Targeting your content

Who are your followers and how many of them are your target audience? In addition, how many of them actually see your content?

We work hard to produce great quality content but are the right people seeing it? Is this something we can control?

The answer is yes…and no!

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts / Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

More of that later but first…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Microsoft announced their 4th quarter results this week. LinkedIn didn’t get much of a mention but they did show a growth in revenue of 37% which was again driven by advertising revenue but also by an improvement in the jobs market (Talent solutions). Sessions grew by 22% again with ‘record engagement’ which is a somewhat vague description! Here’s what Microsoft had to say;

Now, on to LinkedIn. We are experiencing a “Great Reshuffle” across the labor market, as more people in more places than ever rethink how, where, and why they work.

In this new economy, LinkedIn has become mission-critical to connect creators with their communities, job seekers with employers, learners with skills, and sellers with buyers.

Last quarter, we once again saw record engagement. And LinkedIn has become one of the world’s largest platforms for professional events, with more than 24,000 events created and 1.5 million RSVPs each week.

Confirmed hires were up 110 percent year over year, and we added tools to make it easier to discover open roles that align with how and where people want to work.

With entrepreneurship on the rise, our new Service Marketplace has helped nearly 3 million freelancers and small businesses discover new clients.

We also saw strong growth in LinkedIn Sales Solutions, which surpassed $1 billion in revenue over the past 12 months for the first time. Our Sales, Talent, Marketing, and Premium Subscriptions lines of business have now all reached this milestone.

That’s a great milestone for Sales Navigator although it was notable that it wasn't referenced in the sales growth numbers.

I’m impressed with the Events numbers…24,000 a week! and that’s with audio events only being in beta!

The services marketplace reference number feels like a bit of spin to me…have 3 million freelancers actually won business or been asked for proposals or are there 3 million people using the services feature on their profile? From what I can see, there are 7.3 million users across all 16 main categories but you can pick 10 service categories each and these can be split across different main categories. Whilst the services marketplace is officially ‘open’ I’m still waiting for it to be easily accessed by a mainstream audience by having it’s own page that includes a wide range of filters, including locations across the world.

As is the norm, LinkedIn update their member numbers in time with the MS announcement.

It is worth noting that the growth of members does appear to be slowing down as shown in this analysis from John Espirian which he included in this blog post.

New Feature!

URL links in profiles are being tested! I have had access to the new profile design for a few months now but I didn’t spot this change! kudos to Julia Dixon who was sharper than me and posted about it this week;

It’s worth noting that email addresses are not <mailto> links but just take you to the website for that domain. This is also only seen on the iOS mobile app at the moment as well, not Android or desktop

The links are active anywhere in your profile. links have always been active in posts, comments, and replies but this is a very welcome addition and a good reason to think about amending your profile to take advantage, remember that 70% of your views are likely to come via mobile.

This could be an A/B test rather than a full rollout, I lost the feature briefly for a couple of hours today so it might be some time until it’s rolled out fully.

LinkedIn Lite will be shutting down on March 15th. This mobile Android version of LinkedIn was designed for users in India with poor access to fast internet. Internet speeds are rapidly improving in India now making this app obselete.

Content Targeting

Listener Mark Lee sent in an interesting question this week which can be summarised as follows;

I would suggest the following new feature to LinkedIn;

I would like to be able to filter my newsletter subscribers and followers better and be able to target my content at specific filtered groups of followers.

I have 12,000 followers of which about a quarter subscribe to my newsletter but the vast majority of those subscribers are not my target audience. As things stand I have no way of knowing whether my content is actually reaching my target audience.

This is an interesting suggestion by Mark but I very much doubt that LinkedIn will do this and I’m not completely convinced they should!

Content targeting flies in the face of what Linkedin are trying to achieve. The algorithm is designed to ‘machine learn’ what content we want to see and gives us more of that, not the content those we follow want us to see…the only way that happens is via company posts (which have very poor reach) or paid advertising. If LinkedIn introduced content targeting, it would quickly result in our feeds being full of spammy posts we don’t wish to see…session times would drop through the floor and ad sales plummet!

The ability to search through and filter our followers or subscribers would be interesting and useful in that it may help us adjust the topics we cover. We can do this via a search of our connections (filter by 1st tier and any other relevant fields such as industry, location, job title etc) but that is less helpful when a large percentage of our followers are not connections. It would be good to be able to search with filters for our followers in total and also our newsletter subscribers…but this would only be helpful in determining what we post about, nothing else.

In addition for newsletter article ‘views’ it would be very interesting to get a break down of exactly who they are. Remember an article ‘view’ is actually a view rather than a post ‘view’ which is simply just a page impression with no guarantee that the ‘viewer’ even saw the post!

My belief however, is that we don’t need to be so targeted with our content. The aim should be to make our content relevant and interesting to our target audience but also to a wider audience. This way those followers that are not in our target market will be more likely to react or comment, thus distributing our content to a wider audience which may well include people who are of more interest to us.

Visibility is not about pinpoint accuracy, it’s about being widely known for specific things - Your profile and headline make it clear what you do and your content carries that message via engagement. Some of that content is very specific to what you do but much of it is simply designed to carry to a wider audience.

Mark does highlight a very interesting challenge though…how do we get our content in front of more of our target audience?

We will never be able to be highly accurate with this but there are some measures that we can undertake that will definitely help with connections at least;

• Perform a people search and filter by 1st tier connections and other relevant filters such as location, industry and job title.
• Go through this list and bookmark the posts page of anyone that is of interest to you.
• Check this page weekly and engage with their posts (preferably comment)
• If they are never posting, save their ‘all activity’ page instead and comment or react to the same posts they have engaged with, like their comments, and where possible, reply to their comments.
• Send each of them a direct message asking them to reply with topics that they would be interested in seeing in their feed. Try to make this as simple as possible by giving them 4 topics to pick from or to reply with a different topic.

The above process will start to build relevance with these followers, in other words, you are helping to provide clear signals to the algorithm that this person is interested in your content.

We can’t really wait in hope that LinkedIn will make the changes that Mark is asking for but we can undertake some positive activities to improve our chances of reaching the right audience (as well as others).

Post Of The Week

I’ve been overwhelmed with nominations this week! I had 7 very strong contenders to pick from and it was a very difficult choice, this task is becoming quite stressful! In the end, I went for this gem from Rich.

Note that Rich is not a Recruiter but his target audience are recruiters. He knows his market and how they will be able to relate to this video. It’s funny and clever…I’m not sure how easy it was to have the labels move around like that but it’s smart of him to spot the video and be able to make it relate to his audience in that way.

Rich has less than 8500 followers, admittedly Recruiters are one of the most ‘online’ (note I didn’t use the word ‘active’) communities on LinkedIn but even so, nearly 13,000 likes, over 2000 comments and 677,000 views in just 9hrs is mightily impressive.

OK that’s your lot this week, I’m away on holiday next week but LinkedInformed will be back the week after with our 350th episode!

Until then…

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts / Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts