Welcome to episode 176, this week I am going to share my thoughts on the demise of content marketing and the rise of engagement as a much more effective tool to influence and build trust.

But first…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Bumble’s CEO Takes Aim At LinkedIn 18 Enormously Useful LinkedIn Hacks by Andy Foote or just shortcut to the fancy text generator here If You Wanna Crush It On LinkedIn's Hot New Video Addition, Do This

 

New LinkedIn Feature

Invitations. This week saw the introduction of significant improvements to the way we manage our invitations to connect.

The ‘select all’ feature will save me loads of time. Thanks to Perry Van Beek for informing me of this. Great feature, I love it when they give us more but it’s not all good news….

Search. LinkedIn have, for some strange reason, decided to take away the keyword search field from search results.

In addition the ‘search for people with filters’ has been replaced with ‘People’. ‘Jobs’ and ‘Posts’. Selecting People is still a ‘filters’ search but you can’t then subsequently add in keywords to your search. You either start with keywords or have none….odd move!

This has a knock on effect with search alerts because you cannot create one unless you have performed a keyword search. The workaround is to do a search with filters and then create a new search by adding the job title string into the main search, it’s not as accurate but you can at least create the search alert.

 

Engagement

This has been playing on my mind recently as I think we are seeing the start of a significant change in the way people use LinkedIn.

Traditionally we always thought that sourcing relevant content and sharing it on LinkedIn was a great way to build relationships. This led to scheduling of link based posts using tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. I’ve covered this extensively before and had decent results from it……but everything seems to have changed. The LinkedIn algorithm is now penalising external content so much so that it is very difficult to get past 1000 views in the feed whereas text or image based posts are flying as covered recently.

On reflection we have been posting all these links to external articles but is anyone reading them? Probably not! And even if they were, the algorithm is preventing most people from seeing them anyway. So this feels like a sea change to me. No more external links Stop scheduled posting from Buffer / Hootsuite

Instead we should be focussing our time on creating effective posts, good quality articles and engaging with other peoples content. That feels like a much better way to use LinkedIn.

Can you see where I am coming from here? Is this the beginning of the end of content marketing? Let me know what you think