LinkedIn Safari: Session 5 of 12

Welcome to this episode, number five actually, of the LinkedIn Safari with Simon Chapazot in South Africa. Simon, do you want to say hello?

Yeah, it's great to be back and can't wait to to get started today.

Yeah, it's it's great to have you back and thank you for joining us again on the fifth LinkedIn Live and. We're taking a 12-week journey with Simon, who's a LinkedIn expert, to help me, Jim James, figure out how to make the most out of LinkedIn, how to leverage LinkedIn. Because we all spend a lot of time, and we know there are some 800 million people on LinkedIn, but most of us, including me, spend more time than we get back in ROI. So that was the purpose of this, was how can I rebuild my brand, my personal brand, and and start to get connections and build interest in the book that I've written and in building a broader footprint as I grow as an entrepreneur. So, Simon, week 5, what are we going to cover today?

So today we're going to talk about different post types. It's a question that I'm being asked time and again. What type of a post should I use? And are video posts better than text posts? And should I do carousels, slideshows, whatnot? So there There are a lot of options, and I want to today look into the different options that you have as a LinkedIn creator. And I want to piggyback on what you've done over the past week, look at a couple of posts that you've done. And also I want to review what we've achieved over the past 4 weeks, 5 weeks, because you have done quite a lot of work and you have seen results, which is cool.

Thank you so much, Simon. So over to you. And it says, as I look on my screen, that we are actually live. So we've solved in 4 weeks, we've learned how to do a Riverside to LinkedIn Live. So we are moving well.

Simon, take it away.

You've got to show me one day.

I'm still learning.

Yeah, we'll do that. So, but we only keep these shows to 30 minutes. So Simon, let's dive in.

Let's get started. So quick review of what we've done over the past week. We started with a review of your profile page. We looked at the header banner, headshot, headline, and the About section. You've done quite a lot of work here. We will not look at this today, but we will probably do it next week. And one of the reasons is it's an iterative process. What we often see with clients, it's not something you do in one sitting. It evolves over time because it's, um, it's a process of you gaining clarity of what you stand for. And I think in your case, it's also a question of like, where do you want to go to in the future? Because you are at a crossroads in your lives. You've, in your life, you've, you've sold your business and you're now figuring out what, what to do next. And so the, the profile, the about text is a, it's, it's a living piece of content that changes. And, um, I think you're going through some changes here.

Um, yeah, and I think— and, and Simon, you're absolutely right. One of the interesting aspects of working on this with you has been it's really made me question what I am doing and how I position myself. And I'm grateful to you because it, it's enforced clarity on me by having these weekly sessions. So Show us then what progress you think we've made and what progress I'm still yet to make.

Sorry, you threw me this ball. Now I have to catch the ball. It's really great because I think one of the great things with writing on LinkedIn, and it's not only doing your profile but also the content, is that it challenges you to think about what you do, how you do it, for whom you do it. And at least for me, but it's something that I hear from a lot of other creators on LinkedIn, that it really helps them to gain clarity for the business. So it's not only about the profile, it pertains to all aspects of your business, and you've just given testimony to that.

Yeah, absolutely. And in an earlier episode, Simon has a reference to sort of a number of questions that he asks, and you can also get those from Simon as well after the show.

Okay, so back to what we've achieved over the past couple of weeks. So we've reviewed your profile page. Next, we're gonna take a deep dive and review the changes you've done. We have then looked at the frequency of your posting. We found that you— I found that you posted like 3, 4, or 5 times a day, and I told you not to, and you obeyed and you stopped, which is a good thing because it saved you some time. Then the other week we spoke about the posting in groups, which was a thing that you've done. I think you mentioned you were part of 80 groups. You didn't post in all of them, but you posted in many. And so we did a quick review and you saw that you did not really get a lot of views on most of these posts. And you said you spent an hour a day cross-posting in all of these groups for basically no reach.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah, exactly, Simon. So you're highlighting a number of inefficiencies there in my sort of LinkedIn life.

So we've saved, you know, a ton of time by stopping the cross-posting and the frequent posting. And by the way, I did a quick shout-out last week on my profile and somebody else copied that asking, who is seeing any benefits of being part of groups? And I barely heard anybody say, yeah, they're great, they work for me. So it's something I thought I hadn't figured out, but it looks like nobody's really figured out what groups are good for. So glad you left them or you stopped posting. Okay.

Yeah, I think that the groups and the performance of groups deserves another Deeper dive, but let's carry on today with what we've got.

