486. Collaborative content

John Espirian: 00:00:00

How do collaborations work? That's what we're going to look at today. It's episode 486 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone and welcome back to the Informed podcast. I'm your host, John Espirian and this is the show all about LinkedIn best practice. And as usual, we're going to start with listener questions and feedback in the Postbag.

Well, if you listened to last week's episode, you will have heard a question about audience targeting and I said that it wasn't really possible. I got some good feedback from a couple of listeners and I'm going to play you back the response from the first of those, Tonny Mikkelsen. So, let's listen to what Tonny has to say.

Tonny Mikkelsen: 00:00:54

Hello, John. I just listened to the latest episode of the Informed podcast. By the way, the best podcast ever.

You were talking about post and if you could make a post target to only a specific country. In this example it was UK, you were guiding Mark Lee and actually it can be done not from the personal profile but for free, you can from company pages. In company pages, you can target to a specific country.

The only problem with the free version here is that the target audience has to be at least 300 people. I just wanted to tell you and I hope you can use it.

John Espirian: 00:01:31

Yes, Tonny, you're absolutely right and thank you for that contribution. And thanks also to Tamas Banki who also got in touch to say the same thing.

So, I was giving Mark feedback with personal profiles and personal posts in mind. But it's true that if you go and create a company page post, you can define an audience so long as you have a minimum of 300 people in that target criteria, then you can be a bit more refined about who you're trying to reach.

But your content has to go out through a company page, which isn't always ideal.

Now, Mark actually came back to me to clarify the thing that he really wanted to know. So, let's just quickly switch back to Mark for a second for some clarification on his question.

Mark Lee: 00:02:12

My bigger concern is whether when I'm doing a search for relevant content, I can limit searches so that I'm only seeing content from and about UK-based accountants rather than those around the world.

Often when I do a search, the Americans, South Africans, Australians, always English-speaking posts show up, but I don't want to be commenting on those, because they're not my target audience. So, that's what I really wanted to know, perhaps as a follow up at some point. Thanks.

John Espirian: 00:02:43

Now, I think I'm right in saying this time that you really can't do that, Mark. So, you can do a general LinkedIn search and filter by posts and then there's an "All filters" section where you can drill down into more detail.

But I'm looking at my All filters at the moment and it will let you sort things by date, you can sort things by content type. You can even define which members, specific members you want to see content from. You can choose which company they work at.

You can define whether you want to see stuff by 1st connections or things that mention specific people, or mention companies and even industries and companies and so forth and other author keywords. But there doesn't seem to be a way of filtering any of that by location.

So, if you wanted to say, just show me the content from people in the UK, I don't believe that's possible inside the main LinkedIn search.

Now, I don't use Sales Navigator, so it's possible someone who does use Sales Navigator might chime in and say, oh yes, actually you can do that, but in terms of the main linkedin.com experience, it doesn't look as though that's possible.

So, sorry about that Mark, but thank you for the feedback, and it was interesting to get other listener feedback on this bit of the postback.

The main topic for this week is all about collaborating with other people on creating LinkedIn content.

Now, I noticed this week, thanks to someone in my network who posted about this, Ariel Serber said that there was a new preference setting on LinkedIn, and that could hint at a new feature on the way. So, I took a look and sure enough, it was there for me, too.

So, this thing was in the Settings and Privacy panel, and in there inside Notifications and Posting and commenting was an option that said "Post collaborations". And I thought that's interesting. So, I clicked through to take a look and it said "Post collaborations: these are notifications that other members have invited you to collaborate on a post."

Now, I saw the wording of that as separate to collaborative articles, which is something that LinkedIn introduced a couple of years ago and hasn't really been a big success at all.

But I did notice probably about 18 months ago, I would say, someone who worked for LinkedIn did post what might have been an off-hand thing on his LinkedIn feed. Annoyingly, I can't find the post anymore.

But he did say, should we introduce something like an Instagram-style collaboration option where you could start creating a post but then invite another person to presumably edit it with you and then you kind of joint-publish it on both of your feeds. I thought that was a really interesting idea.

And then when this setting arrived earlier this week, I thought that this was the precursor to LinkedIn rolling that out.

Now, that might well still happen, but as I record this, that setting that I took a screenshot of and will include in my show notes is now gone for me. So, I'm not sure what that signals.

Maybe it was a mistake in LinkedIn rolling that out, or maybe it's just a sign that this feature might be on the way at some point soon. So, definitely one to look out for.

So, that's all well and good, but how do you actually collaborate on something?

Well, right now there's no formal way of doing it inside LinkedIn that I can see anyway, but something I did recently off the back of a question that was asked by my colleague Gillian Whitney during a Live Q&A in the Espresso+ community – something that we do twice a month to answer members questions directly.

She asked whether there was any kind of document that exists that sets out the difference between the LinkedIn mobile app features and the LinkedIn desktop features through a web browser. So, in other words, are there things that you can do on the mobile app that you can't do on desktop or vice versa?

I couldn't think of any such document that exists. I think a lot of us are aware of certain differences between the platforms, but it's never been spelled out. So, I thought, well, why don't we use the community to collaborate on this kind of thing?

So, I set up a Google Document and invited members of the community to contribute to that and we had some good feedback, and I've used that to publish an article and to give people credit where they contributed.

So, there's a newsletter episode that's on my feed at the moment called "LinkedIn desktop versus mobile differences".

I'm going to point you towards these in the show notes, but I'll read out a few examples and then you can maybe take a look at the rest of these features.

So, for example, the LinkedIn mobile app won't let you edit longform content such as LinkedIn articles and LinkedIn newsletters.

You can edit your shortform content, but you can't edit your longform stuff. You'd need to go into linkedin.com on a desktop browser to do that.

Another example is that the LinkedIn mobile app will let you record your 10-second audio pronunciation. You'll notice on some people's profiles, the name has a little speaker symbol next to it as mine does, and if you tap that, you can hear the person saying their name.

Well, that can be recorded only through the LinkedIn mobile app. You can't record it through the desktop version of LinkedIn, although you can play back existing recordings. And similarly, if you wanted to send someone a voice note on LinkedIn direct messages, well, you can record that only through the mobile app version. You can't do it through desktop, although again, you can play it back from desktop, you just can't record it there.

So, there's several examples of those differences, and you can go and check those out on my feed and I'll link to that in the show notes.

And however long it takes for LinkedIn to work out a formal way for people to collaborate on content on the platform, I think I'll use that Google Document shared access editing method to gather feedback from people within my community to help strengthen the content that we put out into the world.

Often I've found that, you know, one person sitting there and having ideas and publishing stuff is great, but then often you'll get people in the comments afterwards saying, oh, yes, but you can also do this, or maybe you could do it that way. And then you find out that actually, you know, your content gets stronger if you can involve more other people.

And I suppose it comes back to the idea that Brenda Meller brought to us at UpLift Live 26 a couple of weeks ago, the idea of "co-opetition". So, instead of seeing your peers as competition, you kind of co-operate with them more so that everyone gets a bigger slice of the pie. I'm using Brenda's terminology there.

So, yes, I intend to do more kind of bits of content like that, where I can lean on the expertise within the community and hopefully throw the spotlight on some of the clever minds that we have in that community to get better LinkedIn learning out to all of you.

So, do take a look at that article. If you happen to spot something that we've missed, no doubt there are other differences that we haven't covered, please do let me know. And I'm happy to credit you in any edits I make to it.

Now, I've just given you a few examples of things that you can or can't do depending on whether you're on desktop or mobile. Here's one that you would need desktop for, and it's another quick tip that I shared.

This actually is from ages ago, but I reshared it because I'm still seeing a lot of this, which is, when you have a LinkedIn profile, everyone has their own unique username that's part of your profile address. And when you set up your LinkedIn profile, if you've never customised that address, then it'll mean probably your username is your name followed by a string of letters and numbers. We sometimes refer to that as "alphabet soup".

It doesn't have a good look to it, certainly. If you were ever to put that into an email or print it on a business card, it. It looks like LinkedIn is a bit of an afterthought or you're a complete newbie.

So, if you want to change that, it's probably something you're only ever going to need to do once. It's very quick and easy and totally free to do.

So, if you go to the desktop version of LinkedIn, so you just pull up your desktop web browser, go to linkedin.com, log in and look at your profile. And then in the top-right corner look for a setting that says "Public profile and URL".

So, you click the pen icon, that's to the right of that section. That will open up a new section, a whole new screen.

And then in the top-right of that screen, if you look for a panel that says "Edit your custom URL", that's the bit where you can get rid of the alphabet soup and leave just your name. Now, if you have a common name, there's a good chance that someone else has already taken that name. But the usual rules of usernames apply here. If someone hasn't taken a username, you can have it. So, you might put a hyphen in there, you might put a middle initial in there, or something else to customise the thing. And it will just mean that your LinkedIn profile just looks just that bit more professional.

And this is one of those once and done things. You're probably never going to need to change it again, but do make sure that you at least set it to a username that you like the look of.

I have been trying to take a bit of time off this week to recover from the conference, which was a couple of weeks ago. Still drowning in notifications, believe it or not.

But one thing I've managed to fit into my week is doing a little reconnaissance mission down to Bristol. I'm over the bridge in Newport in South Wales, but I'm planning to run an UpLift Live Nano event in Bristol. And about a couple of hours ago I believe I've found the right venue for us and a date.

So, I'm just formalising that and then I will share that first with people in the Espresso+ community so they can buy tickets and then they'll go on general sale. And I'm aiming for September for that.

So, UpLift Live Nano. This idea is that we keep the conference vibe going, but in a much smaller space and certainly with a much lower ticket price, so that you can still get together and network with nice people, learn a little bit about LinkedIn, and have some good food. That's basically what we're in, in this for, is to get together, learn something, and eat together.

And I'll have those details out to you pretty soon, but it would be lovely to see you again and not just to communicate online, but to see each other in person. So, look out for those details coming soon.

OK, I think that will do for now. As ever, if you have any questions or feedback for the show, please drop me a line on LinkedIn. I do love your direct messages and especially voice notes, so drop me a line anytime. And until then, I'll catch you later. Cheers.