A quick look at a document that explains why LinkedIn should be considered a social media platform just like all of the other big players.

Postbag

Teresa Ward: should we use @mentions in comments?

Lionel Guerraz: on saving money with tech tools

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Don't use the vertical pipe | symbol in your headline

Is LinkedIn social media?

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Is LinkedIn social media? That's what we're looking at today in episode 483 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone, I'm John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast all about LinkedIn best practice. And as usual, we're going to get started with the Postbag.

We have a couple of written questions that have come in this week to the show.

The first of those comes from Teresa Ward, and she asks:

When writing a comment, is it worth mentioning the author's name using the @ sign?

So, thank you for that question, Teresa. The default when you reply to a comment is for LinkedIn to present that person's name with the @ symbol in front of it so that it will get their attention by way of a notification.

That's not really necessary, because especially if someone has written the original post, they're going to see information about the comments that are coming in, so you don't really need to do this. When I do leave the @ mention in, I like to simplify it if possible.

So, if it's got the person's full name, which it will by default, and if that name is written normally, then I would probably delete the surname and just leave their first name. You can't always do that, because of some of the ways that names can be presented on LinkedIn.

If you're replying to a comment where other people have contributed on a little thread, then the @ symbol with the person's name might be useful because it just clarifies who you're replying to, just in case there's any confusion that you're actually not replying to someone else who wrote something. So, in that case it might be useful.

And I suppose you could argue that if a post is particularly busy with its engagement, then an @ mention means that you've got a slightly bigger chance of getting someone's attention by way of their notifications. But I don't think that's much of a reason to do it.

Now, if you're just writing a comment on any random post and you want to get someone's attention, then the @ symbol might be useful there.

If you're bringing someone externally into a conversation, you know a post has been written by someone else, and you've got someone else in mind and you want to bring them in, then that's fine. But obviously you should do that only if it's really relevant to them.

You tend to see this kind of behaviour more in posts where sometimes people will just seemingly randomly bring in people's names with the a symbol to get their attention via notifications. I don't think that's good practice at all. I don't really think that was the question you were asking though, Teresa.

So, just to go back to the main point, you don't need to do it, but it is the default and therefore you'll see it quite often.

The other question for the show this week actually was left as a comment on one of my posts, by Lionel Guerraz, and he said, a question for the Informed podcast. Sorry, I don't do voice notes.

Could you elaborate on the typical use case for each of these tech and how are they connected in the flow?

Now, that question won't make any sense without the context of the post. So, what I've done this week is I put out a post about some changes that I've made to my "tech stack", to use the fancy term.

Basically the tools that I use in my business where I have saved some money by reviewing what I'm using and switching to alternatives.

I did think twice about whether I should include this on the show because this isn't strictly about LinkedIn at all, but it is something I've posted about on LinkedIn and I think a lot of small business owners and the kind of people who listen to this show certainly should be interested in saving money on the tools that you use to run your business.

So, I thought, yeah, why not include it? It's an interesting topic, or at least I think it is anyway.

So, I'll give you the tools that I've mentioned in that post, and I will of course link to the post as well in the show notes.

So, the first of those is a tool called Calendly. So, I used that to handle all of my consultation bookings.

Now, I was paying Calendly £127 per year and it was working perfectly well, looks nice, it's robust, I get my bookings, no real problem there.

But I was coming up for renewal last year and a colleague of mine inside the Espresso+ community said, you want to try this alternative. There's a deal on it at the moment. That alternative is called TidyCal. So, I took a look. It was available through a platform called AppSumo.

You might have heard of that. It's a way of saving money on lots of different software tools that are out there.

So, I took a look and it was being offered as a lifetime licence for only $29. I thought, this can't be any good if they're giving it as a one-off fee. But I thought well look, if it isn't very good, I'm not really lost a lot. It's worth a try.

I downloaded it. I didn't actually use it for a while, but then when I eventually got into it I realised that actually it had a very similar feature set to Calendly. Arguably didn't look quite as nice perhaps, but it did all of the things that Calendly could do.

It allowed me to take payments for my consultations, and it was nicely customisable. And actually since last year I've made that wholesale switch.

So, now if you book a consultation or any kind of time to speak to me, you'll be going through my TidyCal system, and I'll be putting a link to in the show notes to these tools as well. So, you can go and check them out for yourself.

I realise, speaking now that this all sounds like an ad. I can assure you it's not. These are just tools that I use myself. These are not affiliate links or anything like that.

So, if you want to go and check them out independently, you can go and do a quick Google search and you'll be able to find them for yourself. But yeah, TidyCal's working really well for me.

And instead of paying £127 per year for a booking system, I've now paid $29 as a one-off fee and never have to pay for that again. So, that's a fantastic way of saving money for starters.

The next one was Mailchimp, so that was my email platform. So, whenever I send an email to my Espresso subscribers or to my Espresso+ private community, those emails were going through Mailchimp. And I've been a Mailchimp customer for I think more than 15 years now and I was paying for that.

And it's got variable pricing, so depends on how many subscribers you've got and how many emails you actually send. But frequently it was costing me more than £40 a month.

And I just thought, you know, I'm never being salesy in my messages and that's quite a lot of money just to send a few emails, because it was never more than a handful of emails per month that I would send.

And so I actually got a suggestion to make a switch from Claude, which is the chatbot that I'm now using a little bit more to help me run my business behind the scenes.

And it suggested, it looked at my requirements, it asked me a few questions and then it came back saying you'd probably save a lot of money if you switch to MailerLite, which I'd heard a few colleagues talking about and thought, OK, let's go and take a look. Well, I made the switch to MailerLite.

It's a fairly simple user interface and instead of £40+ per month, I'm now paying only £12 per month. I'm basically getting exactly the same functionality in a system that feels a little bit simpler to use.

I'm not one of those people who's got loads of fancy email automations with rules and different groups, and I don't do any of that. I try to keep my messages pretty simple. I've basically got two email lists, and that's the shape of it.

So, it's basically a third of the price of what I was paying before. So, that's how I've switched to MailerLite and saved some money.

And the last one that I mentioned in this post that Lionel was referring to was a voice dictation software. Now, I use a Mac and I use iPhone and iPad as well. That's already got dictation built in, but it's often not very accurate.

And when I started using the Claude chatbot, one of the recommendations I got was to level up your dictation tool because you want it to be as accurate as possible so that you can actually talk, effectively, talk to your AI system through your dictation. So, the recommended tool, I think the market leader in this space is a platform called Wispr Flow. It's very good. I tried it. It works out at about only £12 a month, so not a lot really. But then someone else said, well, yet it is a good tool, but you can get exactly the same with some alternatives.

And they recommended one called VoiceInk. Again, link in the show notes for this one, and that one has again a one-off licencing fee. So, I've paid to use it on 3 separate machines, I've paid $49. If you want to use it on just one machine, I think it's $29.

And at the moment, and I've been in touch with the developer of this tool as well, the iOS and iPadOS version of the app are completely free while it's in beta, so you can use it without paying anything if you're just going to use it on mobile.

And what I really like about it is that, firstly it's probably a bit more accurate than the Apple built-in dictation tool, but also it's got its own custom dictionary. So, when I say things like UpLift Live and Espresso+ and even my name you know, I can teach it what those words are so that it doesn't make mistakes, and that means I don't need to make corrections, and it just means that I can dictate content much more quickly and accurately than I could before.

And again, it's one of those one-off things. I'm never going to need to pay for this again, rather than a monthly commitment.

And that's kind of the point about the whole post, is that how many things are we paying for monthly that we could probably do without altogether? Or at the very least you can probably find ways of saving money on these things.

So, again, that's not a LinkedIn topic, is it? But I think it should be of interest to all of us to think about what does our tech stack look like? What things are we paying for that we could probably do with paying less for or not at all?

So, that's my answer to the question. Go and do your research about what you're paying for and see where you can make savings.

I've seen quite a few people this week with LinkedIn profile headlines that use the vertical pipe | symbol in them. It just almost looks like a capital I. It's not, but it's another symbol that's on your keyboard, and it's frequently used as a separator so that you can put multiple things into your profile.

And I've used this myself in the past, but a while ago I learned that there's a chance that LinkedIn search will get confused about separators like that. It might treat it as a logical OR symbol.

So, in other words, you're saying, you know, I'm an accountant OR I'm a financial advisor or whatever, rather than just being a logical separator that we would read it as. So, whenever I see it, I recommend people to make that change so that their headline uses a different separator symbol.

It could be a full stop, could be a hyphen, could be an emoji, could pretty much be any other character. But whenever I see it, I do baulk. Although I don't know whether LinkedIn search has now improved to the point where it's smart enough to avoid these things.

For me, it's a bit of a sign that maybe someone hasn't updated their headline or isn't aware of this little quirk, and it's probably a good one to avoid.

So, if you've got that in your headline, maybe use this as an opportunity to look at your headline again and see whether you can make some tweaks and change that symbol and generally give your headline of a refresh if you haven't touched it for a while.

Main topic I wanted to mention is that I've heard a couple of people dismissing LinkedIn a bit and saying that it's not really in the same category as other social media.

Whenever social media gets mentioned, people always think of things like Instagram and TikTok and for those people who still use Facebook … Facebook.

But I think I would argue that LinkedIn actually is social media because whenever I debate it with other people, I'll just tell them, remind them, of all of the features that LinkedIn has. And often people are just not aware that that feature set means that LinkedIn should be treated as a social media platform.

I appreciate that it's not primarily that. I mean, it's somewhere that you need to use if you want to ever find work. It's a good place for that. And so that's the way that people pigeonhole it.

But if you look at the feature set, I think it's fairly easy to make the case that it's also a fully fledged social media platform. And so this week I've put out a document post that just sets that out. I've got a load of features, I think there's 35 things in total, and LinkedIn just ticks all of the boxes compared with the likes of Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and X, formerly Twitter.

So, it's got this algorithmic newsfeed, it's got public profiles, you can have followers and connections, you can react to content, you can comment on things, you can share things. There's direct messaging, which is something I'm going to be talking about a bit more at next week's UpLift Live conference.

There's shortform content, there's shortform video, livestreaming even on LinkedIn, although it's not supported natively, but it is possible to do it with third-party tools.

LinkedIn has its own groups and communities, so you've got a privacy element to that kind of discussion that you can have. Not everything is out in the public.

You can set up LinkedIn Events, you can set up polls, you can even use hashtags on LinkedIn, although they're not quite as powerful as they once were.

You can create longer form content with newsletters, you can place adverts if you want and do audience targeting as well.

There are promoted posts now. You can boost personal posts. I'm not actually thrilled that that's a feature on LinkedIn, but it's possible.

There are lead gen forms, you've got analytics dashboards as well and various other metrics that you can keep an eye on. That, and more.

I'm not going to read out the full list that I put together, but I think when you look at it in the round, you can definitely say that LinkedIn can be used as social media.

I know that a lot of people are frustrated with maybe lack of visibility on LinkedIn, but that's kind of a separate point.

All of the tools are still there for you to be able to make connections and share content and attract new people to your door.

So, maybe this is a document that I've put together that might be useful if you're the kind of person who ever is in discussion with people who are a bit hesitant about LinkedIn or perhaps you might even be a social media trainer. You could just present this to someone and go, look, this is the case for treating LinkedIn seriously as a social media platform and getting your people on it, so you might want to take a look. Again, it's linked in the show notes and hopefully you'll find that enlightening.

That will do for now. I am still full steam ahead with preparing for next week's conference, the UpLift Live 26 conference in Birmingham, our third year. I'll probably make my last call for you to join us if you haven't already got a ticket.

So, uplift-live.com if you really want to dive deep on your LinkedIn learning and understand from some of the very best in the business, Birmingham is the place to be on Thursday 26 March.

Really looking forward to seeing so many people. We've already sold more than 200 tickets in total for this event, so it's going to be a fab one. Looking forward to seeing you all.

I'm looking forward to taking a break when it's all said and done, although I won't have that much time off immediately, because I'll have a load of videos to process and do the captions and transcriptions for. But once that's done, I'll certainly be finding a dark room somewhere and lying down, I think.

So, thank you for your support. If you're going to be coming to Birmingham, I'm looking forward to meeting you there. Thanks for listening and I'll catch you all again next time.