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- [00:07]
Jason Pfeiffer
This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor in chief of.
- [00:13]
Nicole Lapin
Entrepreneur magazine, and I'm money expert Nicole Lapin. On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the helpline and help callers solve their work problems.
- [00:21]
Jason Pfeiffer
And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.
- [00:26]
Nicole Lapin
And it starts now.
- [00:35]
Jason Pfeiffer
I am obsessed with LinkedIn. If you've listened to Help Wanted for any amount of time, then you know that I post every day. I have urged Nicole to post every day even though she has not listened to me. And I've also spent a lot of time experimenting and studying how LinkedIn works, which helped me build an audience that is now at 220,000 followers. But you know who's counting? And the real core of that insight, the thing that helped me understand exactly how the thing that helped me understand exactly how the LinkedIn algorithm functions, well, that comes from the conversation that you are about to hear today. So here's a little setup. Back in 2023, I had a conversation with two very important people at LinkedIn about how the algorithm there was changing. I wanted to know, what does the algorithm reward? What is it looking for? And I got answers. I released it as a podcast over at Entrepreneur and published my report on entrepreneur.com and it flew around the LinkedIn universe. It was actually really funny to see all these people on LinkedIn post summaries of my reporting. I'd never seen anything quite like it. As far as I'm concerned, LinkedIn has only become more important for, for anyone in business, any professional, in any capacity, since that conversation in 2023. And I'm not a paid ambassador for LinkedIn by any means. I mean, if they wanna pay me, they are certainly welcome to. I'm really just speaking from my own experience. I get so many deals from LinkedIn, I get so much business just because I'm posting all the time. And when I advise that other people do it, they tell me the same thing. So, with Nicole on maternity leave still, I am going to play you this conversation from my Entrepreneur pod. Going to hear about the internal thinking at LinkedIn and what the algorithm is rewarding and why. This is the stuff that social media people geek out over. And if you want to succeed on LinkedIn, then this is about to give you a leg up. So from here on, I'm just going to play that original episode. If you are a person who posts on social media, what would you say is the basic marker of Success. It's virality, right? It's going viral. Which is why it's pretty interesting to hear someone very, very high up on a social media platform say this.
- [03:01]
Dan Roth
We're not looking for virality at all. That is not how LinkedIn measures success.
- [03:06]
Jason Pfeiffer
That is Dan Roth. He is LinkedIn's editor in chief. And I know what he would say about the things that I just said, which is that LinkedIn is not a social media platform. LinkedIn is so much more. That is true. But you know, it does have a social media component and a lot of people, myself included, utilize that social media component to reach people, to post content and so on. So anyway, let's just go with it. LinkedIn, at least the parts of LinkedIn that are social media, not interested in.
- [03:34]
Dan Roth
Virality, there's nothing in our systems that reward virality.
- [03:38]
Jason Pfeiffer
And if you are a person who is interested in going, okay, I guess not viral on LinkedIn now, but, you know, posting on LinkedIn so that it's seen by a lot of relevant people. How about that? Well, then something Dan said there is going to be of particular interest to you because he said there's nothing in our systems that reward virality. Which of course begs the question, well, what do your systems reward? And the answer to that has changed pretty significantly in the past six or so months as LinkedIn has made a lot of very strategic changes to its feed. And that is what LinkedIn offered me the opportunity to dig into with Dan and one of Dan's colleagues, Alice Shong.
- [04:21]
Nicole Lapin
I'm Alice. I'm a Director of product management at LinkedIn and I lead our search and discovery products.
- [04:27]
Jason Pfeiffer
I asked them to start Big Picture with some context of where LinkedIn is and what it is trying to do and then how we can use that to understand the decisions that they have made. And Dan starts it off.
- [04:42]
Dan Roth
Jason, first of all, thank you for having us on. It is awesome to talk to you and exciting to talk to your listeners and to your readers. The one interesting thing about LinkedIn is in a sense, how little it changes. So the mission of LinkedIn has not changed at all. And I've been at LinkedIn for almost 12 years, or 12 years this month. Our mission is to connect the world's professionals to economic opportunity. We want to make sure that everyone, everywhere, finds through their use of LinkedIn becomes better in what they do or what they want to do. And that means different things to different people. And how we reach that mission, how we succeed in connecting people to economic opportunity, does change because we learn all the time, what people want and what works and what doesn't work and what success looks like. And that changes as we learn more about the platform and how people are using it, and changes based on what professionals want in their lives and what they want, how they think about what success looks like for them. So as a framing mechanism, the one thing to think about is, why does LinkedIn do any of this? It is because we believe in this idea that if we can help people be better at their jobs or whatever, it is their job that they want to get to, or building a company or expanding their company or finding the right people to work for them, you know, if we can make that happen, everyone gets better. A rising tide, you know, raises all boats. And so that's the idea. One of the things that we have seen in the last few years is the importance of knowledge sharing in how that works. Members are, and we call our users members. Members are, when they come to LinkedIn, they're for a specific purpose. You know, we want, when people open the app or when they log in on the desktop, they're doing it during work. They're doing it often during the busiest times of their day. They're doing it at a time when they could be doing a million other things in their business. And they're choosing to go to LinkedIn for a reason. And often that reason is to be able to get smarter about something that they need to get smarter about. Or sometimes it's to find a job or to hire somebody, but it's often they open up LinkedIn with a job to be done, and that job is frequently. That sort of job to be done is frequently like, help me get smarter about this particular area of my world. And they do that by asking questions or by posting what they know. So we've seen a 27% increase in content viewed on the feed in the last two years, so since 2021, and a 42% increase in content shared over the last in that same period. And you're seeing people just come and they're just trying to learn, and they're posting more. They're getting more comfortable with this idea of sharing what they know and how they've learned it and asking these questions about other people. You use the word community. What we see is that people build communities through this sharing of knowledge. And so what we're talking about here and this idea of getting people to share what they're uniquely qualified to talk about or what they uniquely want to know, is the change in the feed you want to make sure you're seeing the right content, the right content that matters to you and that we're helping you get those ideas out of your head in a way that makes sense, and that you can then reach the right people so that they can learn and get something from it and out of that community develops. So maybe I'll hand it off to Alice to talk a little bit about how we're doing all of that.
- [07:55]
Jason Pfeiffer
That's great, Alice. Yeah, please take it. I mean, I have a million follow up questions, but I want to hear what you have to say first.
- [08:00]
Nicole Lapin
Definitely. So, as Dan mentioned, a big part is that we are investing in making Feed more valuable to our members. And when we ask our members what do they find the most valuable in their feed, it's becoming overwhelmingly clear people are telling us that they find it most valuable when the content is grounded in knowledge and advice, and they found it most valuable when the content is from people they know and care about, sharing what they're up to so that they're feeling connected to their connection, and they're feeling the most valuable when they're getting opportunities out of the feed. And this is exactly what we did for feed, which is such an essential, such an important part fueling our overall ecosystem. Two changes that we did. Number one, we're bringing better reach to connections and your followers. What does that mean? People in your network as a creator, people in your network and people who are following you will be more likely to see updates from you. And this is because we hear from members that they find this to be the most valuable. We saw a near 10% increase of content viewed over the past few months for people viewing content from either their connections or people they follow.
- [09:19]
Jason Pfeiffer
And just to be clear, so I understand what you're talking about, you're saying that the feed is prioritizing, seeing posts from people that you follow over posts from people that you do not follow. Is that what you mean?
- [09:32]
Nicole Lapin
That's one part. There's the second part. So the one part is the focus on your connections. The second part is we asked members what they find the most valuable for feed and any content grounded on knowledge and advice. For example, a young Le Quin who is an AI machine learning expert, sharing something about AI and machine learning for someone who is a machine learning practitioner is incredibly valuable content, even if they're not connected to Yang or a connection, sharing some knowledge and advice about how to negotiate salary, how to research company trends, these are valuable content that we're also getting a lot focus on. So over the Past few months, we've seen close to 40% increase of people checking out and viewing content that is grounded on knowledge from people that is out of their network. So the two takeaways from this, one, more from your in network and people you follow and from a creator standpoint, is better reach to the audience that you intend to build and two, is giving members better access to content that is grounded on knowledge and advice and ultimately leading them to economic opportunities.
- [10:56]
Jason Pfeiffer
Got it. This is an interesting place to start because. And by this I mean asking your members what it is that they want and value. Because if we know anything about human behavior, what we know is that people don't actually articulate necessarily what it is that we will do or engage with. Because if you ran this experiment at Facebook, for example, we're just going to use Facebook as a random example here, not asking you to specifically comment on Facebook, but I would bet that people on Facebook would have said, what I value is personal updates from my friends. But when you let the feed be dictated by what people actually engage with, even though they would never tell that to a surveyor, what they start engaging with is a whole wide range of things that we might just want to call like algorithm hacking. People who are posting things purely because they know this is the kind of stuff that people will watch or click or share. And that has happened with basically every single social platform. And I know that LinkedIn is a lot more than a social platform, but just for the purposes of talking about a feed, that's what happens with everyone. And the upside is lots of engagement. The downside is a drowning out of what you would consider actual value. So I'm curious to hear from you about, number one, the decision making process that's happening at LinkedIn to separate what is a value versus what might just get a lot of engagement. Because I bet that your data shows, and I'm not able to see it, but your data shows that a lot of stuff that people probably don't think of or categorize as valuable does get a lot of engagement on LinkedIn. And so if you're going to make a change, you're going to make a change away from some stuff that maybe is low value, high engagement. And so tell me about that decision making process and what you are particularly hoping will result from it.
- [13:08]
Nicole Lapin
I can take a first pass and then feel bad. Jason, I think super important for us to put it in context of LinkedIn's vision. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. And ultimately when we're measuring whether we're making that progress. Our missions, are we actually connecting the professionals? Are we getting them to be more productive and successful? So in what you just shared for us, the most important, the most important part of the equation is do we believe we're getting closer in getting our members to be and feel more productive and more successful? It is not just about. It definitely is not just about like viral. Things could go viral on LinkedIn, but our system is actually not designed for that. We think ourselves as we are really a social, professional, social platform that enables people to be more productive. And in terms of how members are reacting to these changes that we have started rolling out over the past half a year, we're happy to share that we're seeing very promising early signs. We've got an 80% job of members sharing that. So we used to get complaints of members telling us, hey, I don't like my feed. My feed quality isn't good. I wanted to see something different. Over the past few months, since we started to evolve the feed experience, we've seen 80% drop and that is a lot.
