← Social Media Marketing Talk Show
Social Media Marketing Talk Show
LinkedIn Updates: Video Features, Qualified Leads Optimization, LinkedIn Verification, and More
00:24:32
Loading summary
Transcript70 lines
- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Hey there, it's Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner. Are you a marketer trying to navigate the AI revolution? What if you could create content twice as fast, automate tedious tasks and become the go to AI expert in your company? The AI Business Society, brought to you by your friends at Social Media examiner, gives you expert led training, a supportive community, and proven frameworks to master AI marketing that will boost your value and your productivity. And here's the big news. Our spring enrollment sale ends Friday, May 16th. Join now and lock in your discounted member pricing@socialmediaexaminer.com AI.
- [00:50]
Jerry Potter
Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Talk show, your guide to the ever changing world of social media.
- [00:57]
AJ Wilcox
On today's show, we're going to explore LinkedIn updates, including video, going to a whole new level that I don't think any of us could have called three years ago when it comes to LinkedIn. Also, an easier way to grow your following with LinkedIn company pages, which is always nice. And a LinkedIn ads update that could increase conversions significantly depending on how you run your ads. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media Marketing Talk show where we break down all the latest social media news and what it means for marketers like you. This is a Social Media examiner production. 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 also the founder and CEO of B2Linked and the host of the LinkedIn Ads show podcast. AJ welcome to the show.
- [01:43]
Guest Speaker
So excited to be back again. Thanks, Jerry.
- [01:45]
AJ Wilcox
So who would have thought when Microsoft bought LinkedIn that it would become the cool creator platform, right?
- [01:50]
Guest Speaker
Yeah, no one, no one thought that was coming.
- [01:53]
AJ Wilcox
So, so bizarre. But yet here we are, starting with video. But the first thing we were going to Talk about is LinkedIn has rolled out sort of this mini site to help marketers create better content on LinkedIn. So what's this all about?
- [02:04]
Guest Speaker
This is super cool because it seems like LinkedIn is really catering to the creators out there. And I wouldn't have predicted that LinkedIn would be a creator platform, but they really are catering to it nicely. So many more features that we're going to be talking about dealing with video, making it easier and better for creators. And then this little mini site, they have a whole bunch of tips. It's like, here are six different kinds of posts that you can put on LinkedIn. Click on one, it'll give you like, here are the specs, here are Some tips, you can even click on the button that says create one of these right now and it'll take you right into your LinkedIn profile where you can create one of these polls, a live event, an article, video, that kind of thing.
- [02:45]
AJ Wilcox
I gave it a quick look and it seems like not only is it nicely laid out, but it's kind of like, hey, if you're just getting started or you want the basics, here you are. But if you want to do more, then here's some of the stuff. And they talk about video. Stop the scroll. Stand up with video, text and image. The simplest way to start a conversation. The newsletter, a great long form tool, Polls. I thought it was interesting that polls was the other piece of content that they highlighted there. But obviously it's a great way to build up engagement on a dead profile or page. At least that's always been my experience is polls are the easiest way to get that ball rolling. So if you want to find that Google Crete on LinkedIn, it should come right up. And then LinkedIn video templates. So now we have LinkedIn video templates again, making video creation even easier on LinkedIn. So what are you seeing with these?
- [03:28]
Guest Speaker
All right, so this is from Canva and I love this partnership between LinkedIn and Canva because so many marketers that I know are actually creating their content right inside of Canva. So it's not just what you'd expect, which is, hey, if you go to Canva and you type in, I want to create this kind of thing. It has some pre arranged templates for it. It does have that, but they took it a step further. You can actually connect your Canva account to your LinkedIn ads account. And as you create some of these new pieces of content, you hit export and it just goes right into your LinkedIn campaign manager. So that now you just go and type some things, pull in that image or video and you're off to the races very fast to create ads. And it's free.
- [04:09]
AJ Wilcox
Wow. Well, and I. That's interesting because we've had scheduling from Canva for a long time, but the fact that you can send it right into the ads interface is really, really cool. And then the other place video is coming is to direct messages, right? We've had text, we hear, have audio and now there are some direct messages. Sounds like there's some limitations with them though.
