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- Mary Wu: post boosting
- Mic Adam: company pages
- Ashley Leeds: LinkedIn groups
- Nicky Oliver: company verifications and newsletters
Company page comment blocking and removing people from a page
New recommend / super like reaction for Premium members
My interview on Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Full transcript.
This week we have another update about LinkedIn newsletters and lots of other news. It’s episode 506 of the Informed podcast.
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Informed, your independent show, all about LinkedIn best practice. I’m your host, John Espirian, the relentlessly helpful LinkedIn nerd. I’m an independent LinkedIn consultant and trainer and I’m based in South Wales.
This show format always starts with contributions from you, the listener, so let’s get stuck in to the Postbag.
OK, we have a few things for the Postbag this week and a couple of them are voice notes. Let’s get started with Mary Wu.
Mary A Wu 00:49 – 01:11
I was working with a client today and we started discussing what really happens when you boost a post. I know my experience and that my clients have had, but I thought I would run the question up to you to see what you’ve seen in the greater LinkedIn community.
Loving the show. Thank you for this great platform to learn from and to ask questions.
Thanks for that question, Mary. So far, my experience of boosting is quite limited, and what I found is that a post that has been boosted will get around 2000 to 3000 impressions more than my baseline level, but it doesn’t get any more engagement and it hasn’t led to any more conversations or sales or anything like that.
It hasn’t really done anything for me yet. But what I’m currently doing is experimenting by using my Premium All-in-One boosting credit, and I’ve got £480 of that per year to use to boost my posts.
I struggled with this for a while, thinking what should I boost and what should I not? I’ve identified the type of post that I now want to boost, so I’m doing an experiment on that, but it’ll take me probably a couple of months to complete that, and I’ll put the full findings into the Espresso+ community, so you’ll see that, Mary, and then I’ll share some highlights, probably on this podcast and publicly.
But to date it hasn’t really done a lot and I can’t in all good conscience recommend boosting at the moment. But I will give my final thoughts once I’ve done that experiment.
OK, next Postbag question comes from Mic Adam, a LinkedIn trainer in Belgium.
Mic Adam 02:29 – 02:50
As a visitor to a company page, if the company page had less than 5000 followers, I was able to invite people from my network to follow that page. Recently I tried to do this on a page with 3700 followers and I did not have the option. Did LinkedIn change this?
Thanks for that one, Mic. And I love questions from Mic because he knows the platform really well, so it’s always something interesting when he asks a question. And yes, you’re right, Mic, that feature has disappeared.
For those who didn’t know, if you find a company page that you don’t manage yourself but you’d like to tell other people about, if that company page has fewer than 5000 followers, there was an option on the page to invite your own connections to go and follow that page. It’s a nice way of supporting other businesses.
Except, as Mic points out in his question, that feature seems to be gone, and yet the help page for it is still in place, so mybe LinkedIn is just changing the rules, or maybe there’s some kind of bug going on here. But at the moment, if I go and visit a company page with only a few hundred followers, for example, there’s no option for me to go and invite my connections to follow that page.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop me copying the link to a company page and then sending direct messages to people if that’s what I wanted to do. But this facility seems to be gone for now.
OK, last voice note for this week and it comes from LinkedIn trainer Ashley Leeds.
Ashley Leeds 04:03 – 04:29
Should we post to groups? And if we post to groups, does that affect our posting anyway? Because if I post today at say 10 o’ clock and I do another post today, this afternoon, that’s going to kill my post. But if it’s in a group, does it matter? And does that kill the other posts that I’ve done anywhere else?
Interesting to hear your take on that. And which groups are better to make our posting worthwhile? Thanks very much indeed. Keep up the good work.
Yeah, good question, Ashley. Yes, posting to groups is a good idea if you find groups that are relevant to your professional interests.
Often you can find groups where you know one client is hanging out and you might find 10 other clients who might want to be interested in your services.
The idea of posting into groups is good if you can find stuff that is relevant. Use LinkedIn search to do that.
And the first question you asked about whether it affects your visibility of your public content while you’re also posting stuff to a group. I think these are separate streams.
As you know, I very often post stuff into the Espresso+ private group that we have and then also post stuff publicly, and my stats don’t show that there’s any dent in my visibility when I’m kind of posting in two separate places, and I think that holds up if you post into multiple groups.
If you were posting in loads and loads of groups and especially posting the same content, then quite potentially LinkedIn systems might think that you’re spamming, in which case you might then see some kind of penalty.
But generally speaking, these are separate streams and you should be able to feel free and go ahead. But good question. Thanks for that, Ashley.
A couple more questions this week. These come from Nicky Oliver She sent me these via text. The first one is:
How many businesses are verifying their company page?
I’m not sure about that one. I don’t know if LinkedIn publishes a separate stat for verified company pages. They have said recently that 115 million accounts are verified on LinkedIn, but I assume most or all of those are personal accounts, not company accounts. Maybe the company ones are rolled in to the personal ones.
But if you are looking to verify your company page, you can’t actually do it at the moment unless you pay for a Premium company page, which I don’t think is great.
I have verified a couple of my company pages during the early period when verification appeared because it wasn’t monetised then and you didn’t have to have a Premium company page.
But now if I were to verify one of my other unverified pages, I’d have to pay LinkedIn first. And it’s not enough to take a trial of Premium company page: you’ve actually got to be paying them before you can verify.
I don’t think many of these companies are verified myself personally, and I don’t actually think it does a whole lot. It certainly doesn’t do anything to the visibility of your content on a personal profile. I wouldn’t have thought that it would do on a company page either, so I personally wouldn’t waste too much sleep over this one.
The other question that Nicky asked is about newsletters, and I wanted to talk about those in the main topic of the show this week. She asks:
Are newsletters still worth having for SEO and branding, or is it best to focus on your own mailing list or a shift to something like Substack or to do all 3?
So, yes, I have said this before, but newsletters definitely pull their weight in terms of search engine options optimisation.
Everything that you post on your LinkedIn newsletter is going to be indexed on Google and other search engines. That means that you might get discovered through that route when someone else wouldn’t have found you direct on LinkedIn. And of course increasingly now, people are being found through searches of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Claude, and those tools like reading longform content. If you’re publishing LinkedIn newsletters, then you’ve got a good chance of having your presence on LinkedIn somehow being discovered by AI and people being recommended to your account because of that.
They’re certainly worth keeping, but as we’ve talked about before as well, given that there has been a recent problem with LinkedIn newsletter visibility – how many newsletters are being sent via email, what are the open rates and so forth – it is understandable that people are thinking about moving to other, perhaps more reliable platforms like Substack.
But I would say then that maybe why not do all of them if you can. If you can syndicate your content, which is to say you publish it in one place and then you publish effectively a copy and paste on another platform, you get the best of both worlds.
And once you start getting used to the practice of doing that, it doesn’t need to take a lot of time, so it might take you quite a lot of time to produce one newsletter, but it might take you maybe 10% more time to produce the newsletter and syndicate it to 3 other places. It’s probably worth that extra bit of effort. I don’t really do it that much myself, but there’s certainly no harm in it. And we’re going to talk now a little bit more about newsletters, so that question leads on nicely to the main bit.
That main topic I talked about – newsletters – hopefully you’ve listened to last week’s episode of the show, but if you haven’t, just to quickly catch you up, what I put out was that people were reporting they were sending out their LinkedIn newsletters, but then saying that they couldn’t see their analytics properly for how many people had opened those newsletters, and other people were saying that they were pretty confident that their newsletters weren’t actually being delivered to their subscribers at all.
I put out an episode that was about that, but then since then we’ve had a video go out from a LinkedIn employee talking about LinkedIn’s plans around this. And in that video, Sam said that long term “we’re going to transition from opens to clicks.”
To me what that statement means is that they’re getting rid of email open rates in favour of tracking click rates into newsletters, as that would, they say be a more reliable stat.
I thought, OK, well, that’s kind of interesting, but then almost immediately as that video went out, people started to notice that their email open rate stats had come back. That’s confusing, because mine had gone. And then I looked again after that video went out and sure enough, the number had come back.
When you say “transition”, in my head I’m thinking, you’re getting rid of one thing and you’re moving to another one. But maybe we’ll have both sets of stats, I’m not quite sure.
That’s something to look out for. And the kind of broader question around this with is with a bit of volatility going on with regards to LinkedIn newsletters, can you really trust what you’re putting out there to be seen by people?
I looked at my own stats and if my stats are to be believed, about half of the people who subscribe to my newsletter are receiving emails about my newsletter content on LinkedIn. And then that makes you think, maybe I should be publishing in other areas.
As I’ve just said back to Nicky in the answer to her question, I do think that having other channels where you can publish your content is probably a good idea. And really the most sensible thing to do is to make sure that you’ve got an owned channel, so publish the content on your website if you can, because that’s something that you will own.
If you pay for an email service provider like Mailchimp or MailerLite or one of the numerous other ones, set up a mailing list so that you can kind of control who’s on that list, how regularly you message them, and have pretty good confidence about the stats you get from that and pretty good deliverability, whereas you can’t necessarily trust these things on social media platforms.
Hopefully things will just settle down now, those stats will remain in place, people’s newsletter visibility will remain OK. Not quite sure what to make of it all, but I am publishing my newsletter content mostly for the Informed podcast.
I’ve got the Informed podcast as a company page on LinkedIn and I publish these show notes for these shows with the embedded audio as well through that company page newsletter.
Now, an interesting side note here is that someone contacted me and said that they didn’t think that company page newsletter content was always being indexed on Google. But more importantly, it wasn’t being accessed by AI search engines, and that could have a knock-on impact for my expected visibility. It’d be great if, for example, my Informed newsletter to be found by AI engines and then recommended to people as a good show to listen to for people who are interested in LinkedIn content.
But if my company newsletter is not being used that way, then maybe I need to change my approach and post more stuff on my personal newsletter because that’s got many more followers, many more subscribers, and also doesn’t seem to have this restriction of being read by AI agents.
Now, I don’t know whether this is really true. I’ve been told that it is. I haven’t done enough investigating to work out whether it is, but I will certainly look into that because that is significant if it’s true. But that’s one for you to think about and hopefully your newsletters on LinkedIn, if you are publishing regularly, are back on track. But please let me know and what you think about all of this and if you have any questions related to it, let me know and I could cover it in a future episode of the Postbag.
There have been a few more changes this week to LinkedIn and I’ll quickly run through a few of those. I’ll do more of these in detail on the Espresso+ LinkedIn Roundup, but a couple of changes with regards to company pages: you can now block comments from a company page on your posts. This is something that should have been possible a long time ago, but LinkedIn is finally starting to roll that out.
If people using company pages are commenting on your posts and they’re posting stuff that is spammy or inappropriate, you can block those by tapping the ellipsis (…) menu on their comment.
If you’ve got a Premium company page, you can remove people from associating themselves with your company page. People might be falsely claiming that they work for your company, and you can remove those people.
I think that should be available to all company pages, but only people who pay LinkedIn for a Premium company page can do that.
More interesting change I think is the return of pinned comments. I’ll probably talk more about that in a future episode because I don’t have it yet, but a few people have been talking about this return and I’ve seen some screenshots so it’s definitely a real thing. That will be the ability to pin a comment to the top of the list of comments, whether you’re viewing in relevancy mode or recency mode. That’s a good way, I suppose, of sharing links or really important bits of commentary on your posts.
The other thing that’s brand new as I’m recording this is the arrival of the “recommend” or “super like” feature for Premium members.
You will be used to the 6 or so coloured reactions that you can give when you look at a post. There’s now a new reaction which is for some people it’s called “recommend”, for other people it’s called “super like”, but it’s available only for Premium members and it’s, I suppose, a way of expressing that you genuinely resonated with a post and really want to promote it to others.
Presumably, this reaction is more powerful in some way algorithmically than the normal reactions, but it’s not clear. LinkedIn hasn’t said anything about it. There’s no official help page yet.
I don’t know whether Premium members are going to have a sort of ration, a credit limit of how many super likes you can give out in a month, for example.
Perhaps people will be able to think about what they respond to. There are probably some other consequences as a result of that.
But literally I’ve only just found out about this about 3 or 4 hours ago and have got some screenshots and I’ve done a post about it and I’ll link to that in the show notes, but I don’t have the feature myself yet.
One of the benefits of the Espresso+ community that I run is that members share new features with us very quickly when they happen. A few people have already posted about this morning inside the community, and that’s how I became aware of it, but that’s one to look out for. An interesting change from LinkedIn.
I’ll leave you this week with a pointer towards my interview on the Embracing Marketing Mistakes podcast. I spoke to the chaps there. A really good chat with Will Ockenden and Chris Norton. They recorded a video, so the video is available on YouTube, but they’ve also got a podcast available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
OK, I’ll leave it at that for now. As usual, please keep your questions coming. I love hearing your voice notes. Drop me a line anytime and until then I’ll speak to you soon.
