Diving Deeper on the LinkedIn UGC Strategy

0:00Alright, so we're gonna go a little deeper into the LinkedIn UGC strategy. So Neil, I don't know if you remember this, but we did an episode about LinkedIn's SEO strategy. And I wanted to share this good post from the VP of brand marketing at SEMrush, Olga. And so I am pulling up my screen right now and I will read off of it if you're not following on YouTube. But here's the headline. So, and then Neil, you can recap on what this actually, you know, Neil, why don't you recap on what the LinkedIn UGC thing is? Or do you want me to do it? Go for it. You're already sharing your screen. Dude, I can't even see this.

0:30I'm getting old. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, whatever. So the LinkedIn UGC strategy is basically how they are adding a bunch of questions for people to answer. And you can have like influential people answer the questions. And so they're creating a lot of these user generated, it's just user generated content, right? For very specific like business questions. And they're just making it available for search engines to crawl. And so what's happening is this is the title of this post from her is how LinkedIn leverage AI and UGC to rank. And now when we talked about this, I think they're maybe getting a million visits a month or so.

1:07Now it's up to 3 million visits. And so Neil made a point about how this is like a blip in terms of how much traffic they're getting. But my point is like, it's compounding and it could start to get significant after a period of time. But I didn't know this part, Neil, let me just read this off. So the way they're doing this, they're incentivizing people like you and me to, to post by giving you badges. And so if you post enough, they'll give you like a yellow top voice badge or they'll say top voice in digital marketing, top voice in AI or whatever. So like they're gamifying it. And that's how people are starting to post more and more.

1:39Cause like people like, Oh, if I can look good, if I can be influential, maybe that'll help me get business, blah, blah, blah. Do not even that I've gotten emails from LinkedIn. They ask you to participate in certain things and they'll tell you if you participate, we'll give you the badge. Right. So it's really direct. And that's how they're getting a lot of influencers or people with followings to jump on the bandwagon. But the big thing I say here too, and us as marketers, if you look at this UGC strategy, LinkedIn has amazing authority, amazing backlinks, amazing brand queries, which is a factor in the ranking.

2:17If a lot of people type in your brand, if you look at most of the popular Google queries, they're actually brand names like Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. They have a lot of the factors to do well from this UGC strategy. But again, what people forget is in marketing, don't just be enamored by a number like 3 million visitors or whatnot. It's such a blimp in their overall traffic profile. If that traffic doesn't actually cause more signups, more revenues, it doesn't matter as much. And I think that's where people mess up a lot. they focus on the number instead of focusing on KPIs that really matter, right?

2:58What's your key performance indicators? What's the stuff that really moves the needle for the business? That's what marketing should focus on. Creating content could be one of those things. It may take a lot more time when the 3 million visits turn into 300 million. All right, now we're talking maybe that helps move the needle, but it's all about what really moves the needle. And when I say move the needle, I'm not talking about from a traffic standpoint. That's where a lot of marketers get wrong. I'm talking about from a revenue standpoint. What are the most important metrics like lifetime value of customers and revenue, whatever it may be, what moves that?

3:34And that's what marketers need to focus on instead of just being like, look what I did. Look at the visitor count. Look at this blog post. It ranks for this keyword. Did it drive any sales or leads? No. Six months later, did it drive any sales or leads? No. All right. It doesn't really matter of them? Yeah. So I'd be keen to see what their numbers are. They'll probably share maybe in six months or so, whoever's on the LinkedIn SEO team on how this actually went from them. Cause neither Neil and I can speak to that. Um, but we can speak to is if there's a compound monthly growth rate, not even an annual growth rate that, I mean, it's 50 % right now from what we're seeing, it's not going to hold that 50 % forever, but if they can maintain at 10, 20 % monthly growth, and there's a decent conversion rate from it, then it's a win.

4:14So maybe we'll come back to this in a year or so and see how it goes. But I do, at the end of the day, though, it's not really about traffic if it doesn't convert. What matters in marketing is traffic and conversions, right? That's how you got to look at it. So that is it for today. And by the way, you might be thinking, well, how does this apply to me? Like, yes, this applies to large websites out there. Like if you're like a trip advisor or whatever, you have a lot of users and that's why you can have UGC, user generated content. But this is just another way of leveraging the power of AI, right?

4:43But we've talked about in the past, and maybe we'll reiterate in a few episodes or so, but there's AI enhanced content, which is what we're doing with this podcast, where we're taking a transcript and we're making it into a blog post and we're enhancing it. 60 % to 70 % is done by AI. The other 30 % is done by a human being. And then you can also do programmatic SEO. There are things available to everyone, right? And we want to make sure that you understand that. And this is not just this whole AI plus SEO thing. It's going to enhance everybody. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow