Unlocking Success with a Modern LinkedIn Strategy: Insights from Neal Schaffer

Neal Schaffer [00:00:00]:
And I think that’s why that content goes really viral, is if you create something that people would want to share. So it’s a different mindset altogether. First we need to make it for the platform, but then we want to make it so it’s universal enough that other people would want to republish it on their own platform and share it. And if you can do that right, whether it’s text or image or carousel or newsletter, that’s really the secret. Influential and thought provoking minds in marketing, sales and business. The Business of Marketing Podcast.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:31]:
Welcome again to the business of marketing. I’m a Lee Judge. If you’re in B2B and you’re not paying attention to LinkedIn right now, you’re falling behind. This platform isn’t just a digital resume anymore. It’s where real business happens. It’s where buyers do research, where content drives conversations, and where brand visibility can actually move the needle. But here’s the thing. Most people are using it wrong.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:54]:
They post, they hope, and they wonder why, why nothing’s happening. Or worse, they copy what influencers do and attract engagement from the wrong crowd entirely. So in this episode, we’re gonna fix that. You’re gonna hear from someone who’s built a career helping businesses grow through smart, intentional LinkedIn strategies, someone who’s coached teams, written the playbook, and continues to stay five steps ahead of where the platform is going. So stick around, because this conversation could completely change how you show up on LinkedIn. Joining me today is the author of MA LinkedIn for Business Growth, Neal Shafer. Hey, Neil.

Neal Schaffer [00:01:33]:
Hey, Lee. Thanks for that very, very kind intro. I’m really excited to be here today.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:38]:
I’m excited to talk to you because, you know, you and I spoke recently and in that conversation we began talking about LinkedIn and so many things came up that I wanted to know from you and to dive deeper on. Sound like chatgpt. I wanted to dive deeper and learn more about your views on LinkedIn. Where we’re going. I understand you have an updated version of this book coming soon, so maybe our conversation’s timely, right?

Neal Schaffer [00:02:01]:
I would hope so, yes.

A. Lee Judge [00:02:03]:
Okay, so let’s jump right in. The first question I have is, you know, another business professional and I was recently talking about how we get engagement on LinkedIn. In fact, another person who was a LinkedIn guru was kind of schooling us on LinkedIn engagement and because their posts were going almost viral each time. But after, after we researched a bit, we found out that that person, they had tons of engagement, but it was from Perhaps the wrong people. So the other person and I, who kind of felt like we were, weren’t doing enough, realized that like me, Most of her LinkedIn connections were were C suite executives who weren’t on LinkedIn every day and weren’t always, you know, posting as much. So my question to you is, how do B2B professionals ensure their message resonates with decision makers instead of just active users?

Neal Schaffer [00:02:56]:
Yeah. So I guess I would first take a step back. Most, or I’d say an overwhelming majority of people are not posting regularly on LinkedIn. So maybe some people in the audience are like us and they want to know how to get to that next step. But I would take a step back and say before you do anything, because the message has to be aligned with the profile. So to me, all roads lead back to your profile and that’s where I want to make sure that it is really optimized. Now, you may think your profile is optimized, you may have done it three, six, nine months ago, but things change. Your career changes.

Neal Schaffer [00:03:28]:
If, you know, if you’re doing marketing, maybe your employer changed or maybe the focus of your role or the focus of your product and services or industry targeting has changed. So I think it’s, you know, I always find myself, if I was to go in any given month in my own profile, I’d find something to revise to make sure it is completely aligned. And obviously you have the visual at the top. We call it the COVID you know, headline image or cover photo. You have that headline, professional headline, and then you have your about section and then your current experience. Those are the four, you know, I think critical areas just to make sure, obviously there’s a featured section. So if there’s some things you really want to promote, that would be the place to put it. Those are the sections that you really want to make sure that when you do this audit.

Neal Schaffer [00:04:10]:
And I would recommend quarterly, if not monthly, just to make sure it’s all aligned so that when you do create content and you do attract people, if you think of, I don’t like to think of social media as a pipeline because, you know, business comes from true relationships, not from managing people on Excel spreadsheets. But I understand the way that salespeople work as well with CRMs. So it really comes down to, you know, that is the first part of that funnel, of that engagement or relationship building exercise comes down to maybe they see the content, but if they want to go deeper, they’re going to come to your profile. So I just wanted to point that out because in my book and in all my teachings, I always start with the profile that is like your webpage, right? If you don’t have your own website, that’s probably going to be your default professional website. So treat it as such.

A. Lee Judge [00:04:55]:
Well, let’s go deeper on the profile then. Recently I used AI to examine my profile based on best practices from several people, including yourself, to say, hey, what should an ideal profile be like? Made a prompt based on best practices, had it review my profile, and as a result, I changed some things, I changed some images, I changed some about me. And I think that was a smart way to use AI for, you know, updating my profile on LinkedIn. But a lot of folks using AI for perhaps the wrong ways in the name of efficiency, but maybe not the best way. So tell me, let’s talk about the ways that you can use AI for things for not only your, your headline or your, your homepage, but other ways you can use AI. The good, the bad and the ugly. What are some of the ways you see?

Neal Schaffer [00:05:43]:
Yeah, so this is a section, you know, I last wrote maximizing LinkedIn for business growth in September of last year. And things change, right? And I think the AI technology and how we find using it more and we find ways of better using it has only grown as well. So this is a major area that I’ve been looking into, even LinkedIn now, and I just actually upgraded from a free account to a professional account. And we can, we can talk about why, but they even offer, you know, AI built in to their paid account. So AI is not, you’re not spamming people, you’re not doing anything illegal, you’re not cheating. It is part of mainstream business America right now. And the fact that LinkedIn provides it to you. So I think, you know, the way the AI works and you were talking about prompts.

Neal Schaffer [00:06:24]:
Lee, I’m not a big prompt person. I’m a big, you know, there was no instruction book when ChatGPT came out. It’s just a simple, you know, like, how can I help you? Type of thing. So I start out with a conversation. It’s like, hey, I really want to improve my LinkedIn profile. These are my specialties. This is my target audience. This is the message that I really want to get across.

Neal Schaffer [00:06:44]:
You know, can you, can you help improve it? And inevitably, the what the way that AI works in all this. So there are people who like sell ebooks of prompts. Like I said, have a natural conversation, but give it the context. So with the context, the other thing that AI needs to do anything right is training data. Now we’ll talk about content creation, because if you have your own podcast, you have training data. You can teach OpenAI and Claude how you speak, your tone, and that is going to be extremely beneficial in any content you create. But taking a step back, LinkedIn headline, LinkedIn about section, you probably don’t have that training data. So what would you do if you didn’t have the training data? You know, if you didn’t have AI, you’d probably look at some other profiles of people in your industry, thought leaders, influencers, author, speaker, speakers, and you’d probably be inspired by what they wrote.

Neal Schaffer [00:07:35]:
And what we’re doing with AI is we’re doing the same thing. We’re literally saying to AI, hey, these are the headlines that I really like. If you were to get a. I’m not a web designer, I know you’re not either. I don’t know if that’s one of the things you, you provide, but when I’ve worked with web designers, they’re like, okay, give me a few websites that you like right? Or that you think are doing a good job. And they’re, they’re going to use that as inspiration. Now, they’re probably going to use AI on the back end, but we’re going to do the same thing with LinkedIn. We’re going to now feed that into LinkedIn and say, hey, these are the headlines that I think are really effective.

Neal Schaffer [00:08:04]:
Or these are the headlines that I believe the top 10 people in my industry are using. Can you look for? What I always ask AI for is to look for similarities. AI is great at analysis. It’s not just content creation. Look for patterns, look for similarities of these top headlines. And I assume that you would think they’re top performing because the thought leaders are using them. And based on what you find there, please give me 10 ideas of how I can improve my headline. And that is the exact thing that I did to improve my own headline.

Neal Schaffer [00:08:35]:
Right. A few weeks ago. So that would be the process that I recommend. You’re not going to say LinkedIn, write me a LinkedIn headline. You want to give it the context of, you know, why, who’s your target audience, your ICP and all these things. What are you trying to achieve? But also that training data, so that you know, AI has tons of data, but with very, very specific training data, you’re going to get a very, very specific response that’s going to be really helpful. And that those two concepts of context plus training data that can be applied to anything you want to do with AI.

A. Lee Judge [00:09:02]:
So what I’m hearing is if you’re for example, a cybersecurity consultant, you want to look at some of the other top cybersecurity consultants pages and perhaps combine what you see there, use AI to understand what’s working, what they’re doing, and then apply that to your own data, your own Persona for your of yourself and create a better homepage for yourself. Is that what you’re saying?

Neal Schaffer [00:09:29]:
Yes. You are basically being inspired by what you see and looking for ideas of how you can leverage what they’re doing to improve your own headline. And that notion of you’re in cybersecurity, you’re looking at other cybersecurity experts. This is the type of context that just a standard AI tool won’t give you. It’s when you let it know these, ideally, these are the people that I think my target audience are tuned into. Right. So if they’re already tuned into those people, they obviously have something going and you want to try to replicate some of the things they’re doing so that you can be at the same level, or at least your LinkedIn professional headline can be at that same level.

A. Lee Judge [00:10:07]:
I think there’s also a spectrum there from those who perhaps are just taking this advice, just hearing this advice now and starting on updating their, their LinkedIn profile, or those who don’t have that kind of memory in their their preferred AI. The other in the spectrum is like myself. I’ve been training my chat GPT GPT since it came out in 2022 and it remembers things about me that I’ve forgotten and it brings up things that I didn’t think to bring up. And so through my analysis for my update, it says, oh, by the way, Lee, don’t forget you wrote a book last year, it was released earlier this year. Or you talk about this topic a lot, but it isn’t in your about section. And it was able to help me refine it in ways that I had lost in my own human memory, but the ChatGPT memory had it. So I guess you start with either comparing yourself with others in your space and also combining that with whatever data you may already have of your own to contribute that context.

Neal Schaffer [00:11:10]:
Yes. And you know, Lee, I mean, this is the promise of AI at work, machine learning. Right? Always optimizing, always improving, always revising. Another thing you can add that I should have mentioned and so thank you for the reminder is based on everything that you know about me, Please provide me 10 ideas. Did I miss anything. Is there anything else? I should have included these questions. You know, a lot of people will just naturally ask them at the end of every, you know, prompt that they send. Those things can really be helpful.

A. Lee Judge [00:11:41]:
Yeah, I mean, for me, I talk about two things a lot. It’s sales and marketing alignment. Because of the book and because of my history working between sales and marketing, but also have an agency that produce podcasts and I was trying to make my profile one or the other, and I reminded me, look, Lee, you are both of these things. Fix your profile to reflect those things. And it helped me find this thread between the two to. To make it better. So I really appreciate that advice from you marketers and sales leaders. If you want to close more deals and drive real revenue growth, you need cash.

