Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Treat LinkedIn Like Instagram and Watch Your Visibility Soar

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 386

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Think LinkedIn is just a network of stiff profiles? Think again!

Treat it like a professional Instagram to boost your visibility.

Visual content is king on LinkedIn, and I'm here to guide you on harnessing its power for maximum engagement and visibility. Learn how images can outperform other post types and discover effective content patterns by analyzing your LinkedIn newsfeed. I challenge you to embrace more genuine, human-centric imagery in your LinkedIn strategy.

Tune in to learn the data-driven secrets you need to stand out!

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Speaker 1:

those that are successful on LinkedIn treat it like a professional Instagram. I'm going to dig deep into the why and also provide you the data so that you can better understand this, take advantage of it and improve your visibility within LinkedIn.

Speaker 2:

So stay tuned for this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tick-tocking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach helping you grow your business with digital. First marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schafer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Schafer, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to episode number 386 of my podcast. As always, I want to begin this episode with some of the latest news that I have been following that I recommend you check out as well. First of all, linkedin has actually launched a free AI certification course. This course covers foundational AI topics, practical applications and ethics, and really are suitable for all experience levels and can help you boost your career and professional opportunities. If you complete the course, you gain a LinkedIn certificate which can help increase visibility to employers and demonstrate your AI expertise. I really love the fact that LinkedIn is doing this and the source for all the information I share here. Please make sure you sign up to my newsletter at neilschafercom slash newsletter to get all the information. You can also Google it and find it, I'm sure as well, but this is really cool news and really shows that LinkedIn is on this mission. They are social media, but they also want to better equip its members with relevant digital skills. So kudos to LinkedIn and if you are still late to the AI game, you are never too late. Definitely check out those free AI certification courses.

Speaker 1:

We also are seeing a new evolution in AI, of the use of AI to improve other AI models, a method known as AI to build AI. It's basically leveraging AI to optimize the large language models and the outputs of AI that we see around us language models and the outputs of AI that we see around us and it's really, really interesting because this leads to the potential that, well, this could be a self-improving AI explosion or it's AI in a bubble, right. So you know AI continues to evolve. There's no immediate action item or recommendation I have for you right now, but just understand the potential limitations of AI, that, yes, there are ways in which AI can improve itself and AI can help improve your business, but at the end of the day, at some point, especially if you're in a niche industry, it just might run out of content or ideas that are going to help you. So, very futuristic, look at AI very exciting, but also understand those potential limitations as well.

Speaker 1:

Would be just want to plant that seed in your mind and then meta. So you know, back in the day when Facebook was extremely popular still is but you know we had the talk that Facebook was rivaling Google, and then we have TikTok come along, and then we have ChatGPT come along right. So meta is obviously they have a lot of conversations that they are able to leverage to develop their own AI and they have a chat bot. They have their own AI. Now they're reportedly developing a search engine for their chat bot. So the chat bot obviously you see in Facebook messenger as well as when you use AI on their website, but this could allow you to obviously within Facebook to more easily use AI when you use AI on their website. But this could allow you to obviously within Facebook, to more easily use AI when you publish content, but also be able to tap into that AI to search content. In other words, not leaving Facebook if you wanted to do a Google search or a chat GPT search. So really, really interesting development.

Speaker 1:

I think social media back in the day was really all about eyeballs and making social media back in the day was really all about eyeballs and making sure you stay on the site as long as possible. And we're now beginning to evolve, with LinkedIn offering AI tool as part of their paid premium package and we see other networks also providing AI functionality in various formats and even the marketing tools that we use providing AI technology. We're now entering an age where it's not just time on site, but it's also the utilitarian aspect that we are all going to use AI throughout the day. Let our site be the place that you use that AI on. So, really, really interesting development. Once again, nothing that you should immediately be doing, but if you haven't checked out Meta AI, if you haven't spent time on Facebook recently, it is something you should immediately be doing. But if you haven't checked out Meta AI, if you haven't spent time on Facebook recently, it is something you should definitely check out just to understand its capabilities for the future.

Speaker 1:

All right, so today I'm going to talk a little bit about LinkedIn. As you know, it's been about six weeks, but I published Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth. I'm currently working on expanding that book as we speak. Growth I'm currently working on expanding that book as we speak. But I want to share with you that every year, I remotely teach a class as part of a professional certification course at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the class is geared towards financial sales professionals and their use of LinkedIn. So I teach it every year. It's usually in the fall. I'll be teaching it later this month and as part of it, and I've shared this with you on previous episodes. In fact, it was episode number 258. This is back in March of 2022.

Speaker 1:

When I talked about the 10 areas of your LinkedIn profile where a majority of you are failing, this comes from the same data that I took as part of this course, because, as part of teaching the course, I audit the LinkedIn profiles of each participant based on my proprietary list of 20 components to give everyone a score from one to 100. And I do plan to provide this audit to anyone. It will be for a fee because I'm going to put some skin in the game and really want to help you and spend time with you, but once my new store is open and I am building a store on Shopify to help distribute books as well as provide this types of coaching and consulting services and and audits so so stay tuned for that. But I've been teaching this class annually for several years and, while I do plan on talking again about those 10 areas where a majority of profiles are failing, actually this year it was 11 areas and the components and where people fail actually evolves over time, but that's going to be a subject for another episode, but this is the first year and I talk a little bit about this in Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, which I believe the LinkedIn algorithm has significantly changed, even more than in previous years. So let me give you a feel for what I see, based on the data for my own posts. So these are the posts, or I should say the types of posts, which I got the most impressions for on a quarter by quarter basis.

Speaker 1:

So let me take a step back. I am all about impressions. It may get a lot of clicks. It may not get a lot of clicks. If you read digital threads, you understand my view on platform authentic content. It's not necessarily about the clicks and we should be publishing more and more content. That isn't about the clicks. It's the link in bio approach to social media.

Speaker 1:

I also want to say and preface this with the fact that I publish very regularly on LinkedIn. I want to say pretty much every day. There might be days where I publish twice. I don't publish on weekends anymore because I just don't get the visibility when I do. But I publish a variety of text, obviously a lot of links, and I think links has been the primary focus of my LinkedIn publishing. I publish images, I publish newsletters not as regularly as I would like to, but I do. I do live stream video. I also upload repurposed video from those live streams, so I definitely publish content in a lot of different formats and over time.

Speaker 1:

It gives me really really good data to assess what is working and what is not, and it's been a while since I've done this, but I want to walk you through, quarter by quarter, the content that seems to do one. I think you're going to see, or I should say you're going to hear, some common threads here. So I'm going to go back to 2023 Q1, and I'm giving you the top three posts for those quarters in terms of impressions. So 2023 Q1, photo text photo. 2023 Q2, newsletter newsletter photo. 2023 Q3, newsletter newsletter newsletter. 2023 Q4, newsletter live stream image. 2024q1, photo live stream photo. The image is pretty much the same as a photo. Sorry about that. 2024q2, live stream photo photo. 2024q3, newsletter newsletter newsletter. All right, so let's break this down.

Speaker 1:

I think the first, most important thing and the reason why I did this analysis, it was inspired by the audits that I did for this LinkedIn class and recently writing Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth. But every month, I take a look at my Google Analytics and one thing that I look for in my Google Analytics is which social networks are driving how much traffic and how many conversions. And, as you know, if you've been listening to this podcast, pinterest has really come back as the number one driver of traffic. It used to be Twitter. I think the usage of Twitter has really gone down over time, but interestingly enough, I found that Twitter in October of 2024, actually I saw an increase, even though I am publishing less frequently there and I saw LinkedIn take a big drop and Facebook take an even bigger drop, to the point where I don't even know if it's worth publishing on Facebook anymore, in all honesty. But regardless, the big drop in LinkedIn I mean LinkedIn and Facebook combined do not equal what Twitter generated. So it just goes to show you you need to have this data driven approach and I really keep my social media usage on a tight leash because that ends up the creating content, the engaging, spending time in the sites can eat up a lot of time if you're not careful, right.

Speaker 1:

So the number one thing here is that, probably on LinkedIn, half of the content that I publish is link-based, but it does not get impressions and I've been saying this for years. It's the whole reason why I wrote about platform authentic content in digital threads. You know, yes, pinterest, you can still get organic content. Twitter, yes, you can actually still get organic content. The data you know backs that up. Facebook it's been dead for a while. Linkedin it is dying pretty quickly and the reason is that if you see what those little images that appear when you share a link, those default little highlight images that LinkedIn will show, the size of that the vertical size of it really got hacked significantly to the point where it barely shows up in the feed compared to an image or what have you. So link-based content is pretty much dead on LinkedIn and I still publish it. There's still blog posts, podcast episodes, what have you, but I know it's just not going to get that traffic anymore. So I'm trying to shift as much away from it as possible.

Speaker 1:

One way of shifting away from link-based content is to actually publish what you published in that link in the form of a newsletter. So I've been experimenting doing this and I used to republish my weekly email as a newsletter on LinkedIn. That was back in 2023. And you know, when I published it I didn't really see that much engagement, but now I know that newsletters have probably a longer shelf life than other content on LinkedIn and LinkedIn still prioritizes it. I thought newsletters were sort of dead, but apparently the newsletters I did in 2024, q3, and I think I only did three were my top three. So what I started doing 2023, like I said, I repurposed my email newsletters. 2024, I would take one singular podcast episode and I would riff off of that episode and share that episode, including the YouTube video, because now I'm recording, if it's an interview, recording these on LinkedIn and on YouTube as well, and sharing that YouTube video as well for those that wanna see the whole thing.

Speaker 1:

So, summarizing some of the nuggets from that podcast together with that YouTube embed and that has proven to be really, really successful to the point where well, why don't you take the concept? Because a newsletter is a misunderstanding in terms of its terminology on LinkedIn. A newsletter is what LinkedIn posts, what a LinkedIn blog post used to be. It's just that once you have, I believe you only need 100 followers, but once you have that, if you create a newsletter, then you can regularly be publishing this and get subscribers and it gives sort of a taxonomy to what you're publishing. So you could have multiple newsletters if you cover different topics. I think that'd be a little bit crazy. But the concept of the newsletter is you are basically blogging on LinkedIn and it could be similar content to what you use on your website. You can try to lead people to your website through the newsletter, but once again, I think it's the link in bio approach of just keeping people on the site longer, having people consume more of your content, and I think that LinkedIn is seeing that. Hey, there are people that will engage with images, there are people that will watch videos. There's also people because it is a business site that will read longer form content in the form of a newsletter. So that, to me, was a really aha moment. That, okay, I really need to become a more regular producer of these newsletters because they are getting the visibility on LinkedIn that a link-based post will not get.

Speaker 1:

So the other? Well, let's look at two more big takeaways, right? Another big takeaway is videos are not performing that well Now. I know that there are some people because on the LinkedIn app, there is now a dedicated video tab. If you haven't checked on the LinkedIn app, there is now a dedicated video tab. If you haven't checked out the LinkedIn app recently you should and the video tab. If you are able to get your video in, it can get massive amount of impressions. That has yet to happen with me. But on the other hand, if you look at the videos in the video tab, it's not the podcast interview content I've been doing. It's basically one person talking about one topic and there's almost like a format of successful content that you can see there. So video, I think, and even live streams. Now some of my live streams have gotten a lot of visibility. They didn't necessarily have a lot of people join it at the time, but because they had maybe a famous guest or because of the topic over time. Once again it has gotten visibility similar to the newsletter, but not, as I don't want to say viral, but not as high of visibility.

Speaker 1:

But the other thing here and this goes back to the teaser when I started this podcast was the image, right, the photo, and this is where you know when I'm in my newsfeed I predominantly see images and when I do the audits of my students in this class at Wharton, there are clear discrepancies between engagement on images versus non-images, and I should also point out reposts don't really get you that many impressions. I do a bunch of reposts. I might even comment on it. A repost is really not for your benefit but for the benefit of the original creator of that content. So if I am a guest on a podcast and they publish it on LinkedIn, yes, I will repost that at a sentence or two, but it's not going to get a lot of visibility and I want you to understand that as well. That is what the data is showing, but the imagery is really taking a look at LinkedIn and it goes hand in hand with these videos that are becoming popular. In that video tab it is looking at LinkedIn not as a professional networking site, but as a professional version of Instagram, meaning you are visual first. You are visual first with photos, you are visual first with video.

Speaker 1:

And this is the first time, as part of this 20 component audit that I do, where I am now saying, part of this 20 component audit that I do, where I am now saying one of those 20 things is are you publishing images? And that is my challenge to you. If you have not yet been publishing images, I want you to do an analysis in your newsfeed from your network. What sort of images are people publishing. Now I know that there's the selfie with the long explanation of they were a failure, they lost their money, and you don't necessarily need to do that right. You don't need to follow in the footsteps of quote-unquote LinkedIn influencers, but you need to find a groove in this new visual world that we live in, because obviously LinkedIn prefers it and people prefer it. They engage with you on it. So that's my homework for you.

Speaker 1:

If you're already publishing images and you see that engagement, you will tend to want to publish more because you understand that visibility that it brings you. But if not, really take some time to look around. Now, interestingly enough, if you go in on any given LinkedIn profile, you might already know this, but just in case you don't. So if you go into any profile, you can scroll down, you'll see the top matter, you'll see highlights about, you'll see featured and then you'll see activity. If you look at the activity tab, it has these little bubbles posts, comments, videos, images. If they post all this stuff, if you go to images, you can actually see the images that people are publishing on any given profile and then for every one of those images, you can click through and see the original post. This is the research that I recommend you do Now.

Speaker 1:

Graphically created images or just graphics like Canva graphics that doesn't count. That doesn't really resonate. What resonates is pictures of people, like iPhone type pictures. So that is my challenge for you is to if you're not publishing, you're still not sure. Well, that's not what LinkedIn is about. It's not about me publishing photos. I really want you to take a second look. Look at the content that pops up your newsfeed right as your initial data source, and then dig into those profiles that are publishing images that get a lot of engagement. Go in and look at all the different images they published and look for patterns, and I think what you're going to see is, yes, there are selfies, but there's also a lot of imagery when there are business gatherings, when there is an event, when they are meeting with a client, meeting with a colleague, and these are the things.

Speaker 1:

At the end of the day, I always say and if you've been listening to this podcast, you probably heard me say it a thousand times but social media was made for people, not for businesses, right? And this brings social media back down to the human element. I think you know, with COVID and with the emergence of TikTok. There is a greater aspect of this human element, this raw authenticity, as we call it, that's been reintroduced back into social media and I think that's a good thing and I think, yes, even on a network like LinkedIn, it is here and it is here to stay, and those that tap into that will find a lot more success than those that don't. So I provided you the data, I provided you the reasoning, I provided you sort of the steps to take to do the analysis. All that's left is for you to implement and obviously I have written Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth as a way to help you implement.

Speaker 1:

But I really look forward to seeing you take action on this podcast episode and if you did take action, or if you disagree, or if you have further questions, need any clarifications, please reach out to me. I really want to make this podcast a two-way conversation. Neil at neilschafercom I am the real Neil. Folks, that's N-E-A-L. Don't do the Starbucks barista misspelling of my name. But yeah, I would just love to hear from you and I hope that this inspires you to do more and to have better results on LinkedIn and really on any other social network. But I think this is really this professional version of Instagram is really specific to LinkedIn, as you can imagine.

Speaker 1:

All right, well, that's a wrap on another edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. I wanna thank you for all your subscriptions, thank you for those that continue to listen and those that have taken the extra step to review this podcast. If you have reviewed this podcast, please, please, make sure you send me a screenshot so that I can personally thank you for that review. Also, if you haven't hit that subscribe button, the way that I structure this podcast is one half of me doing solo episodes like this and one half of doing interviews, and I've already published interviews well into the future. We have some great interviews coming up on a variety of topics AI generated content and Google and SEO, best practices for email marketing for small businesses, e-commerce marketing, influencer marketing, behavior, science in marketing, clarity with your messages. It covers a wide range of topics, but really, my promise to you is to deliver positive ROI with each episode, so I hope you'll stay subscribed. And well, all that's left to say is that's it for another edition of your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

This is your Digital Marketing Coach Neal podcastneilschafercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your Digital Marketing Coach.