← Social Media Marketing Podcast
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, before we get to today's show, I want to tell you something we just released. It's our 18th annual social media marketing industry Report, and it's out. Now. Here's something that jumped out at me as I was preparing this report. Two thirds of marketers say the pace of change is overwhelming. If that's you, you are not alone. And I want to help download this free report. It covers everything from platform shifts to AI adoption to the growing divide between B2B and B2C marketers. And you can get it for free right now by visiting socialmediaexaminer.com Report 26 socialmediaexaminer.com Report26.
- [00:48]
B
Welcome to the social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [00:57]
A
Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the social media marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators, business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Today, Jerry Potter. Jerry. Okay. Today, Jerry Potter and I are going to explore important updates from LinkedIn with our special guest, AJ Wilcox. Take it away, Jerry.
- [01:23]
B
Thanks, Mike. Super excited to be here because we are entering this era where marketers who plan their content ahead of time are going to see much more reach. So we're going to share the type of content that is getting what some people are calling invisible engagement. So we'll break that down and how to tie your content together so it reaches more people. We're very excited to be joined by AJ Wilcox. AJ is the world's leading LinkedIn ads expert and teaches business owners to drive high quality B2B leads at scale. He's also the founder and CEO of B2Linked and the host of the LinkedIn Ads show podcast. Today, AJ Mike and I are going to explore what these Latest updates from LinkedIn mean for small business marketers and owners like you. You, A.J. welcome back to the show.
- [02:05]
C
I'm so glad to be back. And I have to say, Mike is actually the inspiration why I even have the LinkedIn ad show. Back at the beginning of COVID I said I really want to start a podcast, But I think LinkedIn ads is too narrow of a niche. And I remember Mike said that's exactly why you need to start a podcast, because it's a niche. And so anyway, Mike, thank you.
- [02:23]
A
Oh, thank you.
- [02:23]
C
170 something episodes in.
- [02:25]
A
Thank you. I probably forgot that, but that is super cool. Awesome. So we got some stuff to Talk about today, don't we, Jerry? Let's go.
- [02:33]
B
Yeah. So they have done a huge, huge rebuild of the LinkedIn algorithm. And the more we understand this, the more reach you can get. So just to not get too nerdy on the back end, the old version was five separate tools sort of duct taped together, and the new one is a single unified AI brain, for lack of a better phrase. And so now there's a couple of things to know about this. First, the algorithm now understands meaning, not just keywords. Or as I like to say, the algorithm learns synonyms. So a post about reducing churn before would never have reached any unless they were searching for reducing churn. But now someone searching for customer retention, even if those words aren't in your post, would still be able to come across your content and, of course, have it get recommended. The other update they're saying, is that it tracks your audience, attracts the audience's professional journey over time. That's a straight quote from LinkedIn. Quote, Professional journey over time, not just their last click. And trending content now pops up much, much faster. So we're seeing a lot of different changes here. And we've been seeing this, I think, for a while, AJ where people who boast about the same topic over and over again reach new people more effectively. So does this just feel like an extension of that same thing that we were already seeing?
- [03:48]
C
I think so. I mean, it. What it feels like is LinkedIn's engineering is trying to figure out how do we show your content to more people by topic? Which actually is kind of strange because really, the whole point of. Or the whole crux of it in the past used to be you would follow people, you'd be connected to people, and so you would see their content no matter what it was. Now it seems like there's this owner or this focus on being able to see content from people that you're not already following. I wonder what effect this is going to have if this is going to be more like TikTok, where the majority of what you see is discovery, or is it going to be more. More like 1 out of every 5 posts on your feed is from someone you don't follow? I don't know.
- [04:28]
A
We were talking before we hit record that this is their engineering team, right, Jerry, that released all this information and we had to use AI to kind of interpret what the heck this actually means. The thing that's really interesting to me is let's not Forget who owns LinkedIn. Microsoft. And let's not forget Microsoft is the largest single investor in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. And let's also not forget who the biggest competitor to LinkedIn is, which is probably Facebook. Right? And the other social platforms have been moving away from. You see people that you intend to follow. YouTube subscribers don't always see our videos, right? Facebook, it's the same thing. So do you think that this is actually finally LinkedIn, which tends to be a little late to the party, aj, Effectively following the lead of the other social platforms while also finally implementing some of the AI power that they bring to the table because of their partnership with OpenAI. What's your thoughts on that?
- [05:30]
C
I think that's exactly what we're seeing. I just wonder if that's what the audience wants. I mean, part of me wants to say, hey, if I go out and follow someone who's a professional, that I care about their career, I want to see their content. And I'm a little disappointed if I get served a post that is from someone who isn't them. But if it's like my YouTube feed, where I love everything it's showing me, even if I'm not subscribed, maybe I'm going to change my opinion real quick.
- [05:54]
B
For me, as a consumer, I can tell you, about a year ago I started opening LinkedIn more often specifically because it started showing me content about AI, which I'm just, you know, hugely interested in. And so it was that moment where I kind of went, okay, they seem to be moving, as you described, Mike, to this interest based feed versus a social based feed. But it does feel like it kind of goes against what LinkedIn has been about from the beginning, right?
- [06:18]
A
I mean, yeah, it sounds that way to me. I mean, it just, it makes it a lot harder for marketers and creators, let's be intellectually honest, right? Because LinkedIn is one of the, especially in the B2B world, LinkedIn is the overwhelming platform that so many people, especially writers, you know, LinkedIn is one of the few platforms that really allow people to use written content as the primary way that people are communicating on LinkedIn, from what I can see. And people spend a lot of time and they publish, for lack of better words, treaties or like blog posts on there and really rich content. And, and if for whatever reason, you know, people quote, unquote, want to subscribe to that, there isn't an easy way to do that with this new thing. And I just wonder, aj, is this going to end up being one of those scenarios where the most creative people are going to benefit because they are really good writers and LinkedIn is just going to put their content in front of lots of people, or is it possible that they're going to actually see less people seeing their content? I don't know. Let's just talk about this a little bit. What do you think?
- [07:25]
C
I kind of want to see it. Half and half, if I could. Like half discovery people you've never seen before, half, you know, content that You've already told LinkedIn I want to follow more like this. I'm really curious to see because, I mean, Jerry, to your point, it's really cool when you're interested in a topic and all of a sudden all the content's about that. It's giving you exactly what you want to see. But on the other hand, like, what's the point of following someone if it doesn't mean that you're going to see more of their stuff?
- [07:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing to keep in mind is it doesn't matter what we want, it matters what we do. And the reason that this has happened on the other platforms already is because as humans, even though we say, I just want a feed of my connections and my friends, we tend to engage more with, you know, the stuff that looks like that is more topic based. A couple more things they shared. By the way. The AI now with the algorithm is smarter to really see depth. So it's specifically trained to tell the difference between content people actually engage with versus content they scrolled past as well. And then a series of related posts will essentially start to train the algorithm to associate you or your brand with a topic, like you were saying, and serve you to the right people more reliably over time. So I think for brands that have like a niche expertise, you're going to get a lot more reach with this organically. Now, the thing that pops into my mind, and I want to get your take on this, I just had one of my clients say to me last week, I am so tired of saying the same thing over and over again and talking about my expertise piece over and over again. You know, what would you say to somebody like that? Like how, how do we find new ways to talk about our thing, if it is our niche, niche expertise without burning out.
- [09:06]
C
I'm a really good one to ask on this actually, because I've probably given the same presentation on LinkedIn ads, I don't know, three or 400 times. What I would say is two things. Number one, even though, you know, you've said it so many times, your audience keeps changing and they haven't heard it before. So just remind yourself that, like, yes, number one, the content is still fresh to someone else. Obviously, if people start complaining and saying, oh, you said the same thing as you said last time, then okay, yeah, maybe you're hitting people over the head with it. The second thing is try to make a game out of it. Like for me, sometimes I'll say, hey, I know this is the same presentation I've given before, but I'm going to try and use a different metaphor, a different comparison, or I'm going to try to use a different word when I say this. You can even this is kind of a fun one that may or may not be professional, but you know, if you have a friend who's kind of in the same situation, you could dare each other like, hey, during your presentation, say the word octopus. Or say, you know, give them a hard word to say and see if you can work it in. That makes it really fun.
- [10:07]
A
You know, I have a couple thoughts on this. There are people, a lot of people, that tend to have lots of different interests and they write about them on their personal profile on LinkedIn. And I wonder if LinkedIn's algorithm is going to effectively classify us as creators, right? Whether it's wise to do that. Because there's the old way, right, which is every piece of content kind of stands on its own and is indexed and falls into these categories. And then there's the new way, which it seems as if it's trying to show you people who specialize in things that you're interested in. Do you think this is going to hurt the generalists and help the specialists? What are your thoughts on this?
- [10:53]
C
AJ I am so excited to find out actually, because, you know, it helps me because I'm a deep specialist. I probably haven't had a single post that didn't say the word LinkedIn ads in it. So I think it would. It's what they're saying means it's going to help people like me. But I also wonder if I start posting about things like AI and openclaw and, you know, more broader marketing. I wonder if I see those posts just go to nothing because I'm only being accepted for the specialist bent. I don't know. And I hope it's not murder to the generalist because there's a lot of people who make their career out of being a generalist.
- [11:29]
B
I think it's kind of a trade off though. Like if you are a generalist and you posted about. Let's just go with our example of AI you still have a chance to reach a lot of people with AI, but on the back end, they're not going to take your next post about your dog or whatever else it might be a career fair and match it up to the same audience because it's not the same audience. And so that's where this advantage is. And I've even, you know, since we started discussing this, I've been thinking about my own business. Like, do I just start talking about the same thing over and over again? And this is where my mind is going. I'd love to know what you think, AJ if you want LinkedIn to be your top of funnel, and that is your main focus, it sounds like that would be a good way to go. But if it's going to be your top and middle of your funnel because you want to continue to, you know, add depth to the relationships as opposed to just giving a tip every couple of days, then you're sacrificing some of your reach, but you're going to be able to go deeper to move people further along the buyer journey.
- [12:28]
C
Yeah, that would make good sense to me. I'm just curious to see how it, how it actually plays out in real life, because like you said, this was highly technical and they're discussing a lot of topics that are very ethereal. It makes me wonder, like, how much is this going to matter? How much is this going to actually change our newsfeed? And I haven't noticed yet.
- [12:48]
A
I'm going to give you all some of my thoughts on this. Because AI in general is out there analyzing everything in the world. And when you go to your AI tool of choice and you ask it for recommendations, it has to make those recommendations based on who it believes is authoritative or which companies it believes are the best ones. Right? Because its job is to provide you the best possible answer or the best possible person. And as a result of this, it is super advantageous to feed the AI a great quantity of different things so that it knows that you are an authority on this thing. And I think you are going to get hurt if you keep reposting the same thing over and over again. But you're not going to get hurt if you keep talking about the same kinds of topics. And for those that are lacking creativity, well, one obvious thing would be to go to AI and ask it to help you come up with different angles on this topic. Another thing would be to talk to people who comment on your posts or DM them, right? And figure out like, okay, maybe each of these questions could be its own post on my next post. Then all of a sudden there's no end to what you could talk about in your particular case, AJ, you're talking about LinkedIn ads. But LinkedIn ads is very complicated. You know, it's not simple. You can focus on the creative side of it, you can focus on the technical side of it, you can focus on the ROI side of it, you could focus. And just under the creative side of it, there's an enormous amount of things you could focus on. You could focus on like how to actually create images for your ads, how to create video for your ads, and even under those categories because I've covered these topics extensively across my shows. Then all of a sudden you've got images. All right, how do you actually create a good image? What tools do you use? Should you take those pictures yourself or use AI? Like there's no limit to what. You could talk non stop about this all day long. And aj, you know you're gonna, we're about to go to social media marketing world a couple days from now and it'll have happened by the time this is all over with, you're going to talk to at least 100 people, AJ and you and I both know that they're going to ask you billion zillions of questions. And every one of those questions is fodder for more and more content. So I do think it's strategically wise because AI is not stupid, it's very smart. And if it had to look at AJ versus some competitor and the competitor is posting the same post, that's 90% the same every time, AI is going to say that person is just repurposing where AJ stuff is original and unique every single time. Therefore he is an authority. And therefore I'm going to show AJ stuff over competitor X because that's how AI works. It's looking at everything. And let's not be dumb here and assume that on LinkedIn is not looking at every metric, it's looking at comments, clicks, time on the section, all the things. And therefore it is advantageous for you, AJ to have a nice creative mix of content. What's your reaction? I'll step off my soapbox there.
- [15:52]
C
I just want to say Stelz aren't for president, man. Yeah, that's exactly it.
- [15:56]
A
No, but what do you think about that? I mean, Jerry, what are your thoughts on that?
- [16:00]
B
I think that you're absolutely right. And I remember the first time, I don't remember what year it was now, but the first time at Social Media marketing world we had any sessions about AI and somebody was speaking about how the LLMs all measure volume, but I hadn't heard it put the way that you just put it where it was like, you know, like, let's say that LinkedIn ads, a specific type of LinkedIn ad, was all AJ talked about all the time, or one setting every day. Then, yeah, that could absolutely backfire from that. Now, I am curious if, is there a downside to this? Because what we're hearing is like, wow, increased reach, more authority showing up in whatever we're calling AI search. I know that's still up for debate, but is there a downside where now the algorithm has learned synonyms, as we said, and it's learned meaning behind things where all of a sudden there's going to be a lot of competition? I just wonder if some brands may have been standing out because of the keywords they were using and they're going to see their reach go down. I mean, based on what you know about this, aj, is that something that people should prepare for?
- [17:00]
C
I think it's definitely worth focusing on. I also think, you know, because I'm an agency that just does LinkedIn ads, this doesn't strike fear into my heart at all. I think put me in the, in the spot of someone who, you know, you're a. An agency that does SEO and Google Ads and meta ads and everything. I would be going to my employees and saying, oh, no, LLMs won't send us any traffic unless we create a lot of content about each of these. Like, we need to step up content production. That scares me to death.
- [17:29]
B
Yeah. One of the things that they pointed out, they said now the algorithm can surface trending content much, much faster than before. So as marketers, is this where we have to panic, react to that and set up like, you know, news alerts and trying to get stuff up? Because it does sound like speed will benefit people who can get content out about things as it's trending. But I've never thought of LinkedIn and like Instagram and TikTok, like, oh, yeah, gotta. What's the trending thing? Gotta get on that. Like, it's a really hard way to be a marketer.
- [17:58]
C
It is. And it's hard on our mental health. Like, it's not something I want to do. But it does seem like staying on top of trends right now is going to help us a lot on LinkedIn.