- [14:41]
Jason Pfeiffer
I'm sorry, 80%. 80%.
- [14:43]
Nicole Lapin
What's the change there of members sharing that they, they don't like their feet. Oh, I see, complaining about feed.
- [14:51]
Jason Pfeiffer
Got it. An 80% drop in complaints.
- [14:54]
Dan Roth
Exactly.
- [14:54]
Jason Pfeiffer
Got it. That's really interesting.
- [14:56]
Dan Roth
You asked this kind of question of, of like, how does this compare to other places? And I think, like, just to really amplify what Alice was saying is we don't, we're not looking for virality at all. That is not how LinkedIn measures success. There's nothing in our systems that reward virality. It's not an ad driven platform where ads are a component of how we make money. But that is not the way that LinkedIn is. LinkedIn's not dependent on that. And what we are dependent on is people coming back every day and feeling like this is a place that is good for their professional identity. Because if you think about it, I think this is just helpful for when people are figuring out and when you talk to a lot of people who are trying to master LinkedIn and they're like, I want to be amazing at LinkedIn and the advice I always give is like, one of the pieces is just think about where, what the incentives are for any place that you are spending your time. And it's important that LinkedIn's incentives are, we are more successful if people are here with their real identities, if they feel like this is a good place for them, if they Feel like this is a place they want to have open on their desk at work and checking when they start their workday and that they finish their workday. It's a place where they are recommending to other people that they come. Because that way, you know, recruiters, when they come, they are like real people they're reaching out to and they know what those people care about. B2B advertisers know exactly who they can advertise against. Salespeople can see who it is to reaching the real people who are like, who can actually make buying decisions. So all of those things are incentives. That depends on us having really high quality content and high quality people who are representing what they are really good at. And so if you think about like where this drop comes from, this 80% drop in people telling us, you know, that they don't, that they're unhappy with their feeds, a lot of that comes from both making sure that we have the right content for them. That content comes from saying like, these are people you are following. So you're telling us you want to hear more from them. And also this is the kind of topic that you care about. And we're showing you not just people talking about this topic, but someone with the skills in this area talking about that topic. And I think that's a really important component of this, is that if it's me sharing as a, as a journalist and someone who is, if you look at my background, it's like all, you know, J school and linguistics minor. And if I'm sharing content about how to be a great geologist, that is useless if I don't know what I'm talking about. And even if it sounds good, like, and I'm writing some, you know, I'm trying to like go viral with geology content. I'm not sure why that would go.
- [17:28]
Jason Pfeiffer
Viral, but let's say that's suddenly going some parallel universe. Sure.
- [17:32]
Dan Roth
So if I put that up there, LinkedIn, we have a duty as LinkedIn to be like, hey, this is not, like this isn't the highest quality content. Dan has none of the skills in this area. And this is. And we have not seen him have success with geology content in the past. And so why would we show Alice, who cares about geology content, something from Dan when this is not his area of expertise. And so there's all this because we have the professional profile of record. It helps us also be able to make sure that we are getting the right content to the right people. Even if it's not someone you're following yet you care about this topic. We think this is high quality content from someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
- [18:05]
Jason Pfeiffer
That's super interesting. I want to follow up on that in a second and understand how LinkedIn is identifying what is valuable content. Because what you just said, there is one part of it, but just to put a, just to put a real button on it, about the question about virality. And for anybody who has used LinkedIn for years, and I am on there every single day, we saw it. We saw people who would post real earnest pieces of value and that would show up in your feed, but also so would a lot of selfies and a lot of people just taking like viral crap that they found on the Internet and posting it there and doing basically the stuff that gets rewarded really well on other platforms. And so I just want to put that to you so that people can like hear you react to that. Speaking to people who are on LinkedIn all the time. Right. Instead of speaking about, like broader strategy here, you're basically saying, we hear you and we don't want that stuff on the platform. Is that right?
- [19:04]
Dan Roth
That is. Let me give you a sort of a nuanced answer.
- [19:08]
Jason Pfeiffer
Okay.
- [19:08]
Dan Roth
Which is. The answer is that we want to give people the kind of content that helps them be better at what they do or what they want to do and, or that leads them to economic opportunity. There was a point in time where that sort of content was actually pretty useful to people, and then it really wasn't useful and then it became sort of a flood. What Alice said earlier is like, we are not looking for when things go viral on LinkedIn. Usually that's a sign to us that we need to look into this, because that's not celebrated internally. That's like, let's just make sure this is actually like high quality content that's showing up. Why is this piece of content going viral? Is the question that we'll talk about internally. If something is suddenly doing well, you want to look out what's going.
- [19:49]
Jason Pfeiffer
As you said, that's very interesting. That would seem to be the opposite of how anybody else in the whole universe in the Internet thinks about something going viral.
- [19:57]
Dan Roth
Totally. But if you think about how LinkedIn works, we're often a, we're sort of a proxy or, you know, like a digital version of a workplace. And there's very little content in the workplace or conversations that go on in the workplace that are right for everybody. There's something that's right for you on your team and for someone else on their team or that's okay to talk about in the, you know, at a business lunch or whatever, whatever conversations you're having at work. But it's usually, it's very rare where someone stands up with a megaphone and shouts to the whole office and everyone's like, great, I want to hear more from this person yelling at us with this megaphone. Like, that's not so if stuff's not going viral in the workplace, it shouldn't be going viral on LinkedIn. And, and, but if it is something that's super interesting, let's say, for instance, yesterday, a lot of really incredible posts about Apple's new headsets and people's talking, people who are in VR and AR talking about what this means and what the difference is. These are people with expertise talking about that. That content did incredibly well. So did it go viral? I mean, it's not, it depends on how you define it, but it reached a large group because there was a lot of demand for that particular content. If people are still talking about that a week from now, a lot less demand for it. That's. That's a normal cycle. That's like the way it should be. But it is not a. So during that you asked the question about, like, what happened to this, this content? Like, people are sort of earnestly, you know, where people posting selfies and all that stuff. Yeah, that was during the pandemic. There was sort of this point in time where people were talking about their homes and our work lives got meshed in a way that people really wanted and they were kind of craving and you couldn't avoid. That's past us. That phase is beyond. And now what we hear from members, and this is, I think a large part of this sort of 80% drop is they're like, I don't want to see that anymore. That was. I'm done with that. Great. Tie a bow on it. Different point at different point in my work life. That is not the kind of stuff I want to hear from now. Now I want to learn how to get better at what I'm doing.
- [21:51]
Jason Pfeiffer
Yeah.
- [21:52]
Nicole Lapin
I wanted to quickly add, from the valuable standpoint, an important part is also the perspective from a viewer standpoint. Feed viewer standpoint. Let's take an example. If, say, Jason, you and I are connected, I'm your network. If I share a post about a very successful product launch I led, or I share a post about a very successful team off site that I ran, Jason, you're probably going to see it. And even like my post, like, yeah, now I'M understanding what Alice is up to. But imagine, just because you like my post, some of your connections who have no idea who Alice is Will. Now that was the before state, before we introduced these changes. What they used to see is that they would see, hey, Alice just had a great offside. Who the hell is Alice? People didn't find that being valuable. So it is very important that we still encourage people to bring their authentic selves to LinkedIn. We're still encouraging people to share their stories, but it's very important to understand who is the best audience for that kind of content. It is people who actually know you and care about you. And the same goes for like when you're looking at others content, you probably only care about the personal updates from people you know and care about. So that's a very important distinction. Right, right there.
- [23:21]
Jason Pfeiffer
That's interesting. Can you, can you unpack that just a little bit more? Maybe from the perspective of the user who is just having a fairly binary experience, which is I either saw this or I didn't or here's how I saw it. So in the example of Alice launched a product and let's say I comment on it, what you're telling me is that this, the platform is going to, is trying to make it decision about how this post is going to be relevant to people a circle away and break that down a little bit more. Because I'm thinking about my own experience on LinkedIn and I'm thinking that on my feed sometimes I do see a post from somebody I don't know. Usually it's because somebody I do know commented on it or liked it. And that's actually the first thing that I see at the very top is you tell me which of my contacts liked or engaged with this post. But are you saying that there's a sort of secondary consideration here, which is that you're trying to better refine which posts are worth amplifying to the network of whoever it was that engaged with the post to begin with. Is that what you're saying?
- [24:46]
Nicole Lapin
You're absolutely right. Where we're thinking about it is that we. It is. Your feed is always going to be a combination of different types of things valuable to you, right? There will be, there will be updates that will make you feel more connected. There will be updates that are getting you that knowledge and advice when you need them. In fact, we're also investing in big strides in making LinkedIn the destination for knowledge. So a lot of investment around encouraging more, more people to like bring out the knowledge in their head share onto LinkedIn. A lot of, a lot of investment in making LinkedIn really a place for discovery of knowledge. If I have a question in my mind, I should be able to go to LinkedIn to ask my question. I should do a search and find the answers. I should ask a question directly. So there's a lot of, a lot of focus on knowledge. But at the same time, we're not losing grounds in the connection aspects. We believe that is, that is what makes LinkedIn so unique and that is what, what makes LinkedIn stand out.
- [25:52]
Dan Roth
And Jason, can I just add one thing? If you're a user, you're. And this is from my point of view, I deal with a lot of contributors and we sort of walk them through how to, you know, how to work well on LinkedIn. This can get confusing at times. What Alice is pointing out is such an incredible point. And your point about this, sort of like figuring out the right circle, it's the way I like to think about it, is that every piece of content sort of has its own total addressable market. And you have to kind of think about, well, who am I trying to reach with this thing? And it can be frustrating sometimes as a contributor or as a user, you post something and you're like, well, I got, you know, I got a thousand views for this and I only got 200 views for that. I don't understand it. But what Alice is describing is exactly what's going on behind the scenes, which is we look at that and we're like, well, this is great. This is. Alice showed this. She showed a selfie from her last off site that is a perfect thing to show to her team or to people who are connected with her, who have shown an interest in how Alice's team operates. When Alice explains the intricacies of how a search engine works and what she's learned, that has a much larger total addressable market, I.e. anyone who is in the search business or anyone who's a technologist or someone who's a pm. And so you're doing that matching on a content on a post by post level. And you got to think about like, who was the right match for this particular piece of content, your network, people who are seeking knowledge in this area, a combination of those two. And we've got all these signals to try to figure out exactly what that right market is for that exact post. That's all going on in real time.
