B (2:57)

So when you get a brand new job, you want to announce it, or you get a new certification, you have a new milestone you've achieved in your business. So you update your experience section. This allows you to push out a celebration post. We've historically been able to do these and the maybe running joke was their graphics created in the 1980s. So that's a little bit of a inside LinkedIn joke there. But what is really cool about the new announcements is you can update new images so it has new features. They also look like GIFs. They are moving images. And then I guess the final thing that maybe LinkedIn wants to reiterate is that you can upload your own personal pictures. So say you have a new announcement with a team or a new podcast or a new YouTube channel. You could put your picture with the announcement or feature your YouTube channel graphics with that announcement.

C (3:58)

Okay. And do you feel like it's still sort of career and business related or do you feel like this is kind of getting into being, you know, at a little bit more personal stuff? Because there are those people who are like Donaire, I hate when people share a photo of their dog on LinkedIn, you know, things like that.

B (4:12)

I think it's because it's about sharing your wins, your job opportunities, your career milestones. We do associate LinkedIn with that energy. So I think it's not necessarily maybe celebrating. You had breakfast this morning, but it's definitely more job related.

C (4:29)

Unless it was a power breakfast, right? A network breakfast or something, Something like that.

B (4:33)

I think you could take celebrating a little too far, but it's an additional way, according to LinkedIn, to be more expressive and visually vibrant. AKA no longer 1980s graphics.

C (4:47)

Got it. Okay, well, and I just want to say, I mean, as marketers, we shouldn't sleep on this even if we think it is silly or lame. Because I, when I used to give talks teaching people about the algorithm on any of the platforms, right? All the algorithms are the same. They show people content that they think they'll like. Right? And I used to talk about it on, on Facebook. Like, you know how you'll see somebody pop up in your Facebook feed that you haven't seen in years? It's almost always a birth, a pregnancy, a marriage, an engagement, a new job. Like it's always a celebratory post and because they reach your immediate connections on LinkedIn and then they reach more and more and more. So I think definitely an opportunity. And as you're thinking about the 80s graphics, I'm thinking, well, of course Microsoft owns LinkedIn, right? So it's like the old.

B (5:29)

I was just going to say the number one thing that I tell people is leverage these types of features once or twice a year on average. Don't sleep on them, don't ignore, ignore them for five to 10 years. Because we do want to celebrate your wins and especially how you position a milestone, a career milestone. For example, I posted recently that I was officially an international paid speaker and that posted well. But I also could have used these new announcement graphics and positioned myself on stage speaking as part of that celebratory post. So it could have now been pushed out a slightly different way than the way that I published it originally.

C (6:10)

All right, let's talk about the news feed here in just a second. There's been a lot of confusion about this and some of it is related with AI. So we'll explain that here in just a second. But if you're unsure where to start with AI in your role or in your business, or if you're already using it, but you know you could be doing so much more, the first thing we want you to know is that you don't have to master everything with AI, okay? You just need to know your next few steps. So we put together this three minute assessment to reveal your AI marketing readiness level and get a 30 day action plan specifically on how to get better at it. So are you an observer, an experimenter, an optimizer or a transformer? You can find out in a few minutes. Get specific next steps based on where you are today. There's no generic advice here. This will be customized for you based on what you tell the quiz. No overwhelming tech speak either. So all you need to do is go take this quiz and start using the the results today go to social media examiner.com AI Quiz Again social mediaexaminer.com AI Quiz all right, the LinkedIn news feed. There's been lots of confusion and I like the fact that they're doing this. LinkedIn has now been having their upper executives explain exactly what's going on to get better information out there. And I like that it's personal so that you can credit or blame somebody if you don't like what it says, but also because it feels more authentic. So what do we know now after these updates from the LinkedIn executives.

B (7:34)

I think the main takeaways is LinkedIn's trying to explain how to understand what AI is now doing for the platform and for your custom experience on the platform. Because AI can create some opportunities where maybe in the past did not exist. The number one thing I'm going to say is they are explaining the news feed, and here's my summary of one of their videos. Talking about the four things the newsfeed is trying to do for you. And then of course, it's going to be up to you to decide if it's doing that for you. Number one, it's saying we want you to stay connected with people you already know.

C (8:15)

Okay?

B (8:15)

Your past colleagues, your people you're meeting at a conference, people you are currently working with. All of that is with the intention of staying connected with people you know. So you're supposed to see people you have met and you know in your newsfeed.

C (8:31)

From a marketing perspective, then that means that connections and followers obviously are still very valid.

B (8:36)

Correct. And that also makes me say, you know what, if you're clicking on people's profiles, if you're actually sending direct messages, that is going to create a stronger oh, we bet you know each other signal. So it's outside of just liking commenting on each other's posts, I actually think the staying connected with who you know goes a little deeper. So that's something to notice. The help you learn is the second one. They want to be a place of LinkedIn learning, a place of where you can get more insight. So if they assume, and this now becomes more industry, what we expect to see in our news feeds, because you have signaled that you work in a certain industry, they're going to deliver content that they think is helpful, insightful and learning in that space.

C (9:25)

Okay, well, that's a great opportunity for marketers then.

B (9:27)

Correct. The third one is to join conversations. The way I interpret that is it's about the news cycle in your industry, potentially in parallel industries. So if you're in finance, they want to push conversations that are currently happening in the world around international news. Everything that they want to push out, conversations that they think you can join. Okay, so that makes Sense. It's got LinkedIn news for a reason. We have the news cycle happening and they want you to join those conversations in or near your industry. And then the fourth one is definitely to build your own brand, which I think is a lot of people want their own visibility on their own content. I want you to learn from me. I want you to join conversations. I want to Be posting the power of, I think building your own brand is to position yourself with other people in your industry. So say for example, I am now positioned with social media social media Examiner. I like and comment on social media examiner content and hopefully that creates a ecosystem of a brand that can exist for both of us, if that makes sense.

C (10:36)

Yeah. So collaborative in a sense.

B (10:38)

Definitely collaborative. That's what I heard about the build your own brand. That was my interpretation of build your own brand and how you can show up in the newsfeed because you've been building that brand.

C (10:48)

Okay, thank you. That's very, very valuable. All right, there is a feature that's going away which we'll tell you about. First though, we got to talk about thought leader event ads. So this thought leader ad category has, you know, LinkedIn is great for thought leadership and it's really let some people amplify their reach in a big way. Now thought leader event ads. So what's happening with this?

B (11:09)

So events we can either send people off the platform to say for example a zoom event or a self hosted event, even an in person event. And what's really great about that is getting more visibility around your thought leaders having and hosting these events. So being able to sponsor a member's post that is promoting a LinkedIn event just makes it much more powerful that we're going to now see this specific thought leader or C suite hosting an event and you can push more people to attend, get more visibility. It is definitely aimed to capitalize on the B2B marketers demand for trust and authenticity in their campaigns. That is, we understand that if there is more need for trust in events coming up, that pushing the thought leader as part of this event is going to be a part of that trust.

C (12:06)

Oh yeah. I mean that's huge because essentially you get to borrow the trust of the thought leader.

B (12:12)

We're going to trust a human coming to an event. Like hopefully people listening right now, they trust Judy Fox and Jerry Potter and we're having a great conversation and that's about the people having the conversation.

C (12:24)

So if this excites you, you should know it should be available globally inside of campaign manager. And of course they have to be approved by the member before you can run the promotion. Otherwise it's all there and ready to go. So, all right. LinkedIn is, as they say, retiring a feature. Anytime a feature is being retired, it's because it's not being used. But there's always someone out there that's like, oh that I was using that one. So what is LinkedIn getting rid of now?

B (12:49)

Oh, I was just thinking LinkedIn could do the funniest thing and do like an un milestone post, like non celebratory post. So we had collaborative articles. It was a period of time on the platform. It was the heyday of going out and commenting on these collaborative articles to earn yourself what's called the gold badge of an industry top voice. Unfortunately, they are retiring those and as of mid August they are no longer adding, editing or allowing you to contribute to these existing collaborative articles. What you do have now is the ability to read them. They still show up in search and they still are your thoughts, especially if you publish them. My best advice, if you thought you poured into this collaborative article some really great thought leadership level, turn those pieces that you said on that collaborative article into your own post. Create your own content from the words you shared inside those collaborative articles. The best use of that past feature and how you can use it to leverage your team and your voice going forward.

C (13:58)

Well, and as I understand, they'll still exist, right? They're not being deleted. So you could still link to them in a post.

