[Episode Thirty-Seven of ‘The Employee Advocacy and Influence Podcast] 🎧
In this special two-part episode of the podcast, Bradley and Lewis discuss LinkedIn’s recent algorithm changes, and how they impact employee advocacy. LinkedIn’s algorithm changes have caused quite a stir in the B2B world especially, but what exactly has changed? Spoiler alert: the future looks bright for employee advocacy!
In part one, Bradley & Lewis break down the changes to LinkedIn’s algorithm and offer their key takeaways from the recent updates.
In part two, Lewis & Bradley host a workshop in writing great social media posts for employee advocacy, and Lewis explains DSMN8’s PACKD analogy for writing better posts.
Organizations all over the world in every sector are driving strategic competitive advantage by scaling the impact of their employees’ voices… and now YOU can too! As we delve beyond the why and get straight to the how so that you can put employee-driven growth at the heart of your organization.
Welcome to the new and improved version of The Employee Advocacy and Influence Podcast. In this new format, CEO Bradley Keenan is joined by DSMN8’s very own Lewis Gray (Senior Marketing Manager) as a co-host.
Part 1
[Transcript]
BK: Welcome to The Employee Advocacy and Influence Podcast. My name is Bradley Keenan, and I am the CEO and founder of DSMN8. And with me, I have Lewis Gray, who works in marketing, and I always forget his job title, but he’s, he’s the big dog, big dog in marketing.
LG: Yeah, every time these intros come along, I feel like there’s going to be, I’m either going to get, there’s going to be a jab thrown my way that I’m going to, I’m going to have to bat away, or I’m going to get a promotion or something along those lines.
BK: Well, you say that, so this is a really important episode because typically, obviously, when we started doing the podcast, I was doing it by myself. You came in, then you changed the photo on Spotify or the app store, so it was me and you.
And then this episode, you’re going to kind of take the lead, which is really exciting, right? So I feel like when Obi-Wan Kenobi gave Luke Skywalker his lightsaber. So I’m gonna grab my lightsaber, and I’m going to hand it to you.
LG: This is the fact,
BK: This is for you, Lewis. Go ahead. You are the employee advocacy Jedi today.
LG: the fact I’ve got nothing to grab if I if I mimic it, I don’t have a lightsaber my side. A prop from Amazon could have done it through the screen. We should have aligned ahead of time. I would have got a, I would have just ordered one.
BK: I could have passed it through the screen. That would have been proper special effects.
LG: Yeah.
BK: So today’s episode is going to be more of one of our workshop sessions. So we’ve done a couple now, had really good feedback from people because they essentially said they found it more, more, I guess more tactics so they could actually take these things and use them in their employee advocacy strategies.
And I had a question from a customer, and the question was what everyone’s talking about, which is the LinkedIn algorithm changes and how that’s going to affect their employee advocacy efforts.
So that got me thinking about, okay, well, what is the difference? And obviously, we’ve looked at our data. So I’ve given Lewis the challenge to look at the algorithm.
Let’s talk about it, and let’s explore the impact that it’s going to have and, ultimately, what we can do to improve the reach of our employee advocacy social media posts.
LG: Do you want to say the catchphrase today to launch the podcast?
BK: Well,
LG: Can you remember what it is?
BK: Because actually because the hand in the lightsaber, so you are going to do some episodes without me on it. So I think you should have done the intro today, and I should have done the bit, the catchphrase, which I’ve now forgotten, which is, let’s get into it. Is that what you’re saying?
LG: Perfect.
BK: Okay, let’s get into it.
LG: Okay, so I thought a good place to start with this episode is just to explain or kind of build on what Brad’s already said with why we decided to tackle this topic.
So there’s kind of two things, really, and the changes to LinkedIn’s algorithm have come at the kind of the perfect time for this podcast.
So something that we often see when companies launch employee advocacy programs, at least in the infant stages, is when their admins are writing captions for their colleagues to use when they’re sharing content. Is they will either not put enough time into it to write a good caption, or it’s not even, or sometimes it’s and or, but the alternative is they’ll basically write in a very corporate tone of voice.
So what I mean by that is if you think about if you were sharing something to your personal LinkedIn, if you’re a marketer, for example, so a good example is I write content for DSMN8’s LinkedIn, the tone of voice that I use for the DSMN8 LinkedIn is obviously very different to my tone of voice when I’m writing for my own posts.
And I think people kind of struggle to switch off their marketing brain in that regard. And they write posts that sound like, basically, when their colleagues actually start sharing this content, it just looks like it’s been written by somebody else.
It looks like it was written by the marketing team, and it kind of looks like they’ve been told to share it, which is obviously a worst-case scenario because it doesn’t look engaging, and then it just removes that authenticity. So we’re going to get onto that, and we’re going to talk about how to write better posts.
But then, obviously, like I said, this is very timely because LinkedIn’s algorithm has recently gone through some pretty serious changes. Historically, we’ve been reluctant to kind of tackle anything algorithm-related because, generally speaking. I don’t want to use the phrase guesswork, but because there’s a lot of research that’s gone into people’s algorithms, algorithm theories in the past.
But generally speaking, it’s one of those things where, because it’s constantly changing and you know, one piece of research will say the algorithm loves carousels right now. And then another piece of research will say it’s all text posts. So we’ve tried to kind of steer clear of it, and just when we have spoken about how to write LinkedIn posts, we’ve focused it more on keeping them engaging.
BK: I think the interesting thing with the algorithm changes is, like, so in my friend group, my WhatsApp friend group, everyone in that group is into fitness in some way. And the argument I’m always having with them is they’re always talking about macros and like this app and this thing they can get. But really, that’s going to get them a very small marginal gain, right?
The actual thing that’s gonna get them going is going out and exercising or running. Going out and running is going to get you better at running. But some people will kind of focus so much on the algorithm or some kind of hack that they can get that will get them that much further. They’re actually not doing the core thing, which is, in this analogy is, more write good content on LinkedIn.
And actually, a lot of the people that are complaining about the algorithm change are people who write very generic posts that are for everyone. So there’s a huge community on LinkedIn, and I’m guilty of this as much as anyone but, writing posts which are about writing posts. So you’ve got copywriters and LinkedIn, I hate that term gurus, but the people who refer to themselves as the gurus. And it’s just this kind of like closed network of people talking about LinkedIn, giving themselves boosts about content about LinkedIn.
And they seem to be the people that are complaining the most about the algorithm changes. When the client contacted me about what the impact would have or has had, I looked at our average click per share, sort of six months prior to roundabout when the algorithm changes. I don’t think we have a specific date of when it actually changed, but six months prior to roundabout that time and then since then.
And there was about a, I think it was like a 7% decrease in post-reach after the algorithm change, which to me, isn’t statistically relevant because we’re in July. So typically, July would always see a dip anyway. And actually, when I compared year on year, July to July, it was actually up 20%.
So I haven’t actually seen any impact of the algorithm changes because everybody who shares through DSMN8 is typically sharing, you know, they’re not sharing content about sharing content on LinkedIn if that makes sense.
LG: Yeah, definitely. I think that I’ve been guilty of doing what you were saying about before. So like the analogy that you used with the fitness thing, I’ve spent so much time in the past kind of trying to game the algorithm.
And so, like, carousels obviously have been quite a big thing recently for LinkedIn. And I’ve spent so much time putting carousels together, which I’ll do myself, but it’s time-taxing. And then I’ll share it and, the reality is that I could have just shared a link with a decent caption, and it probably would have done just as well as the carousel, but I’ve now lost a couple of hours of my time because I was trying to game the algorithm.
