Informed 507

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A few points to consider on what it means to have different experiences of LinkedIn.

Voice notes for the Postbag:

• Mark Lee: adverts in the feed and posts referred into the feed 
• Mic Adam: post visibility set to 1st connections only, and event issues
• Tamas Banki: do reposts affect my own original posts?
• Mary Wu:  connect or follow first?

What is your experience of LinkedIn?

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Full transcript.

What is your experience of LinkedIn and how does it differ from everyone else’s? We’re going to take a look in episode 507 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Informed podcast. I’m John Espirian, your host of this weekly show all about LinkedIn best practice.

We start, as always, with listener questions and feedback through the Postbag section.

OK, we’ll kick off with voice notes on two related questions, both from Mark Lee.

Mark Lee 00:39 – 01:54

Wondered if you could share your thoughts on two issues that bug me about my home feed on LinkedIn.

The first one is the huge number of adverts that appear, and I click the 3 dots to say I’m not interested, but I wonder if the reason so many still appear, and it’s daily and there’s huge numbers, could be because the advertisers are not taking the opportunity to adequately filter the audience that see their ads.

Is this something that LinkedIn can deal with or do we just have to suck it up, because advertisers are lazy?

LinkedIn shares with us a post that an existing connection has liked. I can’t think of any occasion when I’ve been interested in those posts, so I routinely look at the 3 dots and click and say I’m not interested in posts by the person whom my connection has liked, and I appreciate it’s LinkedIn choosing to share those with me, but I just wonder if there is any way of turning that off or do I need to unfollow the connection to stop it happening? I don’t really want to do that, but does it make any difference which of those options you choose?

Thanks for those questions, Mark. No real magic bullets on either of them, I’m afraid.

I often see irrelevant ads and I’ve also gone through the rigmarole of saying that I’m not interested in the ad and then often you’ll see that it reappears a little bit later, and I think that is probably a bit of lazy targeting, and also LinkedIn not learning from your user feedback, because it doesn’t serve them to keep serving ads to people who are never going to respond to them, because that’s going to annoy the people who are paying all that money to place the ads.

Really frustrating, and also just the way that the feed works, it does rely on content being referred into your feed by people that you have connected with or followed. And so there’s no real way of stemming the tide.

You can, if you see someone that you know constantly referring stuff into your feed, yes, you can start by saying not interested, and that should slow things down a bit.

But ultimately it might be more productive for you to unfollow those people. Bear in mind that if you unfollow a connection without disconnecting from them, then if that person in the future mentions you in a post or a comment, by putting the @ symbol and then your name, you won’t get a notification about that, which I think is a quite a big limiter.

It really kind of cuts that person off, and I don’t think that’s a good way of doing it.

But yes, if you want to really try and tidy up what you see, then marking things as not interested or unfollowing people if needs be, is the way to go.

If you wanted to take it a step beyond that, I suppose you could make your own custom search for filter where only the content creators that you nominate appear in those results and therefore you see just their content and no one else’s.

But I do think that’s very restrictive and doesn’t open things up to serendipity. Like I say, no magic bullets on either of those, I’m afraid.

OK, there’s one question and one bit of feedback here, both from LinkedIn trainer Mic Adam.

Mic Adam 03:51 – 04:21

I see a lot of people complaining that their posts are not shown to many people in their 1st-degree network.

Both you and I know that you can create a post and set the visibility to the 1st degree. Is that a bad idea, because the post will not go viral and the reach will be limited to your 1st degree.

But if you have a larger network like me or you, would that mean that more people will get to see your post? What are your thoughts on that?

OK, thanks for that one, Mic. I don’t see that there’s a lot of sense in limiting the visibility of your posts to connections only.

I suppose if you had a specific offer where you wanted to be confident that only people you know can see and access that offer, then perhaps you could do that, or if there’s something a little bit more sensitive or some kind of PR type of thing, then potentially you’d limit that.

But I’ve not found a useful reason to do this and so I think I’ve almost never done it, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Let your posts be for everyone or for no one.

The other item from Mic is actually in response to a question I asked him about LinkedIn events. Let’s hear again from Mic now.

Mic Adam 05:06 – 05:35

I’ve been running LinkedIn Live events for a while now. I’m on episode 163 and the last 5 or 6 versions, I was unable to add myself as a speaker.