B (14:06)

Yes, you can still link to them in a post. I think again, back to you own your voice, you own what you said. So go out and get it. Go out and get those words. If you had a great reaction to one of your collaborative article pieces, because we used to be able to like other people and what they said, I'm going to go back and resurface and see what I said. Especially if any of your team, your thought leaders, if a C suite was commenting and adding to those collaborative articles, go grab that, turn it into a post.

C (14:38)

Yeah, I think all of us, I think it's hard sometimes because we get stuck thinking like, oh well, I should create something new. But reusing the stuff, I mean, playing the hits, as we used to say when I worked in radio, is like, it's so much easier and if it worked once, it's probably going to work again. I heard a great analogy for this recently. Somebody was talking about it. If you're one of those people, you're like, no, I have to create something new. Can you imagine if every year Apple was like, we don't make the iPhone anymore, now we make the J phone. Or now we make the, you know, like they change or they stop selling phones. No, they just keep improving it over and over again. And I think we can do the same stuff with our content, which is great.

B (15:14)

The only other thing I'll say is those collaborative articles were created In a mindset, the topics and titles to pull out the answers that would make you look like an expert. So positioning your answer to a question is a powerful way of showing up on the platform to help other people learn. So that kind of feeds into the news feed and everything that we covered at the beginning of the segment.

C (15:39)

Yeah. All right. And normally as marketers, we're not thinking like, oh, I wonder what's going on with the stock of these networks, But I do think it's interesting to just at least glance when they do these, you know, shareholder meetings quarterly to know if it's worth continuing to invest our time and in some cases money into these platforms. So real quick, what were the couple of highlights from the LinkedIn Q4 earnings call?

B (16:02)

It's always good to know the platform is growing. So they are at 1.2 billion members and they have seen four years of double Digigit member growth. That's kind of the, the kicker for me and the data that I like to see. Because if you are going to invest your marketing budget, your team, your energy into a platform, you do want it to be growing with members.

C (16:27)

Yeah.

B (16:27)

The next statistic. I love numbers. The commenting on LinkedIn has risen over 30%. Video uploads increased over 20%. Video uploads doesn't necessarily tell me they're going to get more reach. But having comments go up is actually really important for your brand and your business to give you more confidence that when you post, you have more access to people wanting to comment.

C (16:54)

Yeah, well, I mean, that's huge. Yeah. More video uploads just means more competition, right?

B (16:59)

That is true.

C (17:00)

Yeah.

B (17:00)

Well, I'm trying to look at the video uploads 20%, commenting increasing 30%. But you know, they are bringing AI to a lot of the LinkedIn experience and they are having a LinkedIn hiring assistant to help recruiters quickly identify the best candidates. So they are working and trying to improve the job seeker experience, the hiring experience, the company experience. I think that's what's being communicated. But my biggest takeaway is that membership is over four years, continuously increasing.

C (17:34)

Yeah. For people watching on YouTube, you might have seen my face cringe for a second because I, you know, as hiring got way more automated with all this electronic filters and all this stuff over the last 15 years. Like good people sometimes get missed out on. Right. Because they can't check a box or something like that. But I get it. Obviously over the last 20 years, you know, applying for a job went from something that, you know, might have taken hours to Somebody can apply to a thousand jobs in an hour. So I get it. I get it. All right, quick reminder. Take your free AI readiness assessment right now. Go to socialmediaexaminer.com AI Quiz again socialmediaexaminer.com AI quiz and Judy, where is the best place for people to discover more about you?

B (18:16)

Head over to LinkedIn @judifox and I do have a piece of content that I talk about how to improve your LinkedIn newsfeed and it has improved mine. So the power of not letting LinkedIn decide who you should be talking with is taking all your networking power back into your hands. So J U D I F O.

C (18:38)

X All right, we appreciate you listening to this podcast and if you enjoy it, you might want to check out the Social Media Marketing podcast as well. Until next time, may you be wise with your marketing decisions. Thanks everyone. Bye.

B (18:50)

The Social Media Marketing Talk show is a Social Media examiner production. For more social media insight, visit Social media social media examiner.com.

A (19:03)

Just a quick reminder before you go. If you're ready to become indispensable in the age of AI, the AI Business Society is your solution. Join now and secure your discounted membership by visiting social mediaexaminer.com AI I can't wait to see you inside the AI Business Society.