But the difference between these algorithm changes and the ones that we’ve, I guess, the difference between what’s going on now and what’s happened in the past is that this has come straight from the horse’s mouth.
So this is literally the chief, sorry, the editor-in-chief at LinkedIn and a director of product management have done an interview with Entrepreneur, and come out and said that LinkedIn’s algorithm has gone through some pretty major changes, and then this is what they are.
Which is so rare because obviously, social media platforms don’t really want you to know what the algorithm favors and what it prioritizes, because then everybody starts doing it and then you get into this cycle that we’re just talking about.
BK: Unless, of course, they actually want people to adhere to the strategy of the algorithm change. So typically, algorithm changes are there to compress or suppress, sorry, reach so people spend more money on ads. And there’s obviously lots of theories around people saying, well, the algorithm change happened at the exact same time as personal post promotion.
I mean, I’m sure they are connected in some way, but I think this is actually more to do with the general sentiment around people who are not in the, I don’t want to say in a circle, but like there’s this group of people on LinkedIn, like the people who talk about LinkedIn, and it’s kind of, it’s kind of LinkedIn in itself is the focus, not the reach that you get from it.
So I think a lot of outside people, when they go on LinkedIn, they just say, LinkedIn is just people talking about LinkedIn. So what I want to see is things that are relevant to me that are of interest, and LinkedIn know that if they don’t solve that problem, people are just gonna stop logging on because all they see is content that isn’t of interest to them.
LG: Yeah, I think that’s why it’s important that LinkedIn have come out and said this. Actually, why it’s important this interview happened is because a lot of people were starting to speculate that because I mean if you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, you probably will have noticed a slight drop in impressions and engagements recently.
And there’s definitely been a lot of conversations happening about it, but there’s been speculation that’s because LinkedIn is moving to more of a pay-to-play model. So like, you’ve just highlighted like that. Oftentimes that can be the reason for kind of throttling people’s reaches to get them to pay to achieve more reach further down the line.
So I guess, yeah, you’re right. It’s, it’s important. They’ve come out and said this because they want people to adhere to this. So the people are actually sharing value, but that kind of leads me on to, I guess, do you know, I guess it’s important that we kind of summarize this, and I’m not going to read through the whole interview.
I’ve just pulled together a few points that I think are the most valuable. But the reason that LinkedIn have come out and said they’ve made these huge algorithm changes.
And interestingly, in the interview, something the editor-in-chief said is that they consider viral posts on LinkedIn to be a bad thing internally. So whenever they see LinkedIn posts blowing up and going viral, they look at it and think, okay, why has this happened? What kind of content is it that they’re sharing? And they don’t consider it to be a good thing.
They were basically explaining that during the pandemic, people’s LinkedIn posts, and we will have all seen this again if you spend time on LinkedIn, people’s LinkedIn posts became more personal, work and home lives kind of became intertwined as everybody started working from home, you started to see more selfies, work from home setups, and that kind of thing.
And I think that just encouraged more users to lean into those actions that in the article, they say it becomes endemic on social media, but people then start trying to game the algorithm because they realize these photos are going viral and that kind of thing.
People start chasing likes and followers and that kind of thing. The downside to that is that, generally speaking, that’s not why people go to LinkedIn. It’s a professional platform.
People go there to network, whether or not that’s what you see in your feed anymore, people go there to network and to learn something, and you know, generally speaking, they want to keep it professional. So LinkedIn users started complaining. I don’t know what the official channels are to complain on LinkedIn, but I know, for example, you can go to a post and say, this post isn’t relevant to me. Don’t show me posts like this.
But the two people in this interview from LinkedIn said that users started complaining. So LinkedIn essentially took it upon themselves to try and make their feed more relevant and informative and not just, you know, addictive, engaging and sticky. Which I’m all here for.
BK: Hmm.
LG: I don’t know how you feel about that, Brad, but for me, I hate seeing, social media platforms lean into, you know, trying to meet this one size fits all approach is to keep people using it. Because eventually, they lose their way, and people stop using it. I look at Twitter as an example.
BK: Well yeah, it’s very topical at the moment. Have you signed up for Threads already?
LG: I downloaded it this morning.
BK: And what about Blue Sky? Have you registered?
LG: I’ve never used Blue Sky.
BK: So Blue Sky’s Jack Dorsey’s thing, which is the replacement for Twitter. So I think it’s, I don’t think it’s launched yet, but there’s like a pre-registration thing. But yeah, I’m interested to see. I don’t think it’s a matter of if one of the platforms replaces Twitter. I just think it’s a matter of what one.
LG: Yeah, for sure.
BK: But we’ll, I think we digress there, but we’ll see what happens. But yeah, as far as like relevance in the feed is concerned, then yeah, I mean, the issue with. The issue with Twitter and LinkedIn, especially if you’ve got a large following. So I don’t have a large following. Probably by most people’s standards, I do, but not in the grand scheme of things. So I have about 12,000 connections on LinkedIn.
Now, if I follow all 12,000 people and they just showed me everybody’s posts in chronological order, most of the posts I would see in my feed would be completely not relevant to me because they’re either people that connected to me to sell to me, people I sold to in the past, previous people I’d worked with. So it would be a complete mess.
So about a year ago, I went through an exercise, and I basically just ran a script and unfollowed every single person I connected to on LinkedIn. So I unfollowed every single person. So my feed was empty, apart from promoted posts.
And then, I went through and systematically chose who are the people I want to follow. So, you know, clients, employees. Influencers, people who are of interest and companies actually, because there are companies that I’m interested in what they’re doing.
And over time, that’s actually now deteriorated to the point that I kind of need to do that exercise again. But that’s not a problem for most people who have 500 connections, right? Five hundred connections, and if someone’s only posting, you know, 10% of those people are posting monthly, then that’s not a problem. But when you get into large numbers, it really does become far too much.
LG: Yeah, definitely. I’ve just made a note to do that myself. Usually, when you’re talking, I’m taking notes because I want to speak about something you’ve just mentioned.
BK: It’s really satisfying. So I shouldn’t really promote people doing this given that we want people to follow people, but, it, it’s, it’s not even a bot. It’s literally just a web script you can run, and you can watch it doing it in real-time. So it’s just going unfollow, unfollow. And there’s something, there’s something quite therapeutic around just seeing that go down, but then when you go for and reselect people, it does become a much cleaner environment. And some people I’ll follow, but I won’t connect to by using the bell thing.
LG: Definitely. Yeah, I don’t think it’s discouraging at all. I think we should, you know, I’m going to keep my followers, but I want my feed to be full of people who are, whose content I consider to be relevant to me that I can engage with.
It’s a key part of social selling, right? It’s just engaging with content that’s relevant to you and engaging with other people in the industry. But yeah, sorry, I was just making note of that. But there’s kind of two big changes that I guess you’ll see in your LinkedIn feed now. And again, this is coming straight from the source.
So the first one is that it’s now more likely that your followers will see your posts, and the posts that you see will be from people you actually follow. Which, again, I welcome. There’s so many people that I follow currently whose posts I don’t see.
So if I see somebody on LinkedIn, I don’t know them well enough to send a connection request. I’ll just drop them a follow because I want to see more of their content. Oftentimes that content just never makes it to my feed. It will be these viral posts that LinkedIn thinks I want to see. So that’s kind of the first big changes. It’s now more likely your followers will actually see those posts.
The second one and I think this is the biggest one, especially with regards to what we’re gonna talk about in terms of employee advocacy captions, posts that share knowledge and advice, and that’s a quote. So “posts that share knowledge and advice are now prioritized throughout the platform”.
And LinkedIn has given us the framework of what they consider to be knowledge and advice. So they’ve not just told us what we should be posting. They’ve told us how to do it. So obviously, this is absolute gold dust for us.
What they consider to be a post that offers knowledge and advice is broken down into four different things. The first one is that it speaks to a distinct audience. So if you’re posting, are you talking about marketing for marketers, or are you talking about sales topics that will obviously resonate with salespeople? Is the post speaking to a distinct audience?
BK: I think it actually goes one step further than that. So I think one of the issues we’ve, I don’t know if it’s specific to marketing, but when we talk about marketing, right, B2C marketing and B2B marketing, okay, some people argue they’re the same thing. They’re completely not the same thing. There is such a different skill set in selling a product like a can of Pepsi versus selling cloud tech.
Of course, there’s gonna be commonalities between them. But I think the distinct audience is even going to be, I’m talking about marketing in the oil and gas industry, or I’m talking about sales in pharmaceuticals, and it gets very, very niche. So if I work in the pharmaceuticals industry, I’m seeing things that are actually relevant to me rather than kind of this blanket.
You know, you see that sometimes I see posts on LinkedIn, and they’re so generic. And it’s like, what am I even learning from that? You know, it’s like when you’re in sales, you should really make sure you talk about all the features and benefits. Okay, cool. Thank you so much. so I think getting really specific is definitely gonna help people.
LG: Yeah, definitely. I’ve definitely seen a lot of that as well. Like as a salesperson, you should make phone calls every week. Like, yeah, obviously never that obvious, but you know what I mean?
BK: Yeah, Or everything’s dead, isn’t it? ChatGPT’s dead.
LG: Yeah, emails dead, cold callings dead. That’s the classic. But yeah, so the second thing, and obviously, these are just broad statements. Again, it’s coming from the source, but like Brad’s just mentioned, there’s going to be things here that you kind of have to read into a little bit more.
So when you’re thinking about writing to a distinct audience, you need to think about making it as niche as possible so that it’s actually tailored to a distinct audience. But the second thing is, is the author writing in their core subject area?
And this one I find so interesting because they gave us so much insight about what they consider that to be. So it’s LinkedIn’s algorithm, but they also use AI to determine whether or not somebody is speaking to their core subject area. So the example that’s used in the article is probably the best one, which is a geology example.
So for me as a marketer, if I started talking about geology, the algorithm and LinkedIn’s AI, however, it works, is essentially gonna look at that and say, okay, you’ve never spoken about geology before. You don’t have any track record in the field according to your previous job titles. Your skills on LinkedIn don’t speak to that niche. So it makes no sense for you to be talking about it. Obviously, that’s a very abstract example, if that’s the right word.
BK: Hmm.
LG: But I think that’s the best way to explain it. But it-
BK: I think it’s there to avoid. I heard, um, do you familiar with Scott Galloway?
LG: I know the name. I feel like I know faces more on Linkedin.
BK: Okay. Yeah. So he did. He did the Diary of a CEO podcast, he is a famous kind of marketing lecturer. Disappointed that you don’t know him, Lewis. but he, he refers to these things as idiot magnets.
So like the idiot magnet was, was blockchain, you know, was, you know, is now AI, and it’s those people who are AI experts, but like six months ago they were blockchain experts or two years ago they were blockchain experts, and then they were experts in something else.
I think the reason they’re doing this is to avoid that thing if something comes out and everyone just repackages themselves as an expert in that thing and starts talking about it, and actually, all they know is the limited information that everyone has. They just use it because it’s a buzzword that everyone wants to know about.
LG: Yeah, definitely. I think you could probably get it with job hoppers as well, right? Cause they’re never, never really becoming an expert in any niche. So if you use me as the example, if I would consider myself an employee advocacy expert today and then tomorrow went to go work for a logistics company. For example, suddenly, I become an expert in that.
But yeah, anyway, I digress. I’ll just go through the four points. Sorry, we’re onto the third. So this one, I kind of wanted to. I don’t want to hone in on this one too much for this episode because it doesn’t really speak to what we’re going to be talking about at the end. But nevertheless, how LinkedIn identifies if your post is knowledgeable and offering advice.
The third thing is, does the post have meaningful comments? Now obviously, we’ve known in the past that comments are super valuable to LinkedIn’s algorithm.
BK: The fire emoji by itself is the best comment, right? That’s the one that gets you the most. The most reach is a fire emoji.
LG: And if you share three, you get three times as much reach.
BK: Excellent.
LG: That’s not true, obviously. But yeah, that’s the best example. So people…
BK: Fake news.
LG: …obviously caught onto the fact that comments were sending positive signals to LinkedIn’s algorithm. Naturally, if a post is generating comments, the algorithm would have said, okay, this is interesting enough for other people to talk about. It means they care, so we’ll show it to more people. What happened was, though, people caught onto this as marketers.
I’m throwing no shots here, but people catch on to this kind of thing. And these engagement bubbles started to pop up where it’s like, you know, it could have been a Slack group, a Facebook group, but like groups of people get together and say, when I post, I’m going to share it to this group. And everybody jumps in. They just start commenting. And the comments were essentially just comments for the sake of commenting. So the fire emoji, the great post or love this, just stuff like that, where it’s, it’s not a meaningful comment. You’re not really adding anything. You’re just boosting that content.
And I think I’ve definitely seen this in the past where people have just said, like, commenting for the reach boost or something like that.
BK: Yeah, people also write follow, don’t they? Because they don’t know that you can just click on the three dots and just say follow this post.
LG: Sorry, people comment…
BK: So people comment following, so by commenting following, they know that they will then receive notifications about future comments on that post, but you don’t need to do that. You just click the button that says follow this post, and then you’ll be notified.
LG: Okay, yeah.
BK: about the post. But yeah, I think that might be more of a Facebook thing.
LG: No, that feature drives me mad. If ever I like somebody’s comment on a post, I then get about 20 LinkedIn notifications, especially if it’s one that’s gone viral, because just because I liked one comment, try and bring me back.
But yeah, the algorithm is now prioritizing meaningful comments. So again, it’s an indicator of it offering knowledge and advice because it starts actual conversations. The fourth one is that the post has a perspective.
So, Brad, this kind of touches on what you were speaking about earlier. With people just kind of stating the obvious. So LinkedIn’s algorithm is now gonna say, is this offering anything new? And obviously, when you factor AI into this, you have to imagine what the capabilities are.
Is this a statement that’s been rehashed, you know, thousands of times today? Is this something original? Are you actually offering a unique take, or are you just stating the obvious?
So just to summarize those four, we’ve put together an acronym for it as well, but to summarize those four, the post speaks to a distinct audience. You’re writing to your core subject area. It has meaningful comments, and then you’re offering a perspective. Again, the comments one, when we’re talking about how to write a great post, doesn’t really factor in. You can obviously encourage comments, but that’s just what LinkedIn considers to be a knowledgeable post offers advice. The acronym that we’ve gone for is PACKD. So that’s
BK: The acronym you’ve created. This is your acronym, Lewis. I’m not going to take credit for it.
LG: Okay, just in case it’s really badly received, you’re like.
BK: No, just think that if you’ve created something, you should take full credit for it, and you’ve done it. So this is Lewis’s acronym.
LG: Oh, okay. I thought you meant you’re like taking a step back just in case like
BK: No, no, no, I’m not distancing myself from acronyms,
LG: Nobody does it. So I had nothing to do with this.
BK: I’m just saying, you know, you’ve done it. You own it.
LG: Okay, okay. So yeah, it’s PACKD. So P-A-C-K-D. So just like a trendy, you know, startup name, we’ve missed a load of letters. Imagine that. The P is
BK: There’s no letters in there. No letters. No numbers, sorry. No, you need a
Number in there to be really cool.
LG: Oh yeah, there’s no numbers. Yeah, we do need the number.
So it’s the, the P is perspective. So your post is offering perspective.
A is advice. So you’re offering advice.
C sort of confined this one a bit, but C is the core subject area. You speak into your core subject area.
K it always gets me with silent letters in acronyms because it’s the K is for knowledge, and then the D is the distinct audience.
So just things to bear in mind when you’re writing keep it PACKD. So just you know what the algorithm is looking for. Hopefully, just having that will mean that you can have something to refer back to when you’re writing your posts.
Lastly, and we will move on to how to write post captions for employee advocacy. We, I think this is still super valuable because it does relate to employee advocacy, is they’ve essentially said what they think success should look like.
And this, to me, all of these statements are just absolute gold dust for employee advocacy programs. And I think we should start to see a serious uplift as a result of, you know, these algorithm changes because they’re saying that LinkedIn sees successes instead of reaching lots of people.
They want users to focus on reaching the right people. Obviously, with employee advocacy, you want your employees to become known as thought leaders in the, in, in the industry, you want them to grow their personal brands.
And they’re saying that no single discussion is relevant to every person across every team, just as no single piece of content should be relevant to, to everyone across LinkedIn.
So essentially, they’re saying that you’re reaching the right people, and the people that you’re sharing your content to or tailoring your content for are, I feel like I’m going in circles here, but people that content should, in theory, be relevant to, does that make sense? Or have I,
BK: No, that’s 100%.
LG: Okay, amazing. And then the quote, which I thought was brilliant. So they said “it’s very rare for someone to stand up with a megaphone and shout to the whole office, and everyone’s like, great. I want to hear more from this person yelling at us with a megaphone”. Stuff’s not going viral in the workplace, or if stuff isn’t going viral in the workplace, it shouldn’t be going viral on LinkedIn. So I think that sums it all up.
Content isn’t going to be relevant to everybody. Your content should be tailored so that it’s relevant to the right people. And you, as somebody who’s creating content, should be creating content that is relevant to your core subject area and that you know is gonna be relevant to your audience.
BK: So Lewis, obviously, we’ve covered loads in today’s episode, and I’m noticing that we’re already pretty much at the time limit we would normally put on a regular episode. So what I’m gonna suggest that we do and to give our audience a little bit of a break and to reflect on all of the information that we’ve given them is split this episode into two.
So this episode focusing very much on what the algorithm changes have been and potentially how they can impact employee advocacy. And in our next episode, we’re going to be talking specifically about how we take those changes, and we implement them in our employee advocacy program so we can get the most out of it. Does that work for you, Lewis?
LG: That works for me. Yeah, I think this is the issue when you let me speak. I just chat for 30 minutes, and we’ve, it could be two hours if we’re not careful. So,
BK: Well, we’re going to release these episodes at the same time, so if you are listening to this episode and you’re enthralled with everything that we’re speaking about, you’ll be able to go straight into the second part of our algorithm special.
LG: Yeah, that sounds awesome. Do we want to summarize the bits that we’ve been through today?
BK: I’m going to let you do that, Lewis.
LG: Awesome. Okay. Well, I guess the main thing to take away from what we’ve spoken about so far is obviously taking into account everything we’ve mentioned about LinkedIn’s algorithm changes.
The summary is just to keep your posts PACKD. So unique perspective, is it offering advice? Are you speaking to your core audience? Are you actually offering something knowledgeable? And are you speaking to a distinct audience? So That, for me, would be the key takeaway.
I think with all these algorithm changes, it’s very easy to kind of read into one thing and try, you know, we spoke about this earlier to kind of go off in different times and try different things to try and game it. Just stick to the fundamentals. Stick with what LinkedIn have told us are the essentials. And for now, obviously, until the next big algorithm change, you should be all set.
Part 2
[Transcript]
LG: Welcome to The Employee Advocacy and Influence Podcast. My name is Lewis Gray, and I’m joined today by Bradley Keenan. This is part two of a two-part episode. So in episode one, we spoke about LinkedIn’s algorithm changes and how that can potentially affect employee advocacy platforms positively.
And today, we’re going to be speaking about how you can use what we learned in that first episode to write better post captions for your employee advocacy program.
BK: Can I just say what an amazing job you did, Lewis, at introducing the podcast. It’s the first time I haven’t done it, so I feel very emotional that you did it. You nailed it, and I just feel like I’m sending my kid off to university, and you’re completely self-sufficient at this point. So I think when I’m not on the podcast, I think the next episode I’m not gonna be. I think I just feel like you’re ready.
LG: Are we going to pretend, for the listener’s sake, that was my first time trying? Or are we
BK: Well, no, we can say that was your first time.
LG: Going to okay.
BK: We just cut one out that Lewis did because he sounded a bit nervous, but now he’s fine. Now we’re fine.
LG: Yeah.
BK: So shall we summarize the key takeaways from the LinkedIn algorithm change before we go into talking about post captions because I do want to get right into the meat of this episode.
LG: Definitely, yeah. So the main takeaway is basically that LinkedIn has said that it’s now prioritizing posts that offer knowledge and advice. Four things that make that up. So the first thing is the post speaks to a distinct audience. Second thing is that the author is writing in their core subject area. Thirdly is, the post has meaningful comments. And then lastly, the post has a unique perspective. We summarized all that and created an acronym which is PACKD, P-A-C-K-D. So that’s perspective, advice, core subject area, knowledge, and distinct audience.
BK: If that’s not on a carousel by the end of next week, I’m disappointed.
LG: 100%
BK: That’s got carousel written all over it. Five steps, and then it’s yours.
LG: Yeah, I’m going to see my face on TikTok. So I feel like Selena will chop it up, and it’s going on TikTok.
BK: Hahahaha
LG: I won’t know about it. I’ll just be scrolling my feed, and then alas, my face will be.
BK: I can’t wait. And for those who didn’t listen to the first episode, obviously, we would encourage you to do it. If you didn’t, then the reason why we’re creating this episode is actually a client contacted me and asked about the LinkedIn algorithm changes and basically saying, is this going to affect our reach? And actually, we see it as the opposite.
It’s a huge opportunity to take what LinkedIn are telling you directly. So this isn’t gurus on LinkedIn who have analyzed 15 posts and think they understand the algorithm. I mean, when I see these things on LinkedIn, often it’s like, I studied 500 posts, like 500 posts in the sea of LinkedIn is not statistically significant to make these assumptions.
So getting it directly from LinkedIn should be the Holy Grail for anyone looking to, you know, they’ve literally just given you the blueprint of success. So to ignore it would seem silly. So let’s talk about post captions. We talk about it all the time. So should we talk about what is a post caption? And for those people who are thinking, what are these guys talking about?
LG: Yeah, definitely. So when we refer to post captions, we’re talking about the text that’s used in a social media post, regardless of the content used. So if you’re sharing an image, video, link or whatever, the post caption is the text that accompanies that social media post.
The reason they’re so important and people forget this all the time is because the posts should essentially, or sorry, the post captions should essentially serve as a trailer for the piece of content that you’re actually trying to direct content to, or sorry, direct people to.
The example that I often use is if you’re trying to share a research paper because you want people to click that link, and that research paper is gated by a form, you need to do enough with your post caption to get them excited about that piece of content and to want to fill in that form. Otherwise, you’re just sharing that link, and you’re expecting people to be excited about something. They know nothing about realistically speaking unless you’re a, I don’t know, maybe a McKinsey & Company of the world where everybody wants to read your research anyway.
You need to do something to get people excited about that content. So with a research paper, you can put out some key findings, you can summarize it, just get some meaty bits from that paper, maybe some key statistics, and then just throw that into your social post and use it. Or throw it into your post caption and use it as an opportunity to get people excited and increase the chances that they’re actually gonna click through to that content.
BK: I think the thing that it reminds me of is, and this is probably going to be a bit before your time, so I feel like an old man saying, gather around children while I tell you a tale of the past. But years ago, we had these things called content aggregators, which is basically what kind of LinkedIn became. So it was like, take your LinkedIn feed, your Facebook feed, your Twitter feed and put them all into one feed. And that was the, it was just literally URLs, all the things you’re interested in and in one content aggregator.
So there wasn’t really the need to because you were selecting the things you wanted to see to sell you on the reason to click on that post. But sometimes what I see on LinkedIn is just there’s almost no effort going into saying, like, if we think of time as a currency, which I kind of guess it is, it’s the only thing you can’t get back, right?
We’re saying to someone, take the time to click on this link, yet we’re not even gonna tell you why. We’re just gonna give you the link and hope that you’re just sitting around all day going, “God, I wish I had some links to click on today”.
LG: Oh.
BK: You know, like, “I’ve just got so much time ahead. If only there was a link I could click on, and then I’ll find out what it’s about when I get there. That would be a good idea”. So it does annoy me when people don’t say, what value is there in, what value will I get from spending five minutes and going to read this piece of content?
LG: Yeah, and it’s something that, you know, we always say you see this really in the infant stages of employee advocacy programs because, generally speaking, somebody will intervene and, you know, point this out and then work with them to, to kind of generate better post captions to help them write better post captions. But generally speaking, it’s marketing teams who are writing the captions as well. So these people should, yeah, like, you should know obviously how to.
BK: It’s madness. Yeah.
LG: Try to think about without using the same tone of voice. Try to think about what you would use if you were trying to direct people to your piece of content you were sharing on the company page. Obviously, don’t use the same tone of voice, but try to at least incorporate that thinking into your process when you’re writing captions for your colleagues to use because it’s just as important for them to get people excited about that piece of content.
BK: Hmm.
LG: If their network are gonna actually click on it or watch the video or read through the infographic, whatever the piece of content is, the caption needs to be up to par. You can’t, you can’t fall short there.
BK: And I think it’s like thinking of it as an ad, and obviously, we’re talking about clicking links, but like you said, watching video or even expanding the post, right? So if you write a text-only post, you’re only going to get three lines, three lines, I think, including space.
LG: Yeah.
BK: So if you’re writing some thought leadership, and it’s paragraphs of content, you need to create something in that, you know, the that’s going to make someone say, actually, I want to expand this post and read more. So I do find it surprising when people who are trained in marketing don’t see that as an ad because that’s what it is.
So if you created an ad and you invested, you know, $100,000 in promoting a product, you wouldn’t just have the ad as we’re selling a drink, oh just like click to find out more about the drink, because you’re just never going to click on it. So I think thinking about it like that, I think in the show notes, I think you said thinking about it as like a trailer. For the content, I think is really important.
And the other thing that I think actually goes against advice I’ve given in the past, but it’s just something I’ve reflected on recently, is when you’re creating content, you’re creating it typically for a niche. So if you work in the machinery industry, for instance, machinery for specific to one of my friends, does recycling machinery, right? That’s extremely niche. So. His content is really there for buyers who buy products or machines to recycle products. But actually, the post captions kind of need to appeal to everyone.
So if I’m scrolling through the post of someone who’s not in his market to buy machinery products, I might still stop and hover over that. Cause I’m like, actually, that’s quite interesting. I might not click on the link, but the fact that I scrolled and stopped for a couple of seconds means that. His audience is going to be far more likely to see the content because the algorithm sees it as this is something that is of interest. So putting jargon in the post is definitely something that people should avoid. I think I’m jumping ahead now because I think we’ve got our common flaws listed out.
LG: Yeah, no, it’s a perfect segue, but I just kind of wanted to say before we move on to the common flaws is that I can absolutely understand why this happens because I guess when people first launch their employee advocacy programs, they’re quite excited. They wanna see results as quickly as possible. So they’re trying to curate as much content for their employees or their colleagues to share. They’re trying to curate as much as possible so that they can get some content in their employees’ feeds for sharing.
So I guess they take less time with the captions, but it’s always worth just taking a step back and spending that extra five to 10 minutes just writing great captions so that, you know, your content has that trailer, so it will go the extra mile.
But yeah, like I said, Brad, you’ve teed it up perfectly as we come onto the common flaws in the, you know, the things that we see quite often that people should definitely avoid when writing captions for their employees. First one, we’ve spoken about this on the podcast before, but the overuse of words like we and our in the captions.
So that could be, we are delighted to announce our new research paper. The company might say that if you were writing a post for your company page, but it’s very corporate, and it’s not the kind of thing that, I don’t wanna say the average employee, so obviously that’s quite a generalization, but the average employee is just not gonna speak like that if they were writing a post themselves.
BK: I think it also doesn’t mean you can never say our or we.
LG: Yeah.
BK: It’s just the context. So if we were talking about our research, so let’s say DSMN8 done some research, I’m going to say I’m really excited to share our research because when I’m using the term our, I am using it’s the collective of DSMN8 creating the research. I’m not going to say my research and take full credit for the company. So it’s not don’t use it. It’s just don’t overuse it. And don’t. Refer to the, I guess, the action of announcing something as a, as a we, it would be an I as the person who is announcing it.
LG: Yeah, 100% is the context. And that’s the best example. It’s, if it was, we are excited about our something as opposed to I’m excited about DSMN8 something. It just immediately changed the tone of voice. The second thing, we’ll get to some good and bad examples, by the way, spoiler alert. So we will visualize this.
But the second thing is when people basically just write two to three lines of text and nothing more. So. you’ve got so much space to work with LinkedIn. I think there is a character limit on LinkedIn, but it’s so enormous that I’ve never met that character limit.
You’ve got loads of space to play around with. Again, use it as time to get people excited. Don’t just write a sentence and then click the link below to learn more because it’s not enough. And Brad, like you said before, you’re kind of taking the assumption that the user is kind of scrolling, looking for links to click, and you’ve just teed it up with one sentence.
BK: Hmm.
LG: Oh here’s that link you, I think you were looking for. It’s just. I don’t know. You have space. Use it. Two to three texts are nothing more. Generally speaking, isn’t gonna be enough unless, you know, you’ve got an infographic that can maybe do the talking, but that’s a very rare instance. And then again, with the text, no spacing.
So, Brad, you touched on this a moment ago, but the last thing that is gonna get somebody to stop on a post is a big block of black-and-white text. So. you’re scrolling your LinkedIn feed, you’ve got carousels, images, videos, colors left, right and center, people trying to get your attention.
The last thing that’s gonna get somebody to stop and read is a big block of black and white text, just these huge paragraphs with no spacing. The value could all be there. This is the thing that often frustrates me when I see this is there’s usually so much value in that paragraph, but if you were to just space it out, that first line, for example, just, I don’t know, I can’t.
I wish I had an example to call to here, but there’s, that first line is almost like a, if it’s valuable enough, you want to pull it out of that paragraph.
BK: Mm-hmm.
LG: So that it stands a purpose by itself, and then people can read the second and then it’s kind of copywriting 101 is to tell somebody something and then something else. And then you build on that point rather than just.
BK: Yeah, it’s like to get that every line should be making someone want to read the next line.
LG: Yeah.
BK: And taking them through that journey. I think the issue with this one is everybody, okay, everybody under this big LinkedIn statement, it’s dead. Everyone, loads of people, got annoyed, and we’ve been guilty of this, we’d do this, probably still do it now.
So this maybe this is a passive-aggressive way of me telling you to stop it, Lewis. Just loads of lines. So it would be like, “I woke up today, had a coffee, another space, and I thought to myself, right?” And everyone got annoyed of these really long posts.
And we’re not saying do that. It just breaks it up in a way that it makes it easy for somebody to read it in the same way as you would do any creative, make it easy for someone scrolling through and we overuse the term, but that scroll stopper is that.
Is that first line, and if you were going to put thought into any part of the unless Lewis said, we’re going to go through the anatomy of a, of a good post, that scroll stopper is really important because that’s the thing that says just triggers your brain to say, actually, this might be of interest to me, but I can’t call that out in a block of text. I just see a block of text.
LG: Exactly that. That’s the perfect summary. These two kind of go hand in hand as the big blocks of text is, I often see them with the next floor, which is using too many company hashtags.
So I don’t think company hashtags are a bad thing. We’ve actually encouraged the use of them in the past because I think they definitely serve a purpose for employer branding sake. You can ask employees if they’re sharing.
Behind-the-scenes content, or maybe you’re saying to them, if you’re taking photos at this event, use this hashtag. I think hashtags can be great for that reason, but it’s when you see four or five company hashtags that all incorporate the company name and is quite clearly pushing the company agenda.
BK: Hmm.
LG: Is when it kind of sours the grapes a little bit because, again, if it was one or two, generally speaking, I think your hashtags should be speaking to what that content is talking about. So we went through it in the last episode with the algorithm changes. Is it speaking to a unique audience? One of your hashtags should at least really be just unique to that audience.
BK: Hmm.
LG: So if it’s a piece of market research, hashtag market research should probably take priority over one of the five company hashtags you’ve chosen to use.
BK: Where do you personally stand on using hashtags in the body of text as opposed to like the summary block at the bottom?
LG: I think it, well, it doesn’t make a difference in terms of discoverability because as long as the hashtags in there, your post is discoverable. So in my mind, it just makes sense to always put them at the bottom.
BK: Right, I’m the opposite.
LG: I think it makes it harder to read. Like for me personally, and this is subjective because obviously, everybody’s gonna be different, but for me, when I see three or four hashtags in a block of text, maybe it’s not a block of text. It could even be broken up nicely with spacing.
BK: Hmm.
LG: But then my eyes kind of always gravitate towards the things that are highlighted in blue.
BK: Yeah, I think three or four if it’s one, I think it brings loads of talk about that body of text when you’re going through it, and you use triggering that part of your brain that’s going, oh, maybe this is interesting.
I think tagging a person and having a hashtag in the body of text just add some color to the body of text so it stops it looking as dull. But like you said, it doesn’t make any difference to discover ability. And the other thing I get it irks me about hashtags when people use hashtags that won’t help discoverability in any way.
LG: Thank you.
BK: But they create a hashtag, and like nobody’s searching for what you’ve just written, so unless you’re doing it to be funny, which sometimes it is funny when people put hashtags that aren’t you know, you know, like what I had for breakfast on a Tuesday is the hashtag it’s like no one’s got that set up so you’re just you know it’s just pure nonsense so yeah I would definitely say two or three max.
LG: Yeah, no, what you’ve just touched on as well with regards to throwing it in and having something stand out, that could be a nice way if you do have to have maybe a couple of lines of text altogether that might look unengaging.
If you’re talking about a trending topic, obviously, like you said, it just highlights that one word. Let’s say it’s AI is all the rage right now. If the hashtag was just artificial intelligence, you saw it in that paragraph. It does make it stand out.
BK: Hmm.
LG: So immediately it’s like, okay, maybe I’ll read this because I know, I’ve seen that already. I know that this paragraph of text is gonna be relevant to something I’m interested in.
BK: And I guess just to summarize some of these points is like everything, it’s nuance. So when we talk about the scroll stopper, sometimes when people just take things so literally and to the extreme that they think a scroll stopper should be something like, wow, you won’t believe this.
LG: Yeah.
BK: You won’t believe what they look like now. You know, like the viral, you know, the clickbait type things. It’s not about writing clickbait posts to get people to stop. It’s just making it easy for someone to understand the value for content. So if they are interested, they will stop. Nuance is the key in this, I think.
LG: 100%. So the last two, which I’ll kind of just briefly touch on these ones, but mainly because the first one’s a bugbear of mine, which is when admins will write captions for their colleagues to share, where the caption directs people to the content.
So what I mean by that is they’ll be sharing a link. So you don’t need to direct people to that link. People know that’s what you’re talking about. You’ve shared a link, and you’ve got a caption that’s talking about it. What you then don’t need to say is learn more via the link below.
Maybe if the link is in the comments or something along those lines, then obviously, it makes sense because you want to direct them to the link because it’s not immediately visible. But if I see somebody sharing a link with a huge image on it, that’s super engaging. It’s like, learn more via the link. It’s like, well, obviously.
BK: Is that written like they’re sending someone an email? Please see link below. And then you didn’t attach link. Oh sorry. Here’s see link below. And then you didn’t attach link. Oh sorry. Here’s link.
LG: Yeah! Yeah, it’s almost as if that’s gone through their mind, but that’s a that’s more a bugbear of mine. But for sure, as a, as a marketer, when I see it, I think somebody else has written that for a person. And the last one is this kind of ties in with what we’re saying about the trailer, but it’s just offering no insight into the content you’re sharing.
So we’ve kind of touched on this already, but the caption is the trailer, pull out some, some key findings from whatever it is that you’re sharing, maybe some key points, summarize, have some bullet points in there, just gives people. Something to get excited about. So what we’re gonna do now is basically just pull up a couple of social media posts that we’ve put together. So these aren’t real posts, these aren’t client posts or anything like that, we’re not calling anybody out. We’ve made up a few people and a few companies, and we’ve put together, we’ve Photoshopped together some social media posts on LinkedIn. One we consider to be a bad social media post, and the other we consider to be a good one.
And it’s really just looking at the captions here, and we’re talking about, again, we’re honing in on employee advocacy. We really wanna get into how to write great captions for your employee advocates. So we’re not gonna touch on absolutely everything that we covered in part one. We’re not gonna write the perfect social media post that you need to spend 20 minutes on. We’re gonna look at the bad one, and we’re gonna say, okay, how could we make this better by just spending an extra five minutes just curating this piece of content? So first up, we’ve got Billy Nomartis. He’s Greek.
BK: I’ve only just seen that.
LG: Wait till you see the second one. So Billy Nomartis here.
BK: I love the words at canary.io. Is that like sending the is that like the reference to a canary in a coal mine, or have you just chosen?
LG: No, see, I was kind of counting on your lack of knowledge of football because Canaries is the nickname for Norwich City Football Club, which everybody else in the company will know, but I knew I’d be able to get away with it because you wouldn’t call me out for it. But yeah.
BK: Oh, okay. I don’t know if I will.
LG: So Billy Namartis here is a product engineer at this fake company Canary.io. So for anybody who’s not watching the podcast, we will just read through these just so that you don’t have to bank on the visual aid. So he’s posted new research in big capital letters in brackets.
Canary.io proudly releases our new research paper in both PDF and interactive formats. Explore the latest offering via the link below. If you’re watching, you can see all the hashtags. If you’re just listening, there’s just like five or six company hashtags underneath it.
The first thing Billy’s done wrong here, or do you know what, I’m not gonna call out Billy, because it’s whoever has curated this post for him within his company’s employee advocacy platform. New research. So this is something that makes sense, or the inclusion, sorry, of the new research.
It makes sense if you’re posting to your company page just because that’s immediately a way to get people excited about something that you’re posting. It doesn’t really make sense an employee. Generally speaking, again, it’s a generalization of the average employee just wouldn’t put something like this. I kind of wanted to get your perspective on this one, Brad, because this, for me, is more of a preference and a bugbear when I see it. But I don’t know if that scream somebody else wrote this to you like it does for me.
BK: Yeah, I mean, definitely. Yeah, it’s clearly not written by him. I would say on a company page, then yes, totally fine. Because if I’ve opted to follow a company, then I have I am directly want to be updated by that company I’ve chosen. Nobody forced me to click follow. I did it. So now I know that the company I follow is it is some research. So it’s a bit more transactional. If I was a prospect for this company. And an engineer shared it. I would think it was a bit weird that they wrote new research in brackets because I’ve never written that in a post, and it’s not how I would speak.
LG: Exactly, that’s the nuance you were talking about earlier. So it’s circumstantial. It depends who’s sharing it. Billy here is a product engineer, so it does see more when you first see it. Secondly, he’s used the word our or the product admin, or the sorry platform admin has used the word our for Billy here. Again, it’s the context.
Brad, you spoke about this earlier because it already looks like it’s gone off to a bad start with it kind of adopting this corporate copywriting technique of new research. Says canary.io proudly releases our new research. So because there’s no reference to the first person, it’s not I’m happy to see, or I’m happy to announce our new research paper. It’s referencing the company.
So it just immediately kind of reeks of somebody else wrote this. This is a corporate caption, not a personal one. The second one is identifying the two different formats. This, to me, just feels quite irrelevant. It makes sense again if it’s a company page talking about it because perhaps it’s more accessible if you have it available in different formats.
Billy could talk about the accessibility of this piece of content, but generally speaking, it wouldn’t be done this way. So again, it’s the nuance is the way that Billy spoken about it here. Just making a point of speaking about the two different formats of the contents available in. One of my biggest bugbears is explore the latest offering via the link below. So for anybody that’s just listening and not watching, there is a huge image to accompany Billy’s link here. So it’s quite obvious that he’s trying to direct people to the link.
An employee doesn’t need to direct people to that piece of content. It’s clear to the user. We know how LinkedIn works. It’s clear to the user that Billy wants us to click on that link.
BK: Super, okay, keep going.
LG: I was going to say the last one is glaringly obvious. He’s just used five different canary.io related hashtags. Again, a product engineer, probably depending on the significance of the research, probably wouldn’t be sharing something like this.
But if they were, then the hashtags should really be tailored to the piece of content. So it’s a piece of market research. So hashtag market research, something along those lines and not just four canary.io company hashtags. Sorry, Brad, you’re going to.
BK: Okay, I was going to say I haven’t seen the one that you’ve corrected or the one that you’ve done, but I can tell you just a couple of things. Is it worth me saying what I would have done differently?
LG: Yeah, go ahead, yeah.
BK: Well, the immediate thing is obviously removing the new research, and if we’re curating this piece of content for the engineer, engineers typically are analytical people, and we’re sharing research. So you know, you might say “as an engineer, I love sharing data-driven insights”. That would be something like that as my scroll stopper.
LG: Yeah.
BK: And then you can go into, we released this research, but the other thing that bugs me about this is the stock image. You know.
LG: Super plain, super boring.
BK: Yeah, just it is too far PowerPoint, and it as a trigger if we think about like things like the Pavlov’s dog type thing, anything that has a stock image on it immediately makes me not want to look at it because I just assume it’s someone just trying to sell me something. I know it’s not real because I know that image isn’t real.
LG: Yeah.
BK: As where if it was a team picture or okay, we’re talking about research. I don’t know what the research would be, but if the research was around, I don’t know, if we’re using the Norwich football thing, if it was something, research around the youth academy going into premiership football, I’d rather have a picture of a youth team as the picture and it’d be a real one. But that’s just, that’s just my own bugbear, I guess.
LG: Yeah, and I definitely completely agree. And again, for anybody that’s just listening, it’s somebody just essentially working through a load of papers wearing a white shirt, looks very stock imagery. I think stock images can work. Obviously, they’ve come a long way since stock images like this first came about. These are obviously very recognizable, very corporate and not at all engaging.
There are better stock images out there, so you don’t have to go and design a load of images when you wanna share a piece of content or when you want your employees to share it, but just. Definitely be selective with the stock images that you’re choosing because there’s way more engaging, much more colorful images out there to choose from.
BK: Okay, well, I won’t go into too much because I reckon you’re probably going to have a lot of this covered, so we can proceed.
LG: Yeah, of course. So Betty Plentyamates, it is Betty Plentyamates for anybody that’s, again, that’s not watching, is a data analyst at canary.io. So her post, I’ll try to get through this as quickly as possible, is very happy to see this come together. It’s got an emoji in there with hands raised.
“I’m unbelievably proud to be a part of this team, and I’m so glad this vision finally became a reality. Canary’s maiden research piece has just releasing the findings could and should cause some serious shakeup in the industry. The data speaks to biobehaviors that we’ve witnessed since the pandemic, and the macroeconomic outlook proves to be more positive than experts previously claimed”.
So right off the bat, and then there’s three hashtags in there as well, which are all relevant to Betty’s field. So it’s talking about economic research, data analytics and macroeconomics. But right off the bat, just the tone of voice of this caption is much more personal.
So Betty’s referring to the fact that she is part of this team. It’s content that’s relevant to her. She’s saying she’s worked on it, and she’s happy to see it come together. It’s not just we’re delighted to announce this is now available for you to download and read. Initially, so the hook that we’ve gone for with this one is Betty just saying very happy to see this come together. The reason I went for this is people, generally speaking, like to celebrate their network’s wins on LinkedIn.
BK: Mm-hmm.
LG: I think that’s a nice way of getting people’s attention. So I’ve gone with that just because I think if Betty’s worked on this, her network might be more likely to comment if they can see it’s something that she’s worked on and to kind of congratulate her for it. And then she’s pulled out some key insights as well. So just speaking about the fact that the data speaks to buyer behaviors. I’ve made all of this up, by the way. I’m not an economist, and I really wouldn’t ever claim.
BK: A spoiler alert.
LG: To be an expert on macroeconomics. I’ll do the marketing, but I’ll let those guys handle the data. But yeah, she’s essentially pulled out a few key findings from it, so it’s just teeing it up so that people are more likely to read the full report.
BK: So I would say the things I would have added to this would have been the image. I probably would have looked for one of the images from the research paper, the one that gave a little bit of a teaser, like you said, making it the trailer. So give someone that insight in feed, so they want more of it.