I filed the claim twice with LinkedIn and twice they closed, and with kind of this saying that it works as design, which it doesn’t. And it’s very frustrating that you can’t add yourself to an event.

OK, so I don’t run LinkedIn events very often at all. I thought I’d go to Mic as the expert in this field inside the Espresso+ community. And yes, so what he’s saying is you can still set up a LinkedIn event, but you won’t be marked as a featured speaker anymore, because I assume it’s just taken for granted that you’re setting up the event and therefore you’re the person in charge.

It sort of makes sense, but maybe you get a little bit less visibility as a result of doing this. But thank you for that contribution, Mic.

OK, moving on. Another voice note, this time from Tamas Banki in Hungary.

Tamas Banki 06:11 – 06:51

I have a question about reposts. If I repost any posts or many posts, does it affect my own profile posts? I mean, the posts I share on the feed.

I tend to repost some posts when I like it a lot, but I don’t know if it really makes any difference between doing it or not on my own posts, and I know that reposts with your thoughts is really not very well, but does it really make any difference either with my own publicly posted posts? Thanks very much.

Thanks for that, Tamas. Yeah, it probably will have a bit of an effect because every time you repost something or you repost with thoughts, then that activity is going into your posts and activity section. And so that potentially can interfere with other stuff that you’re posting yourself that you actually want to promote, so I would limit that.

I suppose also keep in mind that if someone is following you and has the bell clicked, then every time you repost something, then they’re going to get a notification about that as well, and they might see that kind of activity as a bit less relevant to them and that might lead them to unclick your bell.

You’ve got to keep in mind what you put into people’s feeds, and consequently I tend not to repost very much at all. The stuff that I do tend to repost is into a private group, so I’ll put it into the Espresso+ community so we can maybe discuss things a bit further, but not really so much with the public reposting. I would avoid that a little bit if I were you.

OK, we have one more voice note this week and this is from a regular on the Postbag. It’s from Mary Wu.

Mary Wu 07:58 – 08:34

On LinkedIn, in the settings back in the back under followers, you can choose whether to make follow be primary when members view your profile or whether to make connect be the primary thing when members view your profile.

I currently have mine set to follow and some people have their set to connect and I’m wondering what the benefits are from both sides of it. Just kind of curious about what you think, and then if any of your listeners have any ideas, they can give you a voice note for the following week and we’ll get a read on the world. Thanks so much. Loving the show.

Thanks for that one, Mary. I have changed my opinion on this one. In 2018, I turned on “follow first” mode on my LinkedIn profile. I probably was one of the first people to do that, and that led to me gaining a lot of followers.

But in the past year I’ve changed my stance on this because I would rather actually have more conversations with the people in my network, and so I’ve switched back to Connect first.

It does mean that growth slows down, but you get more chance to actually learn who’s interested in your work. And I also found myself that when I was following other people, I wasn’t actually seeing very much of their content unless I also clicked the bell, which I don’t do very often because it leads to a lot of extra unnecessary notifications.

I thought, if I’m not seeing very many of the posts of the people I’m following, then that’s probably true for the people who are just following me and not connected with me.

I’d rather just slow down the rate, make the connections, have some conversations in the DMs, and perhaps those people will then be much more likely to see my stuff.

I’ve switched to Connect first. It does mean, of course, that a lot of the connections I receive are completely empty invitations, because people on free accounts are limited to 3 personalised invitation notes per month, and that just puts a lot more onus on someone like me to receive maybe 30 or 40 invitations to connect per week, most of which have not got anything with them, so I’ve got to spend some time trying to work out whether to add these people to my network. But I suppose that’s a bit of a separate topic.

I quite like just giving people the option to connect with me directly rather than just following me, but, as I always say, you’ve got to test these things for yourself.

If you’ve been on one of those two settings for ages, maybe try switching to the other one and see how LinkedIn feels as a result.

Switch between Follow and Connect here

OK, that’s us done on the Postbag. Lots of nice voice notes there. If you want to contribute, please drop me a line on LinkedIn. It can just be a text question if you prefer, but I love hearing people’s voices from around the world. If you’ve got the LinkedIn mobile app, go and DM me, hit the microphone button and you can record up to a minute of time for your questions.

OK, the main topic I wanted to talk about is just generally around the experience of being on LinkedIn and what you think about it at the moment.

I’ve seen lots of people complain, especially when I look at networks like Threads, people will say that LinkedIn is really cringe for them, or irrelevant, or full of humblebrags and stuff like that. And that’s probably true if you’re not doing very much in the way of curation.

I do think it’s all related to the level of effort that you put into curating your network. That’s spending time connecting with people who you think are going to be relevant to you in a professional way and who put interesting stuff out into the world, and then engaging with those people, so not just connecting with them, but actively seeking to continue conversations with them, and that happens in public and in private, so through posts publicly, but also through direct messages, because that means that the algorithms become aware of who you’re more interested in, and therefore you’ll see more stuff from those people.

If you’re not going to put in that level of effort of finding the right people, connecting with them, supporting their posts, DMing them and so forth, then your experience of LinkedIn is not going to be very relevant or useful to you, and you’re going to end up being put off and probably logging in once a year at most, if you’re lucky, and thinking the whole thing is junk, when in fact lots of us are on there pretty much every day and getting lots of value, learning lots of things, having good relationships with people, and opening the doors to new business.

It’s just a very different experience depending on how much effort you put into it, so that’s the kind of the experience and effort side of things.

There’s also the actual user interface side of things. The technical platform bits are different for different people.

I did a post about this just the other day, which I’ll link to in the show notes, but I was listing several of the new features that have dropped just in the last couple of weeks, and I realised that I’ve only actually got a few of them myself.

I’ve got things like pinned comments and I’m able to block company pages and I’m able to put bold text directly into posts, but there’s loads of things that I can’t do.

I don’t have multiple Experience items that are listed as current on my profile.

I haven’t got the new purple “super like” reaction for Premium members.

I don’t have the split feed view of For You and Network, which I’m very much looking forward to, but I still don’t have that yet.

LinkedIn just the other day did an event where they announced 3 new things. A digital business card that you’d be able to put into your phone’s wallet and show when you go to events. Haven’t got that.

There’s something about creator monetisation on the platform. Don’t have that yet.

There’s new analytics. Don’t have that yet.

People are seeing absolute dates on posts rather than the relative dates. Haven’t got that.

There’s a new set of verifications that you can grant to other people by giving people upvotes for people in your network so that they can avoid doing the whole passport thing and verifying their profile.

Loads of things there that I don’t have, but other people do.

It does make it quite frustrating when I’m trying to train people and I’ve got something and they haven’t or they’ve got something and I haven’t, and it just makes you realise that there is no one vanilla flavour of LinkedIn for everyone.

Everyone’s got a slightly different view and that can just change your perception, your experience of the platform, because they might be one of these things that would really make or the world of difference to you and other things that you couldn’t care about at all. And we can’t predict when we’re going to get these new features. There’s that to take into account as well.

I suppose the last thing I’d say as well is that LinkedIn is an online platform, but actually a lot of people would probably have a better experience of it if they were involved in real-world networking that can result from online networking.

Just to give you an example, this past week we had the UpLift Live Nano event in London that was organised by my business partner, Jeremy Freeman.

We had about 45 people there in the room. We had about 10 people watching online and I had, and I’ve done a post about this, I had an awful travel day. Half of the day was actually spent with me on the train watching the livestream of the event, and the other half of the day was me in the room with everyone doing the nice face-to-face networking bit and answering LinkedIn questions.

We had a Q&A panel at the end of the day, and it’s just a very different experience to sitting behind the screen. This is where you make real connections.

You see that people aren’t robots, and I think a lot of people sort of talk a good game. They talk about the power of personal, human connection, but then they don’t actually make the effort to go beyond just the screen and meet people in real life.

I think that would probably enhance your experience if you can do something to meet the people that you’re networking with on LinkedIn.

That’s kind of what the UpLift Live project is about. It’s about seeing people eyeball to eyeball. Keep in touch if you want to know more about UpLift Live events. We’ve got one coming in early 2027, which will be in Manchester next. And we’re just going to try and keep going if we can, and organise more of these events.

That should be just a good way of keeping in touch and just reminding each other that we’re all we’re all human beings trying to succeed, doing good things in business, in the world.

Anyway, I’ll leave it at that for now. Keep your questions coming and I will speak to you again soon.