Yeah, exactly. So today we want to look at different post types, and that is always a popular topic on LinkedIn. And a thing that I keep hearing a lot is people saying video, video is great, we should do more videos because everybody loves videos. And there's some hard data out there. So it's not like It's sort of set in stone. And there's a guy called Richard van der Plouw who publishes the big LinkedIn report every year. Everybody who has not heard of Richard van der Plouw, he's a Dutch guy living in Barcelona and he runs an agency focusing on LinkedIn optimization for companies. And he does an annual report and I'll share some numbers from this report, which basically shows us that not all post styles and types are the same. And there are some post types that do really well, others that don't do well. And I've just listed here these post types. And you have to understand, there's like, there are like 2 sides to the post format you choose. One is the average reach, which means like, across all people who use that kind of post, what is the reach they get? But the other side is how you play that kind of post format. So there are people who choose a post format that does not very well on average, but they just kill it because they are very good at sort of mastering this type. And people have, have come to know them for that.

Yes.

But these are average numbers and, uh, how you have to read them is that So you have a baseline which is the average of all different post types together. And if you do document posts, you get on average 2.2 to 3.4 the average reach, which means without doing much, you just get more reach because LinkedIn gives you sort of a soft boost. It also has a psychological side because some post formats are more easier to consume. And we're gonna talk about this with videos in a second. So we have the document posts, usually slideshows. Then we have polls. I think everybody has seen polls on all possible topics.

Yeah.

They were even more popular a year back. They've sort of dropped in popularity and reach. Carousel posts are not to be mistaken with the slideshow, which is what is called the document post. So what I do is I do document posts, which are slideshows that I create outside of LinkedIn as a PDF. I upload them. That's why they are document posts. And carousels is what you can create natively within LinkedIn. And they look slightly different because you always have a slight overlap to the next slide. So you see slide 1 and a quarter of the second slide. So that's the carousel post. So it's very similar, but it's different and the reach is worse. And almost baseline post is the text and the text and picture post, which I think all of us are familiar with.

Right. And that's kind of the entry-level post, isn't it, that most of us are doing?

Exactly. Because it's the easiest to just write something and it's easy to just add a picture. So it's definitely one of the most popular post types. Then on the below average, we have on first position the video post. And I think it's quite shocking that the video posts only get 0.5 points.

Isn't that surprising?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And again, as I said at the beginning, it's one is the average reach of all people across all formats. And video posts, I think, are a great example because there are people who do pretty well with video posts, but video posts are, I think, a good example if you have to do them really well to reach people. And one of the typical mistakes I see with video posts are people don't do subtitles. And, uh, back to the scenario, London subway, rainy day between 2 stops, you don't gonna crank up the volume to hear what this guy is saying.

Yeah.

So you're just gonna skip it. And, um, so subtitles, super important. And the length, super important. You have a lot of videos that are like 5 minutes. Nobody watches a 5-minute video on LinkedIn. So you can do a lot of things badly, and people who kill it with video really understand how to do that. Then the other post type is a post with an external link. And I know that this is also a thing that a lot of people talk about, whether LinkedIn sort of read deliberately reduces reach for posts with external links. There are 2 theories to it. One is it's not really LinkedIn who's doing that, but it's the visual appeal of these posts. And I can show you an example of one of your posts. Let me get this one.

Simon, just a small thing. You've got someone doing some construction. I hope they're not coming to take you away, but we can hear that quite a lot.

That is horrible. Thanks for pointing that out. I should close the windows.

Sorry, a technical interruption there. Simon's in South Africa. They've had a power outage in the last week, and he was explaining that to me earlier. Okay, so we— perfect. Welcome back.

Oh, that's better. Thanks for pointing that out.

Okay.

Okay, so the post with the external link. I wanted to show you.

Yeah. So that's really interesting. So the assumption that, you know, articles and as you say, external links and video posts means that these are underperforming. Okay.

So you did a post yesterday. Why does—

I was so proud of this post as well.

So, well, it's, it's Beautiful layout. And what happens, I was just saying, you added the link and LinkedIn automatically created this image from the link.

Yes.

It's nothing you did. And there are 2 things why this post might have underperformed technically. One is that It has this external link, which is something that LinkedIn probably doesn't like. But also what happens if you have an external link, you lose control over the image that you have.

Yes.

And this image, um, is not really descriptive of what to expect from this post. And it's not in line with what you do or your brand. It's sort of like, it's, it's not something if I would scroll through the feed, I would not say, hey, this is Jim's post, I want to read this.

Okay.

And that is the reason. Well, the reason is also if you look at the bottom of the post, you see this PR episodes by Prowly. It just doesn't look very nice. And it's the same with newsletters on LinkedIn and articles. If you do those and they appear in the newsfeed as a post, It always looks sort of like not sexy.

Interesting.

I have not any scene really perform well. And one thing is I attribute it to the less than optimal look and feel.

Okay. Right.

Yeah.

Because this is PR episodes where proudly I'm one of the hosts for the upcoming session. So I was trying to amplify that event and the role I was playing. So But I thought I'd done a nice job on it. Is it that if I hadn't put the link in, that it might have performed better then, Simon?

Yeah. So I don't want you to only blame it on the link. There are a couple of things. But the link with the image that is automatically pulled just doesn't look as nice. Then there's the hypothesis that external links limit the reach. in general. There's no hard evidence, but it sort of can be assumed.

Yeah, other platforms do that.

Yeah, other platforms do that. Yeah. And then there's the other thing, which is more the content, and then it's more to style. But what I also see is whenever there is an announcement for some live webinar or something you can join, something time-bound, People don't really care about that. It's it's it's um it's interesting something I try to avoid and um people I see like Justin Wells who are like the top performers in the space they never or barely ever post something like join this webinar or come to this event or da da da it's always pure content on topic. consistently and recognizably on that one thing that they talk about.

Okay, that's really good. Thank you for that. I know we've got a lot still to cover and we've already got quarter past. We've only got 15 minutes left of time, so I won't interrupt you. Carry on. Yeah.

Okay, so let's go back to the overview of the slideshow. So we spoke about the video posts, the posts with the external link, and I mean, it's a drastic drop from average 2.5 to 0.5, uh, 4 to 0.5. Uh, sell rate, let's not talk about that one. It's a new thing that, uh, I think nobody cares about that. Um, but newsletters and articles, uh, are like shockingly at the bottom of the performance, 0.2 to 0.9 and 0.1 to 0.2. And, um, again, yeah, what can I say? Um, Both appear in your newsfeed as a post. And in doing so, they just don't look very good. And let me share an example here.

And I guess, and it makes sense really if you think about it, because actually not original thought. If you're sharing someone else's article, you're not really sharing by and large original thought. You're just taking someone else's and that's not being rewarded by LinkedIn, right?

Yeah. I mean, LinkedIn always likes people to share original content and not recycle other people's stuff. That definitely is one of the factors. I mean, in this case, you link to your own article, as we can see here. But again, it's— if I scroll through the feed, it just doesn't look very nice with this gray area at the bottom. And a lot of text that is not really essential for me to make a decision on whether I want to read the whole thing or not. So I think that's on the aesthetic side, but apparently there's also a technical side why LinkedIn doesn't give a lot of reach to these kinds of posts.

Interesting.

Back here, so Yeah. So general overview, articles, newsletters, the worst. So I would try to avoid that as much as I can. And as you said, text posts with a picture is the baseline, the easiest thing to do. And the best performing post you can do is the slideshow post, which is like a carousel, but it's a Dedicated piece of content. Okay. So, you know, through—

And on another day, we can go through in more detail, but today we're going to just go top line. But that's why we're working over 12 weeks. So, okay, perfect time. What do we have to do next? Because we've, you know, another 11 minutes before people head off for their lunch.

Yeah, I mean, I think we have to make a plan for Asia, how we move forward. One thing I noticed, we spoke about what you wanted to post about. You have a book that has been published. I think it was March 23rd. Show it to us.

I want to see it. Yeah, there's the book. Yeah. Can you see it? Hold it straight up your body.

Yeah.

Okay.

The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Very nice. And I think it was published on March 23rd with Wiley.

February 25th.

February. And in this book, you have 50 entrepreneurs share their strategies, their tools that they've used to get noticed. And we said, you're gonna milk the content from this book for your LinkedIn posts. And when I looked at the posts that you did over the past week, What do I see?

I've been guilty of not following my own content strategy.

You didn't follow your own content strategy. I'm shocked.

Well, and of course, ironically enough, I made work for myself by thinking of new things. So busted, actually. Absolutely busted on that. And funny, I've had a conversation with another entrepreneur this week talking about his Content strategy and he showed me his content strategy that's been written down. And then I asked, what are you doing this week? And he said, I'm doing a post about what my son did at school. I'm like, well, why are you not doing a post about your content strategy? So it's kind of, we, why do we not follow through, Simon? What's your theory?

I don't know. It's the entrepreneur syndrome of jumping for the next shiny thing, maybe. It's like, yeah, I think there's a fear of boredom, right?

There's a fear of entrepreneurs shining.

And maybe the other thing also might be that we overestimate our audience attention and probably they wouldn't mind hearing the same or similar stuff time and again. Because probably either not seen it, they've forgotten about it, or if it's good content, why wouldn't they like to see it again? Because who doesn't like to be reminded about good things? So I think, speaking for me personally, that I probably sometimes feel like I can't again talk about the same thing when in fact I should.

Okay, that's really good. And actually, because the book has 50 entrepreneurs and the plan was I would take 3 per day and highlight some of the learnings. And so I've got 50, you know, I've got a couple of weeks worth of really good content from the podcast into the book. So I must lean into that content strategy again and stay focused.

One, yeah. And one other share, maybe you can back that up with your own experience. But what I've noticed myself is Whenever I create or write something, I spend more time on making a decision and sort of like laying the foundations for a post than I really spent on writing it. So once I have crystal clarity what I'm going to write about, it, it's very fast. But I spend probably half of my time, if I look at one post, half of the time trying to figure out what is this post really about. And only once I've figured it out, it's super fast. And I think that's sort of a time killer par excellence if we do on-the-spot writing because you easily spend an hour or—

Yes.

Me, spend an hour or 2 writing a post and half of the time is just figuring out what I'm going to write about.

Simon, I think you've nailed that again. And I think that the other aspect is that because we want almost instant success, we write something. If it doesn't take off, we think, oh, I've done the wrong thing, I'll do something else. And yet what we have to do is to think through what will work and then execute on that plan. So thank you. So useful to have this weekly session with you so that we can check back in on it. Okay, um, Simon, we've got another 6 minutes before we let people in Asia go to dinner. Make the plan for next week. Yes, what are we going to do next?

For lunch. Um, so what is your commitment till next week? What are, what are you going to post about, uh, and what post format are you gonna choose?

Well, I think I've got the book. I'm going to go back to what the plan and the original remit was, to get people to know about the 50 ideas in this book which will help them to get noticed on a way to a sale of their business. And that's something else I've worked on refining my, uh, speaker bio and my strapline. And so what I'm going to work on is taking the content from the book, and then what I— in light of what you said about the highest performing posts, I'm going to make little video, um, little PDFs. And in fact, the— I think the post that performed best was where I made a 30 excuses to get noticed.

Hmm.

And I did, uh, 6 slides in PDF, which I built in Canva, having asked you how to do that, for which thank you. Um, so I can take some summaries from the, you know, 3 per day, and then I can make those into a downloadable, uh, form that people then can, can get. Because that's then using the content strategy but the optimal format. And actually, if I follow that through, I can pre-bake that because I, I can write those in Word and give those to my VA Alex in the Philippines. And actually then she can start to be making that up for me because What we haven't mentioned is that if you make up something every day different, no one else can do it for you. You can't delegate. And the rest of my business, Alex has been really doing a great job with her team on podcast post-production, for example. And the posting, because of my inconsistent approach, means I can't delegate it.

Good point.

So the workflow implications of having a strategy that's consistent will also liberate time. So that's what I'm going to work on.

I think that was a golden summary in terms of having a strategy and executing on it as a time saver par excellence and everything else stops your team from taking on the work that you can delegate and then it sits on your desk.

Yeah. So I think that's gonna be where I'm gonna go with this. And now we've managed to increase the number of people that are following, you know, and part of my community now to 11,040. So that's gone up. Um, that's cool. Because we were sub, you know, sub-11,000 5 weeks ago. Um, posting rates have also, um, gone down, but the engagement has increased over 100%. So for all the things I'm doing wrong, in the big picture, we're moving in the right direction, aren't we?

Absolutely. And I mean, it's easy to get overwhelmed with all the things that you have to do and can do. And I think we always have to look at how much can we change from a human perspective because we are run by habits and we have to change habits and you don't change habits overnight. So instead of trying to change everything at once, it's better to do one thing after the other. And so on, because otherwise we are just overwhelmed with like all the things we have to take care of.

So Simon, that sounds like kind of an endpoint for everybody. If there's one thing that you wanted to say to people that are listening, because we've got about a minute left, if there's one, if you like, task or tip that you'd like as a takeaway for everybody that might be watching, I've got my tasks. You can have one from Simon. What would you say to people?

Well, I guess coming back to the different post formats, it's really to choose one format for yourself, master it consistently and stick to it and just be good at this one format.

Simon Chapizeau, LinkedIn maestro and extraordinaire. Thank you so much for taking me through week 5. When we started this, you said we'll need 12 weeks and I thought 8, but I can really see the degree of detail and attention to detail that you take. So I'm really grateful that you're investing so much time in helping me on this LinkedIn safari. Simon Chapster in South Africa, thank you.

It's a pleasure. Thank you, Jim.

So thanks for joining us on session 5. We will be putting the video on YouTube on our channel. You can find it on YouTube at the Unnoticed Entrepreneur channel and also on the podcast. which is The Unnoticed Entrepreneur on All Players. And we'll have run this as an audio. And Simon and I will catch up at the same time, same place next week. So join us for session 6, and you can see whether I've managed to stick to my content strategy and whether I managed to make posts that get greater engagement. Thank you for joining. Simon Chapazot in South Africa, me, Jim James, here in the UK. Enjoy your dinner or your lunch and keep on posting on LinkedIn.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Bye.

Bye-bye. How do you say goodbye in South Africa? Goodbye?

I know there's some Afrikaans word that they use, but, uh, my Afrikaans is too rudimentary to—

Okay, we'll just do a universal.