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- [00:00]
A
Hey there, it's Mike. Before we get started with today's podcast episode, I just want to let you know that Social Media Marketing World is literally just around the corner every year. Thousands of marketers gather this year in Anaheim to learn exactly what's working right now with marketing and with AI. Not what worked last year, actually, what works right now. They leave with strategies that they can implement immediately. And I want you to be there. I want you to be part of this special group so that you can get an edge in 2026, because, my friend, the world is going through radical change. And we're going to be talking about it in detail at Social Media Marketing World, taking place April 28th, 29th and 30th. And AI Business World, which is our AI sub conference, is included free with your Social Media Marketing World ticket. Make the decision right now to attend and let 2026 be your best year ever. Grab your tickets right now at social media marketing world.info.
- [01:09]
B
Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [01:19]
C
Hello.
- [01:20]
A
Hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing podcast brought you by Social Media Examiner. I'm Michael Stelzner, your host, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more leads, more exposure, and more sales. Today I'm joined by Jerry Potter, and we're going to be exploring important updates from LinkedIn with our special guest, AJ Wilcox. Jerry, take it away.
- [01:45]
B
You know, it feels like LinkedIn is redesigning how visibility works, and not just through ads, but with AI discovery, content structure, and even what kinds of engagement are allowed. So some of the things that we got to talk about today, if you want your company to be included in answers given by ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, your presence on LinkedIn could actually help. Also, some new ad tools that can help marketers test a lot more ad creative in less time. As long as you don't misuse one of them, that could creep out your prospects. And LinkedIn is taking a stand on automated commenting, which is going to be really good news or really bad news, depending on how you feel about automated commenting. We're very excited to be joined by AJ Wilcox. AJ is the world's leading LinkedIn Ads expert and teaches businesses 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. AJ welcome back to the show, Jerry.
- [02:38]
A
Mike.
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C
So excited to be back. Thanks so much for having me.
- [02:41]
B
So let's talk about LinkedIn and apparently it's becoming a great place to get your business cited in AI answers. So Reddit and Wikipedia are getting cited less and less by the LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini. And LinkedIn is on the rise. And apparently LinkedIn is also investing in structuring its content on the platform in a way that LLMs like yay. Including giving semantic markup, which means adding HTML tags that describe the meaning or the purpose of the content, not just how it looks visually. And then LinkedIn is also given some tips like making sure you're right in clear, factual language, grades nine through 11 to serve both human readers and AI models. So I would love to know, to start, AJ, how much are your clients and you, while you're at it, worried about or making sure you're cited by AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude right now?
- [03:34]
C
Well, you know, on my website when I have someone submit a lead, I have the open ended question of how have you heard about us? And I didn't think at all about this until about six months ago. All of a sudden, two, three leads a week. Now four, five, six are all mentioning that they found me somehow through AI and I'm like, ooh, okay, I got to keep this going. So, yeah, this is something that I'm thinking about talking about and suggesting to clients too.
- [04:00]
B
So if you're comfortable sharing, like, what percentage of your leads would you say you're getting from that right now?
- [04:05]
C
It's probably like 30, 40% right now, which is crazy. And it's on the rise. Wow.
- [04:09]
A
It's absolutely nuts. And you know, if you think about who owns LinkedIn, which people often forget this, it's Microsoft. Right. And if you think about who's the largest investor in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, it's Microsoft. So I'm just curious, AJ, do you think that Microsoft, you know, and they have their own, they have Copilot and they have OpenAI's ChatGPT. Do you feel like they're going to prohibit competitors like Claude and Google gemini from scraping LinkedIn? What's your thoughts on this? I'm just curious.
- [04:42]
C
I fully expect that's the case. All the LLMs have their own relationships that they're building with content hubs. And I think OpenAI is trying to keep LinkedIn's for sure.
- [04:52]
A
Yeah. And I'll just throw this out there. ChatGPT is the largest of all of them in, I believe it Was July of last year, maybe August or September, there were 2.5 billion queries in one day on Chat GPT. Now that's nothing compared to Google. Google is way more like Google is like that in an hour or something like that. But still it is kind of a big deal. So, Jerry, I don't want to take too much of your thunder away, but AJ, do you feel like there's a strategy here to just literally just create content more on LinkedIn with the hope it's going to get scooped up?
- [05:24]
C
I do think that there's a play there. We know if we put out a post on LinkedIn, it's going to get a lot more attention than if we put out an article. But the way I think about it, if I put out something in a post, it's going to live for probably two, three, four days. And then after about two weeks, it's. It's dead, it's gone. But if I put content in a LinkedIn article or a newsletter, a LinkedIn newsletter, because all it is is just articles, that's content that lives forever and LLMs have access to it. So what I would suggest to everyone is put your unique thoughts that you have into posts because that gets the most attention. But every time you write something longer form like a blog post or a podcast episode, put it in an article, put it in a LinkedIn newsletter, because that's going to be a double whammy.
- [06:08]
B
It's interesting because I remember about a year ago LinkedIn came out and they said, hey, we're going to start promoting older content, including posts, so start making stuff that's valuable long term. And I think it's one of the things that's made the platform better. But you're definitely specifying that an article or a newsletter, which you know, would theoretically take longer to create is a much better place to do that than for longevity than posts.
- [06:31]
C
Yeah, I think so. When you put something into an article, it's there long term for SEO to find. And so what I like to do is create a post first on your own blog, wait two or three days or whatever until Google indexes it, then go and take exactly the same content and put it on a LinkedIn article. And that way you get the SEO juice from it, which is fantastic. But of course, that content is now open and available to LLMs, especially ChatGPT.
- [06:56]
A
You know, AJ, I got a couple questions on this because first of all, can you do that with a personal profile and also a page? And then secondly, isn't it true that the actual posts get a lot more reach on LinkedIn. So this is like a new strategy almost. Right? Like you're not necessarily publishing on LinkedIn to get a lot of readers on LinkedIn because you will probably get more readers if you just had a text post. Is that right or am I wrong on that?
- [07:21]
C
Yeah, I think you're right. So anytime you create an article, LinkedIn is going to make you post about it as well. So the article becomes both the article and a post. I wish that wasn't the case because the, the post for the article doesn't do nearly as well as like a fresh post that you put together.
- [07:36]
A
And can anyone publish articles?
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C
Yes.
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A
Do you have a page or you can do it on a personal profile?
- [07:42]
C
Yep. You can personally post, you can personally create articles and you can personally have a newsletter and then you can do all three of those things from your company page as well.
- [07:51]
A
Just out of curiosity, do you recommend posting non article content also in addition to article content, as far as just activating your community? And do you think the non article content is also going to get picked up by the LLMs?
- [08:06]
C
Yes. So if you post, that's the content that people are actually going to see and engage with. Articles are going to get next to nothing unless they're a newsletter. Then they hit whoever I was going to say.
- [08:16]
B
Yeah.
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C
So I think there's definitely value in doing both. And what I would probably say is anything that is like, if you really want to maximize this, anything that's worth being a post, you could also make as an article and send it out as a newsletter as well. That's going to get you best of both worlds.
- [08:31]
B
Yeah, I mean newsletters are, you know, for people that aren't familiar, they have this additional bonus. It's basically a newsletter is a collection of articles, but people can subscribe to them and depending on how they've turned on their notifications, they'll get a notification. When you publish a newsletter, they'll get an email about it. Like it really can be incredible. And I know they tend to peter out over time, I'm sure as people lose interest and I'm sure like on other platforms, even if you've subscribed after a while, if you don't open the emails, LinkedIn stop sending them. But yeah, but that's definitely an incredible opportunity there. I want to ask you about one of the things that LinkedIn said was to write your content in clear, factual language. So I mean, I assume they aren't having to remind people not to lie. Do you think that means like citing lots of sources like a research paper or lots of statistics or what's your interpretation of what they mean by factual language?
- [09:21]
C
My interpretation of this, and I have no idea if this is accurate, is just they want to make sure that we are using statements that they can easily be corroborated. So if the LLMs have in memory, they, they know that this fact seems to be cited in a lot of areas. They're going to feel a lot more comfortable sharing yours and including yours if it matches, if it's brand, brand new to them. They have to wonder, are you making something up or do you have maybe data and statistics that they haven't ingested yet?
- [09:50]
B
Okay, so just tell the truth. It is basically just make sure that you're, you're doing that. Okay. And then the other thing they talked about is in this grades 9 through 11. Now I know when I write marketing, content, whatever it is, I'm shooting for fifth, sixth grade level because I want even smart people to be able to skim it, right? It's, I'm not writing to dumb it down. I'm writing so that it's skimmable. What do you have a, like, does that make sense to you when you write ads or other content for your clients or do you have a level that you shoot for that you would recommend?
- [10:17]
C
Yeah, I shoot for your level as well. I mean, I like to tell people fifth grade level is, is great, not because your prospects that you're talking to aren't super intelligent and that they couldn't read at a 12th grade level because we're moving fast, we're busy and we're skimming. And especially if it's an ad, I want someone in a skim to still get the point of what I'm trying to get across. And oftentimes that means writing at a fifth grade level, but including the buzzwords that they're going to know and care about.
- [10:44]
A
You know, it's funny, as I think about this fifth grade, ninth grade, 12th grade level, it's like, seriously, like, who thinks like this? You know what I mean? Like, I don't think like this when I write, maybe because I'm a writer, but I like to write in the way that my audience can understand, right? So if I am a scientist and I'm writing a scientist, I'm not going to be writing at a fifth grade level, you know what I mean? I'm going to be writing at a PhD level because I'm attracting scientists, right? So I would imagine the AI is smart enough to know, don't you think? I mean, Jerry and aj, don't you think that it's smart enough to know how to discern the level it's writing at and still get at the core of it? I'm curious why they even come up with such a rule. What do you think, aj?
- [11:23]
C
I think it's just to try to make it easy while the models are still being trained. The higher the level of language, the fewer the people who are that that's going to be, you know, written for.
- [11:33]
A
Yeah.
- [11:34]
C
So, yeah, but I totally think, like, write to your audience and if your audience is at that level, great. Like, don't care about LLMs.
- [11:42]
B
Mike, I was going to ask you and just sort of address this, but I was curious, you know, as a, as a very skilled writer, do you cringe when you hear about people writing at a fifth grade level? Because a lot of the clients I've worked with feel that way because they're like, well, no, I don't want to dumb it down.
- [11:57]
A
I just prefer to write in a way people can understand. And you would be surprised how few people understand things that are very academic sounding, you know, And I think that's the key to the whole thing. There's so many of us that have Master's degrees and PhDs, and, you know, back when I was in grad school, I was speaking a different language. I would come home and my family would chastise me and say, can you please speak English? And it depends what your objective is. If you're trying to sound very prestigious and you want sound like you're like a McKinsey, whatever, you know what I mean, then use all that great language. But I just think in overall human communication, the clear communicator will always win. That's my professional opinion.
- [12:40]
B
Well, and the best part is, no matter what level you write your content on, LinkedIn, the LLMs are going to probably rewrite it in the way that that logged in user enjoys content anyway, correct? Yeah. All right, so more about LinkedIn visibility here. So with LinkedIn ads, they're kind of changing how and where visibility can happen for. And these are some very unique features that are rolling out with LinkedIn. So I want to ask you about each of these separately. So one of them is they're bringing in ad personalization where you can automatically tailor your ad copy to individual members, including by their first name, their job title, their industry, and their company name. And I remember when Facebook used to offer something like this with Facebook ads. And I think they took it away because it weirded people out. Like, I remember seeing ads where it was like, hey, Jerry, want a T shirt with your name on it? And you know how impersonal that felt. So, like, how far should brands go? Do you feel like with first name, job title, company level personalization before it potentially starts to feel invasive instead of relevant?
- [13:44]
C
I think it's the right question. You know, I got really excited when I heard this feature was coming out because I ran a test where I was targeting just very specific companies and I would make sure to use the company name inside the ads that are meant just for one company. And I would get 10 times the click through rate. It was insane. So I went, oh, this is exciting. Like, give us this ability to do across all of our ads. So immediately I started including company name and I get almost no lift out of it. So I was like, okay, well let's try first name. Let's see how much of a lift we get. Again, next to no lift. Slightly higher click through rate, but lower conversion rate. So it just, it balanced out. I had a member of our community who said, hey, I'm using job titles and it's working really well. So maybe it's like the, the more personal and creepy you get, the more it pushes people away. But if you use something like a job title that's a little bit more innocuous, maybe that's, that's the ticket. So we're getting ready to launch a test with that.
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B
Do you feel like there's a way to write the copy where it's kind of like it enhances the fact that you're speaking to that individual without calling out that, you know, they're the ones that you're speaking to. Like, for example, I guess off the top of my head it would be like, give me a name of a job title that you would target.
- [14:58]
C
Let's do marketing manager.
- [15:00]
B
Marketing manager. So instead of saying as a marketing manager, you know, or you're a marketing manager, right. You know, instead you would say something like, marketing managers know X, Y, Z. Like, do you feel like that could be more effective without the group factor?
- [15:14]
C
Yep, that's the ticket. It feels a little bit like, of course you could target your LinkedIn ads to that specific title anyway. So I don't think that's gonna raise eyebrows.
- [15:22]
A
If you think about this from a copywriting perspective, you wouldn't want to necessarily put the job title in there. You want to put the pains that they're experiencing. So are you struggling to generate more qualified leads to grow your business, that's obviously going to be targeting someone who's in a marketing role. You don't even need to call it out. So I feel like this is kind of the lazy route, aj, as far as, like, injecting these dynamic things in your ads, I don't know what's your reaction? Because targeting an audience makes sense, right? But injecting the various different industries in there without modifying the copy all around, it feels like an accent waiting to happen.
- [15:57]
C
I think the play for LinkedIn here is if you want to speak directly to a single job title, you have to do this, like, micro segmentation of I'm going to take an ad set, narrow it way down, and I'm going to have a whole bunch of them. And now my account is really difficult to manage because there's so many different creative and audiences to balance. I think LinkedIn's like, well, hey, how about you just create one ad? We personalize it to the audience you're speaking to and, you know, it's a lot easier. I'm not a big fan. I would rather be micro segmented and have that control, but also live in a platform all day. So.
- [16:28]
B
Okay, thank you for clarifying that because, yeah, everything that you're saying that Mike's saying, it feels like there's no point for this. But now that certainly makes a lot more sense.
- [16:36]
A
But they're not writing the copy for you, right? Or are they? Is AI writing the copy for you too?
- [16:40]
C
No, no, you just get to dynamically insert like first name or company name or job title into your existing copy.
- [16:46]
A
Got it. Okay.
- [16:47]
B
Just like you would in email marketing, but you put in a placeholder kind of. Okay. Another ad type that LinkedIn has introduced is called reserved ads, which basically secures the first ad in the feed so that you can boost brand visibility and have consistent impressions. So what's your thought? I mean, as somebody who's advertised on LinkedIn for years, what's your thought on this placement? Is it is first seen good or is it, you know, first seen, first forgotten? Like, what's your gut on this?
