25-09-2023
Speaker announcement: Richard van der Blom
Our final speaker announcement is a Dutch superstar based in Valencia, Spain. It's the man who knows all about the LinkedIn algorithm, Richard van der Blom.
TRANSCRIPT
Back 2 years would practically do nothing for the reach.
Now, you get more people to repost your stuff, it accelerates your growth.
Welcome back to the UpLift Live podcast. This is John Espirian from the Mission Control team for UpLift Live, which is the UK's first LinkedIn-focused conference for LinkedIn specialists, power users and enthusiasts.
It's time for our final speaker announcement, and this time we're shooting over to Spain to speak to a Dutchman. It's social selling and LinkedIn algorithm expert, Richard van der Blom.
Let's hop aboard and get to the interview with Richard!
Richard van der Blom, welcome to the show.
You are going to be a speaker at the UpLift Live conference in Birmingham in March. Welcome aboard.
Tell us, what do you know about LinkedIn? Thank you, John, first of all, thank you for having me both here on the show and in March in Birmingham.
What do I know about LinkedIn? I guess I'll know quite a bit, just like I think all the other speakers.
Have been active on LinkedIn since 2005.
Started to give my first LinkedIn training back in 2009.
So, what I'll probably bring to the stage is about plus 14 years of experience on how to leverage this platform to grow your business.
Basically, that's it, to grow your business, whether you are a solo entrepreneur or a marketing professional, or whether you are in B2B sales.
And that's basically what I hope to share with the audience.
Awesome.
And you're well known for your skills in social selling, but I think probably most people who are watching this or listening to this on the podcast will know you for your algorithm report.
You've become really famous for that.
And you've got more than 140,000 followers, mostly off the back of that, I would guess.
Yeah.
Tell us a little bit about where the algorithm report came from, and what kind of insights people get from that.
Yeah, well working with, so, my main focus is to work with mid-size, larger enterprises.
And back in 2018, we had two enterprise clients.
And they were baffled by the fact that when they publish a white paper or a really well-thought article, they would reach, let's say, 5000 views.
And they were baffled by the fact that if they would publish like a team picture of like, any event that they would participate in, like, I don't know, half the marathon at Boston, they would get like 30,000 views, and they were like, we want to switch that, you know, we want to have 30,000 views for the article and just 5000 views for them.
So, they started to ask us questions.
And back then we only knew from our own experience based on our own postings what would happen, but we could only guess, and then I teamed up with some really amazing people.
And they helped me to, I delivered them with the questions and they started to research like what happens if somebody likes if somebody comments what happens if you change the post in terms of format.
And basically, we released like an algorithm report in October 2018.
That was the first one and it was actually shared first with the two clients.
And they were very, very enthusiastic about it.
So, I thought, OK, let's just publish it.
And it went like, it blew up.
I remember I had almost 1 million views on that post, which was for me back then it was like huge.
And so that was a start, actually.
And back then I didn't thought even about redoing the same thing next year.
I just thought like, OK, it's a one time exercise, job done.
And then I think it was something in May 2019.
May, June 2019.
And people actually came back to me and said, like, are you going to do the research again this year, because we have seen some changes.
And that was when like, it occurred to me like, hey, maybe if we do this on a more regular basis, then you know, people would benefit from it.
So, we started to do it again, October, same month, 2019.
It went even bigger, we have more data because we were more prepared, we know how to examine it.
And that's actually how it started, and indeed you're right.
That's when also my personal growth accelerated my personal page accelerated because social selling is really cool but it's rather boring to post on but if you post like the secrets of LinkedIn content, algorithm, well, you probably know that, then people like really want to have this and really grabbed you know.
Yeah.
And tell me do you agree that the pace of change on LinkedIn is speeding up? Yep.
In which case, how often are you now doing this algorithm report? Now, we switched already two years from really like creating the questions in May/June, passing them on and then we would give like, we will have like two months of research and the report.
Now we switched to ongoing research.
So, our team is ongoing research is doing ongoing research, not necessarily because of the pace with what LinkedIn is changing the algorithm but more that we like, if something happens in February, like this February, we had a big algorithm change.
It doesn't make sense to publish in November an algorithm report and say, hey, you know, 8 months ago this happened.
So, you need to adapt to that because like people already noticed, especially some of the heavy content creators, they noticed themselves, like probably you also noticed that, now I see, especially in the last 3, 4 weeks, I see like the reach is going down for a lot of creators, also mine.
So, then I need to like directly switch with my team and say, hey, I want the data, I want stats to back this up, because this is what I'm seeing.
So, now it's ongoing.
But yeah, I do agree that the changes are more rapidly.
And probably because they're launching more features, more new stuff.
And every time they launch new features, for example, collaborative articles, AI impacts the algorithm because they need to place it somewhere in the feed, which means, you know, the reach has to come from from somewhere, no? Yeah, absolutely.
And we're still 6 months away from our conference.
So, there's no way you're going to be able to work out what to tell us in 6 months' time.
Right now, can you give us any kind of insight on some piece of data or some insight that people might not necessarily know that they would benefit from knowing right now, in late 2023? Wow, there's a lot, a lot of stuff.
And I don't know what what our listeners know.
So, yeah, talking about the conference, I will create a deck like end of February to make sure that at the conference, everybody gets the latest news.
But for now, something that really impacts the growth of your post positively is the amount of reposts your post is getting, which back 2 years would practically do nothing for the reach.
Now, you get more people to repost your stuff, it accelerates your growth.
And the other one, I think a lot of people noted, but it's still a good thing to emphasise is your own engagement on other people's content.
You know, it's really like, it's like LinkedIn is rewarding you for your own engagement on other people's posts.
It's like they drive more traffic to your own posts.
If you play the game, they go like, OK, we reward you for your time, and we drive more traffic to your posts as well.
I, for example, seen this with my own posts.
If I just publish in the morning, and for some reason, I don't have the time to be very active and engaging myself, I guess up to 20%/25% less traction than when I'm active, like, around my posting time.
Yeah, interesting stuff.
I think the point you made about reposting is important now that LinkedIn has relatively recently started showing the repost counter on public posts, because they never used to do that.
No.
And so you were only guessing at how popular a post might have been based on reactions and comments.
So, I can see the psychological reason why reposts are a little bit more powerful.
Yeah, and especially the "instant repost", John.
So, and that's very interesting.
Because that's not like the other social media platforms where if you share something and you write something of your own words to guide it, it would create more impact.
On LinkedIn it's the other way around.
Instant repost gets more visibility than a repost where you, like have 2 or 3 lines of your own words.
So, Yeah, that's interesting.
Like, one thing I'd really love to know is whether a high number of saves on a post would increase its visibility, but you can't see how many people have saved the post, can you? No, but I'm 100% sure that people saving your posts, obviously, is a positive indicator to the LinkedIn algorithm that people are engaging.
I mean, it should be one of the most important indicators, because people saving your post means hey, I don't want to lose this type of content.
So, definitely, and it's a shame that you can't see it.
Also, the number of people that ring the bell in your profile, for me would be a very cool indicator, if really, people are engaged with the content, like I don't want to miss a single post of this person.
But you know, that's hoping that brings us more data in the near future.
Yeah, let's hope so.
Richard, I could talk to you for hours, because this is all fascinating stuff for me.
But please, everyone if you want to hear from one of the absolute apex operators of LinkedIn, come to Birmingham in March, on 21 March, Birmingham, UK, get your ticket at uplift-live.com
You can see Richard in action, and 7 other apex operators of LinkedIn talking on a whole-day event focused purely on LinkedIn.
It's going to be fantastic.
Richard, thank you so much for joining me.
I can't wait to meet you in person.
Thank you for coming all the way over from Spain to join us, and I'll see you in March.
Cheers. Looking forward to it, John, thank you.
It's great to have Richard aboard as one of our speakers. His algorithm report has been massively successful on LinkedIn, and I've no doubt that his talk in Birmingham is going to be hugely insightful.
If you're ready to get onboard, grab yourself a ticket to UpLift Live at uplift-live.com – and if you know anyone else who'd be interested in an advanced conference about LinkedIn, tell them about this podcast and how to get a ticket!
OK, that does it for speaker announcements but we'll see what other goodies we have to share with you soon via this podcast and our posts to our email list, website and our LinkedIn feeds.
Lift-off is coming soon, so thanks for listening and stick with us as we prepare for launch.
This is Mission Control … over and out.UpLift Live Mission Control
🟦 John Espirian
🟩 Jeremy Freeman
🟧 Gus Bhandal
TICKETS: uplift-live.com
PAYMENT PLAN: uplift-live.com/plan
QUESTIONS/FEEDBACK: john@uplift-live.com
