LinkedIn Is Rewriting the Rules of Visibility  🔗 **Source:** [LinkedIn Is Rewriting the Rules of Visibility](https://share.snipd.com/episode/dd9dc5c6-dac8-4dc8-86e9-f994d9747dd1) ## Highlights - **Publish Long Form On LinkedIn To Be Cited By AI** - LinkedIn content (articles/newsletters) is being structured for LLMs and can increasingly be cited by AI like ChatGPT. - AJ recommends republishing long-form posts as LinkedIn articles/newsletters after hosting them on your blog to get SEO and LLM visibility. Transcript: Jerry Potter So let's talk about LinkedIn. And apparently it's becoming a great place to get your business cited in AI answers. So Reddit and Wikipedia are getting cited less and less by the LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini. And LinkedIn is on the rise. And apparently LinkedIn is also investing in structuring its content on the platform in a way that LLMs like, yay, including giving semantic markup, which means adding HTML tags that Describe the meaning or the purpose of the content, not just how it looks visually. And then LinkedIn has also given some tips like making sure you're right in clear factual language, grades nine through 11, to serve both human readers and AI models. So I would love to know to start, AJ, how much are your clients and you while you're at it worried about or making sure you're cited by AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude right now? AJ Wilcox Well, you know, on my website, when I have someone submit a lead, I have the open-ended question of how have you heard about us? And I didn't think at all about this until about six months ago, all of a sudden, two, three leads a week, now four, five, six are all mentioning that they found me somehow through AI. And I'm like, ooh, okay, I got to keep this going. So yeah, this is something that I'm thinking about, talking about and suggesting to clients too. Jerry Potter So if you're comfortable sharing, like what percentage of your leads would you say you're getting from that right now? AJ Wilcox It's probably like 30, 40% right now, which is crazy. And it's on the rise. Wow. It's absolutely nuts. Michael Stelzner And, you know, if you think about who owns LinkedIn, which people often forget this, it's Microsoft, right? And if you think about who's the largest investor in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, it's Microsoft. They have their own, they have Copilot and they have OpenAI's ChatGPT. Do you feel like they're going to prohibit competitors like Claude and Google Gemini from scraping LinkedIn? What's your thoughts on this? I'm just curious. AJ Wilcox I fully expect that's the case. All the LLMs have their own relationships that they're building with content hubs. And I think OpenAI is trying to keep LinkedIn's for sure. Yeah. Michael Stelzner And I'll just throw this out there. ChatGPT is the largest of all of them in, I believe it was July of last year, maybe August or September. There were 2.5 billion queries in one day on ChatGPT. Now that's nothing compared to Google. Google is way more like Google is like that in an hour or something like that. But still, it is kind of a big deal. So, Jerry, I don't want to take too much of your thunder away. But AJ, do you feel like there's a strategy here to just literally just create content more on LinkedIn with the hope it's going to get scooped up? AJ Wilcox I do think that there's a play there. We know if we put out a post on LinkedIn, it's going to get a lot more attention than if we put out an article. But the way I think about it, if I put out something in a post, it's going to live for probably two, three, four days. And then after about two weeks, it's dead, it's gone. But if I put content in a LinkedIn article or a newsletter, a LinkedIn newsletter, because all it is, is just articles, that's content that lives forever and LLMs have access to it. So what I would suggest to everyone is put your unique thoughts that you have into posts because that gets the most attention. But every time you write something longer form, like a blog post or a podcast episode, put it in an article, put it in a LinkedIn newsletter because that's going to be a double whammy. ([Time 0:02:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6d2bf0a7-cd36-4950-9517-e706ccb512cc)) - **AJ Saw 30–40% Of Leads Claim AI Discovery** - AJ observed a rise in leads saying they found him via AI, estimating roughly 30–40% of current leads mention AI discovery. - He began actively optimizing content for AI after seeing two to six AI-sourced leads per week from his site form answers. Transcript: AJ Wilcox Well, you know, on my website, when I have someone submit a lead, I have the open-ended question of how have you heard about us? And I didn't think at all about this until about six months ago, all of a sudden, two, three leads a week, now four, five, six are all mentioning that they found me somehow through AI. And I'm like, ooh, okay, I got to keep this going. So yeah, this is something that I'm thinking about, talking about and suggesting to clients too. Jerry Potter So if you're comfortable sharing, like what percentage of your leads would you say you're getting from that right now? AJ Wilcox It's probably like 30, 40% right now, which is crazy. And it's on the rise. Wow. ([Time 0:03:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c210c9a5-e958-48c4-97df-f0a017e0e268)) - **Repurpose Blog Posts Into LinkedIn Articles** - Post short, attention-getting posts for immediate reach and repurpose longer pieces into LinkedIn articles/newsletters for longevity and LLM access. - AJ's workflow: publish on your blog, wait for Google indexing, then copy into a LinkedIn article. Transcript: AJ Wilcox So what I would suggest to everyone is put your unique thoughts that you have into posts because that