- [17:15]
C
First is usually best. So if you think about scrolling fatigue that we all experience, the very first post you see is going to get more of your attention than seven or eight pages down. You're just flying at, you know, breakneck speeds. So I think this is good. The challenge with it, though, is that with these reserved ads, they are charging so much for this privilege that, you know, I can achieve the same thing just by targeting an audience, giving it enough of a budget that I know it can hit everyone who comes in that day and bidding really high, but when I bid really high, I'm going to end up paying two to three times what I should be, you know, per click or per impression. So I don't know. I think a very limited audience is going to find this very useful. I'm going to guess Fortune 500 brands.
- [17:58]
A
Well, and I would imagine if you have something really timely, like you have something happening later in the day, you know, like you're maybe doing something that's tied to a specific date and time and you want to assure that people see it, but you can still accomplish that, AJ is what you're saying. With more money, do you feel like it's going to be more costly to increase your budget or to do a reserve ad, or are they only reserved for the big brands?
- [18:23]
C
It's probably going to be more expensive to use reserved, so. And there's less flexibility there. But I totally am on board. Like, if you have an event coming up, you've got to push as much attendance to this webinar or, you know, an in person event. Yeah, that's probably what the reserved is going to be for. But the way they price it is based off of the size of your audience, how active they are, and what day you want to show up. So if you want to show up on an, on a Friday or a Saturday, it's going to cost less than if you want to show up on a Monday or Tuesday, most likely. But you have to get a quote from LinkedIn for it. It's not super easy.
- [18:57]
A
Oh, okay. Wow. So you can't just set it up yourself. You have to work through a salesperson, basically.
- [19:02]
C
Exactly.
- [19:02]
A
Yep.
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B
So they talked about how this solves the problem of inconsistent impressions. Do you run it like, is that a real problem that you run into? Because I would think you'd just raise your budget like you said, if you were not getting the impressions you wanted.
- [19:15]
C
Yeah, yeah, I just, I'll increase my, my budget and my bids for how large the audience is anyway. So. Yeah, I don't find that consistency to be an actual issue. I think they're trying to plug holes that don't exist.
- [19:27]
B
Okay. A couple of other ad updates on LinkedIn Mike mentioned, you know, do they actually write the ad for you before they are introducing more tools like this, including flexible ad creation where you can upload multiple assets and then LinkedIn will auto optimize the combinations, whether it's the, you know, the visual creative or the titles. And or the, you know, headlines and things like that, I assume, and then shift budget at the top performers. And then also they've said that advertisers who run five ads see an average of 20% higher click through rate than those running just one ad. And so AI ad variants will automatically generate multiple versions of ad copy from a single input. So I guess in that way they are kind of, you know, writing something and they said it'll even create ads from your existing headline or intro that you have on your profile or I would imagine on your page. So when you start a campaign, or let's, let's say somebody hasn't hired you, A.J. but they're trying to run their own LinkedIn ads. What's a minimum number of different ads that you recommend for someone to start an ad campaign and then over time as Well?
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C
I love two ads at the same time.
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B
Only two?
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C
This goes, yeah, this goes super counter to what LinkedIn recommends. But their recommendation is five to seven. And you can totally tell exactly why they have that recommendation. Because when you have five to seven ad creatives in a campaign, it breaks the frequency cap. So now they're able to show your most active Target audience on LinkedIn, your ads more often, making the auction more competitive and making everyone pay more.
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A
So I understand what frequency cap means just for people that don't know what that means. Means.
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C
Yeah, yeah. By default LinkedIn's only going to show one of your company's ads to one person every 24 hours. But as soon as you have four or more, they get to start breaking that frequency cap. And now they can show it to all the way up to three and a half times per 24 hour period.
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B
Okay.
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A
Do you think that that's a good thing or a bad thing from the advertiser side of things?
- [21:20]
C
If I have something coming up that is time sensitive, I want to hit that audience as often as possible. So I will break the frequency cap when you know, the clock is ticking. But otherwise I don't like to super tire an audience out from my ads. Plus if I go and tell a client we want to run five to seven creatives for this campaign and they have to create all of that, oftentimes that's so much on their plate that they end up just melting down and I don't get anything. But if I say, hey, can you just create two variations here? It's really easy to create two variations and that keeps it going. Plus I know if I upload more than three creatives into a campaign, LinkedIn's gonna wholesale ignore, you know, at least one or two. So. But if I put two ads or maybe three ads, I can fully expect LinkedIn's gonna give each of those enough impressions I can actually tell if it's working.
- [22:09]
B
They'll all get shown.
- [22:10]
A
Okay, you've been hearing me talk about social media marketing world taking place at the end of April, and I know you might not be able to travel, you might not have the budget, but here's the good news. We have an incredible option called a virtual ticket. You can experience all the great content directly from the comfort of your favorite chair. This includes all the sessions, all the keynotes, and even the workshops are included. All from the comfort of that place that you love to hang out, your office or your home or your couch. And here's the good news. You can watch the live stream of all the sessions and all the keynotes and you get all the recordings of everything for a full 18 months. So why not experience social media marketing world for yourself today? Grab social media marketing world virtual tickets by visiting social mediamarketingworld.info. you'll thank yourself for sure.
- [23:08]
B
You spend a lot of time managing LinkedIn ads. They talk about how, you know, we'll create quality ads from a single prompt or from someone's headline. Like, for someone less experienced, would you trust it to create quality ads from that little information? Or is this even a realistic feature for the perfectionists among us that, you know, will spend more time trying to fix what LinkedIn created than starting from scratch?
- [23:33]
C
Yeah, as long as we can review what it comes up with, I don't have any problem with this. But personally, I enjoy creating and writing way more than I enjoy editing. So for me personally, I'm going to go. I think I'm going to come up with this because both are going to take me about the same amount of time. But I wholly appreciative to advertisers who say, oh, just give me some ideas and then let me pick some. I don't know if that's how it's going to work, but I sure hope so.
- [23:59]
A
Well, and you know, if we think about all the great tools that we have available to us today, like, I'm a big fan of Claude. I don't know if you're using Claude, A.J. but yeah, you are. Okay, so you can have Claude come up with. You can take a screenshot of an old ad and just, it'll read it and then you can say, help me figure out how I can make this better in order to get whatever my, my mission is, right. More clicks, whatever, and you can tell a little bit about who your target audience is and we'll just go ahead and it'll, it'll bloop, it'll come up with a whole bunch of variations for you. Right. And then you can choose from there and work with inside of Claude. And then I would imagine that's probably going to outperform because you get that interactive back and forth kind of creative direction thing with Claude just like you would if you were working directly with a copywriter. That's probably going to outperform the one click one and done kind of things that LinkedIn are doing, don't you think?
- [24:49]
C
Yeah, yeah. Where you can't change the prompt at all. Yeah, absolutely. I would much rather train my Claude to understand, to talk like me way better.
- [24:57]
B
I don't think you're ever going to be put out of business, aj because people are always going to want people to manage their ads. But how far away do you think we are to where, you know, the AI within LinkedIn is so good that marketers and business owners will be able to easily manage their own campaigns without it becoming like a full time focus?
- [25:14]
C
Oh, so hard to say because AI is pretty good at text. So I don't think we're very far off from it being able to create ad copy and maybe even imagery that performs well in ads, but it's really bad at imagery right now and it's also really bad at calculation and numbers getting much better. So I think we're still quite a ways off on that. But you know, the more LinkedIn gives us that tries to make things easy, the more complicated the platform gets. And so I don't see them making things very easy. But of course that's my mission, is try to make LinkedIn ads as simple for everyone as possible.
- [25:52]
A
AJ, do you think that we're going to have a day where the concept of media buyers, which is what they call them on Facebook and Instagram, are kind of is going to be a title of the past and the days where, you know, you're manually going in and deciding when turn off ads and turn them back on. Can you imagine this is something that's going to be autonomous for the most part.
- [26:13]
C
I can see it getting there, but I'm going to wait until it's that way with Google and Facebook first and then I'm going to wait about four years and then that's probably when LinkedIn is going to get there.
- [26:23]
B
You're not counting on LinkedIn to win that horse race, huh? No, no, no, no.
- [26:26]
C
LinkedIn's almost four years behind Facebook. I'm just going to let that horse run.
- [26:30]
B
That's the timeline. Okay, well, and as you said, if they're not getting the numbers right, whether it's the analytics or the spend or, you know, whatever, that's a pretty big deal when you're talking about ads.
- [26:40]
C
Yep, totally.
- [26:41]
B
So LinkedIn has taken this stance on automated commenting, which we'll talk about here in just a second. But I wanted to bring up this new Premium, you know, LinkedIn Premium. They have different variations for pages and profiles and things like that. And they've launched a new premium all in one subscription package specifically for small businesses, solopreneurs and quote founders, juggling sales, hiring and marketing. And so some of the features here, one, you get unlimited prospect searches, advanced filters, a assisted in mail writing, which is the internal obviously mail messaging system, Daily lead suggestions, auto invite for people who engage with your posts, a $50 credit each month to boost posts, and then a centralized dashboard where you can track outreach, hiring efforts, and a couple of other things. So starting with this, you know, the $50 credit, because that seems like a good idea. It costs more than $50 a month. But this $50 credit for boosting your visibility is interesting. Will a small business be able to make any meaningful impact with $50 a month? Or is it more like a coupon to get you to spend more on ads?
- [27:42]
C
More like a coupon, for sure.
- [27:44]
A
Yeah.
- [27:44]
C
The kind of boosting that you can do, just to give you some background here, the kind of boosting that you do inside of a post itself is super limited. You only get a few different ways of targeting your audience. So you can't get down to the level of granularity that you can through LinkedIn's campaign manager. You also can't stop your ad. There's no pause button. You have to delete it if you want it to stop spending your money. You don't have control over how it spends. And then the real nail in the coffin is all of the performance from that boost lives inside that post itself. So there's no one dashboard that you can go and look at everything that you've done. Super limited. So my plea, even if you are using this feature, please don't boost your posts this way. Do it inside of Campaign Manager, where you can control budgets, control all your posts, and see everything all together.