A. Lee Judge [00:12:15]:
And I don’t mean money. I’m talking about my new book, Cash the Four Keys to Better Sales, Smarter Marketing, and a Supercharged Revenue Machine. It gives you a proven framework to improve the four areas that impact revenue the most. Communication, alignment, systems, and honesty. You need a stronger sales and marketing engine, and this book will show you how to build it. Get your copy now@aleadjudge.com cash. Now back to the content.

Neal Schaffer [00:12:46]:
Yeah, and, you know, another book, I mean, I talk a little bit about it in LinkedIn, but I’m also working on a personal branding book and I. I teach a course on it and I often get asked that question like, I have an IT background, but I do insurance sales. And I say combine the two because the definition of personal brand, it’s unique and it really, it’s differentiated. When people see it, they’re immediately going to know it’s you. So, but you need to find that those threads and AI is just, it’s infinitely creative. And if you ask enough questions and give it enough answers or given enough information, it can really help inspire you to find those threads. I’m really glad that you found that leak. That’s one of the most hardest things to do because personal branding really is an art, especially when you’re trying to combine two different things.

A. Lee Judge [00:13:27]:
Well, I’m still working on it. It’s a work in progress, man.

Neal Schaffer [00:13:30]:
Life always is, isn’t it?

A. Lee Judge [00:13:32]:
Yeah. So we talked about the good and we talked about profiles. Let’s talk about some of the ways people are using AI on LinkedIn. That is the bad and the ugly. Like some of the posting we see, some of the methods we’re seeing for sales outreach. What are you seeing and what’s your advice on to make it not so Bad and ugly.

Neal Schaffer [00:13:50]:
Yeah. So, you know, I’m actually creating. The chapter in the new revised book is probably going to be called the AI LinkedIn playbook. Right. So going through that, it starts with the profile, then we get to the content. And, you know, Lee, we’re both heavy users of AI, but something tells me more and more people can gauge whether or not something was AI created. Okay, Two years ago we couldn’t. But you see, that long, you know, em, that long dash, or this isn’t just this long dash, it’s a.

Neal Schaffer [00:14:21]:
Let’s dive in. There are certain things that it’s very, very clear. And every line has an emoji, you know, at the beginning. There are certain things that we’re beginning to see that it was AI generated. And that sort of takes away immediately we’re going to block it out or just think it was AI generated and it loses the potential impact that it could have. So it’s not about just. And obviously there’s other, you know, bad things. But I think that the.

Neal Schaffer [00:14:43]:
The AI clearly AI posts things that you don’t even have expertise or experience on. Because, you know, it’s funny, I once interviewed someone who has one of these AI tools specifically for LinkedIn content. And it can make you look like an expert, right? I’m like, well, do users actually, like, publish this content generated from AI as is? And he goes, you know what, Neil, to be honest, you probably 50% of our customers do. So the AI will generate, like, based on my experience, based on my 20 years working with, you know, but it’s all. It’s all made up. So there are people that are saying things because now they’re able to say it really cool in a good way. With AI, it makes them look good, but they really don’t have anything to back that up. So that’s obviously the other thing that you.

Neal Schaffer [00:15:27]:
You only want to talk about your own unique experiences, your own expertise, you know, what have you. The other one is like the LinkedIn comments. I’m starting to get, like, the same people commenting in every post, and they have emojis, um, and they often end with a question at the end. What do you think is the most important advice? You’re. And it’s like, dude, I. I wrote a blog post, recorded a podcast. You’re asking me for more information, but they’re trying to get more engagement from you, right, for the algorithm. So, you know, those are two areas where there is a, I think, responsible way of using AI as an assistant to help you create content based on the ideas that you already have that you want to flesh out or repurposing your other content into LinkedIn content, we can talk about some of that.

Neal Schaffer [00:16:08]:
But AI does not replace you. And that is basically whether it’s content creation or comments. When you’re just using AI as a, a fast, efficient way of trying to replace you and do more with less, I think people are going to be able to read through that really, really quickly and I don’t think it’s going to be effective. So, you know, then we have the whole automated outreach. There’s another set of LinkedIn tools that will automate, you know, here’s a LinkedIn search result. We’ll send out, you know, 100 invites. When you accept immediately send you, hey, I’m just curious over@neilshafer.com, you know, what do you guys do when you run out of appointments? You know, do you do. How would you feel if I was able to get you 25 appointments per day or something? Ridiculous, right? I just block those people left and right like every, you know, and it gets to the point where I just don’t accept their invites because I think they’re just trying to sell me.

Neal Schaffer [00:16:52]:
In fact, going back to the professional headline, if your professional headline just looks like a billboard for you to sell people and stuff, they’re not going to connect with you in the first place, right? So, you know, don’t, don’t be that person. Don’t, don’t be in hyper sales mode. It’s, it’s relationship building, it’s networking and if you forget that it’s going to, you’re just not going to be that effective as you could be.

A. Lee Judge [00:17:13]:
Well, something you said a moment ago, I wanted to go back to because we do tend to have our AI written radar on a lot, those of us who use AI a lot and you can tell who is a new user to AI and those who have been a bit more seasoned, like, like us who using it in terms of writing content. Anybody who falls for the overuse of emojis, you know, that’s like they’re just started like this month using AI, like that’s freshman level newbies. But at the same time there are a lot of AI haters who were calling out people for things that are just traditional grammar. For example, when you were describing that, you did say it’s not just. And that was your natural language. I say it. When I was writing my book, I said it and I often found myself going back and removing it out of fear that I I hear you, right?

Neal Schaffer [00:18:09]:
Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:18:10]:
I write with EM dashes now. I undo EM dashes, you know, and if you write it in Microsoft Word, that’s your settings. I, you know, I typically go space, dash, space, but then it will correct it into an EM dash and I just let it go because I figure, okay, that’s fine, it’s EM dash. And EM dashes have gone back as far as probably Shakespeare. It’s in traditional writing. And I had to look up the phrase when you go. It’s not just, it’s that it’s called a comparative phrase. And the reason I know this is because I looked it up to say, how do I tell Chat GPT to never do that again? Like do not do comparative phrases.

A. Lee Judge [00:18:49]:
But again, that’s graduating from freshman to sophomore to senior user of Chat GPT. So I hope that our listeners don’t get to a point where they’re, you know, super sensitive about, about finding or criticizing those who use AI. But I think the criticism should be pointed towards those who haven’t leaned into it enough to understand how it can help them write as opposed to right for them.

Neal Schaffer [00:19:14]:
Yeah, you, yeah. I mean, the people that use it to replace themselves, that’s the bad way of using it. The people use it to assist where you don’t know, you know, that AI was even involved. I mean, that’s, that’s where we’re all going. If you have, if you have the Grammarly Chrome extension, you’re already there, right? So is interesting because I’m a big fan of it and I used a lot in digital threads, not AI generated. So I think it’s only when it’s used in that context because there are other ways of using the EM dash. Like I was told by some people that my LinkedIn professional headline sucked em dash. And these people were LinkedIn experts themselves, M Dash, which prompted me.

Neal Schaffer [00:19:50]:
That’s probably not correct Grammarly, but I think you get the picture that there are other use case scenarios. So I did. Finally, very recently, I started saying please rewrite this without using the EM dash or any other phrases that would sound like it came from an AI tool like ChatGPT and it understood that and it rephrased it back to me. I wish I’d copied and pasted it in a way that it knew that that was happening. So if anyone’s listening, you should definitely try to add some language like that and see what it says in response and cut and paste that and then put that into, you know, your knowledge base or future GPTs.

A. Lee Judge [00:20:26]:
It works sometimes ChatGPT is hard headed.

Neal Schaffer [00:20:29]:
Yeah, it’s not as consistent. I think it’ll get there.

A. Lee Judge [00:20:32]:
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A. Lee Judge [00:21:22]:
Want to see how it works? Visit contentmaster.com today to learn more. Well, let’s change gears a moment because there’s something that I use a lot and I bring to my clients that have helped them increase their engagement a lot, like instantaneously. And that’s LinkedIn newsletters. I have one when I first launched it, but back then, it’s been a couple years, probably they would tell your entire network that you had a LinkedIn newsletter. And so I have literally probably four or five thousand subscribers that came in day one. So you know, I know if you do that now you have a struggle to get that many subscribers, but back then you could just start one. As with everything with LinkedIn, if you get in early, they will push that thing. So what are Your views on LinkedIn newsletters today and maybe some advice for those who are thinking about doing a LinkedIn newsletter.

Neal Schaffer [00:22:14]:
Yeah, so the step three, once we get through, you know, the, the profile. Well actually the step two, my apologies, the profile, the content would come next. And the amazing thing about LinkedIn, you know, back in the day we could say the same thing about Instagram. For those that remember there were Instagram lives, there was Insta, there was Instagram igtv. For those who remember there were videos and there were static images and then they were carousel images. These days I think Meta has just said, you know, if it’s a video, it’s just going to be real. And you know, Instagram Live is now just a story basically. So on most networks like TikTok, it’s pretty much only one type of content.

Neal Schaffer [00:22:54]:
I mean you can do a live, but it’s pretty much just the real LinkedIn is very different. And I think this is where, and we were talking Lee the other day for us, you know, OG LinkedInners. We’ve been used to, you know, posting links and stuff like that. And it’s really changed over, over the last decade. And I’d say the workforce now is a majority of millennials as far as I know. So, you know, the tastes of, you know, the average user on LinkedIn changes over time with every generation. So when you combine that with the fact that there are a variety of formats that you can use on LinkedIn more than any other platform, and I think if you really want to get ahead, you really need to be publishing content in all sorts of different formats. Newsletter is another type of format.

Neal Schaffer [00:23:35]:
We know that link posts do not do well and people will try to put links in the first comment. And at the end of the day, every social network wants you to stay on their platform. This comes from Digital Threads, this other book that I wrote last year. So if you really want to get seen in the algorithm, and if you’re not seen in the algorithm, why create content in the first place? You need to adapt to the network. And we’re going back to what I call the link in bio approach. The hope that when people see your content, they go back to your profile and they want to contact you and maybe they go to your website from there. So that’s where we’re at. So the newsletter is one of these types of content, if you were curious.

Neal Schaffer [00:24:09]:
We have newsletter, we have polls, we have short form video, we have live stream video, LinkedIn live. We have images, we have image carousels which are multiple images, we have carousel posts which are PDFs, we have text, we have link only. I think that’s like nine different varieties of content we can be creating. Most marketers that have been doing this a while or salespeople, they basically just, you know, maybe they’ve only done two or three of them them. But where we’re seeing a lot of activity is in the newsletter. I’ve had some people say the polls are coming back, they were really big a year or two ago than they died down. But you never know. Text only posts, the kind of thing you see on Twitter that that sort of goes viral and did I mention carousels? And then obviously images, right.

Neal Schaffer [00:24:56]:
The image is the hard one. You know, unless you have lots of photos and you have a lot of inspirational things to say and a lot of memories or experiences. You know, I can always only post a photo like that when I’m, you know, teaching a class in Vietnam and taking a picture with the students or speaking at an event. Right. Or, you know, on a Call with customers. We do so much remotely now. You know, I know with like Riverside you can actually take snapshots, which is cool. But, but so what I find then, looking at my own editorial calendar is I’m looking at a lot of text only posts.

Neal Schaffer [00:25:24]:
I’m looking at carousels, which I’m just started to invest in. I just hired someone off Fiverr. I actually hired two different people off Fiverr with the same project description to see what sort of work I’m going to get. But I’m excited about that because I see that that is another thing that these new generation of LinkedIn influencers, it is something that they, that a type of content that they publish a lot about. And then newsletters are up there as well. I think for virality, it’s more on the carousel, it’s more on the image and it’s more on the text. But the idea here le if we remember social media, things that get shared are most viral and things used to not get shared on LinkedIn. And if you have a picture of yourself with a customer, chances are it’s not gonna get shared.

Neal Schaffer [00:26:06]:
But carousels get shared. And I think that’s why that content goes really viral, is if you create something that people would want to share. So it’s a different mindset altogether. First we need to make it for the platform so that people want to stay on the platform so it can’t be a direct sell. But then we want to make it so it’s universal enough that other people, people would want to republish it on their own platform and share it. And if you can do that, right, whether it’s text or image or carousel or newsletter, that’s really the secret to be able to get a lot more success because with the shares you get more visibility, you get more newsletter subscribers, more followers, and it feeds upon itself. Does that make sense?

A. Lee Judge [00:26:44]:
Yeah. Well, I’m sure anybody who’s listening to this right now is thinking, but Neil, what about video? Like, that’s what LinkedIn is really loving right now. And in fact, today, yesterday I noticed. I don’t know if you’ve seen this yet. I have a for you tab on my LinkedIn app. Do you have that yet?

Neal Schaffer [00:27:01]:
I don’t have the. For you. They’ve had a video tab for a while, for the last several months. Is it now for you? I’m going to check it as we speak right now.

A. Lee Judge [00:27:08]:
Well, here’s the thing. When I saw it, I didn’t know if the label was new or if the feature was new. And it had a new label because it says for you and it says news. Which I was like, wait a minute, I have two tabs now for you tab and a news tab.

Neal Schaffer [00:27:24]:
Yeah, I don’t have that yet, but.

A. Lee Judge [00:27:25]:
Yeah, so that surprised me. Which tells me the for you tab is strictly video. And so we’ve been hearing that LinkedIn is going to go heavy on video. Although I hear that, I see that, but I don’t know how much more weight it’s been getting than other. The other formats you just mentioned. At least for me. I’m a video fanatic. I’m video first.

A. Lee Judge [00:27:51]:
I’d rather do video than anything else. But at the same time, I don’t see this exponential lift in video over the other formats. And I still stick to the rule of having a variety of formats versus just one. What do you think?

Neal Schaffer [00:28:06]:
You’re absolutely right. And yes, I specifically did not mention that. In fact, every week, Lee, I am analyzing the top 30, basically the top 10% of my posts over the last year. And I’m using that to inform my strategy. And I find right now that newsletters and newsletters and texts are the ones doing best. Now it’s going to be different with every person and every network is going to respond differently. So your results might vary. Yes, there are a few people that have done really well with short form video.

Neal Schaffer [00:28:39]:
I find it to be low performing. In fact, I find my LinkedIn lives to be so low performing lead. Based on our recording and all the snafus we went through, I decided I’m not gonna waste a publishing slot on LinkedIn lives anymore because not one appears in my top 10%. Right. Even though I’ve interviewed some thought leaders like yourself and what have you. So yeah, so we always need to be adjusting. It’s always changing, but that’s what I see. But I know I’m missing out on carousels, which is why I want to start including that in the mix on a weekly basis.

Neal Schaffer [00:29:07]:
The two that do the worst are link based posts and videos. And these are short form videos like you would see. So you know, the for you and the following. This is what X did when Elon Musk took it over. Right? And the for you became the standard until you realized there was another tab. So it sounds like LinkedIn is sort of copying that. They understand the video is the future. You know, maybe a lot of people in the younger audience primarily watch the videos, but I am with you, Lee.

Neal Schaffer [00:29:31]:
I have yet to see and I know that there are people in my network that have done really well. But even someone that did really well no longer does well, and she’s trying to figure out why. So it is very fickle. It’s not. I just don’t think there’s enough people creating video content and consuming it for it to become like a TikTok. But maybe a year or two from now it’ll change. Which is why, you know, if you have an editorial calendar I’m trying to publish daily, I would still include one a week and really gauge if that picks up. I think you’ll see it.

Neal Schaffer [00:30:00]:
You know, I would not do more than twice a week at this point, but I was only doing one newsletter a week until I found that I was getting it went, you know, I was getting lots of engagement, lots of comments, and every weekly I get more new subscribers in my newsletter than I do on my own email list with ConvertKit. So. And then I realized, you know, Lee, you can actually tell this to my clients as well. On the fractional CMO side, you can actually go into your newsletter and look at your subscribers. You know, it’ll say how many subscribers you have if you click on it. And now, Lee, this is like part four of the AI. It’s not an AI LinkedIn playbook, but a LinkedIn playbook. It’s sort of the follow up.

Neal Schaffer [00:30:32]:
It’s sort of like, hey, if you see a second, third degree connection, thanks for subscribing to my newsletter. And in fact, most new subscribers are second or third degree. You know, I have some free review copies of maximizing LinkedIn for business growth. Can I send you one? Starting a conversation, giving some value and seeing when that goes. It’s another entryway into this relationship funnel. So, yeah, newsletters are great, as you say, the first time or two it sends out to everybody, but after that your growth stops. Only until you continuously publish and you need to decide. At one point I was copying and pasting my weekly ConvertKit newsletter over to LinkedIn.

Neal Schaffer [00:31:09]:
It was a hassle because of the formatting and everything. What I’ve started to do, Lee, and I’m sure you do something similar, is I’m repurposing my podcast episodes. Sometimes I repurpose a blog post, but I’m heavily using AI to repurpose my ideas into something short and snackable that LinkedIn prefers. You know, I’m aiming for like 500 to 700 words, whereas my blog posts are 2,000 words. I’m including either a video if it’s an interview, or I’m including a Spotify play. You know button. If it is just me solo podcast and I’m also using that as a way to internally link to some of my blog posts for SEO. And at the very bottom, I have a cut and paste.

Neal Schaffer [00:31:44]:
Hey, consider, you know, hiring me to speak at your next event or, you know, click here. If you want to talk about my fractional CMO services, buy digital threads. So I think that a newsletter can serve a lot of different, you know, a lot of different areas. And it is something that most people are missing out on. So if there’s one takeaway outside of that profile revision, it would be to start to see how you can increase include newsletters. And if you can include newsletters on a weekly basis, then you could repurpose that into a 5, 6, 7, 8 page carousel to get more activity. And this is what I’m finding. The influencers that are creating carousels also have a text blog post, a text post, or maybe an image post.

Neal Schaffer [00:32:22]:
They’re repurposing that content into different formats, which is another best practice in the business of marketing right there. So, yeah, so hopefully that’s that. Hopefully that answers, you know, the question about videos as well as the, you know, why I, I’m still excited about newsletters.

A. Lee Judge [00:32:36]:
I think LinkedIn has an algorithmic identity crisis right now. And let me explain, what I mean by that is that the things that we can measure the best because we don’t know how they’re exactly measuring what they call an impression or a view or, or, or whatever. The thing is, from a statistical standpoint, yes, my carousels do better, my newsletter does great. But they’re also claiming they’re pushing video. So I’m not going to give up on video, even though based on the measurement they give us, it says that my videos aren’t doing as well. Now, the other side of that, from a standpoint of soft measurements, in terms of I see people commenting more and I hear about the videos that I produce, it’s almost as if I can hear in the real world more feedback on the videos that I post than on anything else that I post, whether it be, you know, written or carousel or newsletter. So something’s going on that I don’t think we’re able to see because of statistics. And what I mean by the algorithmic identity crisis is that how can LinkedIn sustain its stance as a networking, as a social network for business when it’s adding a.

A. Lee Judge [00:33:54]:
For you, because for you is, is not a social graph, it’s the interest graph. And so LinkedIn can’t become an interest graph based network if it’s gonna also be the business network platform. So I think that we have two problems. One, what is it, is it a networking platform or is it a social platform? And two, I don’t know if the numbers we’re getting that reports on how well each platform does. I don’t have trust in their accuracy. So we’ll see.

Neal Schaffer [00:34:26]:
Yeah, you know, as data driven as we’d like to be as marketers, at the end of the day there’s, there’s anecdotal data, there’s gut feel and that’s important to consider when talking about this. Right. I don’t have that anecdotal evidence of videos doing well and I know that they’re pushing them but, but at the end of the day, like I said, different, maybe my connections are a little bit older. They’re not on TikTok, they’re not even on Instagram, they’re just on Facebook. They don’t respond to videos. Maybe if I was a younger creator with a younger, you know, clientele, they respond more to video. So I think that it’s, it’s LinkedIn future proofing their content. And I believe, Lee, at the end of the day it’s all going interest media, right? Even over the last year or two, I like to say that LinkedIn is the most viral platforms because go into your feed, not your for you feed, but your following feed or connection feed and you’ll see there’s a lot of posts.

Neal Schaffer [00:35:17]:
It’s like so and so liked this, so and so commented on this, right? So they’re exposing, or they’ve been exposing second third degree connection content in your feed for a while now. And to me, Lee, it’s supply demand that there was just not enough supply of good enough content. So similar to Instagram saying, you know what if there’s not enough good content, let’s just, just, let’s just do reels and make sure that people want to come back because maybe their friends suck at creating good content. But if we can get, if we know their interests and we get them hooked right through these great content creators. And I think LinkedIn is doing what every other social network has done. Now the problem with just believing that hey, you know, publish more videos, what have you is that all these platforms change. And if any of you have ever done any marketing on Pinterest where it’s like, please use hashtags. Oh, hashtags don’t matter anymore.

Neal Schaffer [00:36:05]:
We’re gonna do stories. LinkedIn had stories no more. Right. We’re gonna do idea pins. Oh, let’s just call them videos. And LinkedIn has done the same. I mean they had events, they took events away for a while. Groups used to be one of the main tabs and now it’s not there anymore.

Neal Schaffer [00:36:19]:
They go through so many changes. So I highly suggest the data driven approach. Anecdotally, yes, we hear about videos doing well and I know someone on my network personally that has gotten hundreds of thousands of views, not recently, but up to like a few months ago. So yes, I’m going to keep sort of stabbing away at it. But like I said, if you have a multi faceted content format approach, it helps you mitigate your risk and you can have more of a data driven strategy to see what’s working, what’s not with you there.

A. Lee Judge [00:36:49]:
So one thing about engagement I want to ask you about, because that’s one thing we all can agree on, is that if you’ve been on LinkedIn more than a year or two, you’ve seen engagement go down drastically. What are your thoughts on some of the causes of that? I’m wondering if it’s, you know, maybe the content that you’re publishing, maybe LinkedIn is not favoring that as much. Maybe your demographic doesn’t match. Like I mentioned earlier, my demographic is typically management and up. So maybe me doing videos, even if videos was the thing, maybe me doing videos doesn’t fit that demographic. So is engagement drop, do you think it’s more algorithmic or do you think it’s has more to do with the individual who’s making the content?

Neal Schaffer [00:37:34]:
Yeah, I think that there’s a few reasons why engagement drops. First is global, right? It’s supply, demand, pure, simple. There’s more people. You know, when you, when you hear these 20 somethings going, oh, Instagram’s dying, but LinkedIn’s the hot place. And you see these new people coming and creating that sort of videos and what have you, that that’s obviously more supply and it’s good content supply. So I think there’s more supply of people that are publishing content and there’s more supply of people that are publishing good content. So it sort of raises that bar for all of us. Unfortunately, there’s also the algorithm.

Neal Schaffer [00:38:06]:
So if your connections are engaging with other people’s content, it’s going to show up more in the feed. I mean, you know, I go through the, a regular process of pruning my connections because I find people that I connect with back in 2008 or nine that we have never had a conversation and when I look at their job title, I don’t see any. Like, I would never accept an invite from them today because I was more of an open networker back in the day. So I find myself disconnecting to try to keep new blood in my networks that might be actually interested in my content. So. So there’s a combination of things. People retire, people change jobs. So I think as marketers, we always need to be getting new people onto our email list, into our LinkedIn connections, and that will also help us with, you know, the engagement.

Neal Schaffer [00:38:51]:
And I will say, Lee, since I started doing what I’m doing, you want to look at those top 30 posts. And I do this on a weekly basis. I’m starting to see posts that I published in the last week or two show up in that. In, you know, my top 10% over the last 365 days. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a case that globally engagement’s dropping, and I think that you can recover a lot of that. I will say now, I don’t do this, and I don’t know if I’m gonna write about it in my book, but I will tell you what I’ve heard other of these LinkedIn influencers doing, which is using a data scraping tool. I prefer Phantom Buster. If you were to try this, and basically finding people that like and comment on similar content.

Neal Schaffer [00:39:29]:
So in other words, these LinkedIn influencers are getting a lot of likes and a lot of comments. Well, who are those people? Maybe 90% are in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, I don’t know. But maybe 50% are in the United States and we don’t know them. But if we can find who those people are and we can follow them and maybe connect with them, if there’s relevance. These are hyperactive people. It’s sort of like if you were to do a Facebook ad without targeting, you’re probably going to get a lot of people from India, Kenya, Philippines, Indonesia, countries where they just like everything they see. It’s just part of the culture, especially Philippines, from what I hear. So I think that they’re all also people on LinkedIn.

Neal Schaffer [00:40:05]:
I mean, there is one other influencer. When I do analysis of all these LinkedIn influencers that I’m not connected to, I find the same person as engaging with all their content. Right. Which probably increases the chance that maybe she gets more engagement. So if you really want to take it to. It might be creepy by some, but if you really want to try to growth hack your way, that would be my suggestion. Is do some analysis. If you could find five different posts that have, have five thousand or a thousand likes that are in your industry and you put them through Phantom Buster and then you see of those thousand likes, of those five posts are there a hundred, two hundred people that are liking all five of them? Well now you know who are like the hyperactive engagers on LinkedIn and maybe you should pay a little bit of attention to them.

Neal Schaffer [00:40:46]:
So this is something I’ve yet to experimentally. It’s like when we were, when you know, I was preparing for the call, I’m like, I need to bring my best, you know, to Lee’s podcast and everything. I’m working on all of my R D. That is something I know that some influencers have been doing. They do that to connect with people. Like, hey, I saw your comment on Gary Vaynerchuk’s post. Isn’t he great? You know I actually like inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk, I actually have a new webinar coming out like you know, jab, jab, hook, hook approach to LinkedIn. Why don’t you join me? It’s completely free and they’ll use that as a way to get people into their funnel.

Neal Schaffer [00:41:16]:
So a lot of different use case scenarios might be a little creepy for some. But if you really want to do this growth hacking where throw out all the creepiness and what can I do to try to improve things, I would definitely try to experiment with that.

A. Lee Judge [00:41:28]:
I will with caution because I wonder, you know, I decided about a month ago I don’t need a lot of any more followers, many more followers. I need connections, I need people who I relate to. But what I mean by I don’t need followers is that sometimes people who I could have envied, I look at their follower list and it’s a bunch of people who like you said, just like everything. I’m like, you know, there’s a 20 year old coder in Pakistan who likes everything. We’ll probably never do business together. And this is a business platform, you know, it’s not, I’m not there just for social and sometimes I see people who have tons of engagement and most all of their engagement are those types of people who are just liking, liking, liking their students and never will do any business with them. And I’m like, you know what, I don’t need that kind of engagement. Now if I can get, you know, my target audience to connect, I’m always looking to connect more people who, more like minded people who are in there who are potential customers or potential thought leaders or peers that I can talk to and learn from and grow with, even students who are in, who are maybe in the US So I can help mentor or whatever, people who can be meaningful, have meaningful relationships with.

A. Lee Judge [00:42:47]:
And so I realized, you know, I only have about 22, 23,000 connections and most of them are at a certain level. So they, a lot of them, especially the C suite, they’re not going to engage a lot. So I realized, okay, it’s okay, Lee, not to get 10,000 likes on something because there’s not 10,000 CEOs who are online today liking stuff on LinkedIn. So it makes sense.

Neal Schaffer [00:43:13]:
You’re absolutely right. And like I said, Maybe of those 200 people you find, maybe five or ten are hyper relevant. Like when I look at people that subscribe to my newsletter, I’m not sending out connections to everybody because there are a lot of irrelevant people. I don’t know why, you know, why is this person subscribed to my newsletter? Like, if I don’t see the relevance and potential value, I’m not going to send the connection request. So there is a way to filter that. But I will say, Lee, you’re looking at it two ways. You’re absolutely right. You know, it’s like the ultimate scoreboard is not how many likes you get, but how much business you get.

Neal Schaffer [00:43:41]:
Right. And we’ll never know. But I will say from an algorithmic perspective that when you get more engagement, it tends to become more visible in the feed of your connections. Right. The other thing I will say is, you know, I’m a LinkedIn author. I’m not getting the types of likes that those other people are getting. They have immediate social proof because as human animals, we see lots of likes. We assume that there is value there.

Neal Schaffer [00:44:06]:
So, you know, I agree, I agree 100%. You know, it can’t be meaningless. We don’t, we don’t want to chase vanity metrics, but if we think our content is as good as theirs and we have a target audience, why can’t we be getting similar visibility? And if you take it from that aspect, is there some growth hacking? I do you know, who are these people? Could they become potential partners, people that I can mentor, you know, what have you, you know, if you just part of its mindset, man, just have a new mindset, looking at LinkedIn and it might uncover some new ways of, you know, of working out there.

A. Lee Judge [00:44:38]:
That’s a great way to end that, Neil. So before we go, I want to mention your books because you have the One we’re talking about now. Tell us about the one talking about now and we’ll get into the one that’s behind you there on the shelf. But the one you’re working on now, a new version. Give us a title. And how, when can we expect it?

Neal Schaffer [00:44:55]:
Yeah. So maximizing LinkedIn for business growth is available on Amazon. It is ebook only and I believe with Kindle, even if I revise it, I believe your library gets updated. Correct me if I’m wrong. So it’s going to be the same book, the same title. It’ll just the COVID will say revised for 2025, 26, included expanded information about AI, what have you. So if you want to be sure, in the next version we’ll have a paperback hardback. I wrote two books on LinkedIn back in 2009 and 2011, which I never revised.

Neal Schaffer [00:45:26]:
And I’ve always had a free ebook that I send out to clients and I have it on my website as a lead magnet. And I’ve had so many people say, Neil, this is, this is amazing. This is like a book in itself. I decided, you know what, I’m going to repurpose it into a full book, which I did. And now I’m going to continue to expand that from ebook only to paperback hardback audio. And then the other book that was published September 17, 2020, the other book is based on my fractional CMO work because I’ve always had two sides. Like you have two sides, Lee. I have this like social selling, LinkedIn training side, LinkedIn blogger and then I have my fractional CMO side which covers all the digital marketing.

Neal Schaffer [00:46:00]:
So Digital Threads is the other book. Came out October 1, 2024.

A. Lee Judge [00:46:03]:
My copy right here.

Neal Schaffer [00:46:05]:
Thank you, my friend. It is a digital marketing playbook and I cover, you know, when we were talking about the best way to use LinkedIn of being authentic to the platform and keeping people on the platform. This is exactly the approach that I teach in that book as well when I talk about social media. But I also there talk about email marketing and SEO and AI and really a digital marketing playbook. Not for people that are just going to go and hire an agency or big enterprises with big budgets, but really for small businesses and entrepreneurs who, who want to do that. They want to DIY it. They want to be able to. I have a dedicated chapter on hiring people on like fiverr and Upwork to help you with your tasks.

Neal Schaffer [00:46:40]:
So it’s really geared towards that small business owner with a very, very tight budget. So hopefully you’ll, you’ll find a good read in either or both of those books.

A. Lee Judge [00:46:48]:
All right, well, great. Well, give us your website and spell it. So there’s lots of ways to spell Shaffer.

Neal Schaffer [00:46:53]:
Yes indeed. I have many social media cousins out there. It is a Neal Shaffer, so I’m the real Neal. Don’t do the Starbucks misspell. It’s N E A L and the last name is Schaefer S C H A f f e r.com on social on Amazon. I also have a podcast called your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Shaffer, which you can find on Apple as well.

A. Lee Judge [00:47:14]:
All right, wonderful. Well, thank you Neil and to the listeners if you’re listening to the podcast, also want to see Neil and I. A video of the podcast and others are available in the Podcast section of content master.com we’ll catch you next time.

A. Lee Judge [00:47:31]:
Thank you for listening to the Business of Marketing Podcast, a show brought to you by Content Monster.com, the producer of B2B digital digital marketing. Content Show Notes can be found on contentmonsta. Com as well as aleejudge. Com.