492. More about AI, plus the Video tab returns

John Espirian: 00:00:00

We're going to talk a little bit more about AI on LinkedIn, plus the return of a LinkedIn mobile feature. This is episode 492 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone, I'm John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, a weekly show about LinkedIn best practice. And as usual, we're going to get started with the Postbag section.

I think we might be setting a record this week. We've got 4 Postbag entries and they're all as voice notes.

So, we're going to start with the first one, which is harks back to last week's episode that mentions AI, and this one comes to us from Trevor Lambert.

Trevor Lambert: 00:00:47

Trevor Lambert here. I was disappointed to hear you apparently lumping all AI-generated and AI assistant content together as "AI slop" on the latest Informed podcast.

As somebody who proudly credits ChatGPT as the co-author of my white paper, the Death of Knowledge, AI Human Knowing and the Future of Expertise, I'd argue the AI-assisted material I produce is better than most of the human slop I find on LinkedIn.

I do accept that plenty of people are churning out poor content with AI, but to as ever thus, whether the tool is a word processor or Claude, it's the quality of the thinking that goes in that determines the result, not the tools used.

By the way, this note was written by me, but edited by AI. Keep up the good work. Cheers, John.

John Espirian: 00:01:29

OK, so thank you to Trevor for that contribution. I wouldn't say that I lump all AI-generated content together as slop, but a lot of people do take the easy route, and it's very easy to spot when that content has been generated. A lot of it looks quite identikit in posts and in comments.

If you take the approach that Heather Murray did, who spoke at our UpLift Live 26 conference in March, she went through quite a long process onstage of talking people about how to create this, what she calls a "LinkedIn post generating machine", and that requires quite a lot of inputs, quite a lot of effort to set up.

If you're going to put that kind of effort into training your AI tool of choice in your beliefs, your tone of voice, which sources it should choose from, what your back catalogue is, all of that stuff requires effort to do the setup. If you're going to do that, then you're probably going to get something pretty good out the other side, and I don't have a huge objection to that kind of thing.

It's just that easy button stuff. The thing that looks like it's taken a few seconds in ChatGPT or whatever. That's the thing I don't like. And there's a problem with LinkedIn making that an easy option for people because there's AI prompts all over the platform and I think that's a bit of an issue. And that feeds into what our next voice note, which comes from Ross Thorpe, is exactly about. So, let's go to Ross right now.

Ross Thorpe: 00:02:57

red reported back in November: 2024

It's going to be tricky when you consider that a year and a half ago, they were over 50% of their posts being written by AI.

The other thing here is that they, I think they're trying to have their cake and eat it too, because it's still got a huge amount of AI written into it. It literally says, let me help you strengthen your post with AI. Write this post with AI.

So, I don't see how they're going to be able to deprioritise AI-written content and still have tools embedded into the platform to get you to write with it. I guess the answer here is that as long as it's their AI tool, it's OK.

Ultimately, you can't serve two masters. You can't ride a two horses with one ass. And I think this may just be a bit of like greenwashing but the AI version. You know, non AI washing I think might be occurring here with LinkedIn to an extent.

John Espirian: 00:04:13

So, yes, thank you for that, Ross. It's exactly the point that I wanted to make.

You know, how can on one hand LinkedIn be prompting people to use AI in various places, you know, on your profile, in posts, even in direct messages, job applications and so forth. But then on the other hand, talk about, you know, trying to defeat AI based automation in the feed. It's going to be a difficult one to get right.

And what we want to see is if people are going to use it, that they use it thoughtfully and put some effort in and not just hit a single button to generate their content.

I should mention at this point as well, I've enjoyed testing Ross's new platform.

So, Ross has launched a social media platform of his own called Rooverse, and the USP of that is there's no AI allowed at all and I've been testing it recently and although there aren't many users there, I can kind of guarantee that all the people who are there are real people. I've even as a couple of tests I've deliberately tried to put some AI stuff up and it stops you. So, that's something you might want to check out.

I'll put a link to the platform in the show notes for those who just don't want AI on their social media. It might be a little playground for you to test out and see what you think.

So, just to round up the thoughts around this. I think AI certainly has its uses, but I just think too many people use it thoughtlessly and therefore the quality of the content coming out is no good at all.

OK, we'll move on to another topic, and this one's another voice note that's come into the Postbag, and this one is from Espresso+ member Ashley Leeds.

Ashley Leeds: 00:05:51

Hey John, it's Ashley Leeds here, the 15-minute guy. Loving your show.

Quick question for you. On LinkedIn you can actually change your URL. Most people it starts with Ashley - Leeds and then a load of numbers. I've changed mine to Ashley Leeds the 15-minute guy, but I see some people putting random words there or just their company name.

So, which is the best way to set up the LinkedIn URL and does it affect your SEO and how you get found on Google and AI? Thanks very much indeed. Love the show. Cheerio.

John Espirian: 00:06:23

So, thank you for that question, Ashley. It does come up from time to time.

I'm not convinced that there's any search engine optimisation value in putting these keywords into your username of your LinkedIn profile URL. I do think you should pick something that you're almost never likely to need to change. If you can go for your real name, I think that looks neatest.

You've got to remember that these profile URLs might end up maybe on a business card, maybe in an email, maybe on some other list of links somewhere. So, you want something that looks elegant alongside everything else that you do, rather than just something that is crammed full of keywords in order to give you maybe a 1% edge in being more likely to be found, and I'm not even sure it does that to be honest.

You can change your profile URL, but you need to remember that if you do that there is a chance that the old link will stop working.

I know that when you very first set up your LinkedIn profile, which might be years ago for a lot of us, the first username that you get will probably end in a string of letters and numbers, and if you change that to customise it in any way at all, that original URL will still work, which is good news, but then if you make subsequent changes after that, I think only then the most recent one before is likely to work, or possibly just the original and whatever your new one is. So, if you've got some interim usernames in there, they might just break.

So, if you've put them out into the world and then you, on a whim, you decide to change things, you might possibly be pointing someone towards a broken link. So, think carefully and choose something that reflects you, the person, more than just your role, because remember that roles change.

You might be working in marketing now, but you might switch to something totally different in a couple of years. Who knows what the future holds? So, I would keep it short and sweet and linked as much as possible just to your name rather than to your role. That's my recommendation.

OK, the last Postbag item, yet another voice note, our fourth one this week comes to us from the Netherlands. This is Trudy Pannekeet.

Trudy Pannekeet: 00:08:37

Hi John, I've got a Postbag question for you. This is Trudy Pannekeet from the Netherlands. If you have a DM group on LinkedIn, you thought you talked about DMs in the UpLift Live.

And if you have, let's say group chat on LinkedIn and you add somebody to it later, can they read the chat history? I guess you told us, but I can't remember, so I know you cannot do it on WhatsApp, but can you do it? Can they read the chat history in LinkedIn DMs. Like to hear from you. Bye.

John Espirian: 00:09:08

Thank you for that, Trudy. And this should be a fairly simple one to close off the postbag section. I believe the answer is no. Anyone added to a group DM chat on LinkedIn would not then be able to see the history of the chat. And I think that's probably for the best.

If you think about people debating whether a certain person should be added or not, it would be awkward to be showing people that history. So, I don't believe it is shown. Last time I checked with a colleague, it wasn't.

But of course, LinkedIn being LinkedIn, you never know when they might just change the rules and they never tell us when they do change the rules, but for the time being, it looks as though adding someone to the group chat will mean actually they have the same privileges as everyone else in terms of being able to add or remove members themselves, including the person who created the chat, which is a bit weird, but people added to a group DM won't be able to see the history of that conversation.

OK, that really was a bumper Postbag section. Just a couple of other things I want to mention for this week.

First is that the Video tab is coming back to the mobile app. So, at the moment if you look at the LinkedIn mobile app, you won't see a dedicated button that will let you see just videos.

This used to be in place. LinkedIn tested it for a while and then removed it. But they've recently announced that this is coming back and it's starting in 3 regions, so the UK, Australia, and Canada.

Now, at the time of recording, I don't have it back yet. When I do, I expect it will appear in the same position it was in before, which is in the bottom-left corner. So, you've got a row of icons along the bottom. So, where the My Network icon was, I expect that to be replaced by Video.

I must admit that I looked at it out of interest when it first appeared, but the quality of the videos that were in there, the relevance they had to me, wasn't great. So, I didn't really spend much time just scrolling pure videos.

I would rather just go back to the main home feed and if an interesting video happened to pop up in that feed, then of course I would watch it and engage as normal. But I wouldn't be specifically seeking out videos. Now, in the time between LinkedIn testing this before and now, I'm sure the recommendation algorithms and so forth have improved so that better videos will be suggested.

Only time will tell whether it plays out like that. I will certainly test it when I get it. But even if they're better, I still don't think LinkedIn is great as a video platform. So, whether I'm going to spend any more time consuming content because of that new feature, I doubt it.

But that's the whole point of bringing it back in a limited way. If it works in the UK and Australia and Canada. So, for example, if total session time increases or the number of posts that people engage with increases, then LinkedIn will surely roll it out to everyone else. As I say, only time will tell. Look out for that coming to your mobile app pretty soon.

The last item for this week also relates to the LinkedIn mobile app, which is, I'm seeing now that when you go to someone's profile, if you're not connected with them, you might see a Follow button, you might see a Connect button.

If you see the Connect button and you tap it now, you're getting prompted as to whether you want to send an invitation note rather than just firing off a blank invitation, which it used to do by default. I think that's a good feature. LinkedIn has tested this before and then it's disappeared pretty quickly.

So, hopefully it's here to stay this time because for those of us who do like to personalise our invitations, it's nice to be given the prompt rather than have to go looking for the specific personalise option. So, that's there for me now. Go and check it yourself.

If you want to go and find anyone you're not connected with on the LinkedIn mobile app, hit the Connect button and see whether it prompts you as to whether you want to send an invitation or not.

Some people still believe that sending a completely empty invitation is better, because then you can decide to have a conversation after you've made the connection. I don't favour that approach. I'd rather be up front, and I'm never spammy in my approaches. It'll always be a human-crafted message that shows that I've got some interest in the person and I'll try and reference maybe a mutual connection or some piece of content that got my attention, or a profile that got my attention so people know that it's a real person making the outreach. I think that's what counts. And then often conversations flow after that.

And also the whole point of sending an invitation note, I think, is it kind of sets an anchor on the direct message thread so that if you go back in a few months' time and you can then see what happened, you'll remind yourself of who started the connection and why that connection was made. If you don't have that anchor point, then it can feel like a bit of a numbers game, which I don't recommend. So, there we go.

Anyway, look out for this on the LinkedIn mobile app that the Connect button now prompts you to send an invitation note. If you are on Premium like me, there's no limitations. There's no real effective upper limit for the number of those invitations that you can personalise.

If you've got a free account, which is what most people do, sadly, you can only send 3 personalised invitations per month before you hit your cap, and LinkedIn will try and upsell you to Premium. I don't recommend upgrading to Premium for that reason. There are other reasons that you might want to upgrade. That's not one of them.

Not a real fan of that limit, but it's there. So, something to keep in mind.

OK, that will do for now. That was a bit longer than I was expecting it to be because of that longer Postbag. But as usual, if you've got any other feedback, if you want to talk even longer about the AI issue, then please let me know. Or any other feedback or questions that I can include in next week's show.

I really prefer voice notes if possible, but if not, just send me a DM. Anyone can DM me on LinkedIn, even if we're not connected. And until then, I'll see you all again next week.