Welcome to episode 245. I hope you had a good week on LinkedIn, things definitely seem to be getting back to normal after the troubles of last week. That said, I know some of you are still finding you are invisible in searches so hang in there, the issue does appear to be getting better.

This week I want to focus on LinkedIn organic reach and try to answer the question ‘Has it peaked or is there more to come?’

But first……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Not a lot happening this week but for those of you who are excitedly awaiting access to LinkedIn Live video then you might find this video interesting;

Also, listener, Jaz Greer got in touch to let us all know about a glitch that is appearing on LinkedIn;

When I get a notification of peoples Birthdays I always like to send greetings and I use the preset text. Of late I have seen Happy Birthday in the message box and press send only to see posted “thank you for endorsing me for start ups” etc

What a hilarious glitch, clearly wires have (literally) got crossed somewhere!

It’s probably karma for those people who insist on sending those annoying birthday messages to strangers on LinkedIn……sorry Jaz!

New LinkedIn Feature

John Espirian spotted that you can now tag people in image posts, this is how you do it;

I think this is a welcome new feature, it might encourage more spam tagging but I don’t see it being any worse than it is already. Whilst you can tag people in the text of an image post, the viewer is likely to focus more on the image so this is likely to result in more profile views for those you tag.

Additionally, via the edit feature, you can add text to your image!

Reactions are coming to LinkedIn!

Click on the image to view the article

I can’t see me ever using these but it makes sense for a generation of users who are used to this feature on Facebook. I wonder if they will give a ranking to them in terms of sharing it to followers ie is a ❤️worth more than a ???…..?!

As you can see in the above video, I took a thoroughly enjoyable day off this week to spend a day with LinkedIn ads expert AJ Wilcox.  AJ was coming to the UK to speak at a conference and confided in me that his dream has always been to tour the Aston Martin factory, so we went together and had a great time…..we didn’t buy a car though…next year Rodney!

We had an interesting chat about this post from Ian Brodie;

Ian is also a friend of mine and someone whose judgment and opinion I respect so I was interested to explore the difference between AJ’s advice covered in episode 242 where he advocates a minimum $15k LTV and a spend of $3-5k per campaign whereas Ian has experienced consistent success at much lower levels than that.

Having heard both sides, my conclusion is that to get Ad’s to work at Ian’s level of spend you need a very strong downstream process ie a fantastic lead page that converts and a well-honed follow-up process to convert leads into sales. I know Ian has this whereas AJ’s experience is that most people don’t hence why he takes a higher figure as the average for most businesses.

Conclusion: Don’t pay for LinkedIn ads until you have perfected your lead conversion process unless you are prepared to pay at least $15k

I mentioned Janine in a recent episode about video posts and here she is again, delivering an excellent post which attracted some fantastic levels of engagement.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with her message but I love the way she delivers it!

In her example, she describes a Facebook ad from a company she had never heard of before. The message was perfectly targeted at her and so she bought the programme. This turned out to be a great product but I would suggest she just struck lucky!

Just because a company (or their agency) can write a great ad’ it doesn’t mean they can deliver a great product or service. Most don’t in my experience and many people have learnt this the hard way so now, online buyers are more cautious and that is why some level of relationship and trust needs to be built before you can expect to make a sale.

7 touch points is just a random number but the point is correct, you need to build a relationship over time in order to attract business online.

Great post though! Thanks to Emmie Faust for suggesting it.

Has Organic Reach Peaked on LinkedIn?

It seems like the world has finally woken up to LinkedIn, even Gary Vaynerchuck has decided it’s THE platform to use today and the reason for all this interest?….Insane organic reach (their words not mine).

By organic reach they mean the ability to reach a greater number of people without the need to advertise. This means posts (not Articles) on LinkedIn.

In this video post, Gary Vee suggests this might not last forever….and he is right!

Whilst Gary is right, he is also part of the problem because many more people will start following his advice and posting on LinkedIn, the net result will be that LinkedIn may change the algorithms to suppress the distribution of your posts. Why? Because they want to sell more ads!

The justification behind this theory is what happened with Facebook. Facebook organic reach used to be amazing whereas now you can get literally a few dozen views on a post. Only advertising-sponsored content gets really good reach on Facebook these days.

That’s the theory and it might be correct but I’m not so sure. LinkedIn is a very different business from Facebook and has traditionally had a very different monetisation model. Facebook is essentially just an advertising business, LinkedIn makes money by selling Recruiter and Sales Navigator licences. Advertising has traditionally been a less important revenue stream.

Advertising is, however, growing at a rapid rate and might become a more important revenue stream so it is entirely possible that organic reach might decrease, in fact for some people (high influencers) this has already happened.

All that said, I don’t think organic reach has peaked. My experience is that the audience is getting more choosy about what they engage with on LinkedIn and the competition for someone’s attention and engagement has never been greater so the content needs to be of the highest quality

This question wasn’t strictly sent to answer on the show, in fact, it wasn’t even sent to me to answer, it was merely a suggestion for a show topic from a listener but I wanted to feature it because I think it’s a great question and something to really think about;

Is LinkedIn an audience or a network?

I believe it’s both.

The people who follow you are an audience

The people you connect with are a network or/and an audience

The rest of those on LinkedIn who are appropriate to you are an audience. They only become an audience if the above two engage with your content or they actively search for your type of content.

In essence, the audience are people you wish to influence and potentially do business with whereas a network acts as a gateway to your audience.

That’s how I see it anyway but I’d love to hear your views.

That’s all for this week. There will be no episode next week to allow you all to focus on your family over the Easter holiday.

Have a good one.