Informed: the podcast for LinkedIn® users
John Espirian
Recent Episodes
This week's main topic looks at how many active accounts there are on LinkedIn. See my LinkedIn membership tracker, particularly the updated section titled "How many active users are on LinkedIn?"
Postbag
– What do you think of people customising their pronouns?
In short, don't do it!
– There are quite a few LinkedIn experts who seem to attach an image to every single one of their posts. Do text-only posts perform less well than posts with images?
Looking at my own data since the start of 2024, my text-only posts get 27% more impressions than my posts where I include an image.
Other topics
Lynnaire Johnston's livestream with Mark Williams (creator and former host of this show) at 8pm on Wednesday 10 December 2025: "LinkedIn, Legacy and Letting Go".
UpLift Live 26 LaunchPad calls for those attending or considering attending our conference on LinkedIn best practice:
I'm speaking in Milan, Italy at Inspire Day, on 29/30 January 2026.
Congratulations to Gus Bhandal on the launch of his The Squeeze membership!
Postbag
via Beth Kirk: Loving the informed podcast! I have a question around the proactive use of DMs to build relationships on LinkedIn. Do you have any top tips for people with established audiences please?
— Look for opportunities to start conversations: birthdays, job changes
— Look through your network to find key referral partners and potential clients, then scour their profiles and content for anything that could start a conversation
— Don’t jump in out of the blue with a sales message. That will look like a campaign. Be more human!
— If there’s any sign that the other party might be open to it, use a voice note or even a video note to further humanise. I get great response rates.
via Espresso+: Does anyone get high levels of impressions with comments as a company page?
via Espresso+: How to be found through ChatGPT?
via Espresso+: Does an emoji in the Name field lead to spending one day in LinkedIn jail?
Engagement pods
Pods are unholy alliances of LinkedIn users who are trying to artificially boost their posts’ visibility in the LinkedIn feed. LinkedIn are trying to crack down, with a new video about this by Gyanda Sachdeva, a VP of Product Management at LinkedIn.
Thanks to an update from Tony Restell, UpLift Live26 speaker, who got this direct from LinkedIn:
Any profiles or companies you come across that are selling fake engagement services, please report directly via email to [email protected]
Thanks to Mark Williams for his kind farewell newsletter.
Postbag
- Profile verification: to verify or not? (see more)
- Post timing: when is best to post?
- Recommendations: should they be up to date?
Other topics
Everyone is talking about algorithmic bias against women. I’m going to investigate.
A couple of text-plus-image posts:
Starting a post with a short bit of quoted text often seems to get me good engagement, as per the second example.
Why put a date and time stamp on posts? I wish LinkedIn would do something about this.
About the show
This feels a bit meta but here are some things related to the development and marketing of the podcast:
- There’s a new page at espirian.co.uk/informed
- There’s a new banner image as part of my rotating Premium banner
- I’ve invited 250 people (the monthly limit) to follow the company page
- There were ~1000 downloads for episodes 466 & 467 – thanks!
The first episode of the new-look show took me 6 hours to record, edit and produce last week.
Postbag
- How do you manage lots of ongoing DMs?
- How much should we care about algorithms?
- Downgrading desktop features
Why not refresh your About statement with some icebreakers? Pick 3–5 conversation starters and drop them into your profile so that people doing their research can say something interesting to you.
Free LinkedIn members can now send only 3 free personalised invitations per month – there are 5 quick tips in the show for how to get around this very annoying limitation.
This is the new-look Informed podcast, all about LinkedIn best practice, hosted for the first time by John Espirian.
There’s a quick backstory of the handover from the show’s creator, Mark Williams, to John, and then on to listener questions in the Postbag.
Postbag questions
- Can you deactivate a company page without closing your personal profile?
- Can you talk about visibility being down on LinkedIn?
- Should we invest time in making newsletters, livestreams and videos on LinkedIn?
- How are comment impressions gauged and are they a useful metric?
- Is post boosting a good idea?
Generative AI data training: how to turn it off if you don’t want to give your data to LinkedIn for free.
Microsoft’s 2026 Q1 results are out, with some nuggets about LinkedIn growth.
Links
- Growth stalling post 1
- Growth stalling post 2
- LinkedIn membership growth tracker
- Ryan Roslansky on LinkedIn’s results
- Book a consultation with John
- Espresso+ community