You know, yeah, so give them something so you can say actually this is quite valuable or surprising. I bet there’s loads more insights in that, and I want to go and find out more. And the post caption, the title is far more interesting as well. I don’t know if you already said that you know, but the post captions, sorry, the link title so we know where we’re going and what it’s called is far more interesting as well.
LG: Yeah, definitely. So I wanted to pull out the image. So I’ve gone for a darker image because, generally speaking, if you look at the data, more people actually use LinkedIn in standard modes than using dark mode. So if you want a piece to stand out, don’t go for a white image. It’s just not going to stand out in the feed.
So I’ve gone for a black image here with a bit of color in it. But obviously, because this is a fabricated post, Canary isn’t a real company. There’s no images to pull from here. So this is all, just this is all obviously. Fraudulent and not fraudulent, but it’s fake. But yeah, obviously, bear that in mind when you’re sharing your when you’re curating links.
You need to go with an engaging image as well because the caption does a job of the trailer, but ultimately the image is gonna be the largest thing that people are gonna see in their feeds from that post. So if you’ve got an engaging image and an engaging post caption as well, then you’ve got kind of like the. Recipe for success when it comes to getting people to click on your links. Sorry, Brad.
BK: Yeah, I think when I was preparing for this episode, I was looking at random companies that aren’t clients of ours. So one of them was JCB, and I was looking at their press releases. Obviously, I don’t know anything about. I don’t even know what category that would be, large machinery.
And I could see that if you were just curating their content really quickly, it would be very technical and really easy to kind of, yeah, to fill. LinkedIn with jargon, but actually, when I started reading about some of their products, it was actually really interesting. So they were talking about, you know, fully electric, you know, like the cost of fuel and how that impacts construction.
And so there was a loads of information in there that actually if a friend of mine had sent me that link framed around, “oh, did you know they’re doing this and now they’re using electric and how good it is for the planet” and blah, blah. Even if I’m not a buyer for machinery, I would have found that interesting if they had just put on LinkedIn. “Really excited to launch our X1589 plant presser”. I would have gone. I don’t know what any of what you just said is, so pass.
And I think even people in the industry probably would have that same challenge because not everybody’s going to be clued up on, you know, the model numbers and the granular detail in product. So I think it’s like all marketing, have empathy for the person that you’re trying to get to click that link, and when you’re reading the content, whether it’s native content, it’s a video, ask yourself for somebody and if you work in marketing, you probably aren’t an expert in your product, like no disrespect, but you’re probably an expert in marketing, and you got a job at JCB.
You weren’t a construction engineer that then decided to become a marketeer, possibly but probably unlikely. So ask yourself the question, what do I personally find interesting about that? And that’s the thing that you should you should put on the post.
Not granular specs, and you know, it’s like the old thing about the iPod when it came out. It didn’t talk about, you know, how many gig the product had. It talks about how many songs you could store on it. Think more like that, and then it’s going to be far more palatable for people when they’re actually engaging with the content.
LG: Definitely. Yeah, it’s all. It all comes down to time as well, right? Like it sounds like a bit of work to kind of go through what you’ve just mentioned, but at the end of the day, you’ve put the time into select a vendor for your employee advocacy program to, you know, find a tool.
You’ve put the time into launching it and onboarding people. You don’t want to drop the ball when it actually comes to the execution, which is curating your content. So if it means curating a piece of content takes 10 minutes instead of two to three, It’s worth it because the end product is your content gets more clicks.
BK: And one of the things we’ve spoken about loads is this idea of putting your advocate at the center of your program. So seeing them as your customer and the person that you’re serving. So if you think about the service we’re providing to them, so if can you go back to the other post?
LG: Course.
BK: As an advocate, if I’m looking at this and just being completely brutal and really kind of essentially saying how it is, how people view this as an advocate, immediately I’m going, I’m not saying that. Everyone’s going to know that’s not me. That makes me look insincere and actually okay
Maybe I’m now going to change it. I’ll change the text, and then it will look like me. How do I, as a non-marketing person who’s not a copywriter, take that text and make it sound like me? Because I have to delete it and start from scratch. Right, if you now go to your second post, and if I use me as the example. I probably wouldn’t say unbelievably proud. I would say pleased, right. So I’m going to delete unbelievably proud. I’m going to change it to pleased. I’m pleased to be a part of this team. Right, because maybe if I was a really super excitable person, I might change the adjective to be something else. So this is far more easy for me to make it sound like me because it’s in a structure that I can adapt.
The one before, that’s a delete, and then I’ve got that white screen and infinite possibilities, and then that procrastination would basically just mean that I would exit out and say, I’m not using that advocacy thing anymore because it’s too much work. As where altering this would take me two seconds.
LG: Yeah, exactly that. And you have to take that into account as well when you’re curating the content yourself. So if you’re somebody who’s curating content for your colleagues to share, once you’ve got this one post written, it’s very easy to turn this into five separate unique posts.
Maybe you’ll change the hook opener so they’re very happy to see this come together, that opening line that Betty’s got here. You could change that and then just tweak maybe some of the emojis or something along those lines, and you’ve then got two different posts already. It’s very easy to turn one post into five once you’ve got one good post written.
So it’s not even that you need to repeat this process of putting together the acronym that we spoke about at the beginning, PACKD. It’s not that you have to write five-packed posts. It’s just you write one, and then you can tweak that. And before you know it, you’ve got five great posts that your employees can share as opposed to, you know, Billy No-Mates over here with the first post where nobody’s gonna click on it and like you’ve spoken about Brad. Chances are nobody’s gonna wanna share it either because they don’t wanna be seen to be sharing that.
BK: One final thing that I find really funny about what you’ve done here when you made these posts is that you’ve Betty plenty of mates, has liked Billy’s,
LG: Yeah.
BK: Which I think is some kind of power move. She knows the text is better, but she’s saying, I’m going to help this guy out. He’s only got one like, which is probably himself, the Obama giving himself a medal thing. And then she’s pitied him and given him one like. So I like what you’ve done there.
LG: Mate, Betty is considered part of the furniture at canary.io.
BK: Hahaha
LG: And is always there to support her colleagues. And Billy is just wishing that he could be as good as Betty. So I thought it was important to throw that in. And obviously, these are fake, but the likes are thrown in there as well to kind of to show that difference in the quality of posts.
BK: Great. Thank you, Lewis. I think that was super informative. Another long episode, even though it was part two, but this is something that is so strategically valuable if you’re running an employee advocacy program. So obviously, feel free to watch the entire episode again if you feel the need to. So I’m going to close the show off with two things.
Firstly, I want to say a big please to submit reviews to the podcast because it really helps. Not only our ranking, but it also just adds to the credibility of podcasts and help more people receive this great information like what Lewis has given us today.
And the other thing that I wanted to ask was, we’re very, very close now to releasing our book, and we’re thinking it will be available to buy in September. However, what I’m going to ask you to do is, if you want to receive one of the original copies from me, send me a LinkedIn request. You don’t need to send me some long message.
Just say I’d love a copy of the book, and then when it’s available, we’ll actually send you a physical copy of the book as part of the initial distribution. So thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this episode today, and we’ll see you on the next episode.
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Lewis Gray
Senior Marketing Manager and Employee Advocacy Program Manager at DSMN8. Lewis specialises in content strategy, growing brand visibility and generating inbound leads. His background in Sales lends itself well to demand generation in the B2B niche.