- [18:08]
A
For folks listening, on May 26th of this month, probably this is publishing in May. I'm doing an interview on my other show, the AI explored show called outlier video method with a gal named Sandy Lee. And Sandy created using Claude code, a system that tracks creators on YouTube and watches for outlier videos and then immediately decomposes what is it about the way that video is done and then delivers a script to her in her voice for her topic so that she can record a video following this trending topic and she can create outliers. It's ridiculous. But the reason I'm sharing this with, with, with the larger audience here on this show is because do not underestimate the power of other kinds of AI tools that live outside the social platforms that allow us to monitor these things and allow us to selectively, like, deconstruct the hook and the opening sections of videos or articles and really to get to the bottom of, like, why this piece of content is trending. Because content that trends is not just topical based, it's also stylistically based. And if we're able to use AI to our advantage to reverse engineer the style and then use our own brain or AI that's trained on our style or on our expertise to help us look at how we could rapidly respond to that, but in our own creative way. It's effectively like what happens on TikTok. Because if you think about what happens on TikTok is people copy trending videos on TikTok, but this is like at a transcendent next level. So I do believe that really super fast getting on kind of these things is going to be a wave of the future, but I don't think it's going to be as scary as it sounds. So that's just me going off on a little bit of a rabbit trail. Bring me back, Jerry.
- [19:58]
B
Well, that's, that's why I can't wait to be at Social Media Marketing World so I can catch up on the AI fire hose for a couple of days. But no, I think you're right. It's absolutely true that, you know, sometimes things are trending, are not newsworthy or something from the news. It's simply that the somebody figured out something that humans like. And then of course, you know, we always say marketers ruin everything. Everybody makes that video. And, you know, the same thing happens, it happens on YouTube, you know, which is my primary platform all the time. So. Well, let's talk about this, you know, another way to get more reach. And I think it's something that's going to require more planning ahead with your content, which obviously goes against chasing trends for me, gives me a lot more peace of mind. But Every once in a while, different companies will do huge, you know, analytics projects about social media. It's gotten easier now with AI and sometimes they're like, we looked at 17 posts and we ignore those on this show. But in this case, metricool analyzed over 600,000 posts from 63,000 different accounts. And some of the highlights are obvious, some a little surprising. So one of them, personal profiles generate 63% higher engagement than company pages, driven largely by more comments and interactions. Are you surprised at all by that, A.J.
- [21:12]
C
not surprised at all. Okay. For the longest time, we would do company posts in as part of LinkedIn ads, and it was so hard to get anything over like a 1% engagement rate. And then as soon as LinkedIn released Thought Leader ads where we can start to promote personal posts, now we have posts that are getting like 15, 20% engagement rates.
- [21:32]
A
Wow.
- [21:33]
C
So, yeah, not surprised at all. People want to engage with people. You never know if you're engaging with a company. Does Is anyone on the other side? Do they even care?
- [21:42]
B
Yeah. Okay. And then another thing that came up in this report is content that has what is being called invisible interactions is doing really well. And so visible interactions are comments, likes, things like that. Invisible interactions are things like clicks, carousel swipes, video views. In other words, there's not like a social proof number sitting there. And those types of things are pushing overall engagement up nearly 14% while comments and shares and some of these other things are going down. Is that match kind of what you're seeing? I mean, are you advising people to. And I know you're a lot on the paid side, but to do more of these types of posts, like carousels that require swiping, this is actually really
- [22:24]
C
cool because on the paid side I get a breakdown of every kind of metric that's happening. So when we run document ads, which are, I think what they are referring to as carousels because they have a separate ad format called carousel, but that's not what they're referring to documents. We find the engagement rate on them, which is mostly people just thumbing to just the next slide to just read more. They're hugely engaging. I mean, I already mentioned thought leader ads that were like people posts getting 15 to 20% engagement rates. We see really similar engagement rates on a company post that's a document. And again, most of them are these invisible signals just thumbing to the next slide. So I'm really curious how Metricool grabbed this data from the organic. But it totally just reaffirms what we see on the paid side.
- [23:10]
A
Can you clarify on what a document is exactly. Just so people understand that, yeah, a
- [23:15]
C
document post would be any kind of like a PDF or a PowerPoint document that you upload into a slide and then LinkedIn puts it in this mechanism where you can see a little bit of the next page hanging over. And when you click on the right side or if you swipe on your phone, you can actually go through that document.
- [23:33]
A
When those are ads, do you have to pay for people interacting with them or do you only pay for actual other kinds of actions? Do you understand what I'm saying?
- [23:40]
C
Uh huh. Yeah. It depends a little bit on the objective you choose. My favorite objective to use is website visits. So the only time we pay is if someone clicks the link at the bottom and that means every swipe, every like comment share, all of those are all free. So yeah, if you do just the normal like the engagement objective, yeah, you're going to pay for every one of those engagements.
