A (2:18)

I would actually really like that because it's been a long time since someone has dug into what I do and told me what's working or not. But first, Julia, who are you? Tell us about you.

C (2:26)

Yeah, so I work at LinkedIn. I've been at LinkedIn for coming up on 12 years, so quite a long time. I work on our product marketing team and on some of our core consumer features. So your feed all the different types of content in your feed, the products that we build for creators, and really helping creators figure out how to make the most of all of those features. And then some of our other newer offerings, like the games on LinkedIn, if you've tried playing those. I have, yes. I'm addicted to zip myself, but everybody's got their favorite. And so, yeah, I've been at LinkedIn a long time. More recently, I'll say in the last two years, kind of started my own LinkedIn content creation journey myself, where it was really sort of born out of just, hey, I'm the product marketer who works on these features. What kind of marketer would I be if I didn't take them for a test run? And so I've sort of stumbled my way into creating content on my own, and I've been having a lot of fun with it. So I'm sort of coming at this with both, like, my work experience hat on and my own sort of personal, professional brand building hat on.

A (3:31)

Ooh, this is so interesting. So, Julia, as someone who has access to all the knowledge, you know everything about how LinkedIn works, what has been your greatest challenge in building your own personal presence on LinkedIn?

C (3:48)

I'm gonna give you an honest answer, which is just getting over myself and hitting post. I think so many people are held back by this stage fright when it comes to post on LinkedIn. Oh, my God, is my boss gonna see what I share? Are my friends gonna judge what I say or do I even have anything insightful to say at all? And so I really just got a nudge from a mentor who said, you know, you are the marketer who works on the feed. You should really be visible on the feed.

A (4:15)

Should be doing it. Yeah.

C (4:16)

And I just kind of decided I was gonna get over myself and just start putting myself out there. So it's a very basic piece of advice, but you just gotta get out there and start posting.

B (4:26)

I think that's really cool, too, because you're, like, undercover bossing it to some extent. As you're going through the process as a creator, you're seeing the pain points yourself.

C (4:35)

Yeah. And when I run into bugs, I can send them directly to the engineers and ask them to fix them.

A (4:40)

That is the ultimate power move. All right, so this is really exciting to have you here. Before we get into you looking at our work on LinkedIn, I'm curious, just globally, what. What you see people doing right or really wrong on LinkedIn, and maybe even in asking that question, it's worth having you Set up like from the perspective of LinkedIn, what is the point? Why should people be engaging on this platform at all?

C (5:12)

Yeah, totally. So I love what this show is about. It's about people finding more fulfillment in their work and getting their work problems solved. And our thesis is that LinkedIn is a great platform to get your work problems sold solve too. So we have over a billion members on LinkedIn that have collectively over 10 billion years of experience, like what a rich group of people to help you solve all of your work problems. But the thing is you have to share what you know on LinkedIn in order for other people to be able to learn from you. So that's sort of the content thesis behind why you should come to LinkedIn, read the content, engage in the content. We really think it can be this amazing place where you can really openly share and learn from other people. You can learn plenty from a book or an article. There's so much information out there. Just finding the right information is hard. But learning from people who have been there and done that and have that real know how and can share it authentically with their own voice for me is so much more meaningful and engaging. So that's sort of the broad context that we're existing in. And so to address like what people are doing well and what people aren't doing well, I think the best sharing that we see on LinkedIn is authentic. It comes from you, it comes from what you know, what you've experienced and then it shares something that's valuable to other people. So it's insightful, it gives an opinion, it helps someone learn something new. So that's really the best of the best. Is someone coming with an authentic point of view, opinion insight and sharing it for others to learn from where people might tend to go wrong. And we can get into some tactics like this. I would say like two of the big ones for me are like not sticking with the professional context. Like we are professional platform, we want to stay a professional platform. So how you thread the needle on that context is really important. And then I would say the other one is like chasing gimmicks. Like sometimes it feels like everybody's trying to figure out how to game the algorithm. If I post on Tuesday morning at 9:41, my post will do better. And I'll just say that if you focus on consistently sharing insightful content that can help other people learn and solve their own work problems and in the long run that's going to, that's going to take you where you want to go.

B (7:27)

So Is there an algorithm, though? Of course.

C (7:30)

Every feed on the Internet is designed with an algorithm at its backbone. And I'll just say we are constantly testing changes to the algorithm. So even if I gave you the secret keys to the algorithm right now, you know, tomorrow or next week, it might be different.

B (7:47)

Are there some keys that stay consistent, though?

C (7:50)

Yeah, and I think that consistency is we are always looking for people that are sharing something that's knowledge oriented, something that's insightful. So our algorithm's really trying to find those posts that have that deep knowledge, insight, opinion, so that we can distribute those to more people. So if you chase that, like trying to share what I know, make it insightful, make it engaging, that's really the best thing that you can do.

A (8:16)

Yeah. Your colleague Dan Roth, who's the editor in chief at LinkedIn, had told me a while ago, and this was, to me, one of the most clarifying insights about how LinkedIn is structured. He told me that the algorithm is specifically designed to discourage virality chasing, that you are not looking for people to just viral hack LinkedIn the way that they have for basically every other platform. And so the kinds of things that might go viral and other platforms don't on LinkedIn, because what you're really looking for is people who are sharing knowledge and advice and experience from the work. And as a result, I think the great frustration that a lot of people have on LinkedIn and you're making a face because you know exactly what I'm going to say, the great frustration is I'm not reaching as many people as I want to. I like, my numbers aren't as high, my follower count isn't growing as fast, because in other platforms, if you can just figure out, like, what makes something go viral, you can just repeat that over and over again. And that doesn't work on LinkedIn because you don't want people to be filling the feed that way. Am I right?

C (9:25)

Right. And I think rather than chasing virality, really thinking about the audience on LinkedIn is a group of professionals. They're the people that could someday hire you or work for you. So it's a different type of audience in general. And so the eyeballs aren't going to be as large as maybe on other platforms. But the engagement that you do get is so much richer. It's people's real identities. It's again, people who you might work with someday that are seeing your content and engaging with it. So there's more value, we think, even though some of the numbers are smaller and maybe not what you're used to seeing on other platforms. The engagement is still really meaningful.

B (10:05)

Yeah, but is it best practice to not recycle from other platforms? Do you guys feel like the voice has to be really unique?

C (10:13)

I've actually done this a couple times, and it's kind of fun. I've taken content that I posted to, like, my Instagram story and then taken the same content and reframed it and posted it on LinkedIn and compared how it does. So to give you an example, for a long time I was a fitness instructor on the side. I teach spin class, and I was loving a new feature from Spotify where they make you a playlist that refreshes every couple of hours, your day list based on your music taste. So as a spin instructor, it's like kind of professionally relevant to me. But when I posted about it on LinkedIn, I really talked about how I use the feature, how they marketed the feature, and how that applied to my side hustle as a fitness instructor versus when I posted it on Instagram. I just had a screenshot and a quippy comment about how it's funny that Spotify thinks that I want to be in Ibiza on a Friday morning at 8am, which is because that's when I teach spin class. So it can be the same core content, but you got to think about how to reframe it in that professional context if you want it to do well on LinkedIn, because people expect your content to have that professional frame when they're in their LinkedIn feed. And so if it doesn't, it often doesn't perform.

A (11:26)

Who are you on LinkedIn? And let me explain what I mean by that question, because this is something that I'm grappling with a lot myself, and I love your advice. So I have this theory, which is that to be successful in public in any way is to drill yourself down into this 5% character where you just think, what's the 5% of me that's most relevant to the people that I want to reach and then just inhabit that over and over and over again. I mean, right? Like Nicole, that is the career you have built. You are a full, complex person, as we all are, who is not thinking about personal finance all the time. But that's the thing that you portray to the world. That's how you get people to understand you and your value. And I think that everyone needs to do that in some way. I have really always struggled with what that is for me personally, because I straddle a whole bunch of different worlds. And so I almost have come to different versions of that answer for myself based on the vertical. So when I'm speaking, because this is where I found the market to be, I'm the guy who helps you navigate change, but I'm not the guy who helps you navigate change on LinkedIn because I couldn't figure out how to write content about change management that did well on LinkedIn. And instead what I stumbled into was that I was really good at writing marketing content that did well on LinkedIn. So then I became the marketing guy on LinkedIn, and that has done well. So I'm posting these, like, advertising breakdowns and so on, and then I don't do that on other things. I have a newsletter which is called One Thing Better, which isn't about change or marketing. It's kind of about, like, growth and personal growth. And this, I think, is like, a problem for me that I don't know how to solve because I think it creates confusion about how people could or should work with me. And yet I don't know what else to do on LinkedIn because I've tried other kinds of content, and I just can't seem to find it working the way that the marketing content works. But now this means that I get people who reach out to me and they're like, can you be our marketing consultant? And I'm like, I can't, because I don't think that I'd be good at that. And so I really struggle with who I'm supposed to be be on LinkedIn. And I wonder what that is for you. Like, what your answer is for you, and then how you advise others and then maybe how you advise me.

C (13:40)

Sure. Yeah. That's a rich question. Well, I think. And I'm a marketer myself.

A (13:44)

Yeah.

C (13:44)

And so I'll. As a marketer, I will start with the audience. So I think it comes back to who is your audience on LinkedIn, who is it today, and who do you want it to be? That could actually be a slightly different answer. So the way I think about this is, you know, I have a small following on LinkedIn, but the people I really want to talk to are the people that I want to someday hire me or someday work for me. It's like above and below. That's just kind of what resonates for me and what I'm motivated to share in order to reach. And so then as I think about how I want to portray myself to that audience, there's a couple of things that I really want to make sure come across. The first is that I want people to think that I'm a competent business minded marketer. The second is that I want people to know that I feel strongly about career development of more junior professionals. I'm someone who like sends the ladder back down to help other people grow. And then the third is I just want people to find me inspiring and engaging because I think that you tend to want to work for or with people like that. So those are sort of like my three pillars of competent business person. Do a lot of coaching of younger folks, younger professionals, and then engaging and inspiring. So once I have that, I try to make sure every LinkedIn post is helpful to other people because that's my filter on LinkedIn. Is this gonna help someone? And then does that actually fit in one of my three categories? And so what I end up posting a lot about is how to use LinkedIn better because that shows that I know how to do my job and then how to help people think about navigating kind of the earlier years of their careers. And I end up doing a lot of kind of career advice, office etiquette type stuff. And I find that that really resonates and not just with my audience and like on platform engagement, but you know, the younger folks who come up to me in the office and say, hey, I saw Your post on LinkedIn about this piece of career advice. That was really helpful.

A (15:49)

Stick around. Help wanted. We'll be right back.

B (15:54)

So Jason, how did that job search for the social media person go?

A (15:57)

Ah, my inbox looks like a confetti cannon went off. Nicole, there are resumes everywhere, but I just can't tell if any of them have the right background for this role.

B (16:08)

I think you should try ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter finds amazing candidates for you fast and right now you can try it for free with our very own link@ziprecruiter.com help wanted.

A (16:18)

And if I did give it a try, what would that look like?

B (16:21)

Well, the moment you hit post, ZipRecruiter's super smart matching tech starts spotlighting people who actually fit the job. No more resume roulette. And when you spot someone stellar, you don't have to sit around hoping they notice you. Zip Recruiter gives you a handy invite to apply message so you can nudge your top picks and get their applications in stat. 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

A (16:44)

Oh, that sounds perfect. What is that URL again?

B (16:47)

Well, you can try ZipRecruiter for free@ziprecruiter.com help wanted.

A (16:51)

Got it. So that's ZipRecruiter.com help wanted.

B (16:56)

Exactly. ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire.

A (17:01)

Welcome back to help wanted. Let's get to it. You just laid out a really useful formula that I just want to restate before you move on to your next point, which is that you've said, identify the audience that you want to reach and then the message that you want them to receive from you, and then how to communicate that message without just saying it to them. It wouldn't be useful if you just posted over and over again on LinkedIn. I am a good marketer and I am supportive of younger people. That's not going to do it. So instead you have to share content that is helpful to them, but that also communicates the thing that you're ultimately trying to share. And that's how you're shaping the decisions about what you're posting on LinkedIn.

C (17:42)

Exactly. It's a show, not tell. And for me, once I kind of got those pillars like in my head, I just started sort of seeing inspiration everywhere and it became pretty easy to jot down ideas of what to post, shoot a quick video. And so that's sort of how I approach the content process on LinkedIn.

A (18:00)

Yeah. Do you think that I'm doing it wrong?

C (18:03)

No, I. I mean, you're doing something right. You're doing great engagement.

A (18:07)

Yeah.

C (18:07)

But I think, Jason, the thing I would ask for you is like, why do you think the marketing content is resonating with your current audience? And have you tried to dig into who's in your current audience that really responds to that content? And do you actually want to try to shift your audience to reach a different type of person that would respond to something else that you'd rather be posting about on LinkedIn? I think that's the calculus you might have to do.

A (18:32)

I mean, I can tell you how I got to the marketing stuff and why I think that it works, and then you can tell me if I'm right about that and then we can move on to the next phase. The reason that it works is because I get to build on top of existing, proven, attention getting videos. So my process is I flip around on Instagram and I find ads that get millions of views. And then I think to myself, do I have something smart to say about these ads? Because on Instagram you have all of these really spammy accounts. I don't know what the purpose of them is, but all they do is they post advertisements and they all have the same dumb caption. It's like this marketing team deserves a raise or something, but they're not offering anything aside from the video. So I get to think of Instagram as basically a market test for which ads are proven in a social environment to grab attention. And then I think, okay, but on LinkedIn you can't just post a ad, it doesn't do anything. So instead I have to be smart. Like, the reason why this works is it's the combination of the video visual that I know grabs attention plus me being smart, and then the me being smart reflects well upon me and it creates this, like, value add that then also pleases the Instagram algorithm that's looking for knowledge and advice and so on. And that's how I got to the formula. I tried it as a range of things that I was just randomly posting and it did really well. And so this is what I generally do, is if something works, then I tried another version of it and that worked really well. And eventually it came to the point where that's now like 80% of the stuff that I post on LinkedIn because it works. And it does fit inside a broader vision of myself as I want people to think of me as someone who really understands communication and how to engage people. Because at the heart, that is the thing that I do. And so marketing is, it's a slice of it. But I don't have a marketing background the way that you have a marketing background. And so in a way, this kind of content doesn't really serve a larger business goal for me. Aside from that, it helps me grow my following on LinkedIn, which I know is something that LinkedIn is like, discouraging people from thinking about, like big, big followings. But like, frankly, I think that I get larger speaking fees because I have a Large following on LinkedIn. So it is a valuable business tool for me and therefore it's worth me just thinking about what is going to be engaging on this feed. But that has locked me into being a marketing guy on LinkedIn when that's not actually the thing that I offer the world and this is the tension that I live in.

C (21:06)

Yeah, I hear you. And I wonder, having, you know, scrolled through your recent posts today, it does seem like probably 90% of what you post are these like tear downs of advertising breakdowns.

A (21:17)

Yeah.

C (21:18)

And I think, like, your framework is excellent. Like you have a scroll stopping visual. It's already proven because it's an ad that has some virality to it, and then you add a lot of smart commentary. So I think you could take that same framework and find a different category of something that would be scroll stopping and engaging. And then over time, try to shift the percentage of marketing analysis that you're doing down and find another category that fits the same framework but on a slightly different topic and try to sort of balance that out.

A (21:48)

I've been trying to think of that. The challenge that I have is, so what's so wonderful about sharing ads in a way that is unreplicatable anywhere else is it's the one kind of video content that it's totally okay to steal. Right. I can't take somebody's fun TikTok that they posted and posted as mine because that's basically stealing content. But if Taco Bell makes a great ad and I post it, they don't care. They're very happy. Because I'm just sharing Taco Bell's messaging. It's an incredibly efficient kind of thing to share that I can't find replicated anyway anywhere else. And I don't have the bandwidth myself to be making a great video every single day. So this is also where it gets stuck.

C (22:32)

Yeah, I can understand where you're coming from there.

A (22:34)

Yeah.

B (22:34)

Have you tried other formats? And they just didn't land. What did you try?

A (22:39)

Well, so there was another format that was working really well for me for a while and then stopped working as well. And actually, Julia, maybe you have some insights here, like just generally speaking about how this happens. So the other thing that was really killing it for me for a while was branding comparisons. So I would take like an, let's say RX Bar or Olipop. I would take the old branding of them when they first hit the market and then the new branding as they went through a rebrand. And I would put them side by side and then I would explain why the shift was good and what was good and those things were killing. I mean, you know, easily 1, 5, 10 million impressions. And then it stopped. It's been really, really hard to hit those numbers. And I assume that the same thing happened with the advertising breakdowns. Frankly, they used to do a lot better than they did before. So something was changed with the algorithm. That has nothing to do with me. I understand. But the end result of it was that it shifted the performance of these concepts. So, Julia, what is happening when people see those kinds of shifts?

C (23:43)

Yeah, well, like I said earlier, I mean, the algorithm is always going to be changing. And I think one of the challenges of Being a, you know, content creator out there is that you may find something that works, but you're always going to have to keep evolving and keep iterating because things just will continue to change. The other thing I would say is there's probably a level of fatigue that your audience gets if you keep posting content that's really similar. So, like, for example, your Ikea brand post totally caught my attention. I was commuting home on the bus and I saw that in my feed and it totally stopped my scroll and I read it. But then if I saw five more of those from you, Jason, I follow you. I sort of know you post these a lot. Some of the insights probably start to become similar over time.

A (24:29)

Yeah.

C (24:30)

So that's where I think, like having a more diversified strategy where you have a couple different buckets that you post in and maybe the marketing teardowns are like your best performing from a distribution and engagement perspective. But maybe you have another category that shows a bit more of a window into the other things that you offer and over time you can figure out how to build that up to also get better performance and just kind of create some more variety for the people that follow you.

B (24:56)

Do you have a suggestion for him.

C (24:58)

In terms of a different category to go into?

B (25:01)

Yeah. Or a different format or.

A (25:03)

Yeah.

B (25:04)

Jason, I always thought that you could do more with again. And I realize my place in this LinkedIn hierarchy, it's the bottom by far. But I think that your sort of analysis of crappy emails that you get or like, why not to send this email and like a redacted version of it where you cross out the sender, I think are always really interesting. I advocate for something like that.

A (25:31)

Yeah. You know, it's funny, I stopped doing those because they stopped performing. It was something that I used to do a while ago, which is I would screenshot terrible emails. The problem was also that the terrible emails were always largely of one variety, which was some kind of publicist trying to pitch me something. And so what it put me in a position after I shared a lot of those, was like, I'm an important guy and I'm hard to reach and here are all the bad ways that people reach me. And like that actually wasn't. It just turns into a message that I felt like I didn't want to be hammering home to people. But. Okay, wait, enough.

B (26:03)

Okay, nevermind. Back to the bottom of the totem poll.

A (26:10)

Stick around. Help Wanted. We'll be right back. Foreign welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it. Enough about Me. Let us turn to Nicole down at the very bottom with the worms. How do we bring her up? Julia, to your and my level of.

B (26:29)

LinkedIn goals, please, my king and queen.

C (26:34)

Oh, man, I'm very flattered to be called a queen on this podcast. So, Nicole, I took a look at some of your most recent posts just in the last month or so, and I had a few tips and some observations I'd share with you. Don't hold back.

A (26:47)

Okay?

C (26:48)

Okay, so first of all, let me start with what you're doing. Well, though, I think you are sharing knowledge, insights, what you know based on your experience. Like, you're in the right zone. And I think you do bring a little bit of personality into your posts. Although I think that you could show us who you are a little bit more. So that's sort of like doing great at a foundation. You're in the right lane.

A (27:09)

What's missing of Nicole? What do you mean by there could be more personality in there?

C (27:14)

Yeah, so I like you. You often post a picture of yourself, and that kind of gives us a sense of who you are, but even more coming through in your voice and, like, hearing what your voice sounds like authentically, either in video, if you're feeling brave enough to do that, or in how you write. Like, I just don't feel like I got quite as much of a sense of who you are really through your content. So I think you could figure out ways to like Jason. I think you've talked about finding, like, the three words that would describe your 5% character. So, Nicole, I'm curious if you've done that exercise and thought about how you might change your tone to really dial those things up and give your audience a better sense of who you are and what you care about.

A (27:54)

I'm sure, by the way, Nicole, you've done a version of this for your, like, brand at large. Do you know what Julie's talking about? So what are the three attributes, Three words that would be be used to describe your brand. So for me, it's like approachable, optimistic, you know, whatever, and then that kind of guides the content. What do you. What's for you?

B (28:16)

Educational, Sassy. So probably dial up the SaaS.

C (28:20)

I did not get SaaS. So there you go. That would be an interesting experiment.

B (28:24)

I didn't know that SaaS was allowed on LinkedIn.

C (28:27)

Okay, so we should talk about that.

B (28:29)

Maybe SaaS as in software as a service, but not as in sassy.

C (28:34)

So look, I think people like to work with, learn from people that they know that they like and that they trust. And so the more you can show who your personality is and give us that authentic you, I do think that helps your content resonate better. There's a danger on LinkedIn of getting too personal, but I think there's also a distinction between personal and personality. So I think, like, bringing personality into your content is great. Getting overly personal is where people tend to get into trouble sometimes. Does that make sense? Yep. Yeah, totally. So then my other two, like, tips for you off the bat are that you, I think you can do more to, like, really invite discussion in the comments. So that's another thing that we, as a platform are looking for. We want people to, like, talk and debate and discuss and learn together in the comments. We see the comments as Gold on LinkedIn. So the more that you can do to actually drive discussion in the comments section will help your engagement.

B (29:33)

What are good ways to do that?

C (29:36)

I mean, it can be as basic as just asking a question or having a call to action in the post itself. And sometimes if you share, like, a little bit more of a spicier or sassier take, that also kind of gets people more readily engaging and involving because they might disagree with you. And so sometimes just thinking about the right way to kind of tee that up and invite that debate and discussion can be really helpful.

B (29:59)

Okay, cool. And for LinkedIn, how would you differentiate a good CTA from, like, an Instagram CTA?

A (30:08)

Call to action for those who don't know, yes. The call to action being like, click this thing.

C (30:13)

And I think the call to action often can be like, not just let me know what you think in the comments, but have you had an experience with a 401k that you know was defunded? Yeah. Yeah. I want to hear from you.

B (30:26)

Oh, my God.

C (30:29)

Stressful. So, I mean, obviously, like, within sort of more specific to your area of expertise, but, like, asking people to share their own experiences with whatever the post was about, I think can be a really good call to action. I don't see people doing call to action on Instagram to, like, please discuss. You know what I mean? Like, I think LinkedIn is really trying to foster that more, which is different from other platforms. And my last, like, more tactical tip for you was I haven't seen you tag other people in your posts. And not to say you should go crazy and tag 60 different people, but if there are other voices, other people that you know that you think would have a good take or a different take or that you learned something from on this topic, tagging them and inviting them to comment on it or even, you know, reshare it. That that can also be. That's something else that helps drive that discussion.

B (31:26)

I see both of you, king and queen. How am I doing? Mommy and daddy, help me.

C (31:32)

I think it does better when it's like in the flow. So, you know, I think xyz, but I know person so and so might have a different take. I'd love to hear just kind of doing it in the flow of the content to make it more natural.

A (31:45)

Okay, that's interesting. I've seen a lot of people do that. That's an interesting strategy. The thing that you said not to do is extremely annoying, which is when people create a block of 70 tags at the end of a. If I could wave a magic wand, maybe you've already done this, so tell me. But if I could wave a magic wand, those posts would be algorithmically punished if somebody creates a block of 70 tags at the bottom. I'm tagging these things all the time. That would harm their reach as a discouragement. Does that exist?

B (32:13)

Julian knows people.

C (32:15)

We can take that back to the engineering team.

A (32:17)

Take that back to the engineering team.

C (32:18)

I mean, that's a. That's chasing a gimmick. Because if you think about the mechanics of it, when you mention someone and tag them in a post, they get a notification.

A (32:26)

Right.

C (32:26)

Brings them back to LinkedIn. But if you're just tagging a bunch of people to try to artificially inflate the number of people who are coming to your post over time. Again, the gimmicks are not the things that work. The things that work are writing good, insightful content that people want to talk about.

A (32:41)

Yeah. Can I tell you one other thing that I would like to wave a magic wand on and maybe you will also take back to the engineering team.

C (32:47)

Yes.

A (32:48)

Can LinkedIn find some way to identify AI written comments and then either delete them or somehow stop people from posting them?

C (33:00)

Yeah, we've heard that AI generated comments are. They're frankly not like what we want to encourage on LinkedIn either. Everything we've talked about so far today is we want to hear your authentic voice. We want to hear what you think, and that comes from you. So Maybe you use ChatGPT or your favorite tool to brainstorm or refine what you want to say, but we would discourage people using AI generated comments as well. So that's. It's not something we are interested.

B (33:27)

Or are you talking about bots, Jason?

A (33:29)

So, no, what I'm talking about is. Okay, let's say that Nicole wanted to hack her way into LinkedIn royalty. You know, she didn't want to earn it like you and I did, Julia. She just wanted to hack her way in so she could pay for some SaaS tool that would just post comments on her behalf across the LinkedIn ecosystem. So suddenly, tons and tons of people, we would get comments from Nicole. It would seem to be coming from Nicole, but it would be very formulaic in its engagement of what somebody posted. And I'm seeing tons of that in the comments in my posts, and I see a lot of people complaining about it. And so it's made me curious about what LinkedIn is thinking there because it is indeed the exact opposite of the thing that you're trying to encourage.

C (34:15)

Right? It's not what we want. I'm curious if you report those comments.

B (34:19)

Oh, well. So I didn't know that this was happening and I just looked at the recent post I had, and I had a bunch of random people saying, thanks for sharing, Nicole, but like in the exact same format. So I'm assuming that was generated. And then one guy says, thanks for sharing. Come up, Robert.

A (34:37)

That's a cheap AI product.

C (34:39)

Cheap gimmicks are on the long term, not the thing that's going to get you to grow your audience. So, yeah, you always see people try to exploit gimmicks when they find them. And we do try to be really careful to watch what are those gimmicky things that people are doing just for the sake of it, for the sake of trying to hack growth. And we do really try to crack down on those as best we can.

B (35:01)

And you also talked about this line between personal and professional. Can you give some examples of what's gone too far on both sides?

C (35:11)

Well, Nicole, if you're open to it, I love to talk about your Father's Day posts that you posted.

B (35:16)

Talk about it.

C (35:17)

Okay, so for folks who didn't see it, Nicole posted this beautiful tribute to her husband and about how she. What she looked for in men to find someone who would make a great father to your daughter. It was like, incredibly vulnerable and lovely and I actually, I'm curious to hear, like, how did that make you feel? Or did you have any reflection on it?

B (35:39)

Sorry, babe, didn't really care. Didn't have much of a reflection. What's interesting is the last time I was roasted, the most popular post I had was my thoughts on motherhood, being a new mom. You know, I lost my house in the fires, sort of thinking through what that meant for having a newborn. And the rest of it. And Jason pointed that out as something that resonated. Now, I perhaps linked that with a dad type post, which I don't think tracks in the same way. So the mom type posts of like, how much help do you have? And that type of thing, I was surprised to see how much that resonated. So my takeaway is that mom stuff equals not dad stuff.

C (36:30)

That's interesting. That's about you authentically. So that's your experience. And I assume that impacts kind of how you show up in your professional life. Like everything that happened and being a mom has an impact on how you show up professionally. Is that fair?

B (36:47)

For sure, yeah.

C (36:49)

This is where I was talking about earlier. Like, the professional context, I think really matters because I think when people are scrolling through LinkedIn, they do expect things to stay relatively professional. And I think there's a way to share parts of your personal life in a way that is very professional and sits in that professional context. I'll give you an example. One day my husband sent me a post. He does not spend as much time on LinkedIn as I do, but he pinged me a post that he really liked that he found in his feed, which was from one of his co workers, not someone he knew, but this man had written basically like a tribute to his wife about how amazing his wife was as a partner. But it was all through the lens of how they balance in a dual career household. So it was like, I mean, it was a glowing post about his wife, but he brought it back to how they balance their two careers. And so I think that was such a good example of showing a lot of love and appreciation for a partner, but keeping it grounded in work. And I think that keeping it grounded in work is like the thing you have to find that I think tends to help things do well because then you get like that personality and that authenticity, but it's still professional. There are ways to take that way too far. And we've all seen the. I went to the Bahamas and here's what I learned about B2B selling. So there's. You can't stretch it that far, but I think if you want to talk about something personal and you can again, authentically connect it to your professional life or how that impacts you as a professional, that tends to make it work better.

A (38:20)

I also have a somewhat different theory about why the mom posted really well and the dad post did not, and that was simply how the hooks were written. So let me read for you the mom post hook, which I will just define as the text that you can see before you have to click more to read more. So the mom post was pretending I'm 90 got me through nearly every dark day this year. On days I couldn't get out of bed, I would tell myself, you are. And then you'd have to click more. Now here's the dad post. I didn't just choose you for me, I chose you for her. And that has made all the difference now. To me, the mom post is really clearly understandable. I see every dark day this year. I see couldn't get out of bed and then it has a cliffhanger. Not that you intentionally did this, Nicole, but you know, it like cuts off, right? As I would tell myself, you are. And I was like, you are what? I want to know more. Whereas the dad post starts poetically. But the lyricism of the writing also doesn't exactly make it clear what's going to come next. And therefore I think it was easier for people to move past. What do you think?

C (39:33)

I totally agree. I think, Jason, you're a master of the hook and your hooks often have something about like unexpectedness or something overlooked or there's some mystery to it. And so it's really easy to just go look on your LinkedIn feed and see how many lines of text show in each post and then write a hook that's going to get people to want to learn more. That's probably the most like tactical piece of advice I would give to anyone that is a little bit more gimmicky, but it's also just kind of good writing.

A (40:08)

Yeah, I mean it's a couple of things there. Number one, when I write a hook, what I am thinking about is this needs to very quickly, in just a few words, signal who this is for, who is the intended audience, roughly speaking, what you're going to get from learning it. Promise some kind of something to come and then promise payoff if you just read more. And so that I'm always trying to pack into everything that I write. But also here's a hot tip because this tool doesn't exist on LinkedIn yet. Julia, you could I started to use typegrow.com it's this free tool, but one of the great things about it is that it will show you the layout of what your post will look like on desktop and on mobile so I can start to write knowing exactly how it'll be displayed so that I make sure that I'm fitting exactly what I want to fit in text wise. There. Typegrow also is how I bold and italicize text in my posts because that isn't native to LinkedIn. But you can do it. You just have to use a third party service.

C (41:12)

Yeah, okay.

B (41:12)

Captain Hook. I also did a series unexpectedly, based on your advice from our last roast. So then I did something that kind of got some traction, I suppose, and then I just kept repeating it over and over again.

C (41:29)

Nicole, I was gonna say, your hope for that is great. Let me read it. Spotted in my notes. Guys, I've been a financial journalist for more than 20 years. Here are the actual rules the rich follow to stay rich. So right in that you establish your credibility right up front, actual rules is like intriguing. Like, I want to know what the actual rules are and then you clearly need to read more to keep going. So I. You nailed it with that hook. And I think that content series, if you look the first few posts, did really well, and then it seems like they're starting to not perform as well. So that's where I think having something that looks really similar over and over, you might get a little bit of fatigue from people who are like, okay, I've seen a few of these before. I don't know if I need to actually like click in and read the fifth one or the sixth one, but.

A (42:13)

It is a really good hook.

C (42:14)

It is a great hook. Yes.

A (42:15)

Yeah.

B (42:16)

So when do you know when to abandon a series? Like, when is Jason gonna stop doing the marketing? Back to backs? And when should I, you know what, at what part should I stop?

C (42:29)

I mean, like, I treat every. This is sort of one of the rules that I live by with posting content on LinkedIn is like, I try to treat everything as an exc. Experiment and I try not to be too precious about every single post. I find that if I put like a lot of energy into one post and then it doesn't do well for some reason, then you're like, devastated. So I try to, like, constantly keep things moving, constantly look at it as an experiment. And if something doesn't perform well, I start to ask myself why. I also try to post consistently so that I build up like a data set of posts and then look back at all of them like once a month, rather than living and dying by how something performs the next day every single time. So I think, give it a few more goes, let it bake a little bit. Once you feel like you have a robust set of posts to go look back at, give it a look and maybe it'll feel like, okay, maybe this has run its course. Time to try something. New. But I think there's like that experiment, mindset, be consistent and then look at how things are performing on a longer time horizon rather than, oh my God, this didn't perform in the first two hours. I think that, again, is more of a long term sustainable way to grow.

B (43:39)

Do you delete the ones that don't do well?

C (43:42)

No. Maybe if it was like, maybe if I felt embarrassed afterward, but I don't think I've ever done that. No.

A (43:49)

I was just going to admit to you the last thing that I deleted. So. I never want to be controversial. It's just not part of my brand. I'm not interested in it. And I posted a. It was in the lead up to the election. I had noticed I never post political content, but I had noticed that LinkedIn had an option, I don't know if it still exists, to hide political content from your feed. You could click a button and then political content. And so I just wanted people to be aware of that feature because, like, I was really happy to find it. I don't want political content in my feed. So I just shared that this exists. And people started ripping into me. They were like, you're in the media and you are putting your head in the sand and not listening to what other people. And I was like, okay, like we're not interested in this at all. And so I hit delete on that post and I'm very happy that I did.

C (44:40)

Yeah. Not authentic to who you want to be online, right?

A (44:42)

It was actually. I shouldn't have even posted it in the first place. I should have kept to my rule. And I actually, every time that I, like, break my rules, I usually regret it.

B (44:51)

And so the actual roles of Jason Pfeiffer. Random question. Why can't you change a photo in edit?

C (44:59)

Oh, like after you've posted it.

A (45:01)

Yeah, you can change text, but not photos.

C (45:03)

Yes, this is true. I think many of us would love to change things after the fact. It's on an engineering list somewhere.

A (45:10)

Okay.

B (45:11)

And for video, what's your hot take on what works now? Because I see a lot of people reposting videos from TikTok or Instagram. My thought from when I actually went into LinkedIn when I was in New York was that video is prioritized but not recycled video. Is that still the case?

C (45:32)

I would say if you have a video that performed really well on TikTok and it is professionally relevant, sure, bring it over. That's great. But if you have something that performed really well on TikTok and isn't professionally relevant or needs that reframe to be professionally relevant, then you should do that reframe in the text that you share to accompany the video. So, again, it's all about the context of where you are and wanting LinkedIn to stay professionally relevant. We are making a big push with video. We know that learning from someone who's showing you how to do something or talking to you directly is so much more engaging. So we do think that's an important part of the mix of content on LinkedIn. And. And so we have been doing more video. I've been doing a lot more video myself, and I find that, again, I want to come across as someone who is engaging and that someone might want to work for someday. So that, for me, it just is a really authentic way to kind of bring that professional brand to life. But I know some people feel camera shy, so we still love text, too. A quick story there, which I think illustrates this rather well, is I was hiring for a role on my team, not someone who reported to me directly, but I was in sort of the final round interview panel, and the candidate logged on to the zoom call, and she said, you know, I feel like I already know you because I watched a bunch of your videos, like, in preparing for this interview. And to me, that was what I've been trying to do is just help people understand who I am so that if they're trying to hire me or work for me someday, like, they know what they're going to get. So I just thought that was like, such a great example of that coming to life. Yeah.

B (47:07)

And do you feel weird when somebody says that?

C (47:09)

I kind of do, because I'll be honest, like, I'm. I don't really create on Instagram. I never had ambitions of being a talking head or a content creator, but I will say it's kind of a fun little creative outlet. Like, I kind of like editing the videos and I would say I've gotten enough feedback that's genuinely nice. And, oh, you said this. And then I started, you know, you gave this communication tip and I started using it and it helped me. Like, I've gotten enough of that feedback to kind of keep me going. But, yeah, I do feel a little weird sometimes getting that.

A (47:41)

You know, what I discovered for myself, which, Nicole, maybe you discovered a long time ago, for what it's worth on that, is that the more you put yourself out there, the more you start just thinking of the version of you that's out there as a product and when people engage with it or when people Talk about it. They're just talking about a product that you just happen to be that product. So when people talk about me on LinkedIn, I often don't feel like they're talking about me. They're just talking about the product of me. And it feels totally separate. I'm, like, completely detached from it.

B (48:08)

Yeah, I've had people at IRL events say, oh, we're connected on LinkedIn, as if, like, I'm like, okay, that's great.

A (48:17)

What's your name?

C (48:18)

Who are you?

B (48:18)

Yeah, I wanted to just ask a blogging and dangling question of what's the thought process behind accepting people as connections?

C (48:26)

Yeah, it's a great question. It's kind of up to you and your goals. I would say. For me, I try to only really accept connection requests from people I have met or people I would want to meet in real life now. You know, we offer the option to follow people rather than connect. And so if someone requests to connect with you and you don't accept it, they're still following you, so they still get to see your content. I have many unanswered connection requests because I just don't know that person well enough to hit accept. And that's sort of how I manage it.

B (48:58)

Okay, so we are talking about what pops on LinkedIn. You are working toward creating products that help people do that. If we pulled this video right now and posted it on LinkedIn, what do you think we should say that would make it pop?

C (49:20)

Well, we definitely need a good hook. We want Jason to come up with the hook for sure. This is actually a really good point because the text that you share alongside your video is important. The algorithm looks at the text in addition to the video to figure out what it's about. So we'd want to probably have just enough for whatever the clip was about. Maybe it's about whether it's okay to share personally on LinkedIn. I have personally had a lot of that content do quite well because I think it's a topic people are a little bit wary of or curious about. So let's say we clipped it down to being about. Can you share personally on LinkedIn? Jason would write us an amazing hook. We'd have a little bit of detail to basically say the same thing that we're saying in the video and maybe pull in any other kind of talking points that we had missed. We would tag each other and then we would ask other people to share where they fall on the spectrum of personal to impersonal and what they think and whether we nailed it or not.

A (50:22)

So in other words, it's got to have a great hook. It's got to be answering a question that people are already asking. It's got to be visually engaging, but it also has to have a lot of text so that the algorithm can understand exactly what this post is and therefore prioritize it to the right people. And is that exactly what we're going to do in this video that everyone's watching right now?

C (50:42)

I certainly hope so. We might need to add, I don't know, like, a cat over my shoulder or something to make this more visually interesting, but I think we can do that. Great idea. Okay.

A (50:50)

Okay. Well, we have to send that to a video editor, and that's.

C (50:55)

Maybe we all grab our guitars and turns into. It breaks into a song.

A (50:58)

The world's worst worst jam session.

C (51:00)

I should not have suggested that.

A (51:01)

Yeah. All right, well, you heard it here first.

B (51:04)

Algorithm all about artificially adding cats on people in post.

A (51:09)

If only.

C (51:10)

Right there.

B (51:11)

It's going to change.

A (51:11)

Only that did it. All right, well, Julia, this has been really incredible. I just have one final question, which is you said you have many unanswered connection requests. You have a new one. It's from me. Are you going to say yes?

C (51:24)

Okay, I will accept both of yours. Yeah, I accept this, Rose. Yes.

A (51:29)

All right, well, then, in that case, our work here is done.

C (51:32)

Awesome.

A (51:42)

Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason.

B (51:47)

Pfeiffer, and me, Nicole Lapin. Our executive producer is Morgan Lavoy. Do you want some help? Email our helpline@helpwantedoneynewsnetwork.com for the chance to have some of your questions answered on the show. And follow us on Instagram @moneynews and tiktokoneynewsnetwork for exclusive content and to see our beautiful faces. Maybe a little dance?

A (52:08)

Oh, I didn't sign up for that.

B (52:09)

All right, well, talk to you soon.

C (52:17)

It.