- [27:23]
Jason Pfeiffer
Right? So that actually leads me to then what I was bookmarking a moment ago, which was to Understand how it is that you're doing that Now, I will just say up front, I know part of what it's going to sound like I'm doing here is plumbing for information for how people can write posts that are going to get the most engagement. You, on the other hand, are going to try to steer me away from exactly that because you're telling me that that's not the point. But all the same, I'm going to ask it anyway.
- [27:51]
Dan Roth
Yeah.
- [27:53]
Jason Pfeiffer
What is LinkedIn doing to evaluate on a post by post basis who should see something and what should people who are posting to LinkedIn with the intention of writing something that they think is valuable, that they want lots of people to see, what should they be thinking and doing?
- [28:11]
Dan Roth
One thing I think I would point people to is the recent launch of collaborative articles. I don't know if you've seen this, but these are articles that are okay, so these are. And the way collaborative articles work is there's an AI written component of this that kind of goes deep into skills. And it's like, here is the things you need to know about this particular skill. It's all based around skills. And then to your point about how we're, how you are able to reach people, the next step in collaborative articles is the, the we have systems that then reach out to you and we'll look at your skills and your profile and the things that you've talked about in the past and we'll say, Jason, you are an expert at, you know, running a media company. This is a, this topic, this article is about how to run a particular point of a media company. Can you, you'll be, you're like the perfect person to answer this. Can you come in and answer it with your own real world learned experience? And then when you do that, we show it to other people who care. To Alice's point, that shows up in search, it shows up elsewhere and it reaches people who care about the media business. Now that doesn't answer your second question about, hey, I want to reach as many people as possible. And you're right, I'm going to steer you away from that answer. Because the truth is that if you are a, it's just like running a business is. You're not successful unless you're like Coke and you're trying to reach the world. You want the world to drink your product. For most people, you want the right buyers of whatever it is that you're selling in your shop. If you're running a boutique, you don't want the entire world Walking into your boutique, picking up your stuff and then putting it on the shelves and walking out and getting it all, you know, grimy and moving things around. I don't know. I don't run a boutique, but I would imagine that's like a bad thing.
- [29:45]
Jason Pfeiffer
Sure.
- [29:46]
Dan Roth
It's the same way here that you want to think about what is the right audience for you to reach it does it. Those numbers are beach muscles. You know, if you're like, oh, I got 10 million views of something, who cares? Like, it's the one, all you need is one person to say, hey, I want to do business with you, or why don't we do something together? Or you should come work for me, or I want to come work for you. And if it's something that you're trying to achieve, if you can get that out of your work, then all you need is that one or two inmails or comments or someone reaching you on email or going up to you at a conference and saying, I saw your post and I'd like to do business with you. That's successful. That is connecting the economic opportunity. So it is not, I think, the way people have been trained in, you know, over the last 10 years to think about posting, but I think it's the right way to think about running a business and running your business and running your career. You don't want it. You don't need to reach everyone. You need to reach the right people. And what Alice is describing is how we're trying to make sure you are reaching the right people on the right topics. And then the last thing I would say there is, it's an. It is a. You're not always going to hit. Like, the key is really to not focus post by post. Just keep investing. And so you want to post. And sometimes it's going to work, and sometimes it'll reach the right people, and sometimes it won't. And sometimes you'll get crickets and sometimes you'll get a lot of people. And it's the sum total of your work that matters and how your Persona develops and what people think about you and that they learn to trust you and your voice and your opinions. That is a much bigger difference than having them being a one hint, wonderful, you know, one hit, one hit wonder doesn't pay off in the end. So I always say, like, don't focus on how this one particular post did. Focus on how am I doing over time and what has happened and what kind of changes have I seen and what got the most outreach that matter to me and then do more of that. That's the way to invest in your.
- [31:34]
Jason Pfeiffer
Voice, Alice, anything to pick up on that?
- [31:38]
Nicole Lapin
No, I think Dan covered it all in terms of if there is any advice or suggestions. I think as professionals, as experts, we are all experts in something we do. I say there's a lot of knowledge in our heads. So if there is like one, one advice to give to the creators out there or brand builders out there is to think about what kind of knowledge do you have to offer to people to help people. And that is the kind of thing that will likely get you to reach the right audience as well. So. So that is the only thing I want to add.
- [32:11]
Jason Pfeiffer
Perhaps this will be ill advised, but I am going to direct your attention to. You don't actually pull it up, but I'll just describe it a recent post of mine because I'm just curious how you're going to react to it as people who are telling me that in the offices at LinkedIn you're specifically saying if something goes viral, there's a problem. Now, I don't know if this is viral. I don't know if we, we don't really have agreed upon or do we actually, I should ask you before I keep going, do we have any kind of agreed upon definition here of viral? When something goes viral at LinkedIn and you say this is a problem, we have to investigate it. What we're talking about in terms of scale, is there a number?
- [32:50]
Nicole Lapin
Right, Jason? Oh, I don't believe we said. Okay, so what we're trying to say is that the system is not designed to encourage posts to go viral.
