← Social Media Marketing Talk Show
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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Got big marketing goals for 2025, but you're not sure how to achieve them. Learn what works from the brightest minds in marketing by attending Social media Marketing World 2025 this March. That's where you'll learn how to apply AI to your work, the latest in organic and paid marketing and strategies you can put to work right away. Secure your future by getting your tickets at Social Media Marketing World. I hope to see you there.
- [00:33]
Social Media Marketing Talk Show Host
Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Talk show, your guide to the ever changing world of social media.
- [00:41]
Jerry Potter
All right, on today's show we're going to explore the LinkedIn updates that marketers should definitely be on top of, including some ad updates, allowing for way better attribution and tracking, which is always great for return on ad spend. Also, is LinkedIn engagement up or down? Always a good indication of how things are going on a platform, and some LinkedIn video updates that will make you either want to double down on video or get started if you haven't 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 AJ Wilcox. AJ is the world's leading LinkedIn Ads expert and teaches businesses to drive high quality B2B leads at scale. He's the founder and CEO of B2Linked and the host of the LinkedIn Ads show podcast. AJ welcome to the show.
- [01:30]
AJ Wilcox
Jerry. Thanks so much for having me. I'm stoked. I'm a huge fan.
- [01:33]
Jerry Potter
Leading LinkedIn ads expert is a bit of a mouthful there. So let's jump into this. First of all, some great updates for LinkedIn ads attribution, which is always huge when you're watching your ad spend. So what are we seeing here?
- [01:44]
AJ Wilcox
So what we have here is a post from LinkedIn's engineering team. Anytime something appears on the engineering blog, it's quite an eyeful to read. It goes into a lot of depth, which I appreciate, but I don't always actually understand what's happening but what they're sharing here. This is the engineering team sharing how they think about attribution. And this is so valuable because like, notice in the post, they don't talk at all about like, here's how you as an advertiser are going to be able to access this. This is purely we want you to know how we think about attribution. So any tool we come out with that claims to help you with attribution, you'll know that it's well thought out. And it works.
- [02:22]
Jerry Potter
Okay.
- [02:22]
AJ Wilcox
What I appreciate about it so much, they have a product called Revenue Attribution Report that is free for advertisers. Basically what it does is, and I'll come back to the point here, but you plug it into your CRM and anytime it sees a new closed deal, it looks at that company and says, hey, you closed XYZ company as a customer. We're going to look and tell you the people at XYZ Corp who have seen your ads, interacted with them, consumed and watched your video content, seen your organic content, all of those things, we're going to let you know how LinkedIn may have played a role in, in acquiring that.
- [03:00]
Jerry Potter
Okay. That's one of the great things about LinkedIn strength. I think one of them is the fact that people who are active there keep their platforms or keep their information relatively up to date. Right, right. As opposed to some of the other platforms where people are using the email address they signed up with in college and, you know, their hobbies from 15 years ago and things like that. So that's really interesting and smart on their part. So do you go in and look at this engineer stuff and then just kind of translate it for us marketers then?
- [03:27]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, pretty much. And a lot of it, they talk about the organic side of LinkedIn. And so I might look at it and go, okay, that's interesting. But it doesn't have direct applicability. This one does have direct applicability. For me, what I love so much about it is, like, I've been talking for years that LinkedIn is this platform that has the very best business targeting of any, any platform on the planet. But we pay such a heavy price for it, and they haven't really ever focused on the measurement tools. And so they're kind of leaving up to marketers like, hey, come and pay a premium to advertise on our platform. We hope you can tell it works. But in the last few years, they've really started to hone in and focus on, okay, how do we give advertisers tools that let them see how high of quality the traffic is that's coming in and, you know, the reasons we pay for it. And of course, what they hope are reasons that we'll want to increase our budget and pay them more.
- [04:17]
Jerry Potter
Do you feel like this is going to make advertising on LinkedIn Expand even further beyond? Because I know initially it was a lot of recruitment. Right. That's what was kind of driving up the ad costs for years. Do you feel like this is going to then spread that out and make it an opportunity for more businesses or more industries.
- [04:33]
AJ Wilcox
Not as much, I think.
- [04:34]
Jerry Potter
Okay.
- [04:35]
AJ Wilcox
It's probably actually going to do the opposite. It's going to show advertisers the value of what they're doing that they can't see from any other platform and cause them to say, ooh, it looks like the spend that we're putting here is working. Can we scale that up? Can we spend more on the platform? And that's going to drive costs up even more for all advertisers.
- [04:55]
Jerry Potter
And am I hearing you right? It's going to specifically say, this employee engaged with this ad or this specific profile on LinkedIn?
- [05:03]
AJ Wilcox
No, they won't report the exact profile, but by the time someone becomes a customer, you already know you internally know who it is, who's now your point of contact at that company. But what they will tell you is, you closed XYZ company, they're now a customer. Hey, by the way, this company in the last 90 days has consumed this much of your content. You've spent this many dollars reaching them. They've clicked this many times. You get to kind of see that user journey.
- [05:28]
Jerry Potter
Yeah, okay.
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AJ Wilcox
Which is really nice.
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Jerry Potter
Specific profiles would be that. That's when we start to go, wow, that's. Is that okay? Is that. So that makes more sense.
- [05:36]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. And we kind of do have direct profile stuff. Like this article didn't mention it, but LinkedIn released their conversions API or CAPI for short. And so when a conversion occurs, let's say it's in your CRM or on the website through Google Tag Manager, you can pass that exact person back to LinkedIn and say, hey, this person just converted. They're now a high quality lead and you can use that to train LinkedIn signals. Hey, in the future, if you have a choice between like showing this my ads to two different people, if they look more like the one that just converted, maybe prioritize them, show them first.
- [06:12]
Jerry Potter
I love it. I love how smart paid ads are getting too. So while there's a lot obviously going on with LinkedIn and we have lots of updates to tell you about today, and here at Social Media examiner, we definitely operate with a growth mindset. This means anytime something happens, good or bad, we said, okay, what does this make possible? And when we do this, we always discover all kinds of exciting new possibilities. If you're like that, if you're like looking to discover new possibilities with your marketing, then do consider joining us for Social Media Marketing World March 30 through April 1, you're gonna be able to discover the latest marketing strategies that we've got all kinds of amazing speakers and people that you can connect with. And ask yourself, what does attending Social Media Marketing World make possible for you? AJ is going to be there giving a talk called building a B2B marketing machine that drives ROI. And all you got to do to get the information, get your in person or virtual ticket is go to Social Media Marketing world again, Social mediamarketing World. All right, we've got some video updates that I'm excited to share, but let's talk about the performance Max Tools updates continuing in the ad space here. AJ what are you seeing the latest with all of this?
- [07:20]
AJ Wilcox
All right, so this is Microsoft ads, which always has to keep up with and be in parody with Google Ads, which is a big undertaking for sure. The most advanced ad platform on the planet. And then you have Microsoft who's like, ooh, every new thing that Google launches, we have to keep up with what Microsoft has. That puts them head and shoulders above Google, especially if you're in B2B. Is this ability because Microsoft owns LinkedIn? When that purchase happened, they negotiated like, hey, by the way, can our ads platform be able to target people by elements on their LinkedIn profile? And so there's, they're a little bit limited, but there are targeting settings that you can use inside of Microsoft ads to target people's LinkedIn profiles. So some of those things would be like, you can target companies by name, you can target just specific industries, you can target just the departments that people work in. They're kind of broad, like marketing or accounting or, you know, finance. It also, I haven't been in recently enough to know for sure, but the article says it's in addition to market audiences by job title and company size. So I don't know if those are inferred or if you can also select those. And now you have these five different features to target your LinkedIn ads. But very cool. I highly approve.
- [08:37]
Jerry Potter
Two thumbs up from AJ how do you see, you know, like what is the opportunity here now that this is rolling out? Like what, what's a. For example, an example use case you might use with one of your clients with this.
- [08:48]
AJ Wilcox
What I really like about being able to advertise on Microsoft ads, even comparing to Google, it's a lot cheaper. And if they search on Bing and they're using the Microsoft browser, I forget what it's called. Edge.
- [09:00]
Jerry Potter
Edge.
- [09:01]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. The kinds of people, they tend to be older, so they're probably Elder millennials, maybe Gen X, maybe even boomers. So for finance kinds of products, they tend to be more affluent. And so that already is very cool. You also have this ability to target by some who someone is professionally that if you come to LinkedIn you might be paying 10 to $16 every time someone clicks. But on Microsoft you might be paying one to $2. So if you can use the same targeting on Microsoft, you could reach the same audiences at what I would consider a huge discount. So I think that's the coolest use case. Like expand from LinkedIn into Microsoft, get access to more inventory at lower costs.
- [09:41]
Jerry Potter
I think we can universally agree that a dollar a click versus $16 a click is a, is a huge savings for sure. So yes, please, any other updates under that performance max stuff that you want to to the next thing?
- [09:53]
AJ Wilcox
Performance max is kind of the, I mean, advertisers love it or hate it. It's the settings that you kind of hand the keys to the castle over to the platform and say, all right, you optimize and run this. Advertisers like me who love control and watch performance carefully, we tend to hate it. We don't want to lose control. The article is basically saying like, hey, Microsoft has performance max as well. It's caught up to parody in, in the way that Google does it. And so now when you have a paid search advertiser, that's their job. As they run Google, they can go and do the same things without having to incur like a heavy learning curve to just copy stuff over to Microsoft and do the same thing.
- [10:31]
Jerry Potter
Got it. Okay. I never really paid attention to anyone's quarterly reports unless it was something that maybe that I had stock in. But I always love looking at the platform reports because as we are investing our time or our money or our clients money into some of these platforms, it's always good to look at what they're saying in these quarterly reports. So LinkedIn did release its Q2 FY25 performance report, as they called it. What were some of the highlights in there you think we should be aware of?
- [10:59]
AJ Wilcox
Well, first off, I love that they are publishing this because early on I used to listen to the, the quarterly stock earnings reports that the CEO would do. And then when Microsoft bought LinkedIn, it was like, okay, I could tune in and listen to the Microsoft one, but they're talking about Office and Xbox and Windows and all those things and LinkedIn was just kind of a sub item. So I'm grateful that LinkedIn actually published this so we can see it separately what I love seeing and you kind of intimated this, there is growth on the platform. Anytime you see a platform start to either stagnate or drop, you get worried like, ooh, should I keep giving my attention to this platform? But from all of this, a 9% year over year growth in that is members. So that's a lot of new members. LinkedIn now shows that they have over a billion profile members. Not all of them are active, but like 9% growth is awesome. They don't mention what countries it's coming from. North America is quite saturated. It's very rare when I talk to a white collar professional here in the US who doesn't have a profile, but you can imagine how many profiles there are to come online in India and other areas of the world. So I think that's probably a lot of growth outside of North America.
- [12:14]
Jerry Potter
Yeah. They also did some updates about growth and engagement and comments too, right?
- [12:18]
AJ Wilcox
Yes, they had a 37% growth in comments on the network, which if the Network grows by 9%, but they have 37% more comments, what that tells you is the active user base is getting more active, they're doing more things. And I think that's probably a stronger signal to me that the platform is healthy.
- [12:38]
Jerry Potter
Yeah, that was the part that really kind of jumped out at me was that engagement number. Because if people are commenting and you know, I know so many people use it as a mobile first platform, but I, I just don't like typing on my phone. But it, it really is cool to see all of that attached with the video. And obviously the more engagement you get, the more reach you get, the more organic reach you're going to get with all of your content, which is really cool. Cool.
- [13:00]
AJ Wilcox
So my favorite part about growth on LinkedIn is the more members come and are active, the more time they spend in their newsfeed, the more time they spend going through different pages on LinkedIn and all of that creates additional ad inventory. So let's say there's no growth on the platform, everyone just stays where they're at. As long as those users start using it more, all else equal, your ad costs can come down. So I appreciate that. Keep the platform growing to keep our ad costs at bay. We don't want them going to $50 a click anytime soon.
- [13:32]
Jerry Potter
Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. And then the other thing I thought was interesting too because we talk a lot at Social Media examiner about adopting AI. At Social Media Marketing World, we've got a full AI track this year and integrating all of this. And they reported that 40% of subscribers have used AI features for profile enhancement already.
- [13:48]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah.
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Jerry Potter
What are your thoughts on that?
- [13:50]
AJ Wilcox
Microsoft's pushing AI hard. They're obviously a large investor in open AI like ChatGPT. They are trying to push ChatGPT based features into every area of LinkedIn. The ads accounts. We have I think four AI features in there with more coming. We have this if You're a premium LinkedIn subscriber, so you're paying for your profile to get some extra features. That's the one where they're saying, ooh, 40% of those people have used an AI tool where we might suggest like, hey, if you say these things in your, in your summary, it may help you perform better or get a job or better showcase your skills. So we're going to keep seeing that more and more AI. It's a two edged sword though. We see in general when you go to interact on the newsfeed, there will be prompts that say things like, hey, we'll write a comment for you. And I don't know how everyone else feels, but I feel like anytime that you are trying to automate social media by having bots talk to other bots and we take humans out of it, it kind of spoils the experience. So I try not to interact with stuff I can tell that's AI generated, but I like the stuff like we're going to help you make your profile look better and include more of the things that helps profiles perform well.
- [15:02]
Jerry Potter
And the other part of this, and this goes back to the AI and the ads too, is the more people use this and the more available it becomes. This came out of a conversation this week I had with somebody about YouTube and keyword research. And I feel like we're at the point, you know, on YouTube where AI will be able to actually do keyword research for you. Right now I can kind of help but like literally do the whole process which right now to do it well takes some manual work. And if everybody does it well, all of a sudden it's a whole new level playing field. Like my son plays basketball and I always, you know, I said it's kind of like imagine now everybody's seven feet tall. How does basketball change, right? And so yeah, it'll be really interesting to see. But it is, it is cool to see, I think that adoption level, even if it is some people maybe just clicking one thing, I'm sure Microsoft was like, oh, that count? That's in the, that's in the 40%. So it's true.
- [15:52]
AJ Wilcox
That's what they want to report. They want to show that they are using AI and that they are the network who is pioneering AI. I think that's a big push for LinkedIn, whether we want to use it or not.
- [16:01]
Jerry Potter
So the LinkedIn Top Voice Blue badges have been around and some people have gotten excited about them and some people have been indifferent about them. And they announced that they now have a six month expiration period before they were permanent. Now they're going away. What are your thoughts on that? What are you seeing around that so far?
- [16:16]
AJ Wilcox
The badges are funny. So history on this one. They came out with the blue badge originally when they invited, I think it was around 200 top business professionals. They were all hand picked. There were people like Bill Gates and Barack Obama to have the badge and they made it last forever. Because you could imagine going to Barack Obama and saying, hey, as part of this push, like, by the way, we need you to make sure you're posting on LinkedIn once a month. How quick? They'd say no. So that was right, Right. That's like the inception of this program and now they've included more than just celebrities like you and I can get in by hitting certain milestones. They're not very specific about it. It's like you have to be a regular contributor and be providing a lot of value and those kinds of things. But you'll get LinkedIn's notice for doing those things. They'll hand pick you and give you the badge. But you've got to keep it up. You can't do the Barack Obama thing of I posted once and I'm never.
- [17:11]
Jerry Potter
Coming back and I'm done now. Yeah. It is interesting to see too, simply because six months is still a really long time.
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AJ Wilcox
Right?
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Jerry Potter
Like once you've earned it, do you know, like, how long does it take to earn it? For people, you know, in our audience that are thought leaders and want to have that, like, do you just wait and set a timer for five months and then go, all right, I got to start being active again?
- [17:29]
AJ Wilcox
Or I would imagine every six months they humans probably look at these profiles and try to assess. And so if they see that there's been a four month gap in like I haven't posted anything, they're probably going to be like, ooh, let's not renew this person. So they really do want to reward the people who are ultra active on the platform and preaching LinkedIn from the rooftops.
- [17:50]
Jerry Potter
Okay, all right, let's talk LinkedIn video. We know it's been growing these vertical short form videos that LinkedIn recommends between 15 seconds and two minutes. They recommend having a juicy caption with your video as opposed to here's a video. And they reported that video watch time on LinkedIn is 36% up year over year. Not surprising. And that video creation is growing at twice the rate of other original post formats. So what are your thoughts here?
- [18:14]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, LinkedIn has gone really heavily in on video about every area of the platform. If there's a possibility for video consumption and video upload, they're working really hard on it. I actually just yesterday interviewed the lead product marketing manager over LinkedIn ads and she talked about some of the new things that were coming out for video ads. And she said this is part of a huge agenda for us. We're going to keep pounding on video. What I love about it is about three years ago I was evaluating LinkedIn's video ads and I went performance on these sucks. I would so much rather use single image ads than try to get people to watch video because it's a platform that people don't come to be entertained and consume video on. Then in the last two years I've seen that totally flip on its head. Video ads are especially certain kinds and we could talk about that, but they are the highest performing ads on LinkedIn. And I think what really happened is like, I think it's user behavior switched. Yeah, like people are now coming, spending more time and actually being willing to consume video content on LinkedIn.
- [19:18]
Jerry Potter
It's absolutely a big shift across. Like we don't let my, my son has a smartphone, we don't let him have social media. But last night he's like watching videos and I'm concerned that he watches these short form videos. Like what's it doing to his brain? You know that just like all of us as adults too, but he was just swiping through, I'm like, how are you watching that? Like did you get around our parental controls or what's happening? He's like now this is in the NBA app. They have a short form video feed now too. So clearly the consumer behavior as you said, is there, which is making a big, big change. And that's fascinated about the ads as well. So they've got that full screen vertical video experience on mobile devices to help people discover more content. They've added a bigger follow button. So I think for anyone who is looking to grow, it's now easier for someone to see the value and you can even I think add that call to action. Say, you know, hey, if you want more content like this, or if you're looking to do this, hit follow now. So anything else in those video updates that you saw that stood out to you?
- [20:13]
AJ Wilcox
I'm sure you've covered this before on the show, but it's this new video feed from LinkedIn where they look at what TikTok is and how addictive it is. Once you get in this mode of, like consuming short videos and it just automatically plays into the second one, they're like, wow, if LinkedIn could have the same kind of thing, we could keep people for longer. They can watch more ads. And so they have this elusive, you know, vertical video feed sometimes. It, at least it used to be. It didn't have to be vertical video. It could have been horizontal as well. But it sounds like it's mostly vertical and not everyone has it. I still don't have it on my phone. I just hear people on podcasts talking about it.
- [20:50]
Jerry Potter
What? Really?
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AJ Wilcox
Yeah. I thought I was the last one.
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Jerry Potter
Yeah.
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Michael Stelzner
Nice.
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AJ Wilcox
Okay, we can be last ones together.
- [20:57]
Jerry Potter
Yes. No, no, I haven't. I actually have it now. I've had it now for I think a month. But even then I thought, so everybody's supposed to have it. It's so weird the way they roll that stuff out sometimes.
- [21:04]
AJ Wilcox
All right, maybe I need to uninstall the app and reinstall it to get it.
- [21:07]
Jerry Potter
Okay. And then one other thing with that too that I saw in this is that they're now allowing marketers to track average watch time for your videos to understand what resonates and what doesn't. And I'm sure the algorithm there works just like on all the other short form video platforms. If somebody's watching your whole video, or most of it, or watching it more than once, that's going to get that video distributed to a lot more people. So, yes, initially we couldn't really see a lot of that, and now that we can see more of that, that's absolutely huge.
- [21:35]
AJ Wilcox
So, yeah, it's really cool because on the paid side, we've always been able to see all of the consumption from our ads because you pay for it, you get the data right. But organically, if you publish video content, you don't get to see that, and vice versa, if you run a live event on LinkedIn, you see a lot of analytics that you couldn't see before even if you were paying for them. So we're starting to see a lot more crossover where LinkedIn, both sides of the house, the organic and the paid, they're contributing and helping each other. So hopefully we now get better data and more metrics to actually see what if what we're doing is working.
- [22:08]
Jerry Potter
Yeah. Well, we're going to continue this conversation at Social Media Marketing World for sure. Coming up March 30th through April 1st. You can get your ticket today at Social Media Marketing Dot World. Again, Social Media Marketing World and AJ where can we discover more about you?
- [22:22]
AJ Wilcox
Pretty easy to find me on LinkedIn. Just search for AJ Wilcox. You can follow me or if you send a connection request, just customize it and say you heard me on the Social Media Marketing Talk show and then I'll make sure I accept it.
- [22:33]
Jerry Potter
That's the secret password to get through.
- [22:35]
AJ Wilcox
That's exactly it.
- [22:36]
Jerry Potter
Yep.
- [22:36]
AJ Wilcox
Just mention Jerry's name and you got it. You're in.
- [22:39]
Jerry Potter
I love it. All right, if you want to add another podcast to your listening, line up a couple of you to check out the Social Media Marketing podcast as well as the AI Explored podcast. And until next time, may you be wise with your marketing decisions. Thanks everyone.
- [22:52]
AJ Wilcox
Bye.
- [22:53]
Social Media Marketing Talk Show Host
The Social Media Market Marketing Talk show is a Social Media examiner production. For more social media insight, visit social mediaexaminer.com.
- [23:06]
Michael Stelzner
We'Re in the biggest shift in marketing history with AI and social algorithms transforming everything. That's why Social Media Marketing World 2025 isn't just a conference. It's your complete marketing transformation. Whether you join us in San Diego or virtually, one breakthrough could change your entire career. Secure your spot today at socialmediamarketingworld Info.