- [04:25]
Guest Speaker
What are, what's this all about inside of messages? If you're on your mobile device for years now we've been able to send voice notes. So it's like leaving someone a voice message. But it's a little bit awkward because we have our phones and we have a super high quality camera. Sometimes you don't want to just use audio, sometimes you want to have your face. So the limitation that you're talking about, that's kind of crazy. It's 20 megabytes, which might be like, depending on how your front facing camera records, that might be a couple minutes. But voice notes are limited to just 60 seconds anyway. So maybe they just want a video voicemail that is about the same length anyway. But this is not just available on mobile. You'll be able to do it from desktop as well.
- [05:04]
AJ Wilcox
Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I'm guessing, and I don't know, I'm a tech geek, but I don't know all the data numbers. But I think Facebook messenger used to have a limit of like 25 megabytes and it was like a 22 second video at the time. Now maybe compression's gotten better, but I'd be surprised. It could be 60. But again, that's certainly a new option. And one thing I like to do is send people messages on other platforms with video when it's like, hey, I'm here. So I was thinking of you. Like it's a great like visual to, you know, kind of especially I think to open a connection that maybe, you know, was in your pipeline and felt like it was getting a little stale.
- [05:37]
Guest Speaker
Right.
- [05:38]
AJ Wilcox
Here's a great new reason to reach out.
- [05:39]
Guest Speaker
Well, now you have to prepare for AI. Someone fake you record something once and then insert first name and have this be a whole bunch of like outreach spam. I'm sure that's coming, but right now let's use it authentically reaching out to people in our network, just like you said.
- [05:55]
AJ Wilcox
No, you had to ruin it, did you?
- [05:56]
Guest Speaker
I did.
- [05:57]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, you're right. But. All right, speaking of AI, if you are trying to figure out how to improve your marketing using AI, we want to invite you to our groundbreaking community, the AI Business Society. It's a place for marketers like you want to discover how to transform your marketing using AI. When you become a member, you get access to advanced how to AI marketing training and a network of forward thinking marketers who are all on a similar journey. I'm in there. And sometimes you have this AI thought. You're like, I don't know who else to ask or talk to about this. Well, that's where these people are. You won't find a group like this anywhere else. Find out how to become an AI powered marketer at social media examiner.com AI Business all right, social media examiner.com AI Business so back to the LinkedIn video there. It's all about vertical video, right? That seems to be what they're pushing. Although I do still see some widescreen and square videos coming up in my feed. And LinkedIn announced the their video safe zones. Now, the way that they did this was not that helpful for a YouTube show or a podcast because it was sort of, it was an image and then it's like these different pixel counts. But we set it up so if you want to see this image and you can, you know, make sure you're framing yourself right on your phone, just go to socialmediaexaminer.com Livido Zones okay. Social media examiner.com LividoZones so that you can see that. Now, another video feature is the trends highlights, which is one of my favorite things I've seen on LinkedIn in a while. I've actually been opening the app more often. But for those people who haven't seen it yet, explain exactly what this is. AJ yeah, if you look in your.
- [07:28]
Guest Speaker
Upper right hand corner, as you're just in your newsfeed, you'll see trending topics. And these are the stories that LinkedIn editors, usually by hand, are handpicking. These are the trending topics. So now we're going to have that inside of the video feed as well. Great for creators who, if you have an opinion on certain topics, you happen to see that one of these topics is in your wheelhouse and it's hot right now. It's a great time to go and create a video about that topic and then see if the editors will include your video and get you a bunch of free views. Free, free interactions.
- [08:01]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, that's the way I see it is is the. And because of how easy they've made it. Now I'm somebody who likes to plan my content. I don't like chasing trends, but it's. And it's not just like news trends, although it can be that sometimes it's just trends that, hey, a lot of people are talking about this. And what I find myself doing is if I like a video and then I see, you know, I'm like, oh, maybe I want to watch more of these. Or you can swipe through the trends at the top and see different trends. So it's not, it doesn't have to come up in your feed. You can browse the different ones and then you hit like, yeah, I want to make a video about this. And it opens your camera right there in the LinkedIn app. So, yeah, love that you said that. Great opportunity to get a bunch more reach. So, all right, moving on from video LinkedIn verification, LinkedIn has been one of these platforms that has been very big on verification. You were just talking about like, oh, gosh, is the AI generated video spam coming soon? So, you know, verification is almost becoming more important and now LinkedIn is actually expanding it outside of LinkedIn. So talk to us about this and how we can take advantage of this.
- [08:59]
Guest Speaker
Yeah, I love verification as a concept, especially for LinkedIn. LinkedIn has always been the one network where when you post, when you interact, you're not operating under a pseudonym. People know it's you and it makes it safer to interact. It means fewer people are just spewing off at the mouth and bullying people. And, you know, all that that you see on other platforms on LinkedIn, we don't tend to. So now LinkedIn is taking that a step further. You can't just create a fake profile anymore, but you can for at least a little while. But if you do, you can't verify that you are who you say you are from this fake profile. And when you know 90% of the people you interact with, it all shows verified, you're going to be a little suspicious when you see something that's not so. I love the fact that LinkedIn has fully invested in this. Just last week I got my own verification, but now they're. Because they own this data, they have it and it's great. They're now sharing it with other brands. So one that the use case that they've shared in this release, Adobe looks like Adobe Behance is like a. Where people who are in the Adobe community can share their portfolios. And now Adobe is going to show you if they are verified by LinkedIn and it's just, it's one more trust signal and then now they're also rolling it out to a bunch of other partners that you've heard ofTrust Radius, G2, user testing dot com. So I'll be interested to see what people do with these.
- [10:20]
AJ Wilcox
Well, the thing I like about it is, you know, I mean, not that we're all going to agree on a standard, but if you're verified by 800 different people at some point, I think it stops meaning something, right? If I trust LinkedIn and then I see you're verified by LinkedIn somewhere else, I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah, I don't have to recheck what that means. You know, the World is full of people selling certifications that don't mean anything other than this is how I make money. So that'll be interesting to see. So, all right, let's talk about company pages. Always been hard to grow. That's been my impression. Unless you run ads, of course, or if you have a very charismatic, active content creating CEO or employees. But they've been rolling out LinkedIn Premium for pages, and an interesting new way for people to grow their pages. So what's this all about?
- [11:04]
Guest Speaker
So, just like you mentioned, the hardest thing about pages is interactions. And so marketers have been saying, what can we do to get more from our company page? Because when our employees post, it goes viral. It reaches a lot of people. But when we post as a company, we hear crickets. So LinkedIn's always looking for more revenue streams. They come out with this new like, hey, you can have a premium page. And what they advertise the premium page is doing is it will automatically invite people for you to follow the page. So ideally, your page is now growing in followers without you having to do anything.
- [11:39]
AJ Wilcox
It's inviting followers of similar pages, right?
- [11:43]
Guest Speaker
Yep.
- [11:43]
AJ Wilcox
Okay.
- [11:44]
Guest Speaker
And it looks like it's about 77amonth at least when I checked here from North America. It might be cheaper elsewhere. It's probably not going to be more expensive anywhere else. But, you know, 77 bucks a month. So then you're wondering, what's my 77amonth get me? If it's inviting enough people to follow my page and all I have to do is just sit there and I'm going to get more followers, maybe that's worthwhile. It's also allowing you to create a custom call to action button that you couldn't with the free version. So maybe you're now making your page worth a little bit more to you. It'll actually show you the identities of the people who visit your page. Just like if you have LinkedIn Premium, you can see the individuals who are checking you out early usage. From what I'm seeing, I've talked to a couple friends and they're like, yeah, paying $77 a month. We're only seeing like one or two new followers. Probably not worth it. When you know anyone who has super admin access to a page, you get 250 invites per month to just go and send out to people you're connected to. So unless that improves, unless they're doubling tripling what you could do manually, I wouldn't say it's super worth paying for, but it's an option well, there's a.
- [12:50]
AJ Wilcox
Couple of things we have to call out here first. We already talked about how people don't follow company pages. So if. If nobody's already following pages, then there's nobody for them to invite. And then the other thing I kept thinking was like, so does that mean my company's competitors, followers, or like, you know, like, there could be a competition thing there? Now my brain is hurting trying to think of the direction between competitors and all of that. So it'll be interesting. But, yes, if you pay, we will help you. That's par for the course, right?
- [13:17]
Guest Speaker
Oh, yeah.
- [13:17]
AJ Wilcox
All right, let's talk about some of these ads updates. And I know you were excited about these. The first one, for those of you listening to the podcast, AJ just did a fist pump. So let's first talk about this. Qualified leads optimization. This looks like a really cool tool for people that are set up to use it. So what does this do exactly?
- [13:33]
Guest Speaker
When you use LinkedIn's new conversions API, that means when a lead makes it to a certain stage in your CRM, you can automatically report that back to LinkedIn and say, hey, this person that clicked from an ad or came from somewhere else, they just became a qualified lead. You can report that to LinkedIn and say, LinkedIn help. With all of my campaigns that I'm running, let's try to optimize and find more people who look like this. So the more of these qualified leads that you drive, the more you're training their model to look for more people like that who are a good fit. So love it in concept right now, in execution. First of all, you have to set up the conversion API, which is honestly kind of difficult. Like, it's. It's pretty technical, and so I don't see a whole lot of accounts doing it. But when you do now, your campaigns that use this, they have to run on the lead generation objective, which is okay, like, you're going to be using the Legion forms, but you have to run them on the bid type called max delivery and maximum delivery. Bidding is the most expensive way to pay for your traffic, like, 90% of the time. So I'm personally not using it, but I'm excited about the concept. I hope they let us change the bidding model in the future.
- [14:44]
AJ Wilcox
Okay, so it sounds like one of those things that in the future may be really cool. And when you say, like, when you set up your CRM so that way, if somebody in your pipeline visits a website for a third time, like, those are the type of signals you would send back to tell LinkedIn, hey, this person's a qualified lead.
- [15:00]
Guest Speaker
I think it could be. Most of the time, the way that we're using it is like when someone hits a lead stage, we don't know much about them. We just know that they filled out a form. But when someone in sales says, ooh, this looks good, this is an opportunity, they move it to the opportunity stage. Now you're saying, hey, LinkedIn, this is the kind of person who becomes an opportunity. Our sales team loves opportunities get us more people who will become an opportunity.
- [15:22]
AJ Wilcox
Okay, so there's maybe a way to automate some of it, and some of it you would do it manually.
- [15:26]
Guest Speaker
Yeah. You tell LinkedIn, this is the stage. So if it's like the sales qualified lead, or maybe you call it an opportunity stage, push that automatically to LinkedIn. And then LinkedIn goes, Ooh, here's qualified leads coming in. Let's analyze them and see if we can find more people like that.
- [15:41]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, okay. And then LinkedIn did roll out a bunch of new campaign manager enhancements. And, AJ, this is your world. So take us through these and tell us which ones you're excited about and which ones won't matter, you think, in the next six months.
- [15:54]
Guest Speaker
Okay, not a whole lot that matter. But I don't want to bury the lead here. Media Planner is like one that they've really been pushing. And what this is is a place in the campaign manager where you can look and see forecast models for what you can expect from certain audiences. I've been looking at LinkedIn forecasts for 14 years at this point, and they've always been terrible. And so I just honestly don't trust them. But it seems like this Media planner, they're probably taking a little bit more into account. Maybe the. The are going to be a little bit better, so I'll wait and see. But it is nice that they're giving us tools to help us predict. Because I talk to people all the time who say, what should I tell my boss? I'm just starting on LinkedIn ads. What budget do I do I tell him or her that I want to use? What sort of results am I going to get? At least it's something to report.
- [16:41]
AJ Wilcox
Are you saying it's a scapegoat for people that are just getting started with LinkedIn ads? Like, well, the media planner said, that's actually really good.
- [16:48]
Guest Speaker
I like using it. Like, yeah, let's throw that one under the bus when it's wrong. And that way your job is still safe as an ads manager.
- [16:54]
AJ Wilcox
I Like, yeah, yeah, I love it. All right, what else?
- [16:56]
Guest Speaker
One that I actually think is cool is ads duplication. So it used to be that in order to duplicate an ad, you could only do it within the same campaign. So taking an ad from one campaign and using it in a different campaign or a different campaign in a different campaign group or even in a different account, good luck. You just couldn't do it. Now it looks like we've got the opportunity to do that. I think this is going to make my life quite a bit easier.
- [17:21]
AJ Wilcox
Okay, awesome. All right, what else are you seeing?
- [17:23]
Guest Speaker
Dynamic UTM parameters. So I still do this. Every ad that I create, I run it through a spreadsheet that adds my UTM source, medium, campaign content all onto the URL. For me and LinkedIn, this isn't really new news. It's probably been around for a year and a half, but they're talking about it in the news. You can set these dynamic parameters at both the account level and the campaign level. And say when I run an ad, if I don't include those things, just stick them on for me automatically put my campaign id, my ad id, my campaign name. You can do static parameters. You can always say, my UTM source is always LinkedIn, my UTM medium is always like paid social. And then customize other things with dynamic fields. Pretty cool in concept. The one thing that it's missing is you can't give it anything at the ad level other than telling it to dynamically insert the ad id. I wish I could tell it, hey, come up with a parameter that I've created that I can track.
- [18:25]
AJ Wilcox
It's a technical ask, maybe based on the title of the ad or something more specific than 2781.
- [18:32]
Guest Speaker
Exactly. 27815 means nothing to me. I have to then dig to try to see what ad is this. Because of that, I still have to manually create parameters because I'm going to do that anyway. But if they can ever give me something like that that a human could actually recognize, then, yeah, I'm all on board.
- [18:47]
AJ Wilcox
Okay, and then tell us about this marketing overview homepage.
- [18:50]
Guest Speaker
When you log into the LinkedIn ads platform, your default experience you land on has always just been, well, before this, it would drop you on your. Your campaign groups and. And then you'd have to click into your ads and start seeing. Before that we actually had, it was just campaigns. It was back before campaign groups. So it would drop you right into your campaigns before that even. I mean, we're talking like seven years ago. They would drop us Onto a page that looks actually a lot like meta, where you had your timeline at the top so you could see a trend of what's happening with your data down below. I actually really like that. I wish LinkedIn brought that back. You can still access that through the button called performance chart, but now they drop you on another page that they call the marketing overview page. And this is where they'll show you, like a little snapshot of, you know, what spend has been like and what interactions have been like, stats that they think you think are going to be important. I don't find it super useful. I just think it's a splash page or a landing page before I navigate to the ads account.
- [19:49]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, but you live in there and you live for this stuff. But if we go back to our person who's looking for something to show the boss, it sounds like that could be a helpful thing to grab some screenshots of.
- [20:00]
Guest Speaker
And yeah, you're rushing to a meeting and like, oh, in the last seven days I've had 54 interactions. Cool screenshot. I'm gonna bring that to the meeting.
- [20:06]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. Lots of campaign manager enhancements. There are some other ad updates we'll talk about here in just a second. One thing that I always like when these platforms do and that LinkedIn does it well, all the platforms are doing it more is letting marketers try out new things without going all in on having to, like, try, you know, like some of the platforms lately have been making it easier for marketers to work with influencers. For example, and this is really interesting where LinkedIn, let me see if I can summarize and then you can tell me if I'm right or wrong and explain it. Basically letting people run video ads on platforms off of LinkedIn, but all within LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Is that. How is. Am I interpreting that right?
- [20:48]
Guest Speaker
Almost. It's still only on LinkedIn, but what it is, is they've got what they call premier publishers like Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Bloomberg, you know, those kind who, when they post video content on LinkedIn, it gets a lot of attention. They're sharing, you know, news stories of the day. What this is, is it's allowing advertisers through campaign manager to run in stream, like pre roll, mid roll kinds of video ads that get attached to the premium publishers. So now your ads are being seen on a Wall Street Journal video.
- [21:18]
AJ Wilcox
Okay, okay, so that's neat. So then that way, and like you said, pre roll, sometimes it's mid roll. They're not continuous Streams though, right? Like, if somebody's watching it, are they, like, it comes. It would come up in their feed or they'd go to the company page to see the video to start.
- [21:32]
Guest Speaker
Oh, I wish I knew. I.
- [21:34]
AJ Wilcox
That's okay.
- [21:34]
Guest Speaker
Gone to play with it yet? I saw one in the wild and I forgot to, like, interact with it and investigate.
- [21:39]
AJ Wilcox
Let me see what's happening here. Yeah, well, that's cool though. That is definitely probably a way to reach a lot of people fast, if that's what you want to do, and especially around certain topics. So. All right, some other LinkedIn ad updates. We definitely want to make sure that you are up to date on that. AJ is going to walk us through here. What are, what are the rest of these that we want to make sure people know?
- [21:56]
Guest Speaker
All right, so the most recent ones, Accelerate, is the product that LinkedIn's been pushing really hard. This is their AI based campaign and ad creator. So literally all you do is you give it. This is the URL I want to Send people to. LinkedIn's AI looks at it and goes, oh, what audience do we think would like this? And they'll create the audience for you. They'll also say, like, hey, based off of that, we're going to pull some text and this is going to be some ad copy. And hey, we made you an image. So all of this, like, totally hands off, sounds really cool. As you'd expect, it's pretty limited involvement from us as marketers, and so maybe it's good if you, like, you just, you need to run LinkedIn ads, but you, you don't have anyone to do it or don't have any time. But I love the control. I love being able to make sure that unticking all the boxes that waste money and being ultra specific about who my audience is. That being said, they're pushing it really hard. LinkedIn's AI just keeps getting better. I wouldn't be too surprised to see this actually be halfway useful in the next six months or year.
- [22:55]
AJ Wilcox
So here's what I'm hearing. It's a free tool to test your sales page to see if it's targeting the right people. Right? Because, I mean, imagine you upload it and they're like, yep, we want to target, you know, women 25 to 54 who are this. And they're like, we think you should target men 18 to 24.
- [23:09]
Guest Speaker
You're like, like, whoa, what, I wrote that wrong.
- [23:12]
AJ Wilcox
What did we do wrong here? So that'd be interesting. Okay. All right. Yeah. What else are you seeing next one.
- [23:17]
Guest Speaker
Is brand lift testing. So if you are spending at least $90,000 per quarter on LinkedIn, you get access to, it's under the testing category. You get access to some, some cool market research tests that are, they're just free. Like as long as you're hitting that level of spend, LinkedIn will run this market research for you and report back and let you know how it's doing.
- [23:39]
AJ Wilcox
Nice.
- [23:39]
Guest Speaker
Okay, the one that, that they made an improvement to, they'll add a multi question survey and they say click focused delivery, which I don't know what that means. Basically it'll run some survey questions to your target audience at the beginning of the 90 days and just get a baseline for like, hey, how many people have heard of you and what do they like? And you know, how do they like your competitors? And then over the course of running ads for a quarter, they show a whole bunch more of these to a target audience at the end and they measure that lift. So yeah, absolutely no downside to doing this if you're spending at least 90k per quarter. But I also wouldn't increase my budget to 90k just to get access to it because it's maybe not super, super helpful and informative, but it's cool as a free thing.
- [24:25]
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. Okay. Wow. All right. Plenty going on on LinkedIn, that's for sure. Just a quick reminder, you can learn about our community, the AI Business Society. Go to social mediaexaminer.com AIbusiness again, social media examiner.com AIbusiness and AJ where's the best place for people to connect with you easily?
- [24:42]
Guest Speaker
LinkedIn. Just do me a favor. When you send a connection request, just customize it and say, you heard me on Jerry's show. Then I'll know to make sure to accept it there. I'm also the host of the LinkedIn ads show podcast. So if you love podcasts, come check me out there.
- [24:56]
AJ Wilcox
Very nice. Yeah, check out that show along with the Social Media Marketing podcast which we put out every single week as well. Until next time, may you be wise with your marketing decision. Thanks everyone.
- [25:06]
Guest Speaker
Bye.
- [25:07]
Jerry Potter
The Social Media Marketing Talk show is a Social Media examiner production. For more social media Insight, visit social mediaexaminer.com.
- [25:20]
Michael Stelzner
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. But spring Enrollment ends Friday, May 16th. Join now and secure your discounted membership by visiting socialmediaexaminer.com AI I can't wait to see you inside the AI Business Society.