gets the most attention. But every time you write something longer form, like a blog post or a podcast episode, put it in an article, put it in a LinkedIn newsletter because that's going to be a double whammy. Jerry Potter It's interesting because I remember about a year ago, LinkedIn came out and they said, hey, we're going to start promoting older content, including posts. So start making stuff that's valuable long term. And I think it's one of the things that's made the platform better. But you're definitely specifying that an article or a newsletter, which, you know, would theoretically take longer to create, is a much better place to do that than for longevity than AJ Wilcox Posts. Yeah, I think so. When you put something into an article, it's there long-term for SEO to find. And so what I like to do is create a post first on your own blog, wait two or three days or whatever until Google indexes it, then go and take exactly the same content and put it on a LinkedIn Article. And that way you get the SEO juice from it, which is fantastic. ([Time 0:05:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d3efe2e9-e3b9-4b97-a474-b6a921fe870f)) - **Personalization Helps Only When Ultra Targeted** - LinkedIn ad personalization can insert first name, job title, company into copy, but hyper-personalization often produces little lift or worse. - AJ found company-name inserts worked dramatically only when ads targeted single companies; broad personalization had minimal benefit. Transcript: Jerry Potter So with LinkedIn ads, they're kind of changing how and where visibility can happen for businesses. And these are some very unique features that are rolling out with LinkedIn. So I want to ask you about each of these separately. So one of them is they're bringing in ad personalization where you can automatically tailor your ad copy to individual members, including by their first name, their job title, their Industry, and their company name. And I remember when Facebook used to offer something like this with Facebook ads, and I think they took it away because it weirded people out. Like I remember seeing ads where it was like, hey, Jerry, want a t-shirt with your name it? And, you know, how impersonal that felt. So, like, how far should brands go, do you feel like, with first name, job title, company level personalization before it potentially starts to feel invasive instead of relevant? AJ Wilcox I think it's the right question. You know, I got really excited when I heard this feature was coming out because I ran a test where I was targeting just very specific companies. And I would make sure to use the company name inside the ads that are meant just for one company. And I would get 10 times the click-through rate. It was insane. So I went, Ooh, this is exciting. Like give us this ability to do across all of our ads. So immediately I started including company name and I get almost no lift out of it. So I was like, okay, well, let's try first name. Let's see how much of a lift we get again, next to no lift, slightly higher click-through rate, but lower conversion rate. So it just, it balanced out. I had a member of our community who said, Hey, I'm using job titles and it's working really well. So maybe it's like the more personal and creepy you get, the more it pushes people away. But if you use something like a job title, that's a little bit more innocuous, maybe that's the ticket. So we're getting ready to launch a test with that. Jerry Potter Do you feel like there's a way to write the copy where it's kind of like, it enhances the fact that you're speaking to that individual without calling out that, you know, they're the ones That you're speaking to? Like, for example, I guess off the top of my head, it would be like, give me a name of a job title that you would target. Let's do marketing manager. Marketing manager. So instead of saying, as a marketing manager, you know, or you're a marketing manager, right? You know, instead you would say something like, marketing managers know X, Y, Z. AJ Wilcox Like, do you feel like that could be more effective without the creep factor? Yep, that's the ticket. It feels a little bit like, of course you could target your LinkedIn ads to that specific title anyway. So I don't think that's going to raise eyebrows. Michael Stelzner If you think about this from a copywriting perspective, you wouldn't want to necessarily put the job title in there. You want to put the pains that they're experiencing. So are you struggling to generate more qualified leads to grow your business? That's obviously going to be targeting someone who's in a marketing role. You don't even need to call it out. So I feel like this is kind of the lazy route, AJ, as far as like injecting these dynamic things in your ads. I don't know what's your reaction because targeting an audience makes sense, right? But injecting the various different industries in there without modifying the copy all around, it feels like an accent waiting to happen. AJ Wilcox I think the play for LinkedIn here is if you want to speak directly to a single job title, you have to do this like micro segmentation of I'm going to take an ad set, narrow it way down, and I'm going to have a whole bunch of them. And now my account is really difficult to manage because there's so many different creative and audiences to balance. I think LinkedIn's like, well, hey, how about you just create one ad? We personalize it to the audience you're speaking to. ([Time 0:12:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/72a1696d-c7fe-4178-a4ec-fc25d86a9d24)) - **Lead With Pain Not Personalization** - Favor messaging that highlights pains and outcomes rather than inserting dynamic personal fields like first name. - Example: use copy like “Are you struggling to generate more qualified leads?” to reach marketers without creepy personalization. Transcript: AJ Wilcox Personalization before it potentially starts to feel invasive instead of relevant? I think it's the right question. You know, I got really excited when I heard this feature was coming out because I ran a test where I was targeting just very specific companies. And I would make sure to use the company name inside the ads that are meant just for one company. And I would get 10 times the click-through rate. It was insane. So I went, Ooh, this is exciting. Like give us this ability to do across all of our ads. So immediately I started including company name and I get almost no lift out of it. So I was like, okay, well, let's try first name. Let's see how much of a lift we get again, next to no lift, slightly higher click-through rate, but lower conversion rate. So it just, it balanced out. I had a member of our community who said, Hey, I'm using job titles and it's working really well. So maybe it's like the more personal and creepy you get, the more it pushes people away. But if you use something like a job title, that's a little bit more innocuous, maybe that's the ticket. ([Time 0:13:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/db0589fd-90b2-4440-8414-76c235fb32fd)) - **Reserved Ads Buy Prime Placement At A Premium** - Reserved ads guarantee the first feed slot and attention but are pricey, sold via LinkedIn sales reps, and mainly useful for time-sensitive or Fortune 500 scale buys. - AJ thinks raising budget/bids can mimic this for most advertisers at lower cost. Transcript: Jerry Potter It okay just like you would in an email marketing but you put in a placeholder kind of okay another ad type that linkedin introduced is called reserved ads, which basically secures the First ad in the feed so that you can boost brand visibility and have consistent impressions. So what's your thought? I mean, as somebody who's advertised on LinkedIn for years, what's your thought on this placement? Is it, is first seen good or is it, you know, first seen, first forgotten? Like what's your gut on this? First is usually best. AJ Wilcox So if you think about scrolling fatigue that we all experience, the very first post you see is going to get more of your attention than seven or eight pages down. You're just flying at, you know, breakneck speeds. So I think this is good. The challenge with it though, is that with these reserved ads, they are charging so much for this privilege that I can achieve the same thing just by targeting an audience, giving it Enough of a budget that I know it can hit everyone who comes in that day and bidding really high. But when I bid really high, I'm going to end up paying two to three times what I should be per click or per impression. So I don't know. I think a very limited audience is going to find this very useful. ([Time 0:16:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/119d9f1b-bfa6-442a-90d8-16b04a314c5f)) - **Run Two Ads To Test Performance Efficiently** - Start LinkedIn campaigns with two ad creatives, not five to seven; two are easier to manage and reveal clear performance differences. - AJ warns LinkedIn recommends 5–7 to increase frequency (and auction pressure), but two avoids wasted creative and inflated costs. Transcript: Jerry Potter Mike mentioned, you know, do they actually write the ad for you before? There are introducing more tools like this, including flexible ad creation where you can upload multiple assets. And then LinkedIn will auto optimize the combinations, whether it's the, you know, the visual creative or the titles and or the headlines and things like that, I assume. And then shift budget, the top performers. And then also they've said that advertisers who run five ads see an average of 20% higher click-through rate than those running just one ad. And so AI ad variants will automatically generate multiple versions of ad copy from a single input. So I guess in that way, they are kind of, you know, writing something. And they said it'll even create ads from your existing headline or intro that you have on your profile, or I would imagine on your page. So when you start a campaign or let's, let's say somebody hasn't hired you, AJ, but they're trying to run their own LinkedIn ads. What's a minimum number of different ads that you recommend for someone to start an ad campaign? And then over time as well. I love two ads at the same time. AJ Wilcox Only two. This goes, yeah, this goes super counter to what LinkedIn recommends, but their recommendation is five to seven. And you can totally tell exactly why they have that recommendation because when you have five to seven ad creatives in a campaign, it breaks the frequency cap. So now they're able to show your most active target audience on LinkedIn, your ads more often making the auction more competitive and making everyone pay more. Michael Stelzner So I understand what frequency cap means just for people that know what that means. Yeah. AJ Wilcox Yeah. By default, LinkedIn is only going to show one of your company's ads to one person every 24 hours. But as soon as you have four or more, they get to start breaking that frequency cap and now they can show it to all the way up to three and a half times per 24 hour period. Michael Stelzner Do you think that that's a good thing or a bad thing from the advertiser side of things? AJ Wilcox If I have something coming up that is time sensitive, I want to hit that audience as often as possible. So I will break the frequency cap when the clock is ticking. But otherwise, I don't like to super tire an audience out from my ads. Plus, if I go and tell a client we want to run five to seven creatives for this campaign and they have to create all of that, oftentimes that's so much on their plate that they end up just Melting down and I don't get anything. