493. Who is looking at your content?

John Espirian: 00:00:00

Who is looking at your content on LinkedIn? That's the topic of the show this week. It's episode 493 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone. I'm John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, a weekly show about LinkedIn best practice. Now, we would normally start the show with Postbag listener questions. We didn't actually receive anything this week, possibly because it's been a half-term holiday, so schools have been out and people have been on holiday here in the UK. But not to worry, we've got a short show this week and our main topic is about who is looking at your content.

So, this topic was prompted by a change to the LinkedIn analytics that's been announced by LinkedIn recently. They shared a screenshot of a new look for the analytics panel. When you look at your posts, you can see the number of likes and the number of comments and so forth. But you can also see not only now the number of impressions that a post has received, but also where those impressions have come from.

An impression just means that a piece of content on LinkedIn has been loaded into someone's feed and it could have been viewed. And until now that was just a raw number. So, maybe a thousand impressions or whatever.

But now LinkedIn is changing things so that there's a breakdown of where those impressions come from and they're breaking it down by "in network" and "out of network".

What that means is that if someone is a connection of yours or if they're following you, that's considered "in network" and if they're a 2nd- or 3rd-level connection or if they're not following you at all, then that's an "out of network" connection. So, we're seeing percentages now.

I don't actually have this on my profile just yet, but I have seen a screenshot from LinkedIn and I shared it on my feed recently and I'll put that into the show notes that accompany this episode.

A few people are getting excited about seeing this breakdown being included in analytics. I'm not sure how valuable it is. I think it'll be curious to see what the breakdown is the first time this appears on my account. But I'm not expecting a huge level of variance.

You know, if it does break down at say 40% in my network and 60% out, I can't see how that stat is going to vary particularly as each of my posts go out, and I don't know how much that's going to inform my thinking.

I'm interested in speaking to my existing network, but it's in my experience a lot of new business certainly comes from reaching people who are outside of your network and kind of pulling them in and having conversations. In my case with a view to doing some kind of LinkedIn training engagement together.

So, I'm interested in getting I suppose more people outside of my network seeing my content.

The people who are closest to me in my network are already in my Espresso+ community and I'm reaching them not via just public posting: it's much more private content, podcasts and emails and so forth. So, I'm already reaching those people reasonably reliably. I suppose I'm more interested in reaching people outside my network.

I'm just not convinced about how much this new stat is going to give me on that front.

Now, that the algorithms have been re-geared a little bit to make the content that you see much more around subject matter interest rather than just the people that you're connected with and follow, I would expect that the out of network proportions that are reported by this new analytics dimension are probably going to be higher than they would have been if we were seeing these same analytics maybe 18 months ago.

I certainly find that when I'm scrolling my feed now I am seeing content that is relevant to me, but increasingly it's coming from people who I might never have heard of before in my feed rather than seeing a feed that is predominantly filled with people I'm already connected with.

So, I'm interested to see how that works out for you, and I'd love to hear your opinions on whether you think this stat is going to be useful, this analytics dimension is going to be useful, and also whether you like the move towards more subject-based, topic-based interest content in your feed rather than just the people you follow.

I mean I've heard some people say that they're quite frustrated in that they've elected to connect with certain people, they've elected to follow certain people and then they never actually see those people in their feed, because maybe LinkedIn has decided that their content isn't as relevant to the viewer as they might have thought. So, interested to hear your thoughts on that one.

If you want to break through a little bit and get out of the algorithmic sorting of your feed content, just remember that at the top of your feed, certainly on desktop and for some people on mobile, you can choose to show not just what LinkedIn thinks are the top posts, but you can show recent posts. So, things are date ordered and there's even a permanent setting for that in your Settings & Privacy.

So, that's a way of kind of breaking out of algorithmic sorting and just looking at the most recent content. My feed feels quite different whenever I do that. I have had periods where I've gone for just looking at the most recent stuff. In the end, I tend to come back to the top sorting. So, I think LinkedIn is doing a reasonably good job at doing that. But just remember, that is an option to you if you are maybe feeling a little bit bored with your feed and you just want to change it up a little bit.

This topic has prompted another question, which I've been pondering for a while: how much effort should you put into commenting on other people's content?

It's always been the case, or until now, it's really been the case that if you comment more on other people's content, they do stand a higher chance of seeing your content. And I think that's still true to some extent.

So, I think it's a good thing to be a good LinkedIn citizen and comment where you think you can add some value. But I find a lot of times, you know, I do a lot of commenting on LinkedIn and many times I don't seem to get any sort of response at all, even though I'm trying to be helpful, I'm trying to be supportive of the author.

You know, I'm making sure that if there are any ideas I'm challenging, then I'm challenging the ideas rather than the person, trying to make sure that, you know, if I've got some data to share, I share it appropriately where possible and to show a little bit of personality in my comments.

These are good practices, I think, but many times I don't get very much of a response, and that completely turns me off from wanting to support that content creator in the future.

So, if you are creating content, this is a reminder to you to make sure that if anyone shows any kind of engagement on your content, do please acknowledge them if you can, and try and keep the conversation going in the comments, especially if it's a big creator. I find that if I do add a comment to something that's already reasonably popular, my chances of getting something back is very low. And you just start to wonder, what is this about? Why am I wasting my time doing this when I'm just effectively, it feels sometimes like you're talking into the void.

So, I've kind of got a policy now that if I see something interesting and I comment on it and then I don't get any kind of response. I'm probably going to make a little mental note of that and probably not support that kind of content in the future.

I'd be interested to hear whether you take that same attitude or whether it's something you've never really thought about before, or maybe you just think that you'll just comment if you feel it's appropriate and you don't even expect a reply. Either way, I'd like to know what you think about that topic.

A couple of quick tips that I picked up during a webinar that Richard van der Blom was on this past week. He was one of our speakers at the very first UpLift Live conference and a couple of tips I thought were interesting, so I'm going to share what Richard said.

First of all, that if you receive generated comments on your posts, I think we all know what those kind of things look like, there might be a temptation to delete those comments. You just don't want robots clogging up, you know, the comments section of your post. That's a natural instinct, I think.

But Richard recommended not deleting such comments because that could be a signal to the LinkedIn algorithm that you are attempting to stifle conversation.

So, instead of doing that, you might want to respond and even maybe call people out publicly, depending on how brave you are, but not to delete those comments. Let other people see that they are AI generated and kind of leave it at that.

And maybe if you do that, then the engagement signal hangs around, but the person doing it might perhaps be less likely to do it in future. So, that's an interesting take from Richard.

And the other thing that he mentioned as well is that there has been, I've seen a lot of posts where at the end, instead of just providing a resource that the person is talking about, someone might end their post by saying, you know, "comment this special word to get access to this result". You know, "comment X to get Y".

And I always find that quite frustrating because I think if you've got the PDF or the link to the web page in question or the, you know, top 10 questions, you should be asking people, whatever it is that you're providing, just provide the thing, you know, LinkedIn gives you the tools to do exactly that. You don't have to gatekeep this stuff. And the people who do gatekeep it, they're just, it's just a form of engagement bait.

You know, they want to drill up their numbers because they know that they'll get lots of people saying what that secret word is, and then maybe they don't even follow up to actually deliver the resources.

So, Richard was saying that a number of people have contacted him about this and even Top Voices on LinkedIn and they've reported dramatic drops in reach of their posts immediately after deploying that "comment X to get Y" trick. And LinkedIn has said themselves in support posts, you know, ticket responses, that this looks like artificial engagement.

So, it's not AI per se, but it is something that is gaming the algorithm a little bit. And so if they're taking steps against that, don't use that method. I think it's a bad thing to do anyway.

Even if there weren't any evidence that it would, you know, because a problem for your future posts, it's just bad practice. The optics look terrible and it really puts me off a content creator. So, don't do that if you can.

My colleague Gus Bhandal has shared a screenshot of his mobile app screen on LinkedIn. And we knew that the Video tab was coming back for people in the UK, Australia, and Canada, and he now has it. I don't yet have it.

Previously the Video tab appeared in the bottom-left of the screen where the My Network button was. Now, it's appearing towards the bottom-right of the screen instead. So, the bottom panel now has Home, My Network, Notifications right in the middle and then Video and then Jobs.

And if you wanted to start a new post, because one of the buttons that's been replaced is the post button that's now in the top-right corner of the mobile app. So, look out for that. It is rolling out in the UK, Australia, and Canada. Still not convinced the Video tab is going to work brilliantly for people. I can't really imagine people sitting there and kind of doom scrolling LinkedIn videos, but we'll see whether the quality has improved since the last time that was there.

OK, that will do for now. As usual, If you have any questions or any concerns about how LinkedIn works or anything you've spotted that looks a bit weird, please let me know. Especially if you could send me a voice note, that would be fantastic because then I can include your voice on the show. And until next time, have a great week and we'll speak to you soon.