How to Use AI on LinkedIn While Sounding Human

0:00I'm Mari Smith, known as the premier Facebook marketing expert, aka queen of Facebook, and this is actually my 14th time because I have been at every single social media marketing world. There is no amount of sophisticated technology that can ever take the place of live, in person, IRL, heart to heart, face to face. You could very well meet some of your best friends, clients, joint venture partners, alliances, have opportunities, podcasts, speaking engagements. It's extraordinary. So come on in for this beautiful in-person experience. Get tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info

0:37Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Today, Jerry Potter and I are exploring important updates from LinkedIn with our special guest, AJ Wilcox. Take it away, Jerry. Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here. It's a weird time to be marketing on LinkedIn.

1:15On one hand, they seem to be doing more and more to crack down on AI slop than most platforms. But on the other hand, they keep adding more AI tools. So how are we as marketers and business owners supposed to keep up with what's working, take advantage of AI, but also keep the humanity that actually leads to sales for our companies? That's what we're exploring today. We're very excited to be joined by AJ Wilcox. AJ is the world's leading LinkedIn ads expert and teaches businesses to drive high quality B2B leads at scale. He's the founder and CEO of B2Linked and the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast.

1:48Today, AJ, Mike, and I are going to explore what these latest updates mean from LinkedIn for small business marketers and owners like you. AJ, welcome back to the show. I'm so excited to be here. What is this, like fourth time this year? I'm so excited. Yeah, we're excited to have you. So LinkedIn seems to be doing more than any other platform to cut down on AI slop. And they've even said they've now blocked hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts every day and billions of automated posting attempts over recent months. They introduced the feature where members can report content they believe is AI slop, giving LinkedIn additional human feedback to go along with its automated detection models.

2:26And then they're also, you know, telling us in the analytics dashboard if people thought your post felt like a heavy use of AI. So I guess let's start here, AJ. Do you feel like there's less AI slop on LinkedIn than there was, let's say, a few months back? I don't. I see no difference. When they talk about how LinkedIn has now blocked hundreds of thousands or millions of comments, I haven't seen it because I still have like the same five commenters on every one of my posts, all definitely driven by AI. So I haven't seen it yet, but I won't hate it when it cleans things up, if it does. You know, it makes me wonder because I've got this one guy, I don't even know who he is, but he always comments like one of the first commenters.

3:08It's always AI and always has all the AI tells. And I'm like conflicted because, you know, nobody likes to be the first commenter. Do I just let him comment, even though it's pretty obvious to me that it's AI or do I just let it go? I do occasionally report the comment seems like AI slot, but it doesn't seem to do anything. So it makes me wonder, AJ, this must be like serious problems that we don't even see. I don't or I don't know. I mean, what do we make of this? I don't know. I think when LinkedIn released the feature of marking both posts and comments as AI slop, I think the goal from the very beginning was this isn't going to be a penalty for the post.

3:47This is just teaching LinkedIn what actually is AI slop or what we consider not helpful. And so I don't actually think that this is going to. well, at least for right now, I don't see it actually telling LinkedIn like, oh, don't show this, do show this. But I think we're going to see that down the road. What you said, Mike, is so dead on because I, when I see somebody comment and I just go, oh, slop, I don't know what it, I'm trying to like route what is in my brain. I think it's that I look at it and I go, oh, this person only gets a slop comments. Why should I join that conversation? I don't know if every person can tell, but like, you know how it is, AJ, when you seem to have the same person commenting all the time on your posts, you're going to see it more than probably the fans are and the followers are going to see it.

4:28But there's like telltale signs that I notice when I'm looking at those comments. And the one seems to always be guard your mental faculties or guard the doors to whatever. I mean, like it's the one that I see over and over again, but I can smell them and I just don't know what to do with them. So I don't know. Is there an opportunity where we can like hold comments like, or anything like that? There's nothing built in like that, right, AJ? No, but I also don't see the ones that I report as AI slop. I don't see them going anywhere. They get very few likes and responses to them anyway. So they're just going to naturally fall to the bottom.

5:01I think we just kind of let natural engagement, I end up pushing that content down to the bottom where it belongs. Okay. And think of all the billions that are not showing up, right? Where are these? Yeah. So it feels to me like LinkedIn is saying, use AI, but don't let us notice you used AI. Don't let anybody else notice you used AI. Like, is that actually a reasonable standard for where we are at this point? No, it hasn't been reasonable from the very beginning. Like LinkedIn took that stance right from the beginning. That's like, oh, AI, because we're connected to Microsoft and they're invested in open AI, we have to be on the forefront and push it.

5:37And all of us could see it from a mile away. Like, whoa, if you're promoting AI at some point, your platform is going to be taken over by just bots talking to bots. And so I do see this is a pendulum swing that went too far one way. now it's got to swing too far back the other. I do hope that it hasn't turned too many people away because there's still a lot of really valuable conversation happening on LinkedIn and I want to be a part of it. AJ, I am a voracious creator of content and mostly video content these days. So I don't have a lot of time to go in and comment on other people's posts. But I do remember there was a feature that said like enhance your comment with AI or craft a comment with AI that was built into LinkedIn.

6:17Does that still exist? Do you have any insights on that at all? I think that one actually is getting replaced or it might still be there. But what I remember is a little over a year ago, LinkedIn released the visibility of we can see how many impressions our comments get. So it used to be that you would only see impressions on a post, but now it's comments. And of course, we know what gets measured gets optimized towards. And it's a legitimate strategy. I've seen a lot of people saying, I'm not going to spend the time creating the content. I'm just going to go and leave really smart, like adding to the conversation comments on other people who have bigger audiences.

6:52And I'm seeing great performance from that, or at least hearing. I haven't moved that direction myself, but yeah, I don't know about the AI interplay there, but I do see a huge importance of comments. Yeah. Well, then there's been some updates to comments that I want to ask you about too, in just a second here, AJ. But I mean, as obviously as, you know, busy people, it's very tempting to have AI help us write our LinkedIn posts, especially if we're trying to post across platforms. And if you still want that efficiency, like what should AI actually be doing versus which part should we be keeping for ourself?

7:25Like, how do you balance that? Yeah, I think AI helps really well with ideation. So before you start writing, if you come up with a conversation to AI and you say, help flesh out my idea, this is kind of what I want to say. What points should I be hitting? AI is great with that. And it's also really good at the polish. You say, here is my expertise. This is what I want to share. I've hit all the points. You helped me kind of come up with this. Now help me make sure that it's readable, scannable, all of that. I think that's what AI does really well. It's that part in the middle, the actually sharing, helpful, interesting expertise that I think a lot of the slop is lacking.

8:02One thing that I just want to add to this conversation is there are a lot of us marketers who work on a desktop and we have tools like built in tools in the operating system or third party tools that allow us to narrate comments. and I'm starting to notice really actual deep rich comments from people across the social platforms that are formatted beautifully full paragraphs and it's pretty obvious that they're using something like whisper flow and I'm responding also using audio because it's so much faster for me to speak out a comment than to type a comment I kind of don't have a problem with that kind of AI use in comments.

8:44And I'm curious, AJ, do you find yourself sometimes using these audio narration tools to make it easy for you to respond to legitimate comments or comments on other people's posts? I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that. I do. I love it. And I wouldn't call that AI slop at all. Obviously we have a very different writing style than we have a speaking style, but as long as we don't mind sharing a different style in different posts, I think that's great. Whatever's going to help you get your expertise and your ideas out. So if someone's listening or watching right now and they're thinking like, OK, well, I don't think I sound like AI.

9:18Like, I don't know. Can you think of anything that marketers might be doing that could be mistaken as AI without realizing it? I mean, the default tells like using I even if I wanted to use an M dash, I'm no longer using M dashes. That's just not going to happen. Well, and emojis, obviously, you're not going to normally put an emoji in a comment, right? Yep. True. Things that are, it's this, not that this is silently killing you, like all that kind of stuff. I think, you know, obviously just avoid, but I would also say like, just make sure that what you're sharing, whether it has spelling errors, whether it's, you know, finally polished, you're actually sharing something of value.

9:58And I think if you're sharing something of value, it's never going to get called AI slop unless you're a terrible writer, but I would hope not. Well, now I feel like I should go into my analytics and see, because I, I actually changed my email signature to say proud long time M dash user because I do use them in my emails and I, I love it. I'm not going to stop using them. I love breaking up text. Yeah. And I've always used emojis too. So now I'm just wondering, like, is my stuff getting reported? Do you know if somebody's, you know, stuff gets reported by like an automated way? Does it, do you find out somehow?

10:33Because they've said that if the human reported stuff will be shared. I have no idea. But this was actually brand new news to me in the article when it said that we're going to be able to see how many people or what sort of reporting people were calling our stuff AI slop. That's great. I think some people are going to call it AI slop because they don't like you. Maybe it's a competitor, maybe an ex-employee or whatever. Like, I think that's naturally going to happen. But if you see a lot of it, maybe that is a tell that maybe you should adjust your writing style or what you're sharing. Yeah. Okay, that's fair.

11:03So Mike, earlier you asked about the, you know, AI helping you write comments. LinkedIn has or is in the process of replacing the AI powered enhance your post feature with a new one that's just a proofreading tool to correct writing while kind of keeping the author's original voice, allegedly. So it sounds like almost grammarly except built in. So I'm thinking about that. And now, you know, LinkedIn telling you when people think your posts feel too AI, you know, generated. I mean, I guess at what point do you think, and I know you haven't seen it, but at what point do we go, okay, I have to start paying attention to this.

11:39I've got to, I've got to find my humanity again. Like, should we start leaving typos in our content? I've actually considered that and I'm not against it whatsoever, but you know, it's super easy to tell AI, you know, put a typo or two in my content to make it look more human. So I think this is just going to be a constant cat and mouse race that we're going to be having. But I think like, yes, having something review when your voice is already in it. Personally, I'm going to remove the M dashes. I might just put a hyphen in there, even if it's not correct. But yeah, I think that's probably a good way of testing.

12:12If you do see a lot of pushback from it or people calling it AI slop, okay, maybe stop using the feature. Okay. All right. So we've talked about comments. Obviously a lot of this has been about posting, but comments are a big part of LinkedIn and LinkedIn is now making them more prominent without having to click to see the comments. And according to this release, I haven't seen this myself, but it almost sounds like they're going to feature conversations that don't necessarily include the post, like stuff just from the comments. Apparently the thing that's driving this is the time spent in comments on LinkedIn is up 18 % year over year, surprising with all of the AI slop stuff that we've been talking about.

12:50And then also the comments feature, well, they show it's no longer the top comment. It's now gonna be the top comment for you. So the top comment that Mike sees or AJ sees or that I see might be a different one. And so like, is this time to, I mean, you kind of alluded this before, but I know my comments often get way more reach than any of my posts. If somebody's busy, they got 20 minutes a day for LinkedIn. I mean, is it time to consider just commenting instead of posting? I think so. I mean, I think if you are a true thought leader, you're the one coming up with new concepts. I think you have to post.

13:24But if you don't or you don't have the time, I think it's a totally legitimate strategy to spend your time commenting in others. Of course, you can be strategic about it. I probably wouldn't jump right to, I don't know, some massive influencer and go and just like, make sure I'm commenting in every one of their posts. But you know, you could, I would just be smart about it. Make sure that you actually have something to share with the conversation. Where do we find people to do? Like if somebody was going to start this strategy, how do you recommend finding or customizing our feed in order to find the right people for that?

13:54Customizing your feed is it's, it's a little hard because that's going to happen naturally. The people that you engage with, LinkedIn is going to show you more from the people that you're having DM conversations behind the scenes, LinkedIn is going to show you more of their content. So you could, of course, just make sure that the kinds of people you are engaging with them, you're messaging them behind the scenes that can help kind of curate your post. If you're trying to be a thought leader in your industry, follow and find the people who are posting about your industry. For me, it's really easy.

14:22I search for the hashtag LinkedIn ads and I'm going to get everyone that I want, but that's going to hit my competition. You know, basically everyone who is a LinkedIn ads agency like me. But if I want to go where my clientele is, maybe it can be more of like, let me find people who are talking about B2B marketing in general, but not LinkedIn and do those searches on LinkedIn, follow people, send connection requests. It's a long process to curate your feed. I've been doing it for years and years, but now I'm really happy with what's in my feed. Jerry, a couple of thoughts, because this is so fascinating.

14:53I think this is a cross-platform opportunity discussion here. Recently, by the time this show comes out, I don't know how recent it will be, but we had done a contest where we were seeking ideas to get 3000 people to social media marketing world. And it was really fascinating to see some people put an enormous amount of thought into their comments. And what ended up happening was lots of people responded to their comments and people were tagging them and the other comments. And then what happened, you know, And Facebook does this and now LinkedIn presumably is doing this as well. Those comments were brought to the top because that led to people saying there's a lot of gold in the comments.

15:35You know what I mean? And that's what happens on certain kinds of posts. So what does this mean strategically? Well, I think if there's someone you're following who has a rather large following and they are asking for something that could lead to rich dialogue, what you could do is strategically invest a little more time in actually putting together a really thoughtful comment, knowing that it's likely that other people will engage with that comment. And then all of a sudden you become the relevant comment that's at the top. and now all of a sudden that it's almost like you are riding the wave of the post.

16:12Does that make sense? And all of a sudden your name is the first name that everybody sees and all the engagement with that. And that could be a strategic advantage. Now it's not like this happens every day, but I don't know, AJ, what's your thoughts on something like this? Have you seen this happen in other posts? Yeah. We all have our influencers that have lots of comments and sometimes other people's comments rise up to the top. Yeah. I actually saw this on your post specifically about that. I was looking through going, Ooh, I can't wait to go to social media marketing world and look at all these great ideas, man.

