Hello and welcome to another episode of the LinkedIn podcast for active LinkedIn users who are keen to keep up to date and improve their performance on the worlds largest professional networking platform.

An especially warm welcome to any new listeners, I hope you find this episode useful and entertaining. If you want to stay with us and listen to future episodes just search for LinkedInformed on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or TuneIn on your smartphone and subscribe for free.

This week I want to concentrate on a topic I have had my eyes on for some time.

LinkedIn pods are not new but they have been gaining popularity over the last 6 months or so. Like any business idea, they can be beneficial but only when implemented well, so I wanted to spend some time understanding what that looked like before publishing this episode.

Before I get to that though I wanted to revisit last weeks episode and share some audio feedback I received from two listeners

Nik makes a great point. A follow-up message can be very worthwhile if done in the right way. My point last week was mainly referring to the dreaded salesy follow up message we often receive minutes after accepting an invitation to connect.

John Espirian also sent in his feedback which you can listen to in the show.

I can see where John is coming from but I don’t believe this is about the ‘ownership’ of a post but rather it’s about having respect and consideration for the main original poster. Commenting helps them, linking away from the thread rarely does. If you believe you can provide an answer to a question posed and the only way to easily do it is via a link then it might be OK but I believe it’s polite and respectful to ask the original poster first.

I really appreciate feedback like this, please feel free to leave me a voice message at any time by clicking on the orange ‘ask me a question’ button to the right of this page.

New LinkedIn Feature

Angus Grady contacted me this week with a voice message…on LinkedIn!

Apparently, you can send a 60-second voice message – it’s clearly in the early stages of roll-out as I don’t know of anyone else who has this yet but I think it’s a great idea.

I doubt it will catch on though as this type of message has been available on Whatsapp and iMessage for years and hardly anyone uses it!

Here is Angus’ post about it;

When you receive an audio message it looks like this;

I do think LinkedIn should encourage it though as it’s unlikely to be used by spammers and automation tools.

What next? This nicely lays the way for video messaging doesn’t it?

LinkedIn also announced that is had reached 50 million members in India, quite incredible really as it only seems like yesterday when LinkedIn had less than 50 million worldwide!

I sense that LinkedIn is used very differently in India but I really don’t know as I’ve never worked there. Do we have any Indian listeners? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

LinkedIn Pods

What are pods?

Sometimes they are called engagement or amplify or boosting pods. The basic premise is that a group of active users form a group/community somewhere online (LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack or any other online community site) and announce (with a link) to the group everytime they publish a post or article on LinkedIn. The agreement is that everyone in the group then engages with that post (Liking and/or commenting).

This has two effects;

1. It spreads the post to a section of their followers which is likely to increase views and engagement
2. The algorithm will give an extra boost to more of your followers if it believes the post is popular. This calculation seems to be made within the first hour after posting.

Pods are sometimes managed by one individual with strict rules and procedures and others are managed much more loosely. Some pods have hundreds of members and others are much smaller.

I first came across them last year when a listener directed me to a Facebook group that was set up for this purpose, then again earlier this year when I saw this article. My first reaction was that they seemed somewhat ‘shady’ and populated by ‘internet marketers’ who were trying to cut corners and gain quick wins (as they do!).

Then a couple of months ago, I was invited to join one by someone I knew and respected so I thought I would join to learn more and assess it’s effectiveness.

My experience is that they do work but only when managed correctly but I wanted to get the views and knowledge from someone who has been using pods for much longer – enter podcast listener Lynnaire Johnston.

I really enjoyed my chat with Lynnaire, I have found some pods are very secretive about how they operate but Lynnaire couldn’t have been more open.

The interview lasted almost an hour so I have split it into two sections. Next week you can hear the second half as well as my conclusions.

Enjoy!