From entrepreneur media, this is problem solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like the isosceles. It was like we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Feiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. If you are a person who posts on social media,
what would you say is the basic marker of success? It's virality, right? It's going viral, which is why it's pretty interesting to hear someone very, very high up on a social media platform. Say this. We're not looking for virality at all. That is not how LinkedIn measures success. That is Dan Roth. He is LinkedIn's editor-in-chief. And I know what he would say about the things that I just said, which is that LinkedIn is not a social media platform. LinkedIn is so much more that is true.
But it does have a social media component. And a lot of people, myself included, utilize that social media component to reach people's post content and so on. So anyway, let's just go with it. LinkedIn, at least the parts of LinkedIn that are social media, not interested in virality. There's nothing in our systems that reward virality.
And if you are a person who was interested in going, okay, I guess not viral on LinkedIn now, but posting on LinkedIn so that it's seen by a lot of relevant people about that. Well, then something Dan said there is going to be a particular interest to you because he said there's nothing in our systems that reward virality, which of course begs the question,
well, what do your systems reward? And the answer to that has changed pretty significantly in the past six or so months as LinkedIn has made a lot of very strategic changes to its feed. And that is what LinkedIn offered me the opportunity to dig into with Dan and one of Dan's colleagues, Alice Chong. I'm Alice. I'm a director of product management at LinkedIn and I lead our search and
discovery products. So here's what's happening on this episode of problem solvers. If you are interested in reaching people, growing a following on LinkedIn, this is a must listen because we are going to dig in very granular detail into how LinkedIn works, the changes that they have made and what it takes and means to succeed in posting content on LinkedIn. This conversation is super interesting. It is
changed the way that I think about posting on LinkedIn. And if you follow me on LinkedIn and you should just search Jason Fyfer, if you follow me on LinkedIn, you know I post almost every single day there. So this was a very, very relevant conversation for me. And I know for many others. And we're going to get into it right after the break. The world is not short on advice. If you want advice, if you want instruction, it is everywhere. It is so difficult to follow because it's just so much
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better. Email. All right, we're back. I am talking today with Dan and Alice from LinkedIn. And before we get into the nitty-gritty details of the changes that they have made to the feed, I asked them to start big picture with some context of where LinkedIn is and what it is trying to do and then how we can use that to understand the decisions that they have made and Dan starts it off. Jason, first of all, thank you for having us on. It is awesome to talk to you and excited to
talk to your listeners and to your readers. One interesting thing about LinkedIn is in a sense how little it changes. So the mission of LinkedIn has not changed at all and I've been a LinkedIn for almost 12 years or 12 years this month. Our mission is to connect the world's professionals to economic opportunity. We want to make sure that everyone everywhere finds through their use of LinkedIn becomes better in what they do or what they want to do. And that means different things
to different people. And how we reach that mission, how we succeed in connecting people to economic opportunity does change because we learn all the time what people want and what works and what doesn't work and what success looks like. And that changes as we learn more about the platform and how people are using it and it changes based on what professionals want in their lives and what they want, how they think about what success looks like for them. So as a framing mechanism,
the one thing to think about is like why does LinkedIn do any of this? It is because we believe in this idea that if we can help people be better at their jobs or whatever it is their job that they want to get to or building a company or expanding their company or finding the right people to work for them. If we can make that happen, everyone gets better. Rising tide raises all boats. And so that's the idea. One of the things that we have seen in the last few years is the importance of knowledge
sharing in how that works. Members are, we call our users members members are when they come to LinkedIn, they're coming for a specific purpose. You know, we want when people open the app or when they log in on the desktop, they're doing it during work. They're doing it often during the busiest times of their day. They're doing it at a time when they could be doing a million other things in
their business and they're choosing to go to LinkedIn for a reason. And often that reason is to be able to get smarter about something that they need to get smarter about or sometimes it's to find a job or to hire somebody. But it's often they open up LinkedIn with a job to be done. And that job is frequently that sort of job to be done is frequently like help me get smarter about this particular area of my world. And they do that by asking questions or by posting what they know. So we've
seen a 27% increase in content viewed on the feed in the last two years. So since 2021 and a 42% increase in content shared over the last in that same period. And you're seeing people just come and they're just trying to learn and they're posting more. They're getting more comfortable with this idea of sharing what they know and how they've learned it and asking these questions about other people. You use the word community. What we see is that people build communities through
this sharing of knowledge. And so what we're talking about here and this idea of getting people to share what they're uniquely qualified to talk about or what they uniquely want to know is the change in the feed. You want to make sure you're seeing the right content, the right content that matters to you and they were helping you get those ideas out of your head in a way that makes sense and that you can then reach the right people so that they can learn and get something from it.
Out of that community develops. So maybe I'll hand it off to Alice talk a little bit about how we're doing all of that. That's great. Alice, yeah, please take it. I have a million follow-up questions. What I want to hear what you have to say first. Definitely. So as Dan mentioned, a big part is that we are investing in making feed more valuable to our members. And when we ask our members, what did they find the most valuable in their feed is becoming overwhelmingly clear.
People are telling us that they find it most valuable when the content is grounded in knowledge and advice. And they found the most valuable when the content is from people they know and care about sharing what they're up to so that they're feeling connected to their connection. And they're feeling the most valuable when they're getting opportunities out of the feed. And this is exactly what we did for feed, which is such an essential, such an important part, um, feeling our overall
ecosystem. Two changes that we did. Number one, we're bringing better reach to connections and your followers. What does that mean? People in your network, as a creator, people in your network and people who are following you will be more likely to see updates from you. And this is because we hear from members that they find this to be the most valuable. We saw a near 10% increase of content viewed of the past few months for people viewing content from either their connections
or people they follow. And just to be clear, so I understand what you're talking about, you're saying that the feed is prioritizing seeing posts from people that you follow over posts from people that you do not follow? Is that what you mean? That's one part. There's the second part. So the one part is the focus on your connections. The second part is we ask members what they find
the most valuable for feed and any content grounded on knowledge and advice. For example, a young lookwin who is an AI machine learning expert sharing something about AI and and machine learning for someone who is a machine learning practitioner is incredibly valuable content, even if they're not connected to yet or a connection sharing some knowledge and advice about how to negotiate salary, how to research company trends. These are valuable
content that we're also getting a lot focused on. So over the past few months, we've seen close to 40% increase of people checking out and viewing content that is grounded on knowledge from people that is out of their network. So the two takeaways from this one, more from your in-network and people you follow. And from a creator's standpoint, it's better reached to the
audience that you intend to build. And two is giving members better access to content that is grounded on knowledge and advice and ultimately leaving them to economic opportunities. Got it. This is an interesting place to start because by this, I mean asking your members what it is that they want and value because if we know anything about human behavior, what we know is that people don't actually articulate necessarily what it is that we will do or engage with.
Because if you ran this experiment at Facebook, for example, we're just going to use Facebook as a random example here, not asking you to specifically comment on Facebook, but I would bet that people
on Facebook would have said what I value is personal updates from my friends. But when you let the feed be dictated by what people actually engage with, even though they would never tell that to a surveyor what they start engaging with is a whole wide range of things that we might just want to call like algorithm hacking, people who are posting things purely because they know this is the kind of stuff that people will watch or click or share. And that has happened with basically
every single social platform. And I know that LinkedIn is a lot more than a social platform. But just for the purposes of talking about a feed, that's what happens with everyone. And the upside is lots of engagement. The downside is a drowning out of what you would consider actual value. So I'm curious to hear from you about number one, the decision making process that's happening
at LinkedIn to separate what is a value versus what might just get a lot of engagement. Because I bet that your data shows, and I'm not able to see it, but your data shows that a lot of stuff that people probably don't think of or categorize as valuable does get a lot of engagement on LinkedIn. And so if you're going to make a change, you're going to make a change away from some stuff that maybe is low value, high engagement. And so tell me about that decision making process and what you
are particularly hoping will result from it. I can take a first pass and then do a lot. And Jason, I think super important for us to put it in context of LinkedIn's vision. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. And ultimately, when we're measuring whether we're making that progress, our missions, are we actually connecting the professionals? Are we getting them to be more productive and successful?
So in what you just shared for us, the most important part of the equation is, do we believe or getting closer in getting our members to be and feel more productive and more successful? It is not just about, it definitely is not just about like viral. I mean, things could go viral only didn't, but our system is actually not designed for that. We think ourselves as we are really a
social professional social platform that enables people to be more productive. And in terms of how members are reacting to these changes that we have started rolling out over the past half a year, we're happy to share that we're seeing very promising early signs. We've got an 80% job of members sharing that, so we used to get complaints of members telling us, hey, I don't like my fee, and my fee quality isn't good. I wanted to say something different over the past few months since
we started to evolve the feed experience. I've seen an 80% job and that is a lot. I'm sorry, 80% 80% what's the change of members sharing that they don't like their feed. I'm planning about feed. Got it. 80% drop in complaints. Exactly. Got it. That's really interesting. You asked this kind of question of how does this compare to other places? I think just to really amplify what Alice was saying is we're not looking for virality at all. That is not how LinkedIn measures success.
There's nothing in our systems that reward virality. It's not an ad-driven platform where ads are component of how we make money, but it's not the way that LinkedIn is. LinkedIn is not dependent on that. What we are dependent on is people coming back every day and feeling like this is a place that is good for their professional identity. If you think about it, I think this is just helpful for when people are figuring out and we talk to a lot of people who are trying to master LinkedIn.
They're like, I want to be amazing at LinkedIn. The advice I always give is one of the pieces is just think about where what the incentives are for any place that you are spending your time.
It's important that LinkedIn's incentives are, we are more successful. If people are here with their real identities, if they feel like this is a good place for them, if they feel like this is a place they want to have open on their desk at work and checking when they start their work day and that they finish their work day, it's a place where they are recommending to other people that they come. That way, recruiters, when they come, they are like real people they're reaching out to and
they know what those people care about. Be to be advertisers, know exactly who they can advertise against. Sales people can see who it is. They're reaching the real people who are like who can actually make buying decisions. All of those things are incentives that depends on us having really high quality content and high quality people who are representing what they are really good at.
And so if you think about where this drop comes from, this 80% drop and people telling us that they don't, that they're unhappy with their feeds, a lot of that comes from both making sure that we have the right content for them. That content comes from saying, these are people you are following. So you're telling us you want to hear more from them. And also this is the kind of topic that you care about. And we're showing you not just people talking about this topic, but someone
with the skills in this area talking about that topic. And I think that's a really important component of this is that if it's me sharing as a journalist and someone who is if you look at my background, it's like all Jay school and and bring Wistik's minor. And if I'm sharing content about how to be a great geologist, that is useless. And I don't know what I'm talking about. And even if it sounds good, like, and I'm writing some, I'm trying to like go viral with geology content. I'm
sure why they would go viral. But it's like someone parallel universe. Sure. So if I put that up there, LinkedIn, we have a duty as LinkedIn to be like, Hey, this is not like this is in the highest quality content. Dan has none of the skills in this area. And this is it we have not seen them have success with geology content in the past. And so why would we show Alice who cares about
geology content on the room Dan when this is not his area of expertise. And so there's all this because we have the professional profile of record, it helps us also be able to make sure that we were getting the right content to the right people, even if it's not someone you're following yet. Care about this topic. We think this is high quality content from someone who actually knows what they're talking about. That's super interesting. I want to follow up on that in a second
and understand how LinkedIn is identifying what is valuable content. Because what you just said there is one part of it. But just to put a just to put a real button on it about the question about virality and for anybody who has used LinkedIn for years. And I am on there every single day. We saw it. We saw people who would post real earnest pieces of value. And that would show up in your feed, but also so would a lot of selfies and a lot of people just taking like viral crap that
they found on the internet and posting it there. And doing basically the stuff that gets rewarded really well on other platforms. And so I just want to put that to you so that people can like hear you react to that speaking to people who are on LinkedIn all the time, right? Instead of speaking about like broader strategy here, you're basically saying we hear you and we don't want that stuff on the platform. Is that right? That is let me give you a sort of a new last answer.
Okay. The answer is that we want to give people the kind of content that helps them be better of what they do or what they want to do. And that leads them to economic opportunity. There was a point in time where that sort of content was actually pretty useful to people. And then it really was it useful. And then it became sort of a flood to what Alice said earlier is like we are not looking for when things go viral on LinkedIn. Usually that's assigned to us that we need to look into this
because it's not that's not celebrated internally. That's like let's just make sure this is actually like high quality content that's showing up. Why is this piece of content going viral? Is the question that we'll talk about internally if something is suddenly doing well? That's not going to look out what's going on. I just said that's very interesting. That's that would seem to be the opposite of how anybody else in the whole universe in the internet thinks about something going viral.
Totally. But if you think about what our how LinkedIn works we're often a we're sort of a proxy or like a digital version of a workplace. And there's very little content in the workplace or conversations that go on in the workplace that are right for everybody. There's something that's right for you on your team and for someone else on their team. That's okay to talk about in the
I mean, at a business launch or whatever whatever conversations you're having at work. But it's usually it's very rare where someone stands up with a megaphone and shouts to the whole office and everyone's like great. I want to hear more from this person yelling at us with this megaphone. Like that's not so if stuff's not going viral in the workplace it shouldn't be going viral on
LinkedIn. And but if it is something that's super interesting let's say for instance yesterday a lot of really incredible posts about apples new headset and people's talking people who are in VR and AR talking about what this means and what the difference is these are people with expertise talking about that that content did incredibly well. So did it go viral? I mean, it's not it depends on how you define it. But it reached a large group because there was a lot of demand for that particular
content. If people are still talking about that a week from now a lot less demand for it. That's that's a normal cycle. That's like the way the wage should be. But it is not a so during that you ask the question about like what happened to this this content like people were sort of earnestly you know where people posting selfies and all that stuff. Yeah. That was during the pandemic.
There was sort of this point in time where people were talking about there are homes and our work lives got meshed in a way that people really wanted and they were kind of craving and you couldn't avoid. That's past us. That phase is beyond. And now we'll be here for members. And this is I think a large part of this sort of 80% drop is they're like I don't want to see that anymore. That was I'm done with that great typo on it. Different point in my work life. That is not the kind of stuff I
want to hear from now. No, I want to learn how to get better at what I'm doing. Yeah. Let me just quickly add from the valuable standpoint that an important part is also the perspective from a viewer standpoint, feed viewer standpoint. Let's take an example. If say Jason you and I are connected. You're like I'm your network. If I share a post about a very successful product
launch I led or I share a post about a very successful team off site that I ran. Jason you're probably going to see it and even like my post is like yeah now I'm understanding what Alice is up to. But imagine just because you like my post some of your connections who has no idea who Alice is will now that was the before state before we introduce these changes. What they used to see is that they would see hey Alice just had a great off site who the house Alice people didn't find
that being valuable. So it's like it is very important that we still encourage people to bring their authentic selves to LinkedIn. We're still encouraging people to share their stories. But it's very important to understand who is the best audience for that kind of content. It is people who actually know you and care about you and the same goes for like when you're looking at others content you probably only care about the personal updates from people you know and care
about. So that's a very important distinction. That's interesting. Can you can you impact that just a little bit more maybe from the perspective of the user who is just having a fairly binary experience which is I either saw this or I didn't or here's how I saw it. So in the example of Alice launched a product and let's say I comment on it what you're telling me is that the platform is going to is trying to make a decision about how this post is going to be relevant to people a circle away.
And break that down a little bit more because I'm thinking about my own experience on LinkedIn and I'm thinking that on my feed sometimes I do see a post from somebody I don't know. Usually it's because somebody I do know commented on it or liked it and that's actually the first thing that I see at the very top is you tell me which of my contacts like to engage with this post.
But there is there but are you saying that there's a sort of secondary consideration here which is that you're trying to better refine which posts are worth amplifying to the network of whoever it was that engaged with the post to begin with. Is that what you're saying? You're absolutely right. What we're thinking about it is that we it is your feed is always going to be a combination of different types of things that's valuable to you. There will be updates that will make you feel
more connected. There will be updates that are getting you that knowledge and advice when you need them. In fact, we're also investing in big strides in making LinkedIn the destination for knowledge. So a lot of investment around encouraging more more people to like ring out the knowledge in their head share on to LinkedIn. A lot of a lot of investment in making LinkedIn really a place for discovery of knowledge. If I have a question in my mind, I should be able to go to LinkedIn
to ask my question. I should do a search and find the answers. I should ask a question directly. So there's a lot of a lot of focus on knowledge but at the same time we're not losing grounds in the connection aspects. We believe that is that is what makes LinkedIn so unique and that is what what makes LinkedIn stand in. Jason, could I say one thing if you're a user? Jason, I would say that you're a user. From my point of view, I deal with a lot of contributors and
we sort of walk them through how to work well on LinkedIn. This thing got confusing at times. What Alice is pointing out is such an incredible point and you're point about figuring out the right circle. The way I like to think about it is that every piece of content has its own total addressable market. You have to think about who am I trying to reach with this thing?
It can be frustrating sometimes as a contributor or as a user, you post something and you're like, well, I got a thousand views for this and I only got 200 views for that and I don't understand it. But what Alice is describing is exactly what's going on behind the scenes which is we look at that and we're like, well, this is great. This is Alice showed this. She talks, she showed a selfie from her last offsite. That is a perfect thing to show to her team or to people who are connected with
their rooms shown in the interest in how Alice's team operates. When Alice explains the intricacies of how search engine works and what she's learned, that has a much larger total addressable market. That is anyone who is in the search business or anyone is a technologist or someone who's a PM. And so you're doing that matching on a content on a post by post level and you got to think about
like who was the right match for this particular piece of content? Your network, people who are seeking knowledge in this area, a combination of those two and we've got all these signals to try to figure out exactly what that right market is for that exact post. That's all going on real time. Right. So that actually leads me to then what I was bookmarking a moment ago which was to understand
how it is that you're doing that. Now I will just say upfront, I know part of what it's going to sound like I'm doing here is plumbing for information for how people can write posts that are going to get the most engagement. You on the other hand are going to try to steer me away from exactly that because you're telling me that that's not the point. But all the same are going to ask it anyway. Yeah. What is LinkedIn doing to evaluate on a post by post basis? Who should see something?
And what should people who are posting to LinkedIn with the intention of writing something that they think is valuable that they want lots of people to see? What should they be thinking and doing? One thing I think I would point people to is the recent launch of collaborative articles.
I don't know if you've seen this but these are articles that are. Okay. So these are in the way collaborative articles work is there's an AI written component of this that kind of goes deep into skills and it's like here is the things you need to know about this particular skill. It's all based around skills. And then to your point about how you are able to reach people, the next step in collaborative articles is the we have systems that then reach out to you. We'll
look at your skills and your profile and the things that you've talked about in the past. And we'll say Jason, you are an expert at running a media company. This is a this topic. This article is about how to run a particular point of a media company. Can you you'll be through like the perfect person answer this? Can you come in and answer it with your own real world learned experience? And then when you do that, we show it to other people who care at the house at this
point that shows up in search, it shows up elsewhere. And it reaches people who care about the media business. Now that doesn't answer your second question about, hey, I want to reach as many people as possible. And you're right. I'm going to steer you away from that. And because the truth is that if you are a it's just like running a business is you're not successful unless you're like Coke and you're trying to reach the world. You want the world to drink your product from most people.
You want the right buyers of whatever it is that you're selling and your shop, if you're running a boutique, you don't want the entire world walking into your boutique picking up your stuff and then putting it on the shelves and walking out and getting it all, you know, grind me and moving things around. I don't know. I don't run a boutique, but I would imagine that's like a bad thing. Sure. It's the same way here that you want to think about what is the right audience for you
to reach. It does it. Those numbers are beach muskets. You know, if you're like, oh, I got 10 million views of something who cares? Like it's the one, all you need is one person to say, hey, I want to do business with you. Or why don't we do something together or you should come
work for me or I want to come work for you. And if it's something that you're trying to achieve, if you can get that out of your work, then all you need is that one or two in-mails or comments or someone reaching you on email or going up to you at a conference and saying, I saw your post and I'd like to do business with you. That's success. That is connecting that economic opportunity. So it is not, I think, the way people have been trained in, you know, over the last 10 years to think
about posting. But I think it's the right way to think about running a business and running your business and running your career. You don't want, you don't need to reach everyone. You need to reach the right people. And what Alice is describing is how we're trying to make sure you are reaching the right people on the right topics. And then the last thing I would say there is, it's a, you're not always going to hit. Like the key is really to not focus post by post. Just keep
investing. And so you want to post and sometimes it's going to work and sometimes it'll reach the right people and sometimes it won't and sometimes you'll get crickets and sometimes you'll get a lot of people. And it's the sum total of your work that matters and how your persona develops and what people think about you that Matt and that they learn to trust you and your voice and your opinions. That is a much bigger difference than having them being a what hint wonder. One hit
wonder doesn't pay off in the end. So I always say like don't focus on how this one particular posted focus on how am I doing over time? And what has happened and what kind of changes have I seen and what got the most outreach that mattered to me and then do more of that? That's the way to invest in your voice. Alice anything to pick up on with that? Now I think Dan covered it out. Like in terms of if there is any advice or suggestions, I think as professionals, as experts,
we are all experts in something we do. I say there's a lot of knowledge in our heads. So if there is like one one advice to give to the creators out there with brand builders out there is to think about what kind of knowledge do you have to offer to people to help people? And that is the kind of thing that will likely get you to reach the right audience as well. So that is the only thing I want
to add. Perhaps this will be ill advised, but I'm going to direct your attention to I you don't actually pull it up, but I'll just describe it a recent post of mine because I'm just curious how you're going to react to it as people who are telling me that in the offices that linked in, you're specifically saying if something goes viral, there's a problem. Now I don't know if this is viral. I don't know if we don't really have a agreed upon or do we actually I should ask you
before I keep going? Do we have any kind of agreed upon definition here of viral when something goes viral at LinkedIn? And you say this is a problem. We have to investigate it. What we're talking about in terms of scale. Is there a number? I just said, oh, I don't believe we said, okay, so what we're trying to say is that the system is not designed to encourage posts to go viral. Yes. We do not say if the post goes viral, there's some problem with it. Of course. Dan Dan.
Dan Dan. No, this is my own. This is my own like. Dan Dan. This is a it is not as Alice said, like the system is designed not for that not to reward that it is not like we're not we're not a system where if something goes viral, you keep pointing. If you know, oh, there's a fire, pour more and more gasoline on it. That is not how we're built. Yeah. When you're real standpoint, it is like, hey, this is not like there is nothing that should be seen by ever. It's almost there's
very little that should be seen by everybody on LinkedIn. Right. So what are you going to point us to a post? Yeah. So it just just to be just to be clear on that, I understand that like if something reaches a certain number of views on LinkedIn, that there like an alarm doesn't go off
at LinkedIn. And everyone runs into a like an emergency room to talk about it. But but I do think that it's a really interesting insight that the way in which you're viewing that kind of metric is very different from the way that almost anywhere else does because what you're then saying, and I'm just going to say this back to you so that you can confirm or correct what you're telling me is that because your metric of success is are we connecting people with people who are going to
matter for their business? And that happens at a small scale that when things go, let's just say viral, which we're just going to use a definitionless version of viral, that when things do that, that the chances that that's going to lead to the outcome that you're setting out here are pretty low. And maybe that means that people are finding ways to use this platform in a way that wasn't exactly intended. And that's the thing that you want to attend to is to make sure that the maximum
number of people are getting the value as you define it. And that's the reason why something going viral is not exactly a reason to celebrate internally on LinkedIn. Do I understand that right? Absolutely. We've posed. Now I'm not super curious. Well, I had, there were two recently that basically were versions of the same thing, which is that I had found something that I found compelling online. And then I wrote what I thought was genuine useful advice alongside it. So the
one that I'm looking at is the coffee shop post. So it was one week ago and I'll describe it for people who aren't like you furiously trying to find it. I can also drop it in our feed here, I think, is there a way to I found it? You already found it. Okay, great. Okay. So here's what we're looking at right now. Right. So what we're looking at is this, I didn't take this photo. Actually, a friend of mine found this photo a long time ago and put it in a blog post. And I just
remembered it. So the photo is it's like one of those sandwich boards outside of a coffee shop. And somebody is written in handwriting, come in and try the worst coffee one woman on trip advisor had in her life, which is funny. And and then I wrote this post, which I'm not going to read all of, but it starts like this. It said, did someone insult or hurt you? Ask yourself this empowering question. How can I use this? Why? Because we humans need control. We need autonomy. And when
someone insults us, we all feel stripped of that control. Anyway, and then I go on for what looks like four or five more small paragraphs talking about how to utilize being insulted so that you feel like you gain some more control over the situation. And then at the very end, yay for me. I put in a little call to action for people to subscribe to my newsletter. And by my standards,
at least this is done quite well. It has had at this taping on June 6th, it has had 1.9 million impressions, 18,417 people have engaged with it or actually 15 or 8, whatever, 18,000 plus people. And 792 comments. So look, by my standards, at least, that's that's pretty close to going viral. I think it was a pretty good post. I was trying to game anything, but and I would say that it lives inside of my area of authority, which is something that I see that you you're hearing that you care
about. And it's reaching a large number of people. Now, number one, I'm curious what you make of this. But number two, I'm just going to have bundled into my question here is that Dan, when you were talking about the, but actually, wait, I'm going to leave that part first. Number one, what do you guys make of this post? That was cool. You're good. I can't, I can share. So thank you so much for sharing
this example, Jason. I always love to see like real examples of our, what our members and experts have created. This I would say is a pretty classic example of share opinion and advice post. And that's how we have some internal artificial intelligence algorithms that help us classify posts into different categories. So for your post, this is exactly like the kind of what we probably will show like you're sharing some opinion and also like turning that into some of the
advice. The part I would also add to when it comes to virality, what we absolutely don't find valuable and what members have, it's not what we don't find it. It's actually what members tell us that they don't find valuable is what we call blind virality is like something just like goes off the charts because there is some kind of like viral spread of it, viral engagement and then getting getting me to see a post and ultimately I don't find this post to be valuable to me.
In this particular example, I would say it sounds like more generic advice like it's not in a specific area. Certainly, and also we appreciate humor. We want people to bring their authentic selves to work or to LinkedIn as well. So we actually really really appreciate creators kind of taking their creative liberty and use their personality and including using humor, Dan, anything you want to add. Yeah, I would also just add to that that if you look at your comments, we look,
we're always looking to see is something starting a conversation. It's really important to us. It's not just you blasting something out. It is you you're posted this. You left your Zalice, like you left your you have it wasn't just the sandwich board. You left your opinion about why you thought it was important. You shared your knowledge and you have expertise in this area. So that's the system we'll be looking for all of that. And then if you look at the comments,
it's a lot of people who are in marketing, reacting. That's a really good sign for us that this is reached a particular market. So you've got a CMO, you've got some of the craft brands with purpose. This is a fractional CHRO. You've got a lot of really interesting people here who are in in or around this area who have their own unique perspectives that they're sharing here in your comments section. What they're not just saying is funny, exclamation point or too true exclamation point.
They're using this as a way to talk about their own perspectives. This is what I think about being able to share this stuff. Here's what I've experienced in my career. All of that, LinkedIn looks very favorably important. We are looking to show that you are starting, you're building a community around content and around knowledge sharing that you are uniquely qualified to talk about. So that's why that one would have done really well. I would also point
to one that you did. I think it was this week on Ted Lasso. How entrepreneur got in the Ted Lasso. That was a phenomenal post. Something only you could talk about. No one could have had that experience except you. It was, you detailed it, you gave your takeaways, like how this, what you do when you get the call. I mean, it was sort of the perfect post. That's the kind of thing that is if you're building your brand and you're building your voice on LinkedIn, more of that behind the
scenes, what happens. This is what I've learned from it. That kind of content is catnip to people because everyone's hungry. We all, we're all making this stuff up as we go. We have no idea what we're doing at work. And you're trying to figure it out and you're trying to learn from other people. And so if you can say this is what I've learned, people are, people love that. And so is it enough? It would that be viral? We don't, this post would not probably be considered viral on,
in any other place. It did really well on LinkedIn. And it's good that it did well. This would be one that we were celebrating internally. Now, sharing, God, people talking, a lot, unique expertise and really interesting conversation. Yeah. Oh, good. I'm glad I didn't set off the alarm bells inside
of LinkedIn. But and also very interesting to hear you explain what LinkedIn is seeing. And therefore what you're both seeing when you look at it in the comments because a classic piece of advice among people who are in the business of telling you how to go big on LinkedIn is that you need a lot of comments, comments lead to visibility. But you're going a step further here in actually identifying is, are the comments all coming from a particular category of people?
And therefore, is this post reaching a specific market, which is a sign of success for a post or at least a certain kind of post? Is that right? Yeah. I mean, yes. And there's two more things. One is, are these comments meaningful, are they meaningful comments? You know, if it's someone just saying, yes, or agreed, cosine, whatever, that would not be a meaningful comment to our systems would not consider that to be a meaningful comment. But people
are leaving, they're treating this like a conversation starter. That's meaningful. Two is your responding to the comments. That's really important for us to see. And that's important. Like, again, going back to this idea of LinkedIn being sort of proxy for the business world. If you're in a meeting and someone's talking at you and the other person is just staring,
that's not a successful. That's not a conversation. And you giving back, like you, Jason, responding to people who are giving comments, maybe you, in something like this, you probably can't respond to everyone. It's too much. But you're picking and choosing where you want to go in. You're thanking people and you're adding something. Like, that our system, like, this is a conversation, reward this, show this to more people. People want to be part of this conversation. So that's what
we're looking for. Right. I think I'm thinking here as you're saying this about a line that you just used maybe five to 10 minutes ago, which was that every post has its own total addressable market. And if it seems like that total addressable market is coherently revealing itself in the engagement of the post, then LinkedIn's algorithms are going to recognize it as such is what you're
telling me. And then this is these are not words that you use, but just I'm just going to say them to see if you'll react to it, which is that the way that you're describing the kind of quality comments seems very much also to be mindful of engagement groups that people often use to try to pump up their visibility, but engagement groups, which for people who don't know is maybe like a group that somebody has on WhatsApp where everyone just throws in their LinkedIn posts and then everybody
on the group where everybody's assistance jump in and leave comments. Those are usually of the kind of so true. Yes. Kind of stuff, which is an engagement at all. It's fake engagement. So is that on your mind or those kinds of gaming systems on your mind as you guys are developing? Absolutely. Yeah. You've just nailed it. And I think that people assume they've figured out how things work here and usually they have not or something like within that kind of situation,
it might do well within that group and that's sort of it. Like the groups gets deceased. Some piece they're talking to themselves essentially. Right. So if that's what they want, that's great. All right. So final thing and then I'll let you guys go. This has been so fascinating. Is I want to Dan, the way that you described the value of a piece of content that reaches its audience is
was very interesting. And I think in many ways, very true. And the entrepreneur Ted Lasso example that you gave is actually a really good version of that in that that post didn't do nearly as well. Like fractionally well as this one with the sandwich board, right. It was for for people who don't
follow me religiously. It was a it was a clip from Ted Lasso season finale where an entrepreneur magazine cover appeared and I told the backstory of how that happened, which is that Jason today says team got in touch with me and etc. Anyway, so that posted okay, but it didn't do amazing.
And what you're saying is what you're saying is really the explanation for why because LinkedIn recognized that as having a particularly distinct audience of people who are very familiar with entrepreneur, which is going to be a smaller audience than people who are just sort of generally
interested and engaged in the concept of marketing totally got it. But here's what I want to do is my kind of final thing, which is Dan, when you were saying, look, something is that the value here is that maybe one or two people reached out to you on by DM or the you know, it made one valuable connection. And that's how businesses, businesses, not a bunch of noise businesses is focused useful connections. But I will tell you something, which is that a great business tool for me is
building my newsletter audience. And a lot of the reason that people use LinkedIn is because doing well on LinkedIn drives an audience to the thing that you're trying to collect an audience for. And in this case, a post that gets 1.9 million impressions, I will tell you, I saw that directly in the number of people who signed up for my newsletter every single time that a newsletter post does very well. My newsletter subscriptions go up. That is a useful business tool for me. I don't
really want to be narrow there. And so I wonder how you balance that some people's business needs are actually to reach a lot of people, even if there's a lot of noise in there. And how you think about balancing that with what I think is a very, very true and real and earnest thinking that that great business happens in a focused way. It's a great question. So the let's just go back to the 10th last one real question. If you that might turn out to be a more, if you start getting more out
from more Hollywood productions, then now learn how to work with entrepreneur. My guess is that is a great success for you. Without question, true. Yes. So we'll see. This could be it could turn out any year from now. When we talk again, you're like, it turned out that post, which got this, you know, smallish, smaller audience turned out to have a meaningful impact on my business. A more meaningful impact. That's sort of that's that's like one of the things that we are that we
believe is a company. In terms of your question about the driving the newsletter, you know, thinking about your posts as a top of funnel to get into some other product. That's certainly a way you can think about it. In that case, you're going to be doing more posts like the coffee sign post. But what I would say is think about what that means for your brand. If I start recognizing you as a person who's just constantly trying to convince me to go sign up for his newsletter, it starts
degrading your ability to talk about anything else. It is clear to me you're selling all the time. And you got to think about what you are. This is why I say like you have to think about this is a portfolio. You know, you are you're building your voice with every single post you're building your brand. You're like people are understanding who you are. And if you're just a top of funnel person who is trying to get people to go follow some call to action, like you're just you
no one wants to be around a person like that. And so you got to balance it. There are times where you do want to do that. You drive people. What if you're doing it all the time? It's going to be bad for your business. And I think it's going to be bad for your business in the long run. I could be totally wrong. And what it's up to you. I mean, you can like I think you probably figured out a way to do this with you could go you could become the guy who takes pictures of funny coffee shop sign.
And builds builds posts around it. You probably figured out a pretty good formula. That'll work for a while until it stops work because people tire of seeing it or they tire of your content or they're like they just stop interacting with you. So you got to you just have to think again you just got to think about like this as a this is a long this is an investment and you're investing in not your newsletter. You're investing in who you are and how people see you and how they want
to do business with you. And so I would just say like think about the long take the long view. I was closing thoughts. Well, I think I think dance is so well. It is look at it as a portfolio, as a creator, as a brand builder. It's never about a single post. It is always about what kind of economic opportunities that may come down the road. And it's like something that we think about a lot at LinkedIn is what kind of impact we have to our members to people that we serve in the long term.
I want to just like emphasize on like what we're trying to do here as LinkedIn is we're really trying to be the definitive destination for professional knowledge. And we believe with our near one billion members only then there's a lot of professional knowledge that exists in our members head. And what we're encouraging members to do encouraging you all to do is to share the insights ideas and inspirations and share them only to share them with the world and share them
with the right audience that we can help you target. And this way, hopefully as you can everyone we can all be learning from each other. It will be opening doors, but one another to unlock more opportunities moving forward. So that would be the final the final words from me. Awesome. Alistair, thank you so much. This has been super illuminated. Thank you Jason. And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think. And maybe even about a problem that you solved,
you can find me at my website Jason Fyfer.com J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. Also, I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic. I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonfyfer.bulletin.com. Also, check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow. In each episode, I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think.
Problem solvers is a production of entrepreneur media and comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. Thanks to Deepa Shaw for production. My name is Jason Fyfer. See you next week.