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Social Media Marketing Talk Show
LinkedIn Updates: Profile Engagement, Post Analytics, Comment Changes, and More
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- [00:00]
A
After 13 years, we are making a bold move. We've been hosting thousands of marketers in San Diego, California since 2013 for social media Marketing World, and it has been epic. Here's the news. We're making a bold move to anaheim, California in 2026. The decision came down to three very compelling factors. First of all, the location advantages are incredible. Orange County's central location means easier access for our growing international audience. There are five different airports that service the area, including the Los Angeles airport, which means it's a lot more economical for you to get here. Second, the weather. April in Anaheim is absolutely perfect. 75 degrees, sunny skies, less chance of the random rainstorms that sometimes surprise us in San Diego. And third, this is really the big one. And Disneyland. It's only a 20 minute walk away from our venue. Imagine being able to experience Disneyland with your new friends that you make at the conference, literally after the event. I did this with one of my brand new employees. It was an incredible experience. Talk about developing lifelong relationships. This is the way to do it. This is the year to finally come and experience the magic that is social media marketing world. Grab your tickets right now because we have a really big sale going on. Visit social mediamarketingworld.info I can't wait to see you there.
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B
Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Talk show, your guide to the ever changing world of social media.
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C
On today's show, we're going to Explore some big LinkedIn updates to make sure you're on top of everything, including some new analytics and notifications that'll be really helpful for knowing what's working and what's really resonating. Okay. Also, if you're looking to grow a LinkedIn company page, we've always been kind of handcuffed with how we can do this new way that will help and an easier way to make videos for LinkedIn. LinkedIn is obviously growing video in a huge way, so any friction we can remove for ourselves as marketers is always good news. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a Social Media examiner production where we break down all the latest social media news and what it means for marketers like you. Today I'm joined by Judy fox. Judy's a LinkedIn strategist and her course is called the LinkedIn Business Accelerator Program. Judy, welcome to the show.
- [02:22]
B
Excited to be here.
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C
All right, so let's start with some new notifications based on some of the analytics that we're getting over the last couple of years as LinkedIn has started to feel more like a platform where they want us to create content. We're now getting better, specifically on profiles. We're getting better analytics and things like that. So tell us about this update and how we can take advantage of it.
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B
Yeah, there's two updates basically happening together. One is you're going to get notifications that are going to tell you how many profile views you've received, how many new followers you've gotten from a specific post. That's really important because knowing how each piece of content does it's everything. How do you know what is performing and what is getting you the results that you want without getting notified or having some type of metric. So I love that update. And the additional update are. Did. I didn't know if we merged two of these together.
- [03:18]
C
Yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. You're good.
- [03:20]
B
Okay. Because we're also getting saves. How many people have saved your post and how many people are sending it? So I've heard the term dark social. I don't know if other people have heard that, but the language of how do you know who's privately sending it to somebody else? Like they're putting it in the DMs and saying, you need to read this now you're going to be able to see how many people are doing that kind of behavior. Where it's private, people were sending it and saving it and now you get that data. I'm excited for that one.
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C
Yeah. Well, just knowing that somebody took the time to save it. Right. The value of that post is obviously way stronger. And then also that not only was this so good that I liked it, but I wanted to share it with my network or with my a few private people or anything like that. Like, those are huge indicators. If you look back at your analytics and those ones, anything that has lots of those, which lots maybe may mean three or five depending on your profile. Like that's a massive, massive indicator.
- [04:19]
B
Well, and I really love that that will maybe bring more justification or data for any teams building out case studies or longer form B2B. Content that may read heavy in the moment, but if you ask your audience to save it later, save it for a resource. Something that allows them to have a language of, hey, this is maybe too heavy to read in a scroll, but this is a valuable piece of content for your team to get back to or dig into later.
- [04:52]
C
It'll be interesting to see if LinkedIn eventually cracks down on language like save this for later. Oh yeah, but we can always, you know, get around that. Like if you make Posts that are valuable, hey, I wrote this so you can come back to it over and over again. You can use verbiage like that, I think to achieve the same thing just in case they start throttling things where it's like don't forget to save and like this post and you know, that kind of engagement, those engagement hooks.
- [05:18]
B
Oh, I've also heard initial data that somebody saving your content is connected to about an 80% return on effort, which again, I love that term where you will get somebody to come see your next piece of content. LinkedIn's more likely to put you at the top of the next post that you make is going to be at the top of that person's newsfeed if they've saved your content simply because a.
- [05:42]
C
Save is ranked higher in the algorithm than a like for example, yeah, I've started seeing the notifications come in and it looks like they're designed to come in about three days after you put up a post and then again seven days after you put up a post. And it is great for somebody who doesn't have time or doesn't bother to look at their analytics. And when it's good news, I love it. Like your post got all these impressions and I'm like, yay. But then when a post that, especially if I forget I even put it up and they're like, your post only got, you know, 71 impressions, you're like, oh, thanks for letting me know.
- [06:12]
B
Another data point that I've been seeing from myself and other accounts I've been able to view is and I'll always plug it, but a lot of newsletters get saves, sends and they convert a lot more people to check out your profile, I have found.
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C
Yeah, that's awesome. That's good to know. All right, we've got some important updates for LinkedIn company pages as well as anyone doing video on LinkedIn. But take a second and ask yourself, are you wasting time with generic marketing advice? Social media Marketing World is coming up again and it delivers proven strategies you can put to work before you even leave the conference. Attendee Beth Harner said, great lineup of speakers, content was great, relevant and useful. I walked away with so many things that I could start doing right away and and attendee Jules McGuire said, Every single session I attended I've been able to take away probably three things minimum that I'm going to be able to immediately implement. So it's like a huge shot of energy into your role or your business every single spring, every single session designed for immediate implementation Including AI workflows that streamline your content creation, Instagram tactics that boost engagement fast. LinkedIn strategies that generate qualified leads. We love having Judy speaking at the conference and sharing stuff. Video creation shortcuts that save hours every week, plus an all access ticket includes an extra day of workshops where we go even deeper into implementation. So claim your spot now with early Bird pricing. Just go to social media marketing world again. Social mediamarketing.world. all right, speaking of engagement, this is a great opportunity for both profiles and pages. But I'm always excited when they give more features to pages because for a lot of years like when I worked in an agency, it's like we want to grow our company page but we don't want to spend any money. And it's like, oh, that's going to be tough. So some new comment controls and some other things that are attached to that. So tell us what's happening with this, Judy.
- [08:05]
B
The comment controls, it's definitely the ability to not only do it on your profile, but on LinkedIn pages. You can now disable comments or only allow first degree connections. So I think that shift in making that really clear, I think it's been maybe a rollout. I've seen it on people's profiles and on their pages, but I think it's now fully rolled out. Is what they're trying to say that you have more control over the commenting. And of course we know that with a lot of things that happen across social media, having that type of control on a company page can be really impactful or necessary depending on what the company's going through.
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C
Yeah, for sure. Now that company pages can comment in more places. Are you seeing that happen yet just in your time on LinkedIn?
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B
I've seen company pages start to comment more. I have also seen company pages limit commenting on their posts. It's obviously something happening, you know, depending on the pr, the marketing team, what is happening and why they want to limit comments. I have not seen companies embrace the TikTok style commenting. I see the brands doing over there, if you know what I mean.
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C
Say a little bit more about what you mean by TikTok style commenting.
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B
So when we see brands showing up on creators posts, they're trying to join the trends of what is happening in the creator economy. And so they're trying to jump on trending content, trending conversations. Duolingo did a great job of that. You know, there's all these different brands that have, I've seen Heinz, I mean, I'm just mentioning some brands, but we have the power on LinkedIn to also do that where companies could start generating conversations on creators content. I just haven't seen them embrace that. And I think they would do smart to embrace that, but I have not seen that.
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C
Yeah, well, and that's, that's why I was asking if you'd seen it. You know, now that, now that the ability is there. Dan Sanchez is our senior AI marketing strategist here at Social Media examiner and he shared a post this week and it was a screenshot of a comment he left on somebody else's post. And his comment, because we have these analytics now, his comment got 35,000 impressions.
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B
That's incredible.
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C
So imagine a company page being able to go out now you can't just go put up a slop. Right. You got to actually write something meaningful and helpful. But imagine all these impressions that you could get as a brand and again for profiles too. Dan is obviously using his LinkedIn profile for this. But that's an incredible opportunity to get in front of people in a way that a company pages posts are much less likely to do without an ad budget. Wouldn't you agree?
- [10:52]
B
Oh my gosh, yes. Especially if the company can wrap their heads around. Like I said, if they embrace the same type of commenting and already have a plan in place for how they comment across other social media, they would be really smart to implement a similar strategy for LinkedIn.
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C
I would say the strategy is to have a human go in and just do it without a strategy or without much more of that in the beginning just to, to feel it out. Because like you could see like in bigger companies are like, all right, we're going to put this person on this, we're going to design a spreadsheet, we're going to have AI write a bunch of posts and schedule all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's not the way to figure out how what works. Right?
- [11:29]
B
Yeah. I'm working with a company right now where the C suite, if they have been on a podcast, they're starting from a place of engaging with people they already know, hosts of shows or any type of public conversations they've already had. That gives them a safety factor of we've already said yes to that show, we've already had our C suite on this podcast or this channel. There's already been a collaboration. So they've created a list of accounts that are approved to comment and engage on as that company.
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C
Okay. If you do spend a lot of time on LinkedIn as a brand or as a human, you've probably been annoyed with some of the AI generated things and other low quality posts. Good news is LinkedIn is cracking down on this, but also good to be aware of exactly what's happening if you are a brand that's bulk producing in some way. So, Judy, walk us through some of these updates.
- [12:24]
B
I'm going to directly quote LinkedIn because they said we are reducing the number of low quality posts, including clickbait, promotional content and automated comments. If we detect patterns that suggest any of this type of inauthentic engagement, they're going to either downgrade it or we're going to affect that distribution. We're basically going to pull that back. We're not going to give it as much visibility. And I have seen that happen in real time. When the rollout happened or around that period of time, a lot of people's content was strongly impacted, especially if they were using any type of AI or AI bots that they had no awareness of were generating a lot of comments on their account and now they are no longer receiving that level of commenting.
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C
Yeah, I saw they're also combating engagement pods. So somehow they're obviously figuring out, I guess it would be if it's the same group of people all commenting on each other's stuff. I'm trying to think how that would look if it wasn't automated, how that would look different than just a group of like colleagues that support each other, all commenting on each other's stuff.
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B
I think in small groups, potentially you're not necessarily going to raise too many red flags, but I do think as you reach hundreds or thousands, that's where it's going to hit a flag. So I would just assume if you had a group of 10 or 20 of your connections saying, hey, let's support, support each other. I think they're trying to go after these huge bot and comment farms, I would call them, where they're really pumping out AI generated comments at a exponential rate.
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C
So yeah, it's one of those things, you know you've made it when you start getting 10 AI comments in the first hour, right?
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B
Yes. Yeah. And I think that's the point they're trying to say a human wouldn't have been able to write that many comments in that short of a period of time. So they're recognizing we're able to address that, which I'm happy to see. I do notice, like I said, if somebody was benefiting, whether they knew it or not, it is going to impact their account. If the bots had found your content and you now have less Bot comments.
- [14:41]
C
Okay. They did also say too that they're pursuing legal action against some third party manipulation apps. So I know sometimes, you know, in our marketing strategies we hear about a tool, we're like, oh, that's cool, let's try that. So just be aware if you've latched on to any of those.
- [14:56]
B
I have seen a few large tools get shut down in the past six months, three to six months. So it's been very surprising some of the tools, but definitely they are getting shut down.
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C
Okay, well, rather than going through and monitoring all this and blocking, you know, millions of fake accounts, as LinkedIn has been doing on the other side, they're also really expanding everything around verification and getting pages and things verified. So what's the latest around this that you can tell us about, Judy?
- [15:24]
B
Yeah, the verification is available to premium company pages and their research says that 85% of business buyers say that trust is critical, especially in the age of AI. Knowing that a page is a legit company, credible, trustworthy, getting that check mark may be the difference between somebody taking your brand seriously or somebody just scrolling past and not following and not engaging on your brand. The other area of verification is recruiters, especially in the world of job seeking. LinkedIn is focused on making sure that anyone who attaches or updates a recruiter related title is going to have to verify the workplace on their profile. So that just means job seekers should be able to actually work with trusted people recruiting for that job and avoiding scams. I think there must be. Yeah, that must. That's happening in the industry and I really appreciate hearing that they're now verifying recruiter labels not just to the company profile, but to that person's personal profile, which is important.
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C
You can imagine the emotional desperation of somebody who is looking for a job sometimes and how they might be more likely to fall prey to a scam. So yeah, that's really cool to hear.
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B
Yeah. And it's even just from a personal standpoint, if somebody follows you with a certain title related to a certain job, you may get really excited, follow that path, and then realize you've given away a lot of your personal data and filled out forms. So that is really, really important. I'm happy to see LinkedIn doing that. And then in the same thread, executive job titles are going to be verified. So if you are saying that you are a cmo, you are a CEO of a company, those high level titles are going to get verified and require verification, which is very important.
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C
It's interesting because when all of a sudden you could buy verification. I think it kind of started more on meta Facebook and Instagram. But all of a sudden, like we all told ourselves, well, that doesn't mean anything. That just means the person had $20 a month or, you know, whatever it is on that platform. But I think subconsciously our brains still see that check mark and we still trust it more.
- [17:41]
B
Yes. And I mean, again, back to if people can just put anything on their profiles and fill out a profile on LinkedIn. I really have always said LinkedIn's the place that you're going to actually double check that somebody really is who they are across social media. So for LinkedIn to double down on, you have to verify that you have a CMO title at, you know, Social Media Examiner. If you're working somewhere, the title that you have is going to have to be verified.
- [18:10]
C
Yeah. Okay. And then we do have an update getting video on LinkedIn a little bit easier. But before we get into that, how are you feeling about video right now? We've obviously watched it explode over the last couple of years. I mean, we feel like the momentum is still growing or what. What do you generally advise around LinkedIn video?
- [18:27]
B
LinkedIn video has had hot and cold moments, I will be honest about that.
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C
Okay.
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B
I think the energy around LinkedIn video is that if we're going to watch a video, it may be hard to read a long post with it just because of the user experience. So I think the power right now is if you're going to be making a LinkedIn video, you need to still honor people's time. Let us know either how long the video is or make sure it's less than a minute or about a minute. And keep the post pretty tight because I've noticed people just don't have. That's a lot of context switching and the way that they're making the post as like a pop up, it's not as scrollable native to read the post as the video is playing, if that makes sense.
- [19:13]
C
You're talking about the vertical video on your phone and then. And then, yeah, you have to. And sometimes the, the text color is not in contrast with the background. Different.
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B
I know that's really. I've also noticed if somebody has a really bright video, we cannot read the text. We can't read any of. We can't even see the like button or, or where any of the controls are.
- [19:34]
C
So do you recommend then doing shorter captions with videos? Because I remember previously LinkedIn had said, you know, like, write meaty captions to go with your video. Content.
- [19:45]
B
The data to me doesn't lie. I've studied a lot of video data recently and it's all short captions, the ones that are getting the high level of likes, maybe not necessarily comments, which is a balance you have to make. But if you want that like 100, 200, 300, that level of likes are coming from really short posts and people are putting text on the screen to describe in the video what's happening.
- [20:13]
C
Yeah, okay. Okay, that's a great update. And if you are making videos for LinkedIn or you've been thinking about it, there's been some friction. LinkedIn is now starting to work with third party video editors where you can publish directly from them. This is a big one now, Cap Cut. You can now publish directly from Cap cut to your LinkedIn account in like two taps. So one less step of rendering, downloading, you know, and then turning around and trying to get it on there. So that's certainly a big update.
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B
And I was going to say the text on the screen that I just said was kind of a pro for capcut. So there you go.
- [20:47]
C
There you are. Yeah. Quick reminder. Learn more about your all access ticket to Social Media Marketing world today. Go to social mediamarketing.world. check out those early bird prices again. Social mediamarketing World. And Judy, where should we discover more about you?
- [21:01]
B
Head on over to LinkedIn. I want to hear if you are loving any of the data analytics updates. I love hearing from you. If you want to send me a direct message on LinkedIn.
- [21:09]
C
All right. J U D I S O X and if you want to add another podcast to your listening lineup, if you like this one, you'll probably love the Social Media Marketing podcast. Until next time, may you be wise with your marketing decisions. Thanks everyone. Bye.
- [21:22]
B
Thank you. The Social Media Marketing talk show is a social media examiner production. For more social media Insight, visit social mediaexaminer.com.
- [21:37]
A
This is the year to finally come to Social Media Marketing World 2026. Grab your tickets right now by visiting social media marketing world.info.