- [28:31]
A
Do we have a sense of what something like this costs?
- [28:34]
B
I looked it up when we were setting up the show and I want to say it quoted me it was around 75, 80amonth, I think, which is a little bit more than the regular LinkedIn Premium, which I think for me. And it's different everywhere in the world, of course, which I think was more like 60amonth.
- [28:48]
A
So, AJ, in your professional opinion, like, just help everybody understand what the premium, what you get with the LinkedIn Premium, and maybe that, that would be valuable because I bet you most people are like me and they're just on the free account.
- [28:59]
C
Yeah, if you're on free, it's great. And I suggest keep using the free. If you get really invested in LinkedIn and you start searching for more people and sending messages, at some point you're going to get hit with a paywall and the paywall is going to say, if you want to keep doing this this month, you have to sign up. That's when I tell people, shoot for premium.
- [29:16]
A
So this new all in one, is it like a premium plus almost, or do you feel like you're better off just sticking with premium?
- [29:21]
C
Yeah, it's kind of a plus. It's really good for the solopreneur or the small business owner who's very busy if they just want to spend a few minutes on LinkedIn and have everything fed to them. This is pretty cool. If you're a sales rep, you're doing a lot of professional outbound, you're going to want sales navigator, you're going to have your own flow for what you do. But this is pretty cool. Like someone engages with your post, it automatically sends them an invite to connect. I would sure love to know how that connection goes out. Is it just like a. Without a message or customized with AI? If so, I would want control over that. But yeah, it's pretty good.
- [29:55]
B
That's what I was going to ask you about. So. So it's, it actually sends a connection request if somebody likes your post or comments on it or something like that.
- [30:02]
C
Yeah, that's what it says. I haven't had a chance to play with it. I think that's pretty valuable. LinkedIn has their company, their premium company pages and the big benefit to paying is that it starts sending people invitations to follow your company and those go out for free. You don't even have to run them as an ad. So, yeah, I think things like this, they do add some value if you're trying to grow, but you don't have a whole lot of time to give LinkedIn.
- [30:25]
B
I think of myself from the consumer side on LinkedIn, like if I get a Connection request and I don't recognize the person and there's not a message, I just immediately ignore it because I assume there's a sales pitch coming from it. Although I guess if I'd engaged with that person's post in the last 24 hours, maybe I would recognize the name and that I would consider it.
- [30:44]
C
Yeah, that's better. I'm the same way. But I also know that the stats are if you send a connection request with no personalization on it, it's usually like 40 to 50% acceptance rate. So there's 40 to 50% of people out there who just blindly accept connection requests.
- [30:58]
B
Yeah. Some of which are valuable and some of which won't do you any good at all, obviously. So do you run into a lot of people you think that fit this bucket on LinkedIn? Because they talked about like lots of people are absolutely focused on sales and marketing, but then to also be in charge of hiring, which again, if you're a, you know, small business owner, that's possible. Do you feel like there's enough. I mean, I assume they would, they would look at the job titles or do the research before they would introduce something like this.
- [31:22]
C
Yeah, I would say probably half of our clients come on and go, I know I need to be More active on LinkedIn, I know I need to do more, but I just don't have the time and I don't know how. So this is kind of like training wheels on your LinkedIn profile. Just feed me the people that I want to, you know, have conversations with. I'll send messages, I'll comment when I post, people will get connection requests from me. So yeah, I think it's probably pretty valuable for lots of small business owners
- [31:49]
B
and they want help hiring as well. Like that was the part that I thought I found odd because I would think that if you're at the level where you are prospecting heavily on LinkedIn, where you're struggling to manage the hiring process, you're probably not in charge of marketing and sales and HR and hiring and all of that.
- [32:08]
C
Yeah, yeah. If you're a one to three person company, I could see being responsible for all those. But I don't even see hiring being a huge reason to have this. But maybe it's exceptional there too.
- [32:18]
B
Being semi active on LinkedIn myself, I know one of the hot topics is that over the last six months has been how much content feels like it's been written by AI. You know, AI comments if you don't post often and don't get a lot of Comments and you occasionally get a comment, you're like, oh, I got a comment. And then you read it and you're like oh, this was. And now I got to reply to it because they asked a question and I'm going to look bad if I don't reply to it, even though I know they're not there. So LinkedIn has clarified that comments submitted via browser extension scripts or third party tools without a human clicking the comment button are not allowed. So they are taking a stance on these automated comments and they're doing three things. One is they're removing the automated comments from Most Relevant, which is I think usually the default sort on most posts. Right. Is that accurate? Most Relevant is the default. Usually, yeah. Okay, yeah. So they wouldn't, they're obviously getting much less visibility. They also won't be shared outside of the commenters network. So if they didn't have a big network, other people wouldn't see it anyway. And they said if someone continuously automates low quality comments, they may restrict their usage of LinkedIn. So I feel like we're seeing two ends of a spectrum here. Like on one hand we're hearing to use AI to create more content, create more ad variations, you know, automate invites with that premium all in one subscription. And the other hand, relationships can't be automated. So you better hang out on LinkedIn and give thought to every single comment. So as timestrapped marketers and business owners like how do we prioritize what's important or how do we listen to what they're saying here and make sure we're doing it right?
- [33:52]
C
Oh, it's so hard because you know, LinkedIn, they swung that pendulum so far that one way because they're owned by Microsoft that some, you know, in bed with OpenAI. And so right out of the gate it was a, we're going to put AI into everything we do and try to fully accept it. But then the pendulum swing the opposite way was, oh crap. Whenever people are using this, it becomes less personal, it becomes disingenuous and people are now out of the equation and it lowers the amount of engagement that they're actually getting on the platform. So that pendulum, it's got to swing somewhere and stay in the middle. I think that's really nice that LinkedIn is, is saying we're going to try to penalize this kind of content. But they're also speaking out of both sides of their mouth. They allowed it to be created in the first place. But I don't know. Mike, what do you think?
- [34:36]
A
Well, first of all, a couple months ago, I started calling out every single person who is an AI commenter on my thing and I'm all, I'm a. How's the AI comment technology working for you? You know, is what I would say to him. You know, someone would say, oh, no, that's not AI. And I'm like, oh, really? Well, did you look at the comment right above it? It sounds almost exactly the same. So, you know, I mean, it was, it was pretty obvious. Like the way it would work is they'd be like, did make some sort of generic observation about what it thought the article was about. You know what I mean? And then it would end with, what do you think? You know, it would always end with an engaging question.
- [35:06]
B
Yes.
- [35:06]
A
And almost always had an emoji in it too. Now they're getting a little bit more sophisticated where it's harder to tell. But here's where I think a lot of people need to understand this is going. It's going to be exceptionally hard for LinkedIn to police this. And the reason why is because there are tools now like Claude Cowork, which will effectively take over your browser and you can tell it to go and engage with the most active people who are commenting specifically on my LinkedIn. You can watch it. It will literally go to your LinkedIn profile and probably will link, click on their, their profiles, and then we'll go back and we'll take a screenshot and we'll actually write a really thoughtful comment. And I don't think there's any way that anyone is going to know. And now that you've got tools like Claude. Oh, actually it's called, it was called Claude Bot, but it's called Open openclaw. Yeah, Open Claw. You can automate all this stuff. So I think this is going to be impossible for LinkedIn to police. The real question is like, I don't know, A.J. like, I'm more curious, what should we do as humans when we get these comments all seemingly coming in within like five or ten minutes of us posting and, you know, we start to notice these human patterns, like, what's your best practice recommendation? Do you just assume they're human? Do you not engage? Do you just give them a thumb? What's your thoughts?
- [36:29]
C
You know, if it's related? I do feel like I owe my network a response, an actual human response. But so many of the times the comments are like, you say, like it's, you know, vague comment on what you wrote and now it's a question diving way into a Different edge case of LinkedIn ads. And I'm like, oh, if I have to go and answer this, it's going to take me, you know, 20 minutes to answer. And I don't even think there's a human on the other side. So personally, I'm a big fan of like, hey, if it's. If you can tell it's absolutely AI, just ignore. Or like you do, call them out. Try to make it as intensely personal as you possibly can.
- [37:07]
A
Do you recommend keeping the comments relatively short or do you recommend and like using narration tools like on the desktop? Like, there's a cool tool called Whisper Flow, which I use. You use that one as well.
- [37:19]
C
AJ Just started using it yesterday. It's really cool.
- [37:21]
A
So is it also a best practice to tag people? I don't even know if you can do that on LinkedIn with comments or do they get notified, like, help us understand, like, just a little bit of best practices for. For commenting etiquette?
- [37:33]
C
Yeah, it used to be that you couldn't really tell if a comment did anything or went anywhere but about. I want to say it's been about A year ago LinkedIn started reporting to us the number of view on our comments. And that made a whole bunch of people go, ooh, I need to make sure I'm strong on my comment game.
- [37:48]
B
Yes.
- [37:49]
C
And yes, you can mention people. The notifications are kind of spotty. Sometimes they see it, sometimes they don't. Depends on how busy their notifications are. But yeah, I do. I think now because you can actually see what your comments are getting, it's totally worth giving really like complete answers and just test, see, does the complete answer get me more views than just a quick thanks, bro.
- [38:12]
A
And do they rank the better conversations near the top? You know what I mean? Like Facebook does, for example. Sometimes Facebook will have. And I'm much more active on. Well, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn too. But sometimes the stuff that's quote unquote at the top isn't always the first comment. It's the one that has the best dialogue. Is it the same on LinkedIn?
- [38:29]
C
Yeah.
- [38:29]
A
Okay.
- [38:30]
C
Yeah, yeah. The most interesting kinds of comments, they're going to start floating towards the top. So I think that's what they're doing.
- [38:36]
A
Cool.
- [38:36]
B
Sometimes you'll see a post, the comment seems to have more engagement than the post did. It'll be at the top of that most relevant search. Mike, as you're describing, Claude, coworker, these other tools, leaving meaningful comments. Now I feel like I'm okay with that. If it's a bot, but it's leaving really good comments on my post, I'm like, I'm okay with that. And as I think back as a human, when I see one of these comments that's so obviously AI, part of me wants to reply. So I look like I'm a good network worker and I'm a good engager, and then part of me doesn't want to reply because I don't want that person to think that I don't know that this is AI. But if it's a good comment, AJ and LinkedIn didn't know it was AI, it could spark more conversation, increase the reach of your post, couldn't it?
- [39:20]
C
Yeah, it could. And I think that's the risk because for me, when I'm having a conversation over DMs with someone or over comments, the second I can tell that that person has automated the conversation, I lose all respect for him. Like, you've automated my relationship. We no longer have a relationship. And so that's really scary to me. Like, let me just turn this feature on and let it have conversations as me. And then you make a whole bunch of people write me off for the, the whole future. So, yeah, I don't know, could be worth it.
- [39:52]
A
Here's a thought. And again, I'm going back a little bit, so some of the gray hairs that have been around for a while are going to understand what I'm about to say. Like on your Facebook page, typically, like, you would have someone sign it like Jason or Mike or whatever, right? Because it's a. And you don't know who the person is and you personalize it. Who's to say that the response isn't going to say AJ Bot, you know what I mean? And you sign it AJ Bot or AJ Assistant, you know what I mean? And that way they know it's not really you. Because you've got a lot of huge YouTubers, don't you, Jerry, that are. That are doing this with their comments, where they have assistants that are in there like commenting, because there's so many darn people. So I would imagine that this, if you were to train up a knowledge base, AJ on everything you know about LinkedIn and LinkedIn ads and, and it was pretty darn comprehensive. I don't think anybody would be upset because right now we have a bot that is our customer service bot on social media marketing world sales page, you know what I mean? And people ask questions all the time and, and it's really good and it's really accurate. Because it's been well trained. I would imagine people would respect that if they knew that this was not aj, it was AJ Bot. And it actually might lead to some interesting things because it's been trained on your knowledge and wisdom. What do you think about that aj? You see that coming someday?
- [41:03]
C
I do. I mean, first of all, I'm training AJ Bot app right now doing that exact same thing for, for, you know, similar purposes. But yeah, I do think it's a lot less disingenuous if you're claiming it's AI right out of the gate. But anytime someone you don't know it's AI and you find out it is, that's the letdown.
- [41:21]
B
So let me ask you, they talked about third party tools and cracking down on people that are not on LinkedIn pressing the comment button. First of all, are there third party tools where you can manage your LinkedIn comments? Because I know some, some third party scheduling tools also let you manage comments on some of the platforms.
- [41:37]
C
Yeah, I don't use them just because I don't want LinkedIn to have any sort of whiff of automation from anything I'm using because people's profiles get shut down for more. But yeah, I'm pretty sure that exists.
- [41:47]
B
Okay, so should people that are using third party tools right now be worried that it's going to be flagged that way? I guess more specifically too, like I imagine for some time strapped marketers at and you know, business owners that it's either use these tools or just not have time to be on there at all. So where is, where does it become worth the risk? I guess.
- [42:09]
C
Oh man, that's hard to say. I think.
- [42:12]
B
Oh, you're not giving legal advice like.
- [42:14]
C
But yeah, anything that you're going to test, test it at really small volumes first. If LinkedIn is going to sense that what you're doing is AI, you don't want that. But if your tools are good enough, they're going to pass their checks then I don't see how they're going to even really enforce it. So but just do it a little bit, make sure you're actually proud of what it's putting out.
- [42:35]
B
Okay. And I think to reiterate too, I mean LinkedIn officially said like, yeah, we don't really like it and we might not show you in most relevant and maybe non connections won't see it. Like it seemed like it could take a lot before you literally got got removed from the platform or even partially removed.
- [42:53]
C
Yeah, yeah, it's going to be a little while you're probably going to see other people get banned before you.
- [42:59]
B
I love it. There you go. You got. It's like when you're speeding on the highway, not that I ever do that. And somebody else is going fast and you're like, well, they're going to get pulled over before I do, right?
- [43:06]
C
That's right.
- [43:07]
B
I don't need to worry about that. All right, well, lots of new ways to be increasing your visibility on LinkedIn, AJ this has been a great dialogue. Thank you for joining us today. If people want to explore working with you, where do you want to send them them? And if they want to connect with you in the socials, I assume LinkedIn is the easiest place to find you.
- [43:23]
C
Yep. Just search for AJ Wilcox on LinkedIn and just make sure you customize the the connection message. Just say you heard me on Mike and Jerry's show, then I'll be happy to connect with you. I'd love to have that conversation.
- [43:35]
A
AJ and Jerry, thank you so much for being on the show today. And hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 712 can you believe 712 weeks of this thing thing? By the way, if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a longtime listener for a while, we would love a review. And do check out our other show, the AI Explored Podcast. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and I was joined today by my co host, Jerry Potter. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. Catch you next time.
- [44:09]
B
The Social Media Marketing Podcast cast is
- [44:11]
A
a production of Social Media Examiner. Hey, don't forget to get your tickets to Social Media Marketing World, whether they be physical tickets or virtual tickets, by visiting social media marketing world.info it takes place at the end of April. Don't miss out. Social media marketing world.in fox.