- [24:01]
B
So this, yeah, this invisible interaction is really making an impact. They said carousels and multi image posts significantly outperform other formats, with carousels driving 11 times more interactions than just single images. Not surprisingly, posts that include questions or prompts to comment generate 77% more comments. Thank you for that. Thank you for confirming that. And then this, this was one other part that I thought was really interesting. Although I wouldn't say it was surprising, I would almost say it's a little depressing. Half of a post, total impressions occur within the first 48 hours. So if you are going to really get your post going, it sounds like it's, you know, this is why we hear it's so important to, you know, get your content up, get in there, start replying to comments or questions that you get as soon as possible. Is that how you'd interpret that?
- [24:49]
C
Totally, yeah. I know anytime this has always been the case on LinkedIn, I know that post is really only going to live for two to three days max. Something super viral. Yeah, you might be able to go a week, but most posts, like, if they don't have much engagement during the first few hours, that post is dead. No one's ever, ever going to see that again. So yeah, I think it becomes really important when you're posting content either personally or as your brand, make sure you are prioritizing responding to people as soon as possible. Just so LinkedIn is seeing the signals that like, yes, this post is hopping and we should keep showing it to more people.
- [25:24]
A
Just so we're clear, when people comment us interacting with them is some Sort of a metric that LinkedIn is looking for.
- [25:32]
C
Yeah, they want to see conversation. This is a question I asked to the product head over company pages years ago, and I asked her, like, like, what is the main mechanism, like, what determines whether a company page post is going to do well or not? And she said it was comment density. And she went on to explain what that actually means. If someone comments and says, nice post, and you're like, thanks, bro. There is no density to that comment. Like, it was just a quick exchange. But if someone says, that's a great idea, what about this? And you respond with like, oh, yeah, that's a good point. And they actually see depth of that conversation, that's where they go, ooh, this is exciting. I have to imagine they're probably still tracking that.
- [26:13]
B
Does that mean we should reply to the long AI generated comments that we all seem to be getting?
- [26:19]
C
I don't know. I don't know how to handle those. I appreciate the comment, I really do, but I know it was not a human and it's taken me off track.
- [26:27]
A
I'm seeing less of those now. Are you still seeing a lot of those? Because I feel like maybe because, I mean, in the beginning I was like, hey, thanks for the AI comment. You know, I was very, very, very direct. But are we still seeing a lot of these comments that are AI? I feel like it's harder for me to tell now.
- [26:40]
B
I get about, I would say one every couple of posts and I'm not that active on LinkedIn, so I'm not the case study to look at that. But now what I'm hearing you say, Mike, is we can, we can will them out by, you know, calling them on it.
- [26:52]
A
Well, I mean, I used to call them out and quite literally because it was pretty obvious they all posted at the exact same time, like three minutes after my post went live. And they were virtually identical. But AJ, are you, you're hearing a lot of people still complaining about AI posts, or do you feel like it's gotten so good it's hard for, for people to really discern it now?
- [27:07]
C
I think it's probably both. I, I think LinkedIn is taking action against the overt AI, you know, purely created slop. I also think people are probably getting smarter about, let me train the AI to actually talk like me, sound like me, and make it harder to tell. So I don't know, a post I had, you know, 50ish comments on yesterday, I think probably two were probably fully AI created, but I don't know, there might have Been more and, and could have surprised me by just sounding real.
- [27:34]
A
Okay, hey, just a quick interruption. I want to share something with you. If I told you that 62% of your peers are using AI tools every single day, would that surprise you? Well, that's the data that we found in the recent study that we just did. In fact, nearly half of marketers now say that video is their most important content format, more than written, more than visual, and more than audio combined. These are just two statistics, two stats that are in our brand new industry report. It's our 18th annual study. It's 44 pages long and over the next couple of days you can download it for free if you visit social mediaexaminer.com Report26. Grab your copy now. Okay, let's get back to the show.
- [28:19]
B
So here's what I'm wondering about. And especially for the marketers that are Maybe marketing on LinkedIn for another brand or another person is, you know, when I worked at an agency, a lot of the important metrics were kind of there or even if you were, you know, a Facebook business page admin, as the business owner usually was, you could see the reach and things like that. I don't know LinkedIn analytics very well. So if the visible or, sorry, invisible interactions are the things driving that, what should we, like, what is the metric that we should look for or, or report back to our clients if we're managing a LinkedIn profile or a page for somebody else?
- [28:55]
C
I still think impressions on the post are probably, you know, impressions, reactions and comments. That is probably still like the triad that you want to report. Because if you, if you're getting a lot of the invisible interactions, what that's doing is it's telling the algorithm there's something of value here. You should keep showing it to more people and that's going to show up in the impressions number anyway.
- [29:17]
B
Okay. So in other words, if, if it's getting impressions, that's kind of that main thing. Even if, like, if people are swiping through these charact ourselves, as we talked about, it's probably being the impressions are going up. That's the number to kind of know that from.
- [29:31]
C
Yeah. And if you have a post with 10,000 impressions and 0 likes, 0 comments, you might be like, wow, there must be a lot of invisible interaction happening here. And maybe that's a signal to you that what you're doing there is a great signal and it's working.
- [29:45]
B
This might be more of a question for the two of you as humans versus marketers, but I Think we all, all, you know, sometimes feel a little insecure when we put something up and it doesn't do very well on the visible interactions. And so is there a downside for some brands, like, should they be concerned? Should they take something down if it didn't get, you know, any likes or comments if the impressions are still good?
- [30:09]
C
I have learned don't be embarrassed by anything you post because if the algorithm thinks it sucks, no one's going to see it anyway. So, yeah, don't worry. Like, very few people are actually going back through your back catalog and checking things out and the stuff that you do that does work well, you know, a lot of people are going to see that and learn from that. But I think if you're embarrassed by it and you're worried about what's, you know, what am I putting out and deleting stuff, you're going to take fewer shots on goal and you're going to learn less. So I say post away. Learn what your audience cares about and what they're willing to take action on.
- [30:41]
A
Yeah. And I would add, you know, I write exclusively in my social posts and I only do it once a week. I know I should do it more. I just don't have the bandwidth to do more. I post across three platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook and X, because those are the only three that I can put. Longer form content on threads is just too difficult to break into all those little pieces. So if I notice that I'm getting almost zero engagement across all three of the platforms, I will delete it and I will recraft it. But I've found it almost always comes down to the opening. It almost always comes down to the way that I write the first couple of sentences. And everybody who follows people on LinkedIn and or the other social platforms understands that there is a way to write that is going to get them to click the show more or whatever they call it. What do they call it on LinkedIn? Is it see more or show more or something like that?
- [31:31]
C
Yeah, it's more.
- [31:32]
A
Yeah. And that's an invisible metric. Right. So if you write a really good hook and people click the dot, dot, dot more, my guess is another metric they're looking at is how long are they actually sticking around before they scroll further. That's probably a metric that they don't report to us, which I would imagine is time consuming the content or whatever. I know for me is if my hook is not good, then I got to go back and I got to recraft it all. And what I'VE done is I've trained a model on my writing style and I've given it my most viral posts and I've asked it. I paste in there everything I've written, and I write everything myself. And then, then it analyzes the beginning to say, okay, this is not going to perform well because your hook isn't good. So what it will do is it will recraft the hook for me. It'll give me multiple variations of the hook. And the hooks that work the best for me are the ones that kind of involve a story of some sort. Does that make sense?
- [32:28]
B
Yeah.
- [32:29]
A
Like, I was really surprised when I discovered blank, blank, blank, or, you know, I, you know, some sort of a little revelation or story or something along those lines, or. Aj, I don't know. Have you seen this? Also, like, it seems like the people that are really crushing it on LinkedIn are really good storytellers. Have you found this to be the case?
- [32:47]
C
Yep. Stories for a long time have ruled LinkedIn. And personally, I have a hard time coming up with that kind of content where it's like, hey, as I wander around the world, I'm always finding insights into B2B marketing. I feel a little bit, you know, silly doing it, but I do. I see that content all over my feed. I can guarantee it's getting attention.
- [33:10]
B
Get over it, aj. Get over it.
- [33:12]
A
Well, and aj, here's the good news. You could, if you want to figure out how to do this right, all you've got to do is just, you know, every, every time you have any kind of interesting conversation with a prospect or a customer or at an event, you know, it could be something like, I, I got off the stage and couldn't believe this question, you know, or this question. I'd never heard this before. And it really made me think something along those lines. Right. But the idea is not to reveal all of it, is to never reveal all of it, because the objective is to get them to click that more button, right? And if they click that more button, we know this is an invisible metric that, that, that all the platforms care about. So if we just think super strategically, we can learn how to do this. Just throwing that over the fence.
- [33:58]
B
Yeah. When I worked in radio as a morning radio personality, we always tried to start talking with one of two things if it was a story. One is either start with the emotion or two, start with the action, whatever it might be. And sometimes, you know, I saw somebody give a great tip once if you're writing a LinkedIn post, for example, or an Email and you're telling a story, skip down to the most interesting part and then see if you can delete everything above it. And a lot of times you can, like, it was just unnecessary context because of the way we're used to saying things like, hey, let me tell you what happened today day, and it's just not necessary in that format.
- [34:33]
A
Yeah, it's a skill for sure.
- [34:35]
B
Yeah.
- [34:35]
A
All right, let's. Let's keep going.
- [34:37]
B
Yeah. Well, I want to know, Mike, real quick before we keep going, when you do take something down, like, how long do you give it? Because we're talking about this, you know, 48 hours is where half of your impressions are going to come from.
- [34:48]
A
I, first of all, don't always do this because I, I have a lot of other kind of quote unquote jobs to do. You know what I mean? Move on with your day as the CEO of my business. But if I am, am really, really excited about something I wrote and it just does not connect because I'll almost always try to, within the first hour, go and interact with comments, you know, and then I got to get back to work. So if I notice, like, it's just completely not working, I might go and start crafting a new variation of it utilizing my AI and say, hey, this just completely is not performing. And sometimes it'll say, just give it more time. Because it's true, sometimes I do need to give it more time. But generally speaking, I know that if the sample audience that the platforms are showing this to are not interacting with this, then I've got a problem. I've only done it maybe three times, but sometimes I've just realized something's off here and I've gone ahead and deleted it, and then I've redone it, and sure enough, all of a sudden, it works really, really well.
- [35:47]
B
Okay, well, everything we're hearing, you could
- [35:50]
A
do that with your failed post too, right? So, like, you know, aj, you know, you said sometimes you have some bombs. Well, you can go back now and you could just like reposition. There's something gold in there, right? We just try it from a different angle and see if it works. And that's something that's a lot of people I think can do. If they have a lot of things that they felt were good but just didn't perform well, they could come at it from a new angle.
- [36:09]
B
So not to put pressure on ourselves with this 48 hour clock, but, you know, from what I'm hearing is you can kind of tell long term how something's going to do based on how it does in the 48 hours. Does that mean, AJ that we need to go back to thinking about exactly when we post? Because we've all heard one person person say, you can't post on the weekends on LinkedIn, it never works. And other people say, I got the most reach ever on the weekend. Or do you feel like good content's gonna get out there and it doesn't matter?
- [36:34]
C
Boy, I would love to do this, you know, some kind of an analysis to figure this out, but there's just no good a B test way of figuring out the right time of day. What I have found over time is like in order to get my content to the majority of the people in the time zones that I talk to, usually in the US I try to go earlier in the morning and make sure that Europe can see it. You know, all of the North America sees it. I find that it's harder to get attention on Mondays and Fridays. So I try to keep my posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays if I can, or you know, Wednesday in between. I try to keep posts that are business related during the week and if I've got something non business related, weekends work well. But this is just me shooting from the hip. I don't know. I'd love to hear what both of you guys have found.
- [37:21]
A
I think that it's really important for people to put themselves in the psychology of their target audience. Right? If their target audience is busy entrepreneurs who likely are going to be on LinkedIn in the evenings and the weekends, then it might make sense for you to go ahead and try something on Friday. Right? And just Friday, maybe people aren't necessarily looking to learn something, but maybe they're looking to be inspired. So that's where you could share some inspiring stories or you could create something that's specifically engaged for conversation. Because there's a lot of people that on Fridays are just kind of done, maybe mentally or actually and they're just looking to hang out on the socials. And this is where you could have some content that's designed to really get people to interact and respond. I know there's certain marketers that send their emails on Sunday, you know what I mean? Which is kind of crazy. I don't like that personally because I just think it gets stuck in the Monday craziness when people get back to work work. But I think it's all worth an experiment and I think having an experimental mindset is definitely something to try. But. But I do think to put humans behave differently Depending on the day of the week. I think we know this is true.
- [38:29]
B
Yes. Yeah.
- [38:30]
A
So the real question is like, what kind of stuff should we give them if they're likely to be on the platform on those days?
- [38:35]
B
It's interesting you say that because I have about three newsletters that I read every week and they all come in on Sunday. And I don't know if it's. That's why I read them or not, because I, because during the week I'm like, I just, you know, archive. Gotta get to, gotta get to the actual business and work stuff. So the takeaway that I'm getting from all of this is the post on the fly idea with LinkedIn is just gonna become harder and harder because if you think about it's hard to come up with like a carousel or a multi image post on the fly. Like, hey, here's my, here's a random, you know, photo dump from my weekend or photo dump from a conference or anything like that. And, and when we think about really strategically trying to get more comments to increase those impressions, I feel like that's the same thing. I personally struggle to ask, like I try it. Ask questions. I personally struggle to ask questions that get that. And again, it's not my primary platform. I also admit to being a recovering people pleaser, so I'm unwilling to take really polarizing stances on things which are obviously good. But any tips on getting more comments? I mean, is it certain types of questions that you see work best across industries on LinkedIn?
- [39:44]
C
I think the question begging the comment is super important because there's a lot of people who would be willing to leave a comment, but they just don't know what to comment. And so when you give them that invitation, you leave an open door for them to do what you want them to do. Anyway, it obviously depends on the content of the post, but I found if I have something that's very, an educational kind of post, you know, here's what I do with this ad format or you know, something like that. The natural questions are going to be things that are either a, you know, what do you think about this? Does this cause you to want to use this ad format or ask them a question that tees them up for what do they need to do before they're ready for, for running this ad format?
- [40:28]
A
There's some real psychology at play here, Marketing psychology. If you don't tell people what you want them to do, the chances that they will do it are extremely small.
- [40:38]
B
Yeah.
- [40:39]
A
So as a copywriter, I always try to especially when I'm writing, I'll say something along the lines of what do you think about blank? Which is a piece of what I wrote about. Because whenever you write there's multiple things that are going on, right? I might ask, what do you think about this? You know, or have you tried this? And then I said, I'd love to hear from you. And the reason I don't say comment below is I actually really want to hear from people. And I think my audience knows that I try to respond to every single meaningful post and they know that I really want to hear from them. So by ending my post with that, it increases the likelihood that people who would never post on another person's post because they do not say that, that they will. So simply the lesson here is if you want people to take an action, you need to encourage them to take the action. And it's that simple. So in your case, aj, it could be something along the lines of I'd love to know what you think about this particular thing that I just wrote about. Right. I'd love to hear from you. It's that simple, you know, and then all of a sudden you're going to get some really rich comments because I get extremely detailed comments on the stuff that I do and I know that some of that stuff is probably written by AI, but I also know that I try to meaningfully react to that. So it's as simple as making sure that you actually intentionally ask for it. It's just like with selling, if you don't ask for the sale, you're never gonna get the sale. Yeah, right.
- [42:10]
B
So here we are, we gotta plan ahead on LinkedIn, we gotta get more creative, come up with more comments. And then this was an interesting change that's happening on LinkedIn. LinkedIn now they are removing the ability to go live without pre scheduling. And this is coming up very soon here on June 22nd. After that you'll have to plan ahead, but at the same time you can still go live quickly, quote by scheduling events just minutes ahead. So I mean, I know that LinkedIn requires a third party tool to go live, so it hasn't really been a whip out your phone well at a conference type of platform. Right. But why? Why do you see them doing this? Where would this even come from? Does this give us a signal that they want us all to be planning ahead more?
- [42:50]
C
I think what it is, and I don't know for sure, But I think LinkedIn is a platform that you really hang out on most of the time during the workday. And I think all of us can say, our calendars are packed, we're really busy during the workday. So if you just go live with no explanation, no advanced notice, very few people are going to show up. You might get, you know, two or three. Whereas if you can plan ahead, put it on a calendar, let people actually subscribe and hold time aside, that's when you get the real viewership. So I think LinkedIn may have looked at it as a way of how can we optimize this? What are the events that get a lot of people showing up versus not? And it just, maybe it just looked like a waste to them of, well, if they don't have it scheduled ahead of time, two, three people show up, let's remove that. I don't know.
- [43:36]
B
Well, they do seem to be looking for ways to, you know, all of the companies are looking for ways to cut got processing costs so that they can invest more in AI. As Mike shared a couple of shows back as well. Are there any types? I don't see a lot of live streams on LinkedIn, probably because I don't watch a lot of live streams on LinkedIn. But there are any specific types of live streams that you've seen working well in any industries? Because on other platforms, live shopping is the biggest thing. And obviously that's not on LinkedIn.
- [44:02]
C
Yeah, I think the same kind of content that everyone has been running webinars on in B2B for the last, last 10, 15 years, it's the same kind of content that works really well for live streams. You kind of repackage it for a live audience. But I haven't found any certain industries doing it better than others. But we do. See, even in industries where I just go, this is so niche, like heavy freight with enterprise companies. Anyway, I've got a client in that kind of realm. They're getting like 400, 500 people joining their live streams. And I've never heard of this content. So, yeah, just go deep.
- [44:36]
A
You know, I was, while you were talking, pulling up my phone and I'm just like, how could I have never seen this before? There is a schedule post feature and I guess it's on desktop as well. Has this been there forever? And I just never knew it was there?
- [44:50]
C
AJ it's been like year, year and a half, probably.
- [44:53]
A
Okay. Wow. Okay, so then if we're going live. Yeah. So the reason I pulled this up is I could have sworn there was a time where you could go live directly from. From the app, but I guess I just saw people going live from the app, but they were using like obs or some other kind of tool in order to go live. Is that correct? Okay, yeah. Yeah, I guess it makes sense to go live scheduled because most people aren't just hanging out on the platform, what, wanting to like, just stop everything and watch you live, right?
- [45:21]
C
Yep, I think so. I do wish we could go live right from our phone. And there's probably a cool way to do that, like right from Zoom or something. I've just never seen it done. And yeah, I don't know if LinkedIn's the best place for it.
- [45:34]
A
Yeah, fascinating.
- [45:35]
B
Well, this is, I think these are encouraging changes for marketers and business owners and this has been a great conversation. AJ, thank you so much for joining us today. People want to explore working with you. Where do you want to send them?
- [45:45]
C
Oh, come Listen to the LinkedIn AD show podcast that Michael helped inspire. Follow me on LinkedIn. You know I'm sharing my very best stuff in both of those places.
- [45:55]
A
Well, everybody, thank you so much for listening to all the random little trails we went down today. And AJ and Jerry, thank you. Thank you so much for being on the show. And if you missed anything, because we covered a lot, we took all the notes for you@social mediaexaminer.com 720. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a while, we would love a review. Do check out my other show, the AI Explored Podcast. And this brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I was joined by my co host Jerry Potter today. We'll be back next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and make your marketing keep evolving. Catch you next time.
- [46:31]
B
The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.
- [46:40]
A
Hey, thanks for listening to this week's episode. Before you head out, I wanted to personally recommend that you download our brand new industry report. I've been publishing this study for 18 years. It's a long time and this year's data points to a really clear picture of where the industry is headed it. Whether you're focused on organic paid video or artificial intelligence. It's all covered in this 44 page report with more than 50 charts and right now it's totally free. Visit social mediaexaminer.com report26 to download it right now. Social media examiner.com report26. See you next time.