of their stuff in future.

On one hand you want to try and unfollow and say that you’re not interested in the stuff that doesn’t appeal to you, and on the other hand, get more involved in the stuff that does light you up, leave more comments, send more direct messages, and hopefully that will slowly start to change the balance of what you see in your LinkedIn feed. I hope those tips are helpful in improving your LinkedIn feed.

Please let me know what your feedback on this show has been and any other questions that you have for the show, especially if you could send me a voice note. I love getting your voice on this show, and until next time, I’ll speak to you soon.