LinkedIn HUGE Change! ➕ On-Demand is Dying? ➕Goodbye Gossip Magazines? What’s Up THIS WEEK| Ep. 347

0:01What up? Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's dig into some tips and some randomness. We are back for what's up this week from the Do This Not That podcast presented by Marigold. This is our short episode where we break down what's going on in marketing and business and in life. And then we still have our longer episodes later in the week. So hopefully you check it all out. So what's going on? Well, first, let's talk LinkedIn. LinkedIn just had a major, major update to some analytics that we should all be looking at. This is not some sort of advanced thing where you need to be like a super duper LinkedIn user, but if you are, that's great too.

0:41And this applies to your company pages and your personal pages as well. And the game changer is this. Now you can see on any post that you've put on LinkedIn, even if it's a post from a year ago, it could be an older post, a post you just did, a company page post, you can see if that post generated any profile viewers. So if somebody saw your post and then they visited your profile, it can also show you in the analytics if the post that you put out generated any new followers, either for you personally or for your company page, and it's on a post by post basis. So what does that mean in English?

1:20It means that let's say you put a post up today about some new topic or something that you're doing and the post gets you know 2000 impressions all you now need to do is go to that post and then you open up that post and then you click on where it says view analytics and when you click on view analytics it will then show you for that post specifically how many profile views how many people then went after you posted and viewed your profile because of that post or how many new followers you got because of that post. Why does this matter? So I went back and I looked at all my old posts and what blew my mind, I thought, okay, if a post gets a lot of impressions, a lot of views, those are the posts that are getting the most new followers or the most profile views.

2:09And as it turns out, that wasn't the case. I would have posts that I did that might have a hundred thousand views and get, you know, a handful of followers, a handful of profile views. I might have another post that got 10 ,000 views and it had exponentially more profile views and followers that resulted from it. And then we looked at our company pages and we saw the same thing. And what you should really be thinking about is bucketing the type of content that you're putting out on LinkedIn. Are they carousel posts? Are they informational posts? Are they post promoting a new product or service?

2:45Are they polls that you're doing? And then looking at, is this generating profile views? is this generating followers? This is allowing people to make a content roadmap on LinkedIn that we couldn't do before. And this is now rolling out. It's not on everybody's feed yet, but I think it will be in the next few days. And this is not just for premium users. This is for all users, free users, premium users, everybody. So really this is a game changer as people look to expand out on their LinkedIn content strategy. So another thing going on this week, and this is not a promotion for my event, but I want to tell you a tactic that we're doing.

3:23So we have a big event this week, my company called Eventastic. It's this giant free virtual conference that we put on and we got about 11 ,000 people signed up. But I've been getting a lot of heat. People angry at me about something, but it's a tactic that I love. And I want to explain to you why we do it because I think you could steal from this and do it for your own business. And we're seeing this as a big trend. So it's this giant live free virtual event. It's two days long, but what we are doing and what we've done in the past is we don't have on demand, right? It's not one of these things where you, the event occurs and afterwards, everybody that registered just gets the on demand link.

3:58We don't do that. What we do is something called earned on demand, which means that in order to get the on demand link for the event, you have to show up to the event for 60 minutes in total over the course of the two days of the event. And if you do, our system triggers and you get the on-demand link for everything. And it's this idea that for free events, you're not paying any money. What you are paying with is your time. And if you're willing to invest a little bit of time, we're willing to give you all the content that we're putting out there. Why do we do this? So we used to play the on-demand game like everybody else for our events.

4:36And we said, okay, when the event's over, everyone gets the on-demand link. And on average, we had about a 40 % show up rate for our virtual events. When we moved to this earned on-demand model, our show-up rates hit 70%. And here is the reason you might want to be thinking about, you're like, I don't put on events, but maybe you put on webinars. Maybe you put on whatever. I don't care if you're a consumer brand, a business brand, whatever. And here's some of the data about why you should be thinking about this. On-demand is really no demand because we're trying to basically turn the planet into Netflix, where everything's available all at once.

5:12But you even see it now with a lot of the TV shows that are out there. Apple TV releases episodes on certain days. Netflix now releases not all their episodes at once. Why is this trend moving away from just pure on-demand for all things at all times? Well, first of all, availability of on-demand for webinars, for example, has dropped. It used to be that 80 % of all webinars were also then available on-demand. Whatever you put on a webinar, 80 % of webinars would just make the on available. In the last 12 months, that has dropped down to 63%, meaning that a lot of people now, a lot of brands are saying you need to show up live if you want the content.

5:5334 % of webinars are now being offered as live only. Okay, live only. There's not even a snippet of on demand. And why is everyone doing this? Number one, show up rates are important, not just for the energy, but here's the stat from World Data Research that'll blow your mind. People who show up live to webinars and virtual events convert to pipeline 400 % more than those that just watch the on-demand version. And you know you feel that, right? You feel it because you register for stuff like, I'll watch the on-demand, and then you never do. The secret sauce here is when you do this and you say, okay, we're not going to have any on-demand, or we're going to have on-demand only if you show up for the first 10 minutes of our webinar, or however you want to play that game, you need to be very intentional in all of your marketing saying that this is live only, that if you don't attend in person, then you're not going to see it.

6:47And if that's too difficult for you to do, that's too big of a bite of an apple for you to take, you could do live only and then say something like, you know, the on-demand will be available 30 days from now. So you're telling the person, listen, if you want this, you got to show up now 30 days, who cares? So you're not saying there is no on-demand, but if you're just playing the game the way you used to always play it, that everything's available on demand always, yeah, you'll win the day, everybody's gonna love you, yay, you've catered to everybody, but you're gonna get no sales, no pipeline, no growth, okay?

7:18This idea that you should make all of your content so that way everybody has access to it, that is legacy thinking. You wanna make your content be the engine for your business. So that's why we do earned on demand, and I get so much hate mail, I don't care. I don't want to be for everybody. When you're for everybody, you're for nobody. Okay. So that's my vibe. All right. What else is going on? So this is slightly ridiculous information. I thought this was a kind of wild thing. I don't know if you saw this, but there's all these gossip magazines when you go to the supermarket, right? There's Us Weekly and OK Magazine and In Touch and Life and Style and all these magazines that always have the craziest headlines on them.

7:59You know, Elvis is alive or, or, you know, so-and-so is dating so-and-so. And those have been a staple at the supermarkets forever. Well, a lot of these magazines are going out of business. So this week In Touch, Life and Style, um, and a few of their sister publications are all announced that they're ceasing publication. They're going to be going away. And these are some of the biggest, uh, gossip magazines that are out there. And look, it doesn't surprise me because, uh, who's really buying those anymore. You just go on the web, whatever. I will tell you a wild story though about one of these magazines.

8:32I won't say which one. So back in the day, I used to do a lot of work with all of the magazines. All of the gossip magazines were clients of mine and we used to do a lot of their marketing. And one day I went to New York and I met with the publisher of one of the biggest ones in this category. One of the biggest, you would know the magazine. Okay. and we were meeting and we were talking about stuff, whatever. And I said, I have a question for you straight up. I go, some of your headlines and these celebrity stories are wild. I don't even understand. How do you get this information when nobody else has it?

9:07Like, how do you actually get it? And he turned to me and I'll never forget this. He goes, well, um, he said, did you know that Jennifer Aniston is secretly dating George Clooney. And I said, really? And this was before George Clooney was married. I said, what? I go, that is wild. I go, is that true? And he goes, I don't know, but it would sell magazines, wouldn't it? I said, I guess so. He goes, yeah. So what we do is we sit around, we come up with the most sensational ideas that are plausible. and we all say, let's roll with that one. That will sell the most. I go, get it. That is not okay. That can't be the foundation of a business.

9:53This is ridiculous. And I got to tell you, as soon as I walked out of there, I went back to my team. I go, I don't know if I can work with these magazines. This is ridiculous what's going on over there. So I lost my faith in humanity walking out of that meeting, but that happened. That blew my mind. Anyway, appreciate you being here. Listen, if you dig this up, I would really appreciate it if you could leave this thing a review. Follow the show. It really helps with the algorithm. It helps circulate it. And we have big plans for the show. So the more that we can get it out there, the better. You are very awesome.

10:26And yeah, keep it real. Later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. and hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.