- [33:00]
Jason Pfeiffer
Yes.
- [33:00]
Nicole Lapin
We did not say if a post goes viral, there's some problem with it.
- [33:03]
Jason Pfeiffer
Of course. Dan.
- [33:05]
Dan Roth
Dan. No, this is my own. This is my own. Like, Dan did say that this is a. It is not, as Alice said, like the system is designed not for that, not, not to reward that. It is not like we're not, we're not a system where if something goes viral, you keep pouring, oh, there's a fire, pour more and more gasoline. That is not how we're built. Yeah, no standpoint. It is like, hey, this is not like there is nothing that should be seen by every. It's almost. There's very little that should be seen by everybody on LinkedIn.
- [33:31]
Jason Pfeiffer
Right.
- [33:31]
Dan Roth
So what are you going to point us to a post?
- [33:33]
Jason Pfeiffer
Well, yeah, so, so it just, just to be, just to be clear on that, I understand that, like if something reaches a certain number of views on LinkedIn, an alarm doesn't go off at LinkedIn and everyone runs into a, like, emergency room to talk about it. But. But I do think that it's a really interesting insight that the way in which you're viewing that kind of metric is very different from the way that almost anywhere else does. Because what you're then saying, and I'm just going to say this back to you so that you can, you can confirm or correct what you're telling me is that because your metric of success is, are we connecting people with people who are going to matter for their business? And that happens at a small scale, that when things go, let's just say viral, which we're just going to use a definitionless version of viral, that when things do that, the chances that that's going to lead to the outcome that you're setting out here are pretty low in. And maybe that means that people are finding ways to use this platform in a way that wasn't exactly intended. And that's the thing that you want to attend to, is to make sure that the maximum number of people are getting the value as you define it. And that's the reason why something going viral is not exactly a reason to celebrate internally on LinkedIn. Do I. Do I understand that? Right?
- [34:56]
Dan Roth
Absolutely. Which post now? I'm now super.
- [34:58]
Jason Pfeiffer
Now you're super curious. All right, well, I. So I had. There were two recently that basically were versions of the same thing, which is that I had found something that I found compelling online, and then I wrote what I thought was genuine, useful advice alongside it. So the one that I'm looking at is the coffee shop post. So it was one week ago. And I'll describe it for people who aren't like you furiously trying to find it. I can also drop it in our feed here, I think. Is there a way to.
- [35:26]
Nicole Lapin
I found it.
- [35:27]
Jason Pfeiffer
You already found it. Okay, great. Okay, so here's what we're looking at right now, right? So what we're looking at is this. I didn't take this photo. Actually, a friend of mine found this photo a long time ago and put it in a blog post. And I just remembered it. So the photo is. It's like one of those sandwich boards outside of a coffee shop, and somebody has written in handwriting, come in and try the worst coffee One woman on TripAdvisor had in her life. Which is funny. And. And then I wrote this post, which I'm not going to read all of, but it starts like this. It said, did someone insult or hurt you? Ask yourself this empowering question. How can I use this. Why? Because we humans need control. We need autonomy. And when someone insults us, we often feel stripped of that control anyway. And then I go on for what looks like four or five more small paragraphs talking about how to utilize being insulted so that you feel like you gain some more control over the situation. And then at the very end, yay for me, I put in a little call to action for people to subscribe to my newsletter. And you know, by my standards at least, this has done quite well. It has had at this taping on June 6, it has had 1.9 million impressions. 18,417 people have engaged with it, or actually 15, whatever, 18,000 plus people and 792 comments. So look, by, by my standards at least that's, that's pretty close to going viral. I think it was a pretty good post. I wasn't trying to game anything but and I would say that it lives inside of my area of authority, which is something that I see that you, you know, you're hearing that you care about and it's reaching a large number of people. Now number one, I'm curious what you make of this. But number two, I'm just going to have bundled into my question here. Is that Dan, when you were talking about the. Well, actually wait, I'm going to leave that part first. Number one, what do you guys make of this post?
- [37:18]
Nicole Lapin
Alice, go ahead, I can share. So thank you so much for sharing this example, Jason. I always love to see real examples about what our members and experts have created. This I would say is a pretty classic example of share opinion and advice post. And that's how we have some internal artificial intelligence algorithms that help help us classify posts into different categories. So for your post, this is exactly like the kind of what we probably will show you are sharing some opinion and also like turning that into some of the advice. The part I would also add to when it comes to virality, what we absolutely don't find valuable and what members have, what is not what we don't find. It's actually what members tell us that they don't find valuable is what we call blind virality. It's like something just like goes off the charts because there is some kind of like a viral spread of it, viral engagement of getting me to see a post. And ultimately I don't find this post to be valuable. To me, in this particular example, I would say sounds like more generic advice. Like it's not in a specific area, certainly like. And also we appreciate humor. We want people to bring their authentic selves to work or to LinkedIn as well. So we actually really, really appreciate creators kind of taking their creative liberty and use their personality and including using humor. Dan, anything you want to add?
- [38:57]
Dan Roth
Yeah, I would also just add to that that if you look at your comments, you know, we look, we're always looking to see is something starting a conversation. It's really important to us. It's not just you blasting something out. It is you. You posted this. You, you left your. Zala said like you left your. You have. It wasn't just the sandwich board. You left your opinion about why you thought it was important. You shared your knowledge and you have expertise in this area. So that's the system would be looking for all of that. And then if you look at the comments, it's a lot of people who are in marketing reacting. That's a really good sign for us that this has reached a particular market. So you've got a cmo, you've got someone who craft brands with purpose. This is a fractional chro. You've got a lot of really interesting people here who are in, in or around this area who have their own unique perspectives that they're sharing here in your comment section. What they're not just saying is funny exclamation point or too true exclamation point. They're. They're using this as a way to talk about their own perspectives. You know, this is what I think about being able to share this stuff or here's what I've experienced in my career. All of that LinkedIn looks very favorably upon. We are looking to show that you are starting. You're building a community around content and around knowledge sharing that you are uniquely qualified to talk about. So that's why that one would have done really well. I would also point to like one that you did. I think it was this week on the, on Ted Lasso on how entrepreneur got into Ted Lasso. That was a phenomenal post, something only you could talk about. It was the. No one could have had that experience except you. It was, you detailed it, you gave your takeaways like how this, what you do when you get the call. I mean it was, it was sort of the perfect post. And that's the kind of thing that is a, you know, if you're building your brand and you're building your voice on LinkedIn, more of that behind the scenes, what happens. This is what I've learned from it. That kind of content is catnip to people because everyone's hungry. We all we're all making this stuff up as we go. We have no idea what we're doing at work. And you're trying to figure it out and you're trying to learn from other people. And so if you can say, this is what I've learned, people love that. And so is it enough? Would that be viral? This post would not probably be considered viral in any other place. It did really well on LinkedIn, and it's good that it did well. This would be one that we were celebrating internally. Knowledge sharing got people talking a lot. Unique expertise and really interesting conversation.
- [41:18]
Jason Pfeiffer
Yeah. Oh, good. I'm glad I didn't set off the alarm bells instead of LinkedIn, but. And also very interesting to, to hear you explain what LinkedIn is seeing and therefore what you're both seeing when you look at it in the comments. Because a classic piece of advice among people who are in the business of telling you how to, you know, go big on LinkedIn is that you need a lot of comments. Comments lead to visibility. But you're going a step further here in actually identifying is, are the comments all coming from a particular category of people? And therefore is this post reaching a specific market, which is a sign of success for, for a post, or at least a certain kind of post? Is that right?
- [42:07]
Dan Roth
Yeah. I mean, yes. And there's two more things. One is, are these comments meaning, are they meaningful comments? You know, if it's someone just saying yes or agreed, cosign, whatever, that would not be a meaningful comment to. Our systems would not consider that to be a meaningful comment. But people are leaving, they're treating this like a conversation starter. That's meaningful. Two is you're responding to the comments. That's really important for us to see. And that's important. Like, again, going back to this idea of LinkedIn being, you know, sort of proxy for the business world, if you're in a meeting and someone's talking at you and the other person is just staring like, that's not a successful. That's not a conversation. And you lean, you giving back. Like you, Jason, responding to people who are giving comments. You don't. Maybe you. In something like this, you probably can't respond to everyone. It's too much. But you're picking and choosing where you want to go in and you're thanking people and you're adding something like that. Our system's like, this is a conversation. Reward this, show this to more people. People want to be part of this conversation. So that's what we're looking for.
- [43:01]
Jason Pfeiffer
Right? I Think. I'm thinking here as you're saying this about a line that you just used maybe five, 10 minutes ago, which was that every post has its own total addressable market. And if it seems like that total addressable market is, is coherently revealing itself in the engagement of the post, then LinkedIn's, LinkedIn's algorithms are going to recognize it as such, is what you're telling me. And then this is. These are not words that you use, but just, I'm just going to say them to see if you'll react to it, which is that the way that you're describing the kind of quality comments seems very much also to be mindful of engagement group groups that people often use to try to pump up their visibility. But engagement groups, which for people who don't know, is maybe like a group that somebody has on WhatsApp where everyone just throws in their LinkedIn posts and then everybody on the group, where everybody's assistants jump in and leave comments. Those are usually of the kind of. So true. Yes. Kind of stuff, which isn't engagement at all. It's fake engagement. So is that on your mind? Are those kinds of gaming systems on your mind as you guys are developing?
- [44:09]
Dan Roth
Absolutely, yeah. You've just nailed it. And I think that people assume they've figured out how things work here, and usually they have not, or something like within that kind of situation, it might do well within that group. And that's sort of it. Like the groups gets to see some, some piece. They're talking to themselves, essentially.
- [44:25]
Jason Pfeiffer
Right.
- [44:26]
Dan Roth
So if that's what they want, that's great.
- [44:28]
Jason Pfeiffer
All right, so final, final thing. And then I'll, I'll let you guys go. This has been so fascinating is, is. I want to. Dan, the way that you described the value of, of a piece of content that reaches its audience is, was, was very interesting and I think in many ways very true. And the entrepreneur Ted Lasso example that you gave is actually a really good version of that in that that post didn't do nearly as well, like fractionally well as this one with the sandwich board. Right. It was for, for people who don't follow me religiously. It was a, it was a clip from Ted Lasso season finale where an entrepreneur or magazine cover appeared. And I told the backstory of how that happened, which is that Jason Sudeikis team got in touch with me and et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, so, you know, that post did okay, but it didn't do amazing. And what you're saying is what you're saying is really the explanation for why because LinkedIn recognized that as having a particularly distinct audience of people who are very familiar with entrepreneur, which is going to be a smaller audience than people who are just sort of generally interested and engaged in the content concept of marketing. Totally get it. But here's what I, here's what I want to do as my kind of final thing, which is, Dan, when you were saying, look, sometimes the value here is that maybe one or two people reached out to you on, you know, by. By DM or you know, it made one valuable connection. And that's how businesses. Business is not a bunch of noise. Businesses is, you know, focused, useful connections. But I will tell you something which is that a great business tool for me is building my newsletter audience. And a lot of the reason that people use LinkedIn is because doing well on LinkedIn drives an audience to the thing that you're trying to collect an audience for. And in this case, a post that gets 1.9 million impressions. I will tell you I saw that directly in the number of people who signed up for my newsletter. Every single time that a newsletter post does very well, my newsletter subscriptions go up. That is a useful business tool for me. I don't really want to be narrow there. And so I wonder how you balance that Some people's business needs are actually to reach a lot of people, even if there's a lot of noise in there. And how you think about balancing that with what I think is a very, very true and real and earnest thinking that that great business happens in a focused way.
- [46:50]
Dan Roth
It's a great question. So the. Let's just go Back to the Ted Lasso 1 real quick.
- [46:56]
Jason Pfeiffer
Sure.
- [46:57]
Dan Roth
If you. That might turn out to be a more. If you start getting more outreach from more Hollywood productions that want that now learn how to work with entrepreneur. My guess is that is a great success for you.
- [47:10]
Jason Pfeiffer
Without question. Yes.
- [47:12]
Dan Roth
So we'll see. This could be. It could turn out in a year from now when we talk again. You're like, it turned out that post which got this, you know, smallish, smaller audience turned out to have a meaningful impact on my business.
- [47:21]
Jason Pfeiffer
A more meaningful.
- [47:23]
Dan Roth
That's sort of, that's, that's like one of the things that we are that we believe as a company. In terms of your question about the driving the newsletter, you know, thinking about your post as the top of funnel to get into some other product, that's certainly a way you can think about it. In that case, you're going to be doing more posts like the coffee sign post. But what I would say is think about what that means for your brand. If I start recognizing you as a person who's just constantly trying to convince me to go sign up for his newsletter, it starts degrading your ability to talk about anything else. It is clear to me you're selling all the time and you got to think about what your this is why I say like you have, you think about this as a portfolio. You know, you are, you're building your voice with every single post. You're building your brand. You're like people are understanding who you are. And if you're just a top of funnel person who is trying to get people to go follow some call to action, like you're just, no one wants to be around a person like that. And so you got to balance it. There are times where you do want to do that, you drive people. But if you're doing it all the time, it's going to be bad for your business and I think it's going to be bad for your business in the long run. I could be totally wrong and, but it's up to you. I mean you can like, I think you probably figured out a way to do this with. You could go, you could become the guy who takes pictures of funny coffee shop signs and builds, you know, builds posts around it. You probably figured out a pretty good formula that'll work for a while until it stops working because people tire of seeing it or they tire of your content or they're like, they just stop interacting with you. So you got it. You just have to think again. You just got to think about like this as a, this is a long, this is an investment and you're investing in not your newsletter, you're investing in who you are and how people see you and how they want to do business with you. And so I would just say like think about the long take the long view.
- [49:12]
Jason Pfeiffer
Alice Closing, closing thoughts.
- [49:15]
Nicole Lapin
Well, I think Dan said so. Well, it is look at it as a portfolio, as a creator, as a brand builder. It's never about a single post. It is always about what kind of economic opportunities that may come down the road. And as like something that we think about a lot at LinkedIn is what we, what kind of impact we have to our members, to people that we serve in the long term. I want to just like emphasize on like what we're trying to do here as, as LinkedIn is, we're really trying to be the definitive, the definitive destination for professional knowledge and we believe with our near 1 billion members only then there's a lot of professional knowledge that exists in our members head and what we're encouraging members to do, encouraging you all to do, is to share the insights, ideas and inspirations and share them on LinkedIn, share them with the world and share them with the right audience that we can help you target this way. Hopefully it's like you can everyone, we can all be learning from each other. It will be opening doors for one another to unlock more opportunities moving forward. So that would be the final words from me.
- [50:29]
Jason Pfeiffer
Awesome. Alice, Dan, thank you so much. This has been super illuminative.
- [50:33]
Dan Roth
Thanks, Jason.
- [50:37]
Jason Pfeiffer
Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason.
- [50:42]
Nicole Lapin
Pfeiffer and me, Nicole Lapin. Our executive producer is Morgan Lavoie. 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 Instagramoney News and Tik TokoneyNewsNetwork for exclusive content and to see our beautiful faces. Maybe a little dance?
- [51:02]
Jason Pfeiffer
Oh, I didn't sign up for that.
- [51:03]
Nicole Lapin
All right, well, talk to you soon.