Welcome to episode 259.

It’s great to have followers but to increase the visibility of our posts we need to get more of them to engage.

This isn’t just about what we write but also about how we treat our followers, especially new ones!

This week my main focus is on my new (and not fully tested) engagement blueprint. I have covered elements of it before but the extra part that I want to focus on in this episode techniques to get our followers more engagement.

But first….

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• How We’re Protecting Members From Fake Profiles
• LinkedIn’s Dark Mode is underway
• Could this be the new Mike Winnet?

Clearly, a spoof post, the likes of which Mike can’t get away with these days so much but Bart has managed to catch plenty of people out with this one!

Frustrated you don’t have LinkedInLive?

You can make an application to get the feature here

A Question I’m Pondering

• Internal links vs external links. This subject comes up time and time again. I commented as follows in the post below;

LinkedIn officially deny that external links are penalised but we know from experience that they perform very badly.
Internal links do perform a bit better but still not great so here’s what I think is happening…
WE DON’T LIKE LINKS!
I have thought for some time now that the biggest issue here is time…when we scan our feed we want to read what we need to see there, if it’s good it pulls us in and we like or comment.
If we see an external link we subconsciously think “looks good but right now I don’t have time to go there and read it”
LinkedIn users are far more time sensitive that other SM users…they are at work with stuff to do!
If we do have time, we click on the link but we don’t engage and that does nothing to help the organic reach of the post.
Both scenarios lead to poor performance.
The best technique is to post about the subject of your article with an intention of creating a conversation - mention that you have written an article and even add the link if you wish but that should not detract from the post….which MUST engage

Teammates has arrived in Europe.

LinkedIn announced this feature earlier this year in April but it was initially only in the US. This week many listeners have been in touch to report that they have seen it in their accounts this week.

Is this a good feature?

I’m somewhat sceptical!

I smell a rat! I think this is more of a win for LinkedIn and the useful data they can sell to recruiters than it is of use to us! It won’t be long before this data appears as a filter option in LinkedIn Recruiter search, there may even be uses for it in Sales Navigator.

Here’s a post I did about this;

A Bit of LinkedIn Fun

Both these posts had me chuckling this week!

Engaging Your Followers

When we connect with someone, they automatically become a follower meaning that they are added to the list of people who might see our posts.

The keyword being MIGHT!

So who does see our posts? We know it’s a small percentage of our followers, especially in the first critical hour.

I had heard that LinkedIn prioritise posts from new connections (and possibly followers) in your feed as mentioned in my ‘Mass posting’ section of the last show

I’ve been doing some research and I haven’t seen much evidence of this so I thought I would try something.

When accepting an invitation I send them a message….nothing salesy or generic, just a short note based on their profile which encourages a reply and this seems to trigger their posts appearing in my feed (not all, many aren’t active). I can only assume that the same happens to their feed…..so could this be a way of making sure my posts appear in their feed?

This might not be 100% true as I’m only in the early stages of my research but so far, the signs are encouraging.

But wait….isn’t that just the same for everyone? …Not exactly - if I send a message to an older connection it doesn’t seem to have the same effect, at least not always.

So I have now added this step as part of my ‘blueprint for organic reach’

• Know your audience avatar (not just prospective customers but also those that influence them)
• Engage with them
• Connect with them
• Following connection, send them a personalised message that motivates a response (not promotional)
• Understand what topics strongly resonate with them
• Search for content and follow hashtags pertaining to these topics
• Engage with this content
• Engage with content from highly relevant new followers (bookmark them initially)
• Post 3-5 times a week, mostly about the above topics
• Aim for a min 3:1 ratio of comments to posts, ideally more so 3 posts = 15 comments min per week (at least 10 of these should be those followers you are most interested in)

Julian posts regularly and is lucky if he gets 10 likes and 5 comments…..and then he posted this message of hope and positivity.

It’s a simple selfie on a train but clearly, the authenticity and positive message in his post struck a chord with many people.

227 thousand Likes, 6500+ comments and over 11 million views

Who said Image posts performed badly?!

This weeks question comes from Joshua Parks;

Recently I saw a post (through a connection’s ‘like’) from an individual who works for the U.S. government’s Health and Human Services and I wanted to ‘Follow’ that person (he seemed clever, interesting perspective - I wanted to improve my feed so to speak).

However, when I went to do so, the PLUS sign and ‘FOLLOW’ option weren’t available. Through my cursory research it appears that this is something that he has disabled in his privacy settings - is that correct?

If that’s the case, it’s simultaneously understandable and a bummer - because it’s really important to be able to follow the thoughts/comments/job progression of key members of the government especially as it pertains to drug affordability (what I do and what this person does too - but from very different perspectives - thus the value of his ideas to me).