16:41I wish I was thinking of these things too. Yeah. So there is a strategy to being the one who puts the thoughtful comment in there that, and in a timely fashion, right? Because there is a window, I think, right, AJ? I mean, how long is the window on LinkedIn before that post is no longer shown to anyone? 24 hours, 48 hours. When I've had a post really pop off, I'm still getting comments like two, maybe three days later, but most of my posts are dead by the evening if I post them in the morning. So yeah, you probably want to make sure if you're leaving thoughtful comments, leave them in the first, let's say hour or two.

17:16Otherwise they might just get buried. Yeah. And strategically, if you know that someone posted a certain time each morning, then you can kind of be sure to go in there and be one of the first to comment. That's just thought, right? How frequently are you posting AJ, when you say that, because I don't post frequently, but sometimes I swear somebody's commenting on something from a month ago and they're like, Hey, can you send me this? And I'm like, Oh, that already happened. Uh, yeah. I mean, LinkedIn announced it's probably been six months ago that they were going to do more of that. They're going to let your posts live longer.

17:47And I have seen some evidence of that. I still see some likes and comments come from older posts, but it hasn't changed all that much. I still see my most recent post is actually getting more engagement every day. So yeah, I think it starts with, you know, just make sure that you're giving the attention to that post and don't release another one and cut off the previous one's engagement. So usually I'll post on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mondays and Fridays are kind of problematic. Monday, there's a lot of competition. Everyone's going to post. I don't want my post to get lost there. Friday, people are checking out, but Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I like.

18:23So if I'm doing one post per week, it was probably going to be on a Wednesday. And if I'm doing two, It's probably gonna be a Tuesday and a Thursday. Okay. Whoa. Okay, wait, let me ask you a question on this because there are obviously influencers on LinkedIn that are posting multiple times per day. They're playing a different algorithmic strategy here. What do you want to say to the person listening who is concerned about just posting a couple times a week versus multiple times a day? I would say don't try to fix what's not broken. If it's working for you, great. I just have noticed with my own posts that if I post two times in a day, my first post will perform all the way up until the time where my second post happens.

18:59And then the new post steals all the engagement and the first one stops getting shared for the most part. Okay, see, and you're looking at the data and other people aren't. So I think that's amazing.

19:09AJ Wilcox: Hi, my name is Mandy Hedrick and I'm here at Social Media Marketing World. My first time attending Social Media Marketing World and I had won my ticket. And so I attended online and the impact it had in what I could do for my business immediately. It was my goal as a business owner to be able to earmark the dollars. This is my second time in person. So I just love being in a room full of people that are like-minded. It's a big investment, but I'm not just investing in myself, but I'm also investing in my clients. And I will be coming back every single year. I'm already ready to buy my next ticket and book my hotel room.

19:48Get tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info. Mike, I want to come back to what you said about, you know, really putting intention into your comments because, and I've seen this on my own account where again, I, my comments, if I looked at the last year have probably gotten more reach than my profile, which is a little on the sad side, but I'm also now thinking if they're going to surface comments by themselves, should we be thinking AJ that the comment should include even more context so that it even works without the original post or without fully knowing or understanding the original post?

20:20I mean, are we headed to that point? I don't think so. I I could be wrong, but I think LinkedIn's always going to show the original post. They're just going to have the top comment pre-broken out below it. So you see it as you're reading the post. That's what it looks like now. If they change it, I would be really surprised because the context of the original post, it's everything for how the conversation starts and who's sharing it. But I don't know. LinkedIn really could surprise me here. And then maybe you're right. Maybe we do want to enumerate this is the topic and this is why it's important.

20:53I read it the way you read it, AJ. I mean, as I was reading over the release or the article that was written by social media today, I think it's not the comment without the post. I can't even imagine that. Yeah, that would truly be bizarre. Yeah, and then another thought I had too is, Mike, you were saying, and this is kind of cross-platform, is that comments that get replies also get more featured. So should we be asking for, like should we have a call to action for people to reply to our comments then? Well, there's a lot of commenters who intentionally try to strategically do this and I don't fall for it.

21:26What they'll do is they'll say something along the lines and they'll say, well, and what do you think about this? Because what they're trying to do is get the follow-on comments. And obviously as a creator who has a very limited amount of bandwidth, I'm only gonna comment once. Maybe I'll just say thank you or whatever, but I'm not gonna keep that discussion going because I just don't have the bandwidth for it. But there are lots of people that do a great job at this. I don't personally have any data. I don't know if you do, AJ. if I think about how the algorithm likely works, my guess is they probably want lots of different people because you can get into this little comment thread where you're going back and forth with someone in 16 different threads.

22:01And I don't think that's going to matter as much as having maybe a bunch of people adding into the discussion. I don't know. I don't really have the insights. AJ, have you heard anything from LinkedIn on this? Yeah. The head of LinkedIn company pages years ago told me that the one metric that they care most about, I think they They called it comment density. And it was like, if everyone's just like, thanks, bro. Thanks, bro. Nice job. Like they don't consider that a high quality post. But if it's like, oh, I say this and someone's like, oh, that's interesting. What about this? And there is depth there showing an actual conversation happening.

22:34I know from the company page side, LinkedIn really cared. I have to imagine if company pages care about that, their profiles, their personal profiles are also catering to it. So, yeah, I think my favorite follow on to a comment would be something like, am I wrong or what am I missing? I feel really good about that because people are going to actually add in what I might be missing. And that helps me. That helps me actually learn what I was missing. But a lot of them are just going to jump on and say, no, no, I agree with you. I like that phrase, comment density. And to clarify, too, I agree, Mike.

23:06I wasn't suggesting you go back and ask the original poster a question. Just have them keep coming back. you know like you said that 16 exchange but asking other people so i comment and then i yeah the one you just gave aj is perfect like what did i miss and then other people comment that's that's that's what i would think it would be valuable because back in the day this was on facebook but i tested two people commenting back and forth and it doesn't that's not what they're looking for well and i hate to say it but the posts are going to get the most comments are not the positive posts they're the negative posts it's when you sow disagreement and so many of us marketers don't want to do that.

23:40That's not how I roll. Sometimes I just happen to talk about something that's controversial, like AI, and it naturally invites people that are in opposition to me. But those are the ones that are going to have the deepest, richest reactions because people feel very vehemently in opposition to something. I don't know. Those are the ones I don't personally like. I prefer the ones that have a rich field of opportunity and ideas and other people are spawning and playing on top of each other and they're all getting into the vibe of it. Can I ask a question just because you're both active content creators.

24:10An issue that I see a lot is someone will post something and I don't agree with it. What sort of comment can I leave to be respectful and not be a jerk, but also try to set the record straight? Here's how I would do it. I would first of all say, hey, name. Hey, AJ, thank you so much for explaining your view on this. I think that you might want to figure out something, some way to compliment them. like you're brave to go out there and say that. I have a slightly different take. You see where I'm going with that? And what do you think? Right. I think if you do something like that, then you're probably going to get a better response versus the alternative, which is to say unfiltered what's in your brain.

24:52Yeah. You're wrong. Yeah. Well, and first of all, you have to decide, do I want to get into it with this person? Right. That's the risk. Second, you know, we've both known AJ for a number of years and I can't even imagine you being disrespectful, AJ. I'd like to see that. That would be neat. But there's a thing that I actually use with my kids that I think applies here. And I got it from an episode of Ted Lasso, where he says, be curious, not judgmental. So one of the things that I do with my kids sometimes is when, you know, instead of saying, you know, they say something that I think is ridiculous or off, instead of saying I disagree, I just keep asking them questions to make them justify their own thing.

25:27Now, obviously, you got to have time to do that, right, as a busy marketer. But it's a great way to kind of get into things politely. And sometimes it goes nowhere. And that's the great thing is as an adult, you can close the app and move on with your day. I love the Ted Lasso principle. I'm going to use it. Yeah, it works right with kids. And I think it would work really well with adults as well. So cool. Well, another AI addition that is coming to LinkedIn, even though they're saying don't let us know you're using AI. They've added an AI system that analyzes live streams on the platform and then find standout moments and basically turns them into short form clips.

25:57You can adjust the length of each suggested clip. It also generates chapters inside of longer recordings so viewers can navigate to sections rather than scrubbing, which is awesome. Like, you know, that's a feature YouTube has had for years. And it's available supposedly to all LinkedIn users globally, although it appears to just be pages and not profiles because I do a weekly live stream that we've been putting on LinkedIn, but I didn't see anything in there. Do you know if it's everything or have you seen anything official, AJ, as of now? Nothing official, but I would assume that yours is pretty authoritative if you're not seeing it on a personal live stream.

26:31I do hope it's coming because this has been fixing an issue that LinkedIn Live has had. I don't know how long we've had lives for three or four years where the replays are just like mind numbing to try to scrub through. Like who's actually going to sit and watch a replay if if they can't see it? And then you as the creator, if you go and want to respond to comments, you have to hit the play button. Watch live for when the comment appears. At least this is the way it was in the past. I don't know if they fixed it. you couldn't just go to the end and start responding to every comment that people left.

27:04Oh, it's so infuriating. So if anything, I'm really a fan of this just because I think it's going to make people want to actually engage with the replay. Do you think this is to encourage people to do lives more on LinkedIn? Because it seems like, you know, with the clubhouse boom, and after that, they were all about it. And now I don't feel like I see it as often. I don't think so. I think the die off that's kind of happened with live streaming on LinkedIn, I think it's caused them to not release as many features for it as quickly. So I think this is something that probably should have come out two, three years ago, and they just didn't make it a priority until now.

27:37But yeah, I do. I think if you have a reason to live stream, great. Like this will be encouragement for you. But if you don't have a reason to live stream, I probably wouldn't start just for this. Yeah, it's interesting because it says that after the stream is over with, they have recommended clips. so the idea here is if you do stream and many of us that stream i mean i don't actually stream anymore but many people that do stream tend to simulcast to lots of different platforms it might be interesting to see how good the clips are because one of the things that a lot of people try to do and they struggle to do is to find in a one hour or three hour stream because there's people that go along for a very long time, kind of what the nuggets are.

28:19And sometimes those actual clips from a live stream will outperform the stream itself because they will potentially go viral. We've seen this across all the platforms where there's an interview and it's obviously taken from a larger interview and there's just that one little gold clip. So if this thing is able to identify that and create that clip so you can share it on the other social platforms, I would imagine that would be really valuable. But my instinct is it's only going to be shareable on LinkedIn. That's what my instinct says. Can you say more about that? What do you mean internally to only be able to be shared on LinkedIn or the content will only be relevant?

28:51According to this, it's going to automatically come up with recommended clips and it's going to probably allow you to make the clips. I don't know how well it's going to format the clips. We know there are third-party tools like Opus Clip and other tools like AI tools that will potentially do a better job, but then you have to know how to use these tools and have subscriptions to these tools. I'm not sure LinkedIn will want you to download these clips to be able to publish on other platforms. I don't know whether those clips will be formatted into a nine by 16 instead of 16 by nine. My guess is they won't because I don't really see, unless I'm wrong, AJ, I don't really see LinkedIn as vertical video platform.

29:29Although I do publish vertical videos on there, but they're very short. I don't know. Are people doing vertical video on LinkedIn? Yeah. I think a couple of years ago when LinkedIn started trying to create the TikTok like feed, they were going really heavy on vertical video. And you pretty much only made it into the video feed if you were vertical. Personally, one of my posts has never made it into the feed. And then LinkedIn kind of lost some steam and now that's not such a thing anymore. But what was so interesting is we ran tests on the ad side. If you are advertising, you can run AB and ABC tests in this way that you can't run organically.

30:06And what we found, even though we know 80 % of engagement on LinkedIn comes from mobile. So of course you'd think, oh, if 80 % of users are mobile, that means if you go vertical video, it takes up more of the screen. You're going to get more engagement. It's going to look better. When we've done this test of the exact same content in wide, square and tall, we actually found that wide 16 by nine is outperforming everything hands down for engagement, for watch time completion. and so I don't know if it's on the organic side, if it works the same way, but I'm doing most everything 16 by nine wide on LinkedIn.

30:41Do you think it's because of the text that accompanies the top and bottom of it that might be helpful for people that aren't gonna necessarily watch the whole video, AJ? Because isn't there normally a headline and description text that goes with that? Yeah, I think that probably plays into it. I think it also plays into the fact that if the only thing on your screen is the video itself, you're not seeing the engagement buttons like like and comment. So you're probably going to do less of that. I don't know, but Michael, that does make a lot of sense. You know, what's interesting is I've had LinkedIn experts on the show and I can't remember the names of the people that told me this.

31:12But when it comes to organic content, vertical images actually perform better than square and horizontal images when they're accompanying text for whatever reason on the organic feed itself. Because those images tend to be shown fully in the feed and they will kind of stop the scroll. And I have experimented with that, but I do find that sometimes they will shrink them down. So I'm not 100 % sure. I don't know, AJ, have you tried this at all on your organic content, putting vertical images in there, like selfies and stuff like that? Yeah, I've tried. Like if I'm going to do it as an ad, I find that square outperforms tall and wide, but organically it's really hard to AB test that way.

31:54So I've tried a little bit of everything. I have had some Intel, you know, most of my testing, I'll do 16 by nine and then flip it and do nine by 16. But I have had several people tell me that four by five, the same format that they use on, I think it's Insta and TikTok is performing really well. I just haven't had a chance to test that yet. Yeah, it makes sense because the four by five takes up a substantial portion of the screen. But as you said, you can still see the caption. And on the consumer side, I don't read the, like, I don't watch many videos because if I don't have a caption to draw me in, That's not why I'm on LinkedIn.

32:27So with this, I'm kind of excited about this. Like I'm half tempted to stream to my company page if this thing actually works and my company page is covered in dust. I don't know if I've ever posted on it. I just wanted to have a logo there. So like, what do you think knowing what you know about the way people use LinkedIn and the LinkedIn algorithm, if somebody starts using these, I mean, is the expectation more reach obviously, but is it likely to get more people attending the next live? Or you said live stream replays are terrible to watch? Or is it just another shiny tool? Yeah, I think it really is going to enhance the rewatch experience.

33:01So I don't think it's going to make any more people show up. I think your live stream is going to be what it is when you go live. But if it's less frustrating of a process to actually watch and get value out of later, I would hope that those live streams live longer. And one thing for folks to know is that on Facebook, they only will keep your stream up there for, I believe, 30 to 60 days and then that video is gone. So the benefit of LinkedIn is I do not believe that they're pulling the old streams off. I think that those turn into videos. Do they not on LinkedIn, right, AJ? And you can watch those down the road.

33:34Yeah. I mean, they're normal video posts. As long as people are watching it, it'll live for six months past that. So I wouldn't be surprised if they live for six months, but who knows, maybe longer. Yeah, they do exist. But just like trying to go back and watch anybody's content on LinkedIn, the experience is very clunky, right? You go to their profile, you scroll down, you choose, you're like, it's not like going to a YouTube channel and you can, you know, binge all their live streams or anything like that. So is there a scenario where someone who's not currently live stream, like just let's assume this works well, it picks good clips.

34:05It doesn't start without context. It actually opens with a decent hook. It doesn't, you know, like a lot of these AI tools have been, you know, set up and no payoff when I've tested them. So let's say that it works. Is there a scenario here where this is a solution for companies that, for example, can't get their CEO to make any videos, but they do a live stream and now they've got a month worth of content all from the CEO on video? I do think so. Specifically for that scenario, like, you know, that if something comes from your executive team, it's going to perform better. It's going to get a lot more reach.

34:38It's going to be a lot more impactful for your business and doing a live stream is the only way you can get them on video. Absolutely. But I have found that when you have someone in an interview, a type of format, they're going to speak differently than if they're just explaining the topic. So when I use short form video as ads, I want those posts or I want the videos to be like 30 to 40 seconds. That's going to perform the very best to cold audiences. And if I go and try to pull 30, 40 second snippets out of a podcast or a webinar, it's going to be really hard. They're not going to say it as succinctly as if I could get them to just say, Hey, riff on this topic, tell me about this.

35:17So if you can, I would actually go direct, but you know, maybe as a live stream, maybe that's a great way, especially if you can download those clips later that it gives you. Yeah. I'm just picturing the marketing director and the, they're busy CEO, or in some cases agencies that are going to their clients and they're like, Hey, can you record some videos for us and they're like too busy. Nope, nope, can't do it. Well, and I think you're onto something here, Jerry, but I don't think you have to go live to pull off what we're talking about. I think that anyone could with a smartphone and a tripod film someone who is an expert and just ask them a series of questions.

35:55We do this at social media marketing world. You guys have seen this, but we have a professional video guy doing it, but you don't need this where we ask a series of questions engineered to get them to say the kind of thing we're looking for, right? Like, what is it about this conference that makes it different than other conferences, right? Or whatever. You prompt those questions, they'll echo back the question typically, and then they'll say something. Now, not every response is great, but it does require someone, historically a human, to go through and cut out all the winning testimonials. However, this is where the however is very strong.

36:26AI has gotten ridiculously good at this. and for folks that are watching my new show, Press Start the Road to 3000, I am literally taking Google Meets and I am having AI go through like a 20 minute meet, find the story arc, find the clips, edit the whole thing together locally on my computer and it's creating everything for me. And we are very close to people not needing to go out and find the tool like LinkedIn clips or this or that. They'll pretty quickly be able to do this themselves. and I do think this is going to be the holy grail of content creation because this is the hard thing right it's really really hard AJ you know how hard this is I'm sure when you're filming ads with clients it's really really hard to get someone to succinctly say something or even script it and sound natural but it's actually not hard to just ask them a series of questions knowing that you're going to fish for the value and maybe cut some clips together and this is where you know professional video companies and agencies thrive, but we're getting really close to being able to actually engineer the right kind of questions on the front end and have great content on the back end.

37:37AJ, are you finding that some of your clients are doing this with success and they're making for great ads? There are some people who are more seasoned on video that if you tell them, hey, record in 4K on your phone with a good mic, they'll go and do it and it's going to turn out great. But most are not. Most are not media trained. And so the next best thing is interview them and ask questions exactly like that. Oh, I found that somebody has to do the work to find the gold, but, but we're getting to the point where AI can help you with this is where I'm going with this. Yeah. And I found you can do it on zoom and you can do it on Google meets, but of course those platforms are going to try to degrade the audio and video quality to just make the meeting better.

38:13I use Descript, Squadcast, Riverside, like one of those who really do prioritize like the highest quality video and the highest quality audio, pretty cheap subscription, I'm sure, but that's the best way to record. We're using StreamYard and it does the same thing. So there are great tools out there and then you can just do all that stuff. So this is a worthy diversion. Back to you, Jerry. Well, so, you know, we're talking about ads here. And one thing that marketers have always known is, you know, assuming the platform can handle it, the more ads you can test, the better chance of finding the gold to use that phrase.

38:47And LinkedIn is actually reporting that any marketer who runs more than five variations see a 20 % higher click through rate over those who just test one ad. And so now they are introducing these new AI powered creative tools to help you create more ad variations. They've added where you can add brand kits to make things happen faster, like all of these additional tools. So AJ, have you played with these yet? And like, how good are they? To be honest, they're no different than if you just went to chat GPT and said, you know, here's my logo and my brand voice, write some copy for me. They're going to come out like exactly the same, but it is nice that it's baked into the platform.

39:26It's just, it's one less place to go to copy and paste in. You can do that right within the platform itself. I still don't find the actual AI created content all that great. I'm still going to always like edit as a human and put my own things in there, but it can be good for a start. Well, as somebody who's been doing LinkedIn ads since before this was here though, that you'll, be the last one, right? The last adopter. Probably. So just so I'm clear, AJ, is this purely with the written word? This is not with video or images or anything along those lines? Yep. We know images is coming. LinkedIn have talked about the integrated Microsoft, I think it's a publisher or something.

40:02It's like their visual editor is kind of like a Canva into it. I didn't see it in there today, so it looks like it might've gotten pulled, but we know the next piece is going to be LLM-based image generation. So I'm excited to see that. But yeah, right now it's just simple text, headlines and intros. So if we don't use LinkedIn's AI and we do assume that what they said is true, more creative equals better likely results. Do you have any tips on how we could use tools like AI, ChatGPT, Claude to kind of help us create more assets so that we can use them on LinkedIn? Any thoughts on this? Are you currently recommending this?

40:41So many thoughts. I don't recommend it. Here's why. This is what LinkedIn's not telling advertisers that if you have five or more creatives in an ad set, what's going to happen is you're going to be able to show your ads. It kind of graduates you into breaking the frequency cap to where now you're able to show your ads more often than twice per day to the same active user. And I don't like doing that because now you're entering more auctions and raising your prices and everyone else's prices you're making the whole auction more competitive by doing that. Alternatively, what happens is if you have a lot of creatives, we know LinkedIn's still going to pick their top one and two, give them the majority of the impressions, and then everything else is just going to trickle out.

41:22So what I generally recommend is two creatives per ad set, maybe up to four if you want, but I don't go higher than that. It's just, it's putting more money in LinkedIn's pockets. And when you say creatives per ad set, clarify what you mean by creatives. Oh, yeah. Individual versions of an ad. So oftentimes I'll have one image with two intro texts to describe it. So it would be two separate creatives. Or you might have one intro text and two visuals. Or you can go crazy and do the combination of all four of those. And then you'd have four creatives in an ad set. Now, this is completely different than what Facebook does.

41:58Facebook recommends lots and lots of combinations. First of all, because they've got a bazillion different placements, right? And they're trying to place it on Instagram or WhatsApp or this or that, you know, they've got all these different placements, Messenger, Facebook. So it's quite a different thing. So what I'm hearing you say is, hey, don't bring your meta best practices over to LinkedIn because that actually might end up backfiring on you. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's not going to kill you for sure. Like sure, test more creatives, but generally what we found is like, it's not going to be worth it to bring more creatives.

42:29I do like to find like bring your highest performing creative over for meta. Let's test it and see if the LinkedIn audience likes it. Test the same strategies, but I'm not going to feed it with content just like I would meta. Meta loves lots of content. LinkedIn does not. Hey, Jay, this has been a really fascinating conversation. Thank you for joining us today. If people want to learn more about you or explore working with you, where do you want to send them? Come listen to the LinkedIn ad show podcast. That's probably the best way. Also, follow me on LinkedIn. and I'm sharing all my top best stuff for free everywhere.

43:01AJ and Jerry, thanks so much for being on the show today. And folks, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you because we took some diversions today. Head on over to socialmediaexaminer.com slash 738. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a little while, we would love a review. Do check out my other show, the AI Explored podcast. This brings us to the end of the social media marketing podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzer, and I was joined today by my co-host, Jerry Potter. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving.

43:32Catch you next time. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

43:43Hey, before you go, we just announced our first speakers for Social Media Marketing World 2027. Two dozen practitioners, every single one personally recruited. Every session, pitch free. Go see the lineup and grab your discounted tickets right now at socialmediamarketingworld.info.