Here are LinkedIn’s own best practices for video formats that work on the platform.
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- Two voice notes from Mark Lee, about sent invitation withdrawals and post impressions.
- Portrait video sample
- Should captions be included in cinema screenings?
Full transcript.
How are videos working on LinkedIn right now? Let’s take a look. It’s episode 509 of the Informed podcast.
Hi, everyone. I’m John Espirian. Welcome back to the Informed podcast. It’s your weekly show about LinkedIn best practice, put on by me: I’m an independent LinkedIn consultant and trainer based in South Wales in the UK.
We’re going to get started, as always, with listener questions and feedback in the Postbag.
OK, we have two bits of voice note feedback, both from Mark Lee on separate subjects. Let’s go to the first one about sending invitations.
Mark Lee 00:50 – 01:28
I think it was your predecessor host of the podcast, Mark Williams, who shared a tip with me, which I have followed diligently for years, which is to check out the connection requests you’ve sent and delete, as in, withdraw, those that are perhaps over a month old, because having too many such outstanding connection requests can count against you in terms of the extent to which your posts are shared by the algorithm.
I remember when I first did that, it absolutely made a difference, and I’ve done it diligently ever since. Don’t know if it still makes a difference or not, but I share it because it’s a tip others might find of use and of value.
Yes, thanks for that feedback, Mark. We probably should do some housekeeping on our LinkedIn accounts from time to time, and this is one of the areas where we can do it.
I’m looking at LinkedIn desktop now, and if I go to the My Network tab and then click on “Show all” to see all of the invitations I’ve received and sent, there’s a Sent tab at the top, and I can see everything that I’ve sent. Every time I send an invitation to someone, I always personalise it, which I’m able to do because I have a Premium account.
If something has been sitting for more than a few weeks, I would say it’s very unlikely that someone is going to accept it, and it’s possible that LinkedIn might look negatively toward that.
If you’re sending out loads of invitations and they’re not being accepted, that might count against you in terms of your profile being promoted in other parts of LinkedIn.
If you have the discipline to come and check this screen every so often, you might want to just withdraw old invitations that you’ve sent, and that way the screen just clears down and any negative penalty associated with having outstanding invitations goes away.
When you withdraw an invitation through this screen, LinkedIn will give you a message saying that if you withdraw it, you won’t be able to send it again for another 3 weeks. It’s very rare in my experience for me to send another invitation to someone if they haven’t accepted the first time, so I wouldn’t worry about that one too much.
OK, as I said, we had another voice note from Mark on a different subject. This one is about impressions. So, let’s go back to Mark now.
Mark Lee 03:02 – 03:39
Picking up on your comment about impression numbers, and I’m absolutely with you that there’s no point trying to chase the algorithm, beat the algorithm, or pay too much attention to impression numbers, but and I have over 16,000 connections. Nevertheless, most of my audience are not very active on LinkedIn, and certainly don’t seem to have the time to react much or comment much, and yet I know that they’re seeing the posts because when I do speak with people, either perhaps because they’re a guest on my podcast or I meet them at an event, they tell me how much they enjoy seeing my posts. Maybe they’re just being polite.
Yes, thanks for that one, Mark, and yes, that is pretty much the way things go on social media.
I would guess that about 90% of the people who see our content never interact in any way. They don’t like, they don’t share, they don’t comment, they don’t send you DMs. So, it can feel like talking to the void at times.
When you go out into the real world to events and meet people, it’s funny how often stuff that you’ve put out has been recognised, gets cited or something, and you think, well, you obviously paid attention to that, but you didn’t say anything about it at the time.
I’m kind of used to that now. It’s just a fact of life, I guess. People don’t have the time or inclination to really show up in a meaningful way on social media in general and certainly on LinkedIn, and therefore they are the vast majority of consumers, and I talk more about this actually in the Content DNA book.
But there we go. It’s just a fact of life. We deal with it, we move, and we appreciate the people who are paying attention because maybe, who knows, behind the scenes, maybe they’re doing our good work, our marketing work for us and recommending us to other people, and we never know about it until there’s other people get in touch to hire us for our services and so on.
Nothing goes to waste here. Would certainly be nice if people who were quiet on social media just spoke up a little bit more. That would give us content creators a bit more to feel comfortable about when putting our content out into the world.
The topic I wanted to cover for this week’s episode actually relates to the second point I made back to Mark, and it’s about videos on LinkedIn and who sees what and so forth.
Videos are a bit of a strange beast on LinkedIn. The numbers have never been quite the same as for the other types of posts on LinkedIn, because the thing that you’re really interested in with videos is how much people are paying attention to the content, not just a pure impression count.
Traditionally, video view counts have been based on a video having been viewed for at least a few seconds, and that model doesn’t really apply for other types of content. So, it’s just a different thing.
Low impression counts or video view counts are not the end of the world, because, as I said to Mark, I’m always impressed when I go to events at how much people have paid attention to my content, even though they haven’t interacted in any way, but particularly people reference stuff that I might have said in videos. So, I know that stuff must be landing in some way.
Now, that effect has probably died off a little bit in my own personal case because I don’t do that many public videos anymore.
Almost all of my video content that I create these days is for my private Espresso+ community. So, those people in my community will see plenty of me on Q&A calls and other recorded videos, but not so much of that type of content really gets out into the public anymore.
The first point I want to emphasise is that even if you get those low view counts for your videos, that’s not necessarily a reason not to create the videos, because the vast majority of the silent audience out there who are still consuming your content and who are maybe getting something from the videos that they might not get from your other types of content – because they can see stuff like your body language and your enthusiasm and your tone of voice and so forth – those intangibles don’t come across in your other types of content so much.
Don’t think that I’m going to say that you now need to go off and create loads of videos every week or anything like that. I’m absolutely not going to say that. But if you haven’t created any videos at all, so if I looked at your LinkedIn profile and I’ve got no kind of idea about what you might look like in action, that might put me off from getting in touch with you, and obviously that means that it might put me off from hiring you.
Consider creating at least one or two videos where you can convey what your expertise is and show off tone of voice and body language and all of those other good things.
Maybe make a couple of those video posts and you can put them in your Featured section of your LinkedIn profile so that even if you don’t make videos on a regular basis, I can still at least find one or two examples of you in action. I do think that would be a really worthwhile use of your time.
It’s clear that LinkedIn haven’t given up on the idea of more content creators prioritising video on the platform, because recently there’s been the return of the Video tab on the LinkedIn mobile app. I just got this returned to me last week.
Now, if I open up the LinkedIn mobile app, I can see at the bottom of the screen there’s a tab that says Video, and it’s a constant, sort of TikTok-style, Instagram Reels-style feed of people’s videos.
I haven’t really found that content very useful at all, I must admit. It often feels very irrelevant, and some of the content feels as though it has the vibe of videos that are in tune with the cringey, cheesy stuff that people who hate LinkedIn complain about. It’s all kind of concentrated in one space.
Also, I never seem to see content from people I know in that feed. So, I haven’t spent much time looking at that part of LinkedIn, because it always puts me off a bit.
But that’s just the Video tab. It doesn’t mean that your videos won’t appear in the main LinkedIn feed, and that’s how I’m seeing them. I don’t see that many videos in my LinkedIn feed, but they invariably end up being from people I’m connected with and the content tends to be more relevant than not.
As a sample, I did a test video post in portrait-mode format. That’s where you hold your phone vertically, and I was following LinkedIn’s current best practice advice on how such videos should look.
They’ve said that they prefer that vertical, portrait-mode format and that they prefer videos that are between 40 seconds and 2 minutes long, and also that they prefer videos that have the captions burned into the video as opposed to uploaded as a separate captions file. I’m not really a great fan of that approach, because it’s not considered very accessible.
It is better to have a separate captions file, because then the viewer can choose whether or not to look at the captions, whereas if you burn captions directly into the video, as they’re suggesting, it means that everyone is co-opted into seeing them, even if they don’t want to see them. But that’s a separate point, and I will actually talk about that again in a minute.
I’ve done that as a test, and I’ve shared that on my LinkedIn feed and actually, surprisingly, even though it was just a sample video with only about 40 seconds of content, it actually got quite a lot of engagement for what was a pretty simple post.
That portrait-mode format is not ideal if you’re consuming videos on your desktop. It doesn’t look great there, but we have known for some time that the vast majority of LinkedIn browsing sessions are happening through the LinkedIn mobile app, and therefore I suppose it makes sense to optimise for that mobile-first approach for LinkedIn.
If you wanted to cover all bases – if you were confident that lots of your ideal audience is using LinkedIn via the desktop as well as on mobile – then maybe you would create videos in a square format, because that actually looks pretty nice on desktop and still works acceptably well on mobile. There’s a bit of space wastage at the top and bottom of square videos on mobile, but it’s perfectly acceptable, frankly.
A couple of people asked me how I recorded that sample video and I said that I use a tool called Camtasia to record all of my videos, and I have a companion tool called Audiate that handles some audio processing, and it generates the captions for my shortform content. So, my process is working pretty well for this.
I can create these shortform, portrait-mode videos quite easily with a combination of my iPhone for recording the video and then the desktop with those tools for processing the content and getting it out onto LinkedIn.
But even if you’re not technically minded in the way that I am, you could still, if you’ve got a smartphone, you can just pull out your phone, record something, and upload it to LinkedIn and let LinkedIn handle the automatic captions, which isn’t ideal, but it’s very easy to create video and put it on LinkedIn if that’s what you wanted to do.
You’re out for a walk and talk, you record something for a minute, upload it, let the captions sort themselves out, and it’s a perfectly acceptable solution. So, perhaps this is a jumping point for you to go off and create one or two videos on LinkedIn.
No pressure, but it’s nice to see people in action, talking, hear their accents, see their body movements, and so forth. I think that can be really powerful.
If you want a bit of help with the practicing around this, feel free to send a test video to me and I can give you some feedback. Send me a direct message. My messages are open regardless of whether we’re connected, so just look me up on LinkedIn, send me a DM and we can chat about it.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on videos on LinkedIn in general. Do you hate them? Let me know, and if you’ve got any questions about them, do also let me know as well.
I’ll finish by mentioning something else that I’ve posted about recently, which is something I was reminded of while I was creating some videos and playing around with the captions, which is that, as someone who goes to the cinema a lot, I’ve noticed that I don’t really see movies on big screens that have captions on them.
I might be sitting at home on the TV and I’m watching YouTube or I’m watching a TV programme, or I’m on social media and I’m seeing videos and all of that stuff has got captions on it pretty much guaranteed every time.
The only time I would consciously turn off the captions is if I’m watching a live broadcast, because the captions aren’t always timed very well, the accuracy can be a bit sketchy. But apart from that, I would have the captions turned on.
Even though English is my first language and I’m pretty good at understanding what’s being said, nevertheless, I find the content a bit more immersive when I see the captions, and it means that I don’t miss any odd words or phrases.
It felt to me as though, as someone who goes to the cinema quite a bit – I’ve been 3 times in the past week – it just feels as though there should be more options for people who would like to see captions on movies.
I know that there’s some kind of compliance thing out there, which means that all of the cinema chains have to do at least one film with a caption on and so forth, but they’re really few and far between.
Anyway, I put out a poll on LinkedIn about this, which is still ongoing at the moment. You might want to go and check out the results of that poll but it said, if you went to the cinema would you feel as though your experience was being diminished if there were some subtle captions at the bottom of the screen?
Opinions are definitely divided in the voting and in the comments but I’d be interested to hear what you think, because I’m not sure that the big chain cinemas have really done that much thinking about the topic and they certainly haven’t surveyed me. I’ve been going to the cinema regularly for quite a while and I’ve never heard any real chatter about this.
It feels a good time to be chatting about captions because the coming week is Captions Awareness Week, and I think accessibility is a good thing for everyone so let’s have more of it if we can.
Anyway, I will leave it at that for now. Do let me know your thoughts about video on LinkedIn, and until next time, I’ll speak to you soon.
