Welcome to episode 233 and this week I’m looking forward and planning for next year.

What is your plan for LinkedIn next year? Hopefully, I can stimulate a few ideas for you in this episode.

Before that though…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week.

I was fascinated to see this post go viral this week. It’s not applicable for post of the week because I don’t think it’s an especially great video post but it is worth examining why it went viral.

This post currently has over 919,000 views!

It doesn’t really say much and it’s definitely a me me me post which typically fail. So why has it gone viral?

OK it’s a pretty girl and the jig is a little bit provocative…but nothing OTT in my opinion. I guess that is the key, it is borderline inappropriate so some people complain and others come to her defence…it’s in the margins where debate flourishes!

Animoto Partners with LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to Facilitate Video Creation for Marketers

This is an interesting move, I suspect the templates are pretty cheesy but very useful for smaller companies who can’t afford to make their own videos. My only issue is that with only 6 templates available I fear we might be seeing the same video in ads (different words and message) time and time again in our feeds!

A document from LinkedIn Marketing services called The Social Media Manager’s Guide to LinkedIn had me scratching my head this week. In particular, I found it hard to believe that the number of active members had risen from 22-25% per month earlier this to a staggering 40% daily!!

I know activity has increased but those figures required a deeper investigation. It appears that the data used in that guide is not from LinkedIn but from a 3rd party blog post!! So to be clear. The marketing team at LinkedIn are quoting data in their marketing material that is not directly sourced from the company they work for…what?!!

I know from experience that figures quoted by 3rd parties are very often inaccurate…..but surely LinkedIn marketing wouldn’t use inaccurate data!

The blog post figures didn’t seem to add up to me and sure enough, when I questioned the author he replied “Thanks for bringing this to my attention. There were some issues and we’ve updated the article to reflect the latest numbers as reported by LinkedIn.” It turns out that they sourced the numbers from research conducted by web usage company Apptopia and have not been confirmed by LinkedIn.

Ominously the daily active figure disappeared from the updated article! The number of members that are active on a monthly basis is 260m which is 44% of all members. I guess it’s possible that virtually all of them (40 of the 44) are active daily but highly unlikely!

I have since found several other LinkedIn influencers and experts quoting this figure of 40% daily and why wouldn’t they? LinkedIn use it themselves…it must be true! Well, I’ve been doing this job long enough to know that LinkedIn are so secretive that their internal staff don’t even get access to such numbers so they have to resort to using figures quoted elsewhere….even if they turn out to be wrong!

All that said, an increase from 22% to 44% monthly is still very impressive!

Update from episode 231 – Posting for Engagement

Remember my analysis of this post?

I received so much enthusiast feedback on this, including this voicemail from Nigel.

Unfortunately, Lisa has had a very busy couple of weeks so she hasn’t been able to post my recommended updated version of this as yet. I’m hoping to be able to report back soon.

New Feature Update

Document posts are flying! This new type of post seems to be getting some sort of algorithm boost. This post has (at the time of publishing) 185,000 views and just look at the amount of engagement listener John Espirian achieved with his first document post! If you have the feature, I would strongly recommend you start using it.

I also reported last week that InMails seems to have an indication of what account they may have been sent from. Friend of the show AJ Wilcox got in touch to suggest that might have been an indicator that it might be advertising focused. LinkedIn’s sponsored Inmail messages have a frequency cap of 45 days which means that you’ll only ever receive one every 45 days. It’s hard for LinkedIn sales reps to convince potential advertisers of the efficacy of that as a format when they’re constantly saying “I get InMail messages from people I don’t know all the time”. He wouldn’t be surprised if they started labelling them just to make that conversation easier to have.

John Espirian sent this one.

Planning for 2019

Now I’m no planner, it’s definitely one of my weaknesses so traditionally I get to January, having had a great Christmas break and then start thinking…..

I need a plan for this year!

The problem is that the month is already underway so I tell myself every year that I’m going to do this plan in December….and then December comes, Christmas starts to dominate and I’m back to where I was at the start of the year…planning again whilst others are taking action!

It might only be the start of December but we all know that we easily get distracted towards the end of this month so I’m suggesting that now is the time to take yourself away (maybe with others) from your normal office and spend some quality time planning what you will do next year.

With regards to LinkedIn, these are the areas I would suggest adding to your agenda;

• Consider reducing those you follow to radically lower the number of people that the algorithm has to choose from. This could really help to improve the quality of your feed and the consequence of that should be greater engagement. Go to the ‘Me’ menu (desktop) and then ‘posts and activity’ then ‘Your followers’ in the left panel. Now change to ‘Following’ at the top of the next page, scroll through and unfollow. The other way is to do it from your homepage feed which can be more effective.
• Cull your connections. This depends on how many you have but if you are over 5000 (and not a recruiter) then there are real advantages to be had from a smaller network. This helps with the first point (your feed) but it also helps to increase the possibility that your posts will land on the home page of those you are targetting and really want to reach. Go to ‘My network’ and click on your connections number (top left) and the search with filters. Do this on desktop, not the mobile app because the filters are useless.
• Research thoroughly the content topics that your target audience respond to. Use your company page ‘Content suggestions’ feature covered in episode 230 as well as going to the profiles of active people from your target audience and looking at their activity.
• Plan your posts and Article for the first quarter. My suggestion is to plan one each week and just one Article in the quarter. You will end up doing more posts because inspiration will come to you every week but at least plan one based on topics that you know will resonate with your target audience. I believe you are better posting less with higher views per post than matching the view number via many posts. The latter will not give you the variety of coverage that you need.
• Get into Video! Video posts are very popular and extremely effective in developing a relationship with your target audience (which is critical). If you haven’t tried it yet then 2019 is the year you really need to crack video. Book on a course, observe what others are doing and do whatever required to make it a priority. Live video is likely to happen in 2019 so don’t get left behind!
• Revamp your company Page. I have never been a fan of company pages as I think they achieve very little but with the new design and added features it’s possible they may start to have more impact. The very least you can do is spend a bit of time refreshing yours – check the copy and refresh it to more accurately reflect where your business is it. Consider upgrading the logo (maybe using a .gif to give it some movement) and think about how you can use the ‘call to action’ button (see below)

I may be a poor planner but that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the benefits of it!

Let’s get ready for a fantastic, highly visible and successful 2019 on LinkedIn!

That’s all for this week. Have a fantastic week, get that planning day in your diary and I will be back soon.