LinkedIn Just Got Much More Important - AI is Changing Everything
EP 160: Brand Design Masters Podcast ===

Philip VanDusen:

We’re gonna be talking about LinkedIn today, LinkedIn just got much more
important.

Why is that? First of all, I like to think about branding, personal
branding, business branding in terms of these four pillars. And they are
credibility, visibility, value, and authority. And they build like that.

You start off with what you know, what your expertise is, what your
superpower is, and then you seek visibility in order to make that more
public so people can find you so they can engage you for business and
become clients, or to become partners, or whatever that may be.

You have to seek visibility, You have to establish your credibility.,
And then you deliver that value through your channels, and then that
over time will build authority. It’ll build to a level of recognition in
your industry, which is what continues to bring you benefits, new job
offers, new clients, et cetera.

So I like to think about branding, it in terms of credibility,
visibility, value, and authority. And those words are going to be very
important as we walk through this because you’ll see how what I’m gonna
present to you today relates to these various stages and these pillars.

Here’s today’s agenda. We’re gonna talk about the AI effect and how it
relates to LinkedIn, and then talk about recent changes. In how LinkedIn
works that affects content longevity on that platform and what content
longevity has to do with anything in terms of visibility, getting you
new clients, recognition, all of that stuff.

We’re gonna talk about competition for visibility. How do the recent
changes at LinkedIn affect content visibility and the competition for
that visibility?

We’re gonna talk about content to contact friction. what that means is
the kind of friction that someone who could be attracted to you, your
content, your authority, your credibility wants to engage with you. What
friction is involved in making that connection. And then we’re also
gonna be talking about something I like call the shift from posting to
positioning.

And finally, we’re gonna be talking about some key trends in LinkedIn
content. When it comes to posting content, what is the most successful
thing right now? Why, what’s emerging, what to do on certain kinds of
posts, what you should post.

And we’re gonna be talking about that too.

First of all, we’re gonna talk about SEO, AEO and the AI effect, AEO or
GEO is Ask Engine Optimization or generative engine optimization,
essentially LLMs ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Bard these LLMs returning
citations, returning answers.

Here’s something you gotta understand.

There’s a massive shift going on in search. People are no longer
searching first with Google. They’re starting with ai. And the funny
thing is that Google, now Google search is actually starting with ai. If
you do a Google search, the first thing that you get above the fold is
an AI answer.

And so AI is completely permeating search and usurping search in a lot
of ways. This is a very important part, and it’s a massive shift in how
people discover things online and how you become visible online.

So here’s just an example of the power of LLMs. I had a free Facebook
group for a while, and when people joined, I asked them how they found
me. 99% of the time it was from YouTube, but just recently it started to
be, I learned about you on chat GPT. So I would dig into that a little
bit with them and say, Hey, what did you ask ChatGPT that I happened to
come up on?

And so this one particular guy said, it returned an answer that was a
particular one single video that I did. He asked what was the absolute
best video online for how to increase brand awareness when you’re not a
market leader? That was his question, and it returned my video as being
the authoritative video on this question People are searching on ChatGPT
Gemini perplexity. But the important point I wanna make here to you is
that titles matter, how he asked that question and how he phrased it,
and then the title of my video were almost exact matches. And so you
have to think about how people are asking questions as it relates to
your expertise in what you do, and then how you are titling your content
or videos or podcasts or articles or posts to see if you can get it to
correlate to those questions as closely as possible.

SEMrush, which is an internet search company, just did a big study and
they were looking for and ranking the online platforms that were cited
most prominently or most often in LLMs. So when you ask the question of
an LLM it searches the internet and it will surface answers from a
various range of platforms.

And so SEMrush did a study to see what are the platforms that are most
often cited by LLMs. The number one platform is Reddit. The number two
platform now is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has moved up six steps in the last
six months. LLMs are citing LinkedIn much more prominently, than just a
year ago. And this is hugely important for your activity on LinkedIn.
And I’m gonna get into the real specifics of that. The other thing you
want to keep in mind is that LLMs are increasingly biased towards
verifiable human expertise.

LLMs wanna return answers that are verifiable, that are true authority.
Real answers not some opinion of some schmo somewhere who doesn’t have
any real authority or credibility in the topic. And this correlation,
the fact that LLMs are looking to cite places where there’s verifiable
credibility is one of those things that is linking LLMs to LinkedIn. And
because we also know that over 50% of the content that’s coming out on
the web these days, they’ve done studies, over 50% is generated by ai.
AI itself is looking for verifiable human expertise rather than AI
generated content, because then it just becomes a, AI infinity loop.

So let’s talk about long tail content as it relates to LinkedIn.

This is another really important topic, and all of this stuff really
weds together. LLM, stands for large language models and large language
models are AI platforms like Bard, Gemini, perplexity ChatGPT, et
cetera, on down the line.

How long does content last? Social feeds today push really quick
decaying content because they want you coming back. They want you coming
back for newness. They want you to be an addict.

They want you to be getting on your phone and going on their platform
because that’s how they make money. They want things to show up and
disappear and have there be something else new there because that’s
what’s gonna keep you coming back and crack addicted. So social
platforms generally feed off of, or they push quick decaying content.

Here is the longevity of some of the major social platforms, Twitter. A
tweet lasts anywhere from minutes to maximum, an hour after that,,
unless it’s gotten incredible engagement and is being surfaced again,
higher in the feed. Because of that engagement, it disappears in the
feed. Facebook, five to six hours for the most active sorts of
engagement posts.

Instagram, a post might last one or two days. Some formats can last a
little longer. Again, those formats would be resurfaced or last longer
if they received a lot of likes, comments, and engagement. If they
didn’t, they’re gonna fade away a lot more quickly.

LinkedIn has a longer life cycle, one to five days in general.

But here’s the thing, now that LLMs are resurfacing and citing LinkedIn
more often. The lifecycle, the lifespan, the longevity of LinkedIn
content is increasing because of that. YouTube is the longest long tail
content that there is. You can have a YouTube video and post it, and
it’s, it’s major pushes within a week.

But I have videos that are 10 years old that are returning thousands of
views a week. Still, my LinkedIn videos are still showing up in Google
search and AI search when they’re 3, 5, 8 years old. YouTube video is
the best long tail content that there is hands down.

But Because LLMs are citing LinkedIn more often, the lifecycle, the
longevity of a LinkedIn post is increasing due to LLMs citation,
LinkedIn’s content lifespan is dramatically increasing from days to
years, meaning it’s starting to move into the YouTube territory and how
long your content can serve, you can show up, can become visible to
other people.

It didn’t use to be that way. And this is what’s making LinkedIn so much
more important when it comes to your content mix, and there are other
reasons why LinkedIn, again, is even more important, in particular as it
relates to business and bringing you client opportunities or network or
partnership opportunities.

There’s another factor in all of this, and that is the ratio of content
supply to eyeballs. The content and the volume of content that’s coming
out on these platforms and the number of people who are looking at it,
There’s a percentage, there’s a breakdown, there’s a correlation between
those two things.

Let’s talk about that a little bit. Most platforms, most of these social
platforms that I just cited in terms of the longevity of content are
content dense platforms. They’re noisy. There’s a whole lot of
competition for eyeballs, and they’re also very creator heavy as opposed
to consumer heavy, That’s a ratio that is critical when it comes to
visibility. What is your competition when you’re posting content to get
those eyeballs of people paying attention to your content?

Let’s look into a few of the platforms. So Reddit has approximately 850
million users, active users, and a hundred million of those are daily
active users.

So the people who are on Reddit are on Reddit a lot.. The biggest
problem with Reddit is that it’s anonymous by design. When you are
looking at people’s screen names, that’s not their real name and you
can’t contact them via email, you might be able to click into their
profile and see their actual name.

But that’s friction. That’s a step that you have to take, and you can’t
do it across a whole lot of people who are commenting on your posts at
the same time. Also Reddit in terms of its format is extremely
discussion based. It’s based on entertainment and research and back and
forth conversation and general Q&A.

This huge user base of Reddit doesn’t necessarily correlate to any kind
of business intent. So if you’re using Reddit to post about your
authority and your credibility, it’s very difficult to get that return
that contact back to you, that cycle of outputting content and getting
return from it.

And in fact, a lot of creators on Reddit say that they can get over a
million impressions on a post of theirs, but not have it drive any
inbound contacts.

That’s mind blowing, right? That shows that Reddit is very one way
platform.

TikTok, on the other hand, a billion users, right? 52% of them, over
half of the users of TikTok have posted content. It’s short form, it’s
entertainment based. It is not particularly business friendly, and the
friction to go from viewing this thing to contacting the person who did
it is a number of steps.

And also just because of the volume of content on TikTok and the pure
format of TikTok, which is a fast, short form video, thumb scrolling
attention span, anorexic platform. It’s not particularly good for
business. yes, there are people who have made it on TikTok. I remember
going to Social Media Marketing World a couple years ago and seeing a
woman who was an Excel spreadsheet specialist of all things, and she was
killing it on TikTok because she did dancing videos about Excel.

It was brilliant. She was absolutely brilliant. yeah, there are business
people who’ve made it on TikTok, a, unless you want to dance about
branding that entertainment platform is probably not the best platform
to be on.

You have to correlate the type of platform, the vibe of that platform,
and then also look at that viewer to content production competition
ratio.

YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly active users globally. Crazy. But here’s
the thing that’s even more insane, which is that on YouTube, more than
20 million videos are posted every day.

And if you do the math, and I did it, if every video that was posted got
a percentage of the people on YouTube to watch it, if you break that
down. Your video gets 135 users looking at it.

Now, of course, one video might get 50 million, might one might get
nothing. But the point is made is that the amount of content that’s
coming out like a fire hose on YouTube means that the level of
competition that you have for the number of eyeballs that are on YouTube
is very tough. Only 2.4% of the channels are actually active every
month.

And the other thing about YouTube, and this is the biggest problem with
YouTube, is that there’s no way for you to contact who these people
are..

People may say, I’d really like to do business with you in the comments
of a video I post, and there’s no way for me to contact them. There’s no
dms. So you have to look at the platform you’re on, the content you’re
doing, and that friction that is involved in responding to or getting
any true action, going to create a connection around your content that
could result in new business for you.

As opposed to LinkedIn, linkedIn users, there are 1.3 billion users of
LinkedIn globally, and less than 1% of them post content. Put that a
different way. 99% of people on LinkedIn are consuming, they’re not
creating, and that’s only the smallest piece of it. There’s aspects of
LinkedIn that make this even more poignant, and that makes LinkedIn a
uniquely low competition space to play in when it comes to content.

And the other thing is that LinkedIn is specifically made for business.
So when it gets down to it,, you’re getting more attention because less
people are posting and there’s less competition for eyeballs. But the
quality of the attention that you are getting is also much, much higher.

And the friction around getting contacted around that content is much,
much lower, and we’re gonna get into that right now. So it’s so much
easier to stand out on LinkedIn than is on any other platform.

Now let’s talk about business intent and then contact friction. people
who are watching your content, their level of intent to do business, and
the amount of friction that is involved in their engaging with you. That
contact, either you’re contacting them or them contacting you, what’s
the friction involved in that?

LinkedIn is explicitly a professional network, so people are there to do
business. It’s built around people’s identities, their roles, their
companies, their career history. All of those things build to verifiable
credibility and verifiable profiles. None of that exists on YouTube, a
little bit on Facebook, right?

Twitter, TikTok, they’re, anonymous platforms essentially by design.

LinkedIn skews heavily towards people who have purchase intent. So when
you’re on LinkedIn you either have a job and you’re looking for more
network connections, or you’re a freelancer, or you have a business and
you’re looking for more clients, your goal on LinkedIn is to get
conversions, right? You wanna make network connections that are
meaningful connections that could result in partnerships or sponsorships
or affiliate relationships, or clients who are gonna hire you, or B2B
relationships of people and partners that you wanna hire.

On the whole, you want conversion. On LinkedIn, there are fewer steps.
There is less friction and there’s less. This is an important one,
cognitive effort. It takes less thinking to actually contact and make
connections with the people that you wanna make connections with. On
LinkedIn.

You have to think about it this way. LinkedIn aligns content. The
audience for that content, the intent of that audience and why they’re
viewing and why they’re even there. That audience’s identity and your
identity, and then access. Access to you. LinkedIn aligns all of those
things. All of those things that between those steps, if it’s not
aligned, creates friction.

LinkedIn aligns all those steps in one place on one platform, and that
makes it such an incredibly strong platform for doing business.

The other aspect of LinkedIn that’s also really important is that your
content is attached to a profile that already answers the questions that
people are asking. So if you post content and they go, who is this
person? They go to your profile and that profile will answer all of the
questions that they have about you.

Who is this person? Are they legit? Do they know what they’re doing?
What have they done in the past? How do I contact them? All of those
things. Zero friction, right? If you post on LinkedIn and someone wants
to engage with you, every single question that they have is answered by
your profile. If that doesn’t happen on any single other social platform
that people use for business, LinkedIn essentially provides leverage
that no other platform offers.

Now I want to talk about something that’s a little. It’s not hard to get
your head around, but it’s a paradigm shift. It’s a mindset shift that
you have to go through when you’re moving from every other social
platform in the world to LinkedIn, and that is you are moving from a
posting mindset to a positioning mindset.

Ultimately, your goal is to become visible to the right people. You’re
credible. If you become visible. You can deliver value, you can develop
authority, and your business and your career can flourish.

When you’re posting. Posting is an activity, but the mindset shift here
is on LinkedIn. You are essentially creating a positioning for yourself.
You are building authority. It’s not about entertaining. It’s not about
the output. It’s really more around establishing a positioning for
yourself.

So LinkedIn, if you think about it, is a positioning layer for
professionals. This kind of positioning capability doesn’t exist on any
other social platform or any other platform that you can actually try to
build a business with through content marketing.

If you’ve ever done brand strategy or if you’ve ever been involved in
marketing, there’s a thing called brand positioning.

brand positioning is essentially establishing in a very clear, simple
way the answers to certain questions.

Who are you?

What do you offer?

Who do you offer it to?

Why are you better, and

Why are you different?

Those questions. when answered very succinctly, set your positioning in
the marketplace.

It sets you up and establishes you in the landscape of all of your
competition in the space that you are in business, who you are, what you
offer, who you offer it to, how you’re better, and how you’re different.
Those are positioning questions and LinkedIn enables you to answer all
of those questions through your profile.

so a LinkedIn profile and LinkedIn activity of posting content, those
two things in concert with each other are establishing a positioning for
you and your business in the market. And you also have to think about
your content as a body of work. on YouTube, I have 550 videos, right?
Over the last 10 years, I’ve built up an archive, a professional
archive, a body of work of what I know and my expertise on YouTube.

I’ve also done that on my podcast. I’ve also done that on LinkedIn. But
LinkedIn is one of those places where my profile, my credibility, my
history, my cv, all of my posting, my thought leadership is all held in
one place where people can contact me directly, and when they do, I can
see who they are immediately.

So you have to think of LinkedIn as basically a public professional
archive of everything that you know, everything that you professionally
know or how you think. This aligns with how LLMs learning language
models, ChatGPT perplexity, Claude Gemini.

This aligns with how LLMs evaluate credibility. So as I said at the
beginning, LLMs are looking for verifiable resources to cite in answers
to questions that people ask them, meaning the AI platform and
LinkedIn’s capability is the perfect platform to establish that sort of
verifiable credibility.

And so that marriage is what makes LinkedIn and LLMs so important. You
want to shift from a mindset of I don’t want to be a content creator to,
I need to create a visible point of view.

There’s two pieces of that sentence visible and point of view. You have
to put a point of view out there and you have to make it visible in
order to be contacted, in order to establish that magnetic presence
that’s going to bring you important business contacts, new jobs, new
network contacts, new clients, et cetera.

All right, linkedIn has trends just like any place else. Formats of
content that are working or not working go up and down all over. The
social media stratosphere, LinkedIn is not immune to that. There are
formats on LinkedIn that do better than others.

And so let’s talk about those a little bit and what’s been changing on
LinkedIn.

Carousels love ’em or hate ’em, get more engagement than anything else,
and there’s a number of reasons for that. Carousels get 278% more native
engagement than video 303% more than image posts. 600% more than text-
Only posts. Carousels get more engagement.

Why is that?. Carousels have an advantage. They’re long form, but
they’re not. They tell a story, they have a progression, they’re
visible. They’re like a magazine. So you get a long form story, but
they’re at the same time, very bite sized, right? So it’s not like a
long form 2000 word, 4,000 word article.

It’s generally 200 words, but it’s broken into slides with visuals,
tells a story, and it also establishes this level of education. And all
of this happens in a single post. It’s very consumable. And that’s why
carousels work, and that’s why they also create a higher level
engagement than almost anything else on LinkedIn.

And it’s also really easy to create carousels. Canva has amazing
templates for carousels. There are a number of different kind of
carousel creating. Templates that can be driven by AI actually. So if
you write 200 words of copy and then have ChatGPT, break it down into
carousel slides, telling a nice story it’s really easy to create
carousels, much easier than you think.

The one power tip I want to tell you about carousels is that always have
your contact information On the last slide should be a call to action,
how to contact you, the best way to be contacted. Maybe it’s what you’re
selling. Maybe it’s a lead magnet that you want people to go to so they
can get on your email list.

Use that last slide of your carousel as a call to action.

Video on LinkedIn is also evolving.

And there’s a sweet spot with video on LinkedIn. 30 to 60 seconds, it’s
snackable, it’s consumable, it’s not long form video. And 30 to 60
second videos on LinkedIn get a much higher engagement rate than any
other length of video. Video also has the advantage that it builds
trust. It exhibits you as a human being, lets people hear your voice,
see you, catch your vibe, see how articulate you are, how you think, and
it builds trust in a very quick way because we can really make a
connection with a human being.

And the other thing is that because video is engaging, the algorithm
supports and will promote that sort of engagement.

On the whole LinkedIn now rewards depth over frequency, and there’s
something happening on LinkedIn, which is a split.

There’s a bifurcation of content that’s happening on LinkedIn. There’s
short form, entertaining story-based, and then there’s long form heavy
thought pieces. LinkedIn is splitting in a way between those two things.
LLMs are really really focusing in on that long form, in depth sort of
text posts.

And if you are to air on the side of doing shorter text posts or longer
text posts, if you want to do four short text posts a month or one
really in-depth article a month, go for the one in-depth article because
that’s gonna actually serve you more than the shorter length posts.

So here are some post tactics.

Here are some things to post about or themes around posting. There are
long form thought leadership posts that I was just talking about, which
are feeding AEO or ask engine optimization for the LLMs. And there’s
posing a question or taking a poll that creates engagement very easily.

You could tell a personal story. This is upping that level of human
connection and people recognizing you as a human. You can explain
tactics with your verifiable expertise because like I said, they can
jump over your profile and see that you know what you’re talking about.

That builds your credibility. You can present a viewpoint Coming out of
the gate on LinkedIn without a viewpoint and doing something very kind
of broad swath and not putting a stake in the ground, you might as well
just sit on the bench because when it comes down to it, people want you
to express a viewpoint.

You have to be, because it is a professional platform, careful about how
vehement you are and how you state things. Because any social platform,
any point of view that you put out there will attract people who don’t
believe that. And you have to steal yourself about the fact that people
are going to comment and they are going to take the opposite viewpoint.

But it’s better to have a point of view and put it out there than to do
a bunch of AI generated slop that is just very generalized. And, you
also want to answer real questions that your clients Ask, or your ideal
customer target. Ask, think about how they ask questions and answer
those questions as directly as you can because again, those LLMs are
going to be looking to pair specific questions with specific answers in
order to serve that up on LLMs, so many acronyms.

All right, this is one of the big shifts that’s happening on LinkedIn,
and I’m sure you’ve noticed it. And that is that LinkedIn is splitting
into a little bit. I just alluded to this a second ago, and that is that
there is this push towards in-depth, very researched, long form text
content, which is super attractive to search engines, AI search engines.
And then there’s this emerging thing that’s happening and that is these
almost Facebook looking like posts where people are doing selfie videos
and they’re just talking into the camera. And it may not be something
that’s even business related.

Sometimes I’m seeing like vacation photos and here we are in Rio and
it’s not quite Instagram, taking a picture of your plate of food level
yet. But we’re definitely starting to see more and more Facebook like
social posts on LinkedIn. Why is that? Why is that happening?

There’s this human social feed aspect that’s emerging on LinkedIn versus
the professional archive aspect of LinkedIn That is happening because of
ai. AI has introduced this level of slop content and generalized
non-point of view content that people can’t trust.

There’s a level of trust that is deteriorating across the internet and
with all of us, and that is that everything we see, we’re having trouble
trusting whether it’s real or not. Videos we see on social media, we see
some video. Then we realize though, it’s AI created content that’s
obviously AI created.

LinkedIn is getting swallowed by AI created. Content. And it’s sad, but
that’s why this whole human Facebook post like thing is happening on
LinkedIn is because people want to know that a human is behind this
point of view. There’s actually a person behind this. It’s verifiable.
And people want to do business with people.

They don’t want to do business with faceless corporations. People want
to do business with someone they know and trust. And if you put yourself
out there and let people get to know you a little bit by showing some of
your human side, that attraction breaks down a barrier of trust that is
starting to get very important in the social world because of the lack
of trust that AI is introducing in all of our interactions on social.

So let’s do a little review. So LinkedIn is a major AI citation source
now. Second only to Reddit. And Reddit doesn’t even fit into the
equation because Reddit is all discussion based and you can’t contact
anybody on Reddit, right? it’s all about commentary. And so while LLMs
may be citing it for point of view, for soft human feedback, it’s not
citing it for verifiable content feedback.

That’s what it’s using LinkedIn for, particularly around business. So
there’s major AI citation happening on LinkedIn. It’s a very low
competition platform, so the competition you have for eyeballs when you
put your content out there is very low. It’s also a super low content to
contact friction platform because it, combines all of the aspects of the
entire business cycle all under one roof, and it’s all verifiable.

Positioning beats posting now. So you have to think of LinkedIn as being
a way to establish your marketplace positioning, rather than just a
place where you’re outputting stuff all of the time, like we do on other
social platforms. And then there is the format trends that are happening
on LinkedIn.

carousels still very important. Some people are over them, but the fact
remains is that they perform and video, but more kind of short to medium
length video, 30 to 60 seconds, are performing very well and returning
really great engagement on LinkedIn.

And then there’s a range of formats in text posts that are performing.
But the longer, the more in depth the better.

I wanna segue just a little bit. It. If you wanna raise your LinkedIn
game, I run a community called Bonfire, where there’s a lot of people
who are doing exactly this stuff as it relates to getting more clients
and as it relates to building their business, getting promoted, making
pivots in their industry where they are, because it’s very clear.

in all of the coaching, in all of the corporate work I’ve done in my
life, great leaps that you make in your career are seldom done alone.
And when you are a solopreneur or you’re pivoting and you are moving
from one job to another, or you’re developing some sort of a side
hustle, it’s really important to get perspective of other people.

in a Mastermind community, it’s basically a group coaching peer support
and peer sharing community where we’re helping each other through these
pivot points and junctions in our careers. And when you surround
yourself with other people, who are on fire and who are really
passionate and ambitious and trying to make change and progress in their
careers, you can’t help but catch fire too.

And so Bonfire is the name of my community. And if you go to philipvan
dusen.com/bonfire, you can learn more about it. It’s a really amazing
community, and it’s run on Zoom. We meet four times a month, we meet two
times a month for masterminds, one for office hours, and one for
visiting experts. All of these sessions are recorded, so you can go back
and see them again if you wanted to hear some feedback that you or
someone else got again, or if you missed a session and you want to catch
up.

It’s a private online community and there is a huge resource library of
tools and downloads and templates and How-ToS and checklists, and also
my Brand Strategy 10  course is housed within Bonfire as well, and you
get a 50% discount on Brand Strategy 101, which equates to over $250
discount, which is essentially the cost of your first quarter of
membership

The second you join, all of this stuff is available to you. Membership
and Bonfire is $97 a month. There’s also other levels. So there’s a
guild level, which includes one-on-one coaching with me. So you actually
get hourly one-on-one coaching with me every month. And then there’s a
mentorship level, which includes, one-on-one in-person interaction with
me and much more regular direct mentorship.

And if you go to philipvandusen. com/bonfire. You can learn more about
it. There’s a lot of videos, testimonials for other people who have been
in Bonfire and a couple videos from me explaining more about what it is,
So if you’re interested in Bonfire as a community to join, hit me up in
a DM on LinkedIn, send me an email and we will jump on Zoom and talk
about your membership and if it’s right for you. And with that, thanks
again I hope you guys enjoyed this information on LinkedIn, take care.