Informed 510

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• Postbag voice note questions on company pages, invitations, audiences, and events
• LinkedIn’s report on content best practices (full report)
• Company page support form

Full transcript.

What can we learn from LinkedIn’s new report on content best practices? We’re going to take a look in episode 510 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Informed, your weekly show about LinkedIn best practice, run by me, John Espirian, an independent LinkedIn trainer and consultant based in South Wales. As usual, we’re going to start with the Postbag section.

OK, the Postbag is where we handle listener feedback and questions, and we’ve got a few voice notes this week. Let’s start with a couple from Hanne Møller.

Hanne Møller 00:45 – 01:08

Having a page on LinkedIn for a company, if you want to delete some of the members and you’re not on a verified company page, how do you do that? Do you have to contact LinkedIn and get their help?

I’m thinking that might be just impossible to get them to reach out to me. But do you have any ideas how to do that?

OK, thanks for that one, Hanne. Yes, there is a way of doing it even if your page isn’t verified, but it’s just not as convenient.

What you’d need to do is to pull up LinkedIn’s company pages request help form. I will link to that in the show notes.

It’s part of a much longer blog I wrote about how to get help from LinkedIn. So, basically you find that form and then on there, one of the fields is for you to specify what you’re asking for help with.

It’s a dropdown menu and there’s an option in there that says “Report inaccurately associated employee”.

You fill in the details, cross your fingers, and hope that pretty quickly LinkedIn take action and remove that person from the page.

All of this is much easier if you do have a verified page, because you can just visit someone’s profile and hit the More button and then say, “Never an employee of my organisation”.

But as I say, that’s available only to verified pages, and right now, if you don’t have a verified page, the only one where you could get one is to pay for LinkedIn’s Premium company page feature and then verify.

So, it’s a bit of a hassle to get the verification. If you don’t have it, you’d need to fill in that form that I mentioned to remove people who are not genuinely associated with the company.

OK, there was a second question by Hanne, so let’s go to that one now.

Hanne Møller 02:25 – 02:33

Is it possible to export your followers if you have a Premium account, because as far as I can see, you can’t do it with a free one?

I think Hanne’s question actually was about company pages, but this applies to personal and company pages.

No, there seems to be no personal or company export to get all of your followers. Now, that’s not to say that it can’t be done, but you just can’t do it through legitimate means.

I don’t think there’s anything in your data export, for example, that would reveal this information.

I’m sure some third-party tools could probably do it if they had access to your browser and do some kind of auto-scrolling thing and read a list and write it all out to a file, but none of that is legitimate and I wouldn’t recommend doing that.

It’s weird that LinkedIn don’t offer this as a paid service ,because I’m sure lots of people would love to be able to do that. But no, it doesn’t seem to be possible at the moment.

OK, we move on with another voice note question. This one comes from LinkedIn trainer Guy Strijbosch.

Guy Strijbosch 03:23 – 03:56

A few weeks ago I suggested that LinkedIn should let us choose who we want to reach with our posts.

But then I thought, why not turn it around as well? Why not let people choose what they want to see in their feed?

And here’s the interesting part. LinkedIn is already testing something called an interest picker and also feeds based on topics.

So, my question is, could giving people more control actually be good for LinkedIn’s business, too? More relevant content, better conversations, maybe people spending more time on LinkedIn? Or am I missing something here?

OK, thanks for that, Guy. I would love to see more control about what appears in my feed.

As I’m sure you’re aware, the feed has recently been split between “For you” and “Network”, so you can now more easily see content from people in your network.

But if you wanted to drill down further, right now you could go and do a custom search and add some filters to it to help determine what you see.

So, if you were to do a search for any topic in the search bar and then filter by posts and then turn on all filters, you can do things like asking to see content only from a specific set of people, or from people who work for a specific company, or a specific industry, and some other keywords in their title, so there are a number of filters you can put on.

I think what you’re asking for is something that’s even more specific than that, where you can set topic titles and so forth.

I’m not sure that LinkedIn would want to do that for free. Maybe it could be part of a paid service, maybe part of Premium in the future. I would love to see that.

I was wondering though, how much benefit LinkedIn would think that it would give us.

I suppose it would keep more of us engaged, but then maybe we would miss out on some of the stuff that we see through serendipity, the stuff that we’re not necessarily expecting to see, but we might still find educational or interesting.

But yes, certainly from a member’s point of view, if I could say, show me topics about these things only and build multiple feeds, that would be super useful. Whether LinkedIn will do it is anyone’s guess.

OK, the last voice note for the Postbag this week is from Tamas Banki, and he was picking up on last week’s topic about withdrawing sent invitations, but also asking about sending invitations for events. So, let’s go to Tamas now.

Tamas Banki 05:46 – 06:14

If I have a company page or a group and I invite to there, should I withdraw these invitations as well from time to time or that doesn’t really matter?

And what about events? How many invitations can be sent?

I know that I as the organiser can send 1000 invitations, but if someone else is inviting to my event, how many can they send?

OK, thanks for that, Tamas. My instinct says that withdrawing invitations that you send on a personal basis is probably more effective than ones you send for your company page, but I’m not really sure.

Once you’ve sent an invitation for the company page, that credit is used up and you don’t get it back unless the other person accepts.

Even if you were to withdraw it, you don’t really benefit from that.

With groups, I’m not sure. I don’t really have much experience with that because people opt into my group through a different method. I’m not sending out invitations to join groups.

I suppose it would make sense to keep that lean as well, but I can’t say for certain.

If anyone is used to sending out lots of company invitations or lots of group invitations and has seen a positive impact from withdrawing them from people who look like they’re not going to accept, then I’d really like to hear that feedback.

On the second point, you’re asking how many event invitations can someone else send on your behalf?

So, we already know that the limit for you personally would be 1000 event invitations per week, which is for me a crazy number.

But it looks as though that limit is also true for other people inviting on your behalf.

Basically, you have a personal allowance of 1000 event invitations per week, whether it’s for your own event or for someone else’s. So, it’s just a total that you can use.

You can’t invite someone else to attend an event if you aren’t already registered to attend it yourself, though, so you need to do that bit first. And also your invitations have to go to someone you’re already connected with. So, it’s your 1st-level network.

You can’t just invite any random person on LinkedIn. They have to be your connections and you have to be attending the event yourself.

If you try and send any more than 1000, then you’ll start getting failures, and invitations won’t be sent.

I’ve never got anywhere near those numbers, but if you give it a try, please let me know what you find.

OK, that’s us done for the Postbag.

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The main topic this week is my response to a new report that LinkedIn have published.

The report is called Unlocking AI Search: the B2B Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn. Bit of a mouthful.

It’s 36 pages long, so not a quick read and I will link to it in the show notes. But I went through it, I read the whole thing and I picked out the most important bits and that’s what we’re going to go through now.

LinkedIn say that articles, so that’s longform pieces of content account for roughly 60% of LinkedIn’s content citations by AI search engines, whereas posts, so shortform pieces of content, on LinkedIn account for about 40% of those LinkedIn content citations.

They say that content from linkedin.com posts gets about 8 million weekly visits from organic traffic.

And they’ve said that the best length for LinkedIn articles and newsletters, again longform content, is between 800 and 1200 words, while the best length for LinkedIn shortform posts is between 200 and 300 words.

LinkedIn say that we should put our most important keywords in the first line of our posts, and the opening sentence often then goes on to become the URL “slug”. I don’t know if you’ve heard that term before, it’s the bit that goes at the end of the web address.

When you look at a LinkedIn post, you’ll sometimes see words towards the end of the address.

Those words can be useful for search engine optimisers and the answer engines that are looking up this content.

What you put in the first line of your LinkedIn post informs what goes into that part of the URL and therefore that can affect the search findability and relevance of the content.

You should lead, therefore, with your core keywords, and LinkedIn suggests that we skip hashtags, emojis, and special characters, certainly in the first line of our content.

I did a little check with a colleague in the Espresso+ community, Kevin D Turner, who I often reference, and he said that despite LinkedIn’s advice here, actually including hashtags in your post, even if it’s at the end, will almost certainly override the keywords that have been detected in the first line.

Which is to say that hashtags in the post will then get encoded into that URL slug, which is quite important, but only 3 of them will.

So, if you put 3 hashtags into your post, that can override any keywords that you might want to include at the top of the post, that’s a good one to keep in mind.

LinkedIn are saying get rid of the hashtags, get rid of the emojis, and get rid of special characters because “they dilute your signal and the URL that gets created can’t be changed after you publish.”

We then move on to some post formatting tips from LinkedIn. They say to frame your content around a real question that your audience is asking, to stick to one topic per post, to use direct questions as your subheadings, to use bullet points and plain definitions of terms, to front-load the takeaway, in other words, really to get to the point and make that clear at the top of the post, and to close with a short summary or a checklist.

And remember, all of those tips are about shortform posts on LinkedIn, which can be at most 3000 characters long.

So, that was shortform, but LinkedIn also gives some tips about article and newsletter format for longform content.

They say that you should open each major section with a 30-to-80-word answer block that addresses the topic named in the heading of your piece or in the subheading of the piece as well.

You should follow the answer block with some detailed explanations, examples, and sources.

“That balances the need for quick answers with SEO’s demand for comprehensive content” – I’m reading what they’ve written in their report here.

You should also add a label such as “quick answer” before your summary to signal to AI that this is a direct response to a question.

OK, we’re almost done with the report now. Some other interesting bits that came out of the report.

LinkedIn said that every single top cited article by an AI answer engine is one that includes at least one list, that 95% of all citations of content on LinkedIn come from original posts and not from reshares.

What used to be called a reshare is now called a “repost with thoughts”. So, sometimes you’ll see a post with someone else’s contribution on top of it. That content tends not to get citations. The original post does.

LinkedIn also recommend that you should refresh your older content with inline edits or new comments that point to your latest thinking.

I found that really quite interesting. It means that you should go back and review past content that you’ve put out to see if you can update it a little bit and maybe point to something newer that you’ve more recently published. Don’t think I’ve ever seen LinkedIn say that before, but that’s fascinating.

They also say that you should add a sort of TL;DR or “At a glance” section at the top of your articles, and they’ve said that strong engagement, so things like reactions and comments, they do suggest that that leads to content that is more likely to appear in AI generated answers, but it’s not proof of it.

So, if one of your posts has done really well inside the LinkedIn feed and it looks like it’s getting loads of reactions, loads of comments, that’s not necessarily a guarantee that it will come up as a good answer in AI engine. So, don’t just take that bit for granted.

Now, as I said earlier, the whole report is 36 pages. There is some stuff I’ve omitted from it, but I’ve included quite a lot of the important stuff. I’ll link to that in the show notes. Take a look and see what you think and if you tweak anything in your LinkedIn content creation process, please let me know. I’d be fascinated to know whether any of this leads to you making a change.

OK, that’s all I’ve got for you this week. I’d like to encourage you to keep your questions coming, especially if you want to send me voice notes.

I’m going to be away next week actually. I’m taking a break with some old university friends and we’re heading off to Rome for 4 or 5 days next week, so I’ll be out of the office, but I’ll have my phone with me and no doubt I’ll probably be looking at LinkedIn from time to time, so there won’t be an episode next week, but I should be back the week after that. But keep your questions coming in the meantime and until then I’ll speak to you soon.