485. Direct messages and algorithmic immunity

John Espirian: 00:00:00

What is the only bit of LinkedIn that is immune to the algorithms? It's time to find out. This is episode 485 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone, and welcome back. I am John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, a show all about LinkedIn best practice. And as usual, we're going to kick off with the Postbag section.

So, the Postbag is where you get to ask your listener questions to the show.

The first item I've seen a couple of times recently, so I'm not going to attribute it to one particular person, but people have been posting and asking whether it's OK to delete posts on LinkedIn.

Well, there's nothing technically stopping you doing that. If a post hasn't performed as well as you would have wished, you can just hit the delete button if you want to, and there's no time limit on doing that.

I don't actually recommend it, though, because I do think that sometimes we try to represent our best selves, but if we try to make it look as though everything we post is a stellar success, I don't think that looks particularly authentic.

If you go back and look at some of the biggest YouTube content creators, almost all of them haven't deleted their early posts where they were getting no engagement, no likes at all, very little in the way of views. It just shows their progression, it shows some authenticity.

So, if a post hasn't done well for you on LinkedIn, I actually would recommend just leaving it there. And if you wanted to put another post in flight, have another swing of the bat if you like, then that second post might then perform a lot better than the first one and everyone forgets about the first one and moves on.

But I think deleting a post is something you should do, really only if there's been a technical error, so, for example, somehow you've managed to post the same thing twice, it doesn't need to be in the feed twice. Or if there's some kind of PR situation where you really want to retract a statement that you've made in error and it's not a good idea to leave that out in public.

In that case, well, that's fine, you would delete those posts, but generally I would leave the post there and let people see that we're all fallible and that not everything is always a success.

John Espirian: 00:02:20

OK, we have a voice note now from Richard G Abrahams about newsletters.

Richard G Abrahams: 00:05:43

Hi, John. Based on things that you and Ashley have said to me, I've started to put together kind of regular, let's call it blog post on grammar, stylistic, that kind of stuff, points that I'm learning through the writing process. I'm just wondering, should this be a newsletter? Would it be better as a newsletter, worse as a newsletter? What? What are the pros and cons?

John Espirian: 00:05:44

LinkedIn post can be at most: 3000

So, yes, if you've got lots to say, having a long blank canvas on which to write out all of your thoughts could be good for your thought leadership in this space.

A lot of people think well, do I really have anything to say? And so they hold off on starting writing things like articles and newsletters.

So, I'm going to read out a list of things that I've put into a blog post that's about this topic, and I'll link to that in the show notes as well. So, here's some things to think about. What questions are you being asked by your clients? Because your email inbox and sent items will contain lots of topics that you can probably talk about at length.

What are the common misconceptions in your industry, and what are the behind the scenes things that you could write more about?

What are the dilemmas and contradictions in the industry?

What are the orthodox positions you disagree with?

What topics listed in tables of contents of relevant books could you expand into longer form thinking?

What ideas can you get from reading Amazon reviews about books that are related to your topic?

What are trending news topics that you could do deeper dives on?

Is there any new research or surveys that are relevant in your industry that you could dig into and write more about?

And are there any live events or conferences that you could report on?

So, those are just I don't know what that is, about 10 examples of things where you could do a bit of thinking and probably write quite a bit of content in depth about something that you know a lot about and that's great if someone has just discovered you can see a large body of work where you're writing with real substance, not just a couple of sentences, but long pieces that shows that you've probably been around for a little while and you might just know what you're talking about.

So, I think there's a lot of value in investing a bit of time and energy in producing a LinkedIn newsletter of longform content.

It's a good idea to be consistent with it. So, if you're going to set up something like this, you know, you need to build some kind of cadence.

You're going to say, well, maybe I'm going to produce one of these a month and that's just going to be part of my content machine going forward. So, good luck with that, Richard, and let me know how you get on.

OK, the other item for the Postbag this week comes from Mark Lee, who you'll remember hearing in last week's episode. Let's hear from Mark right now.

Mark Lee: 00:05:51

Love the podcast, John. Here's a question relating to targeting and focus. We can identify which profession we're in or interested in our profiles, and mine is accounting and, but specifically UK accountants, and I make that clear in my profile and also any searches that I do, I limit them to the UK.

But obviously my posts get shared much more widely than this and I choose to limit myself to those who I engage with outside the UK, but if I could limit my posts so they're only shown to people in the UK, that would be so much better.

Now, maybe I'm alone in this. Maybe nobody else on LinkedIn wants to limit themselves to one territory. But are there any tips you could share for those who do?

John Espirian: 00:06:44

Well, it's a reasonable question, Mark. And wouldn't we all like to control who gets to see our content, because then we could just target things exactly at the people who are most likely to buy from us or refer us to work.

I mean, there is no direct control that you can have over the distribution of your content to different geographies or across different languages. So, that's the first thing to keep in mind.

You were in the room with us in Birmingham last week, so you'll remember that Mic Adam and Guy Strijbosch, who were the double act talking about cultural issues on LinkedIn, they did somewhat address this question. So, you can refer back to their talk for a little bit more detail on that.

When you post things on LinkedIn, the only control that you have directly for an organic post at least, is that you can limit the visibility.

So, you can go from anyone potentially seeing the content to your connections only, or you could even post directly within a group, but that's probably too restrictive for what you're looking for.

I suppose my best advice here is to make sure that you're engaging consciously with your ideal audience so that they have more of a chance of seeing your own content and maybe also looking at what your ideal audience is engaging with to see what kind of posts are obviously floating their boat and seeing what lessons you can learn from that, so that you can perhaps slightly mould your own content to be more in line with the things that they're obviously already engaging with, because then LinkedIn's algorithm will think, "well, this is like that thing that they engaged with before. They're probably interested in this. I'm going to show them more of that."

So, it could be something to do with post structure, it could be turns of phrase that you could perhaps adapt for your own content.

The only real way of doing more targeted outreach with your content is to place ads, I'm afraid, because when you do that, then you can say, well, I'm targeting people in these geographies, or I'm targeting this particular industry, and then you can drill down from there and be a lot more specific about who you want to get to see your content.

But then that content will look like an ad, it will be an ad, and obviously it will come with a charge, and it won't be quite the same as putting organic content out there.

So, I'm afraid there's no great answer to this. One other tip I suppose you could do is if you know that there are specific people that you want to see your content, you could take one of the bits of advice that I mentioned during my talk at the conference, which is to use the Send feature and you can send posts to up to 10 people at a time, just to make sure it gets in front of them. But you need to be mindful of not overdoing that because otherwise you'll look a bit spammy. So, hope that helps, Mark, and thank you for the question.

The main topic I wanted to talk about this week is the idea of direct messages and algorithmic immunity, and that was the topic that I talked about at last week's UpLift Live 26 conference.

So, if you want to see the whole session, you'd have to have a ticket and you can go and watch the replay of that. But I'm going to play for you now the first few minutes of the talk that I delivered. I was the first speaker up on the day, so see what you think of this.

John Espirian: 00:09:49

So, I'm talking this time about LinkedIn DMs, the most important part of LinkedIn in my experience, and I've titled it LinkedIn DMs and algorithmic immunity. And this is probably the most important slide I'm going to show you.

So, DMs are immune to the algorithms.

Whether someone sees your profile is kind of controlled to some extent by an algorithm. Whether someone sees your post, controlled by the algorithm.

Whether someone sees your LinkedIn group comments, you name it, events, it's all algorithmically controlled. There's only one part of LinkedIn that isn't algorithmically controlled, and that's your DMs.

So, they're massively powerful in terms of building your brand, building a relationship with people. But they're not just immune to the algorithm: they are algorithm boosters as well.

The more active you get in your DMs, the more likely people are to see your content, the more likely you are to see their relevant content to you. So, it's really worth investing time and effort in getting into the DMs because you basically, you'll get more visibility out of doing so.

Now, a lot of people write their post, post it out first thing in the morning, and then they might, if you're lucky, engage in bits and bobs during the day. That's not optimal in terms of getting your maximum visibility.

Actually, if you can send DMs before you post, maybe even a day or two, that primes the pump for LinkedIn to say, "this person is making an effort. Let's show their content to those people who they're interacting with."

So, if you can, especially if you're about to post something important, a campaign like that, try and engage a day or two before you really want people to see your stuff.

Now, I analysed my data over the last year and I send on average 13.1 DMs per day. I've restricted it to the last year because the actual number is much higher if I look at previous years. But that's still probably a lot more DMs than the average person is doing. But it's all the stuff that you can't see.

But I guess that I've probably DM'd most of you in this room multiple times, and I've got loads of those plates spinning all the time. One of the ways I do lots of DMs is by replying to my new connections.

Most of the connections I receive, sadly, are not personalised, mostly because of LinkedIn's changes to the way that free accounts work. So, you know, you can only personalise 3 invitations per month.

So, a lot of the stuff that comes into me is generic and I always reply with a message. And here's an example.

John Espirian: 00:12:12

So, that was a bit of me in action on the stage in Birmingham last week, and I think one of the most fascinating things about direct messages is that when you look at someone's profile, you have absolutely no idea of how active they are behind the scenes in the direct messages. But that's where all of the relationships are built and actually that's where all of my business is transacted.

And you can't tell, you can't look at someone's profile on their follower account and think, oh, they must be busy in the DMs. You know, you might have a guess, but you don't really know.

So, it takes connecting with someone and actually finding out what their method is to see whether they are active and whether they send good DMs. I think sending good DMs is an art, and I gave lots of examples of how I do it and good ones that I've received during my talk.

So, I'd encourage you, if you're not active in DMs to give them another try and see what relationships you can build. Never to be salesy, never to be forceful, never to be inappropriate, but just to make human connections with people and see what doors that can open.

And as I always say, feel free to use me as a guinea pig. I love receiving direct messages of all types, particularly voice notes, but any type of direct message, if it leads to a human conversation, it's something I really enjoy. So, feel free to send me a message and let's have a chat.

Anyway, if you have a ticket for the conference, if you either were in the room in Birmingham or you were watching on the livestream, the replays of all of the talks that we delivered from the stage are now available in our on-demand area. I've worked pretty hard on that. At least 12 hours of editing time on the video replays and we've now got a total of something like 17.5 hours of content across the 3 years of conference. So, there's no fluff there, it's just top level speakers delivering LinkedIn insights.

And we now have a replay page if you want to go and grab a ticket for any of those years. So, if you go to uplift-live.com/replay then you can grab your replay ticket, sit back and enjoy high quality video.

Everything is captioned, everything has a full transcript and there's links to further information. So, loads of great content for you. I think it's good value. Go and check it out if you haven't already.

It's some of the best content I think all about LinkedIn best practice.

This week I saw an interesting report from Social Insider and one of its insights was that native document posts on LinkedIn, so that's usually PDF uploads, tend to get the highest levels of engagement compared with the other types of post.

And that prompted me to, well, first of all share that stat on my public feed, but also to look at some of my own numbers to see whether that was replicated. And indeed it was.

So, I track all of my stats for my posts pretty carefully and I analysed my last 9.9 million post impressions and that showed that my average impression counts for document posts, so that's PDFs that I put out into my posts on LinkedIn, were in the lead compared with everything else.

n count for document posts of: 9660

posts, which come in at only: 4498

That's no guarantee that any of that would be replicated for you, but if you've never put out a document post, this might be a useful reminder for you to give it a try.

So, when you're on LinkedIn desktop, if you start a new post and click the + button and then you'll see a document icon that looks like a little file. If you click on that, that will let you upload a PDF, a Word document, or a PowerPoint.

So, if you've got something like a longform piece of content or a tips sheet or something like that, something that would look good as a PDF, you might want to consider just popping that into your LinkedIn feed and seeing how that performs for you. I'll link to the Social Insider report in the show notes.

Couple of other items for this week. So, a few people have said to me that they are having problems with LinkedIn, asking them to update their email address and then failing afterwards.

So, some people have been saying that they're getting a message saying that their "email is not reachable", other people saying they're seeing messages that say "update your email to ensure you don't lose access to your account." And all of the people who've been affected seem to have Gmail accounts, which is probably the most popular email system out there.

I don't really recommend using a Gmail account as your primary LinkedIn login account, only because I don't think it always gives the most professional look if someone's connected with you and goes and looks in your Contact info panel and then they'll see a Gmail address.

I think it is nicer if you've got a professional domain associated with your account, but I appreciate that's not always straightforward for people to set up. So, if you do have to use Gmail, generally speaking it works pretty well. But right now there does seem to be a glitch going on.

So, if you're affected by this, I would guess hopefully that you can just hold out until the glitch is over, because I can't believe that all Gmail accounts are going to stop working on LinkedIn. But it is something to be aware of.

One of my colleagues thinks that it might actually be an issue with Gmail itself as opposed to an issue with LinkedIn, but a real pain if you are affected by that. So, one to be aware of and look out for.

And the last item for now is that LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky has co-authored a book and it's called Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI. It's something that I had on pre order as Kindle version. I've now got the book.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet because I've been so busy with processing the replays for last week's conference, but I'm going to read through this and summarise any insights I find for my Espresso+ community. I did take a look at the sample chapter, or at least a bit of a sample chapter that was dropped a couple of months ago. It didn't read brilliantly to me.

It felt as though it might have been written by AI actually, which probably isn't a good look, but I will check that out and report that back to people in the community if there is anything of value in there. And I'll link to the book on Amazon as well if you want to go and check it out. It's available as a hardcover and a paperback and a Kindle version and an audiobook as well.

OK, I'll leave it at that for now. As usual, if you have any questions for the show, just please get in touch either via text or via voice note and I'll speak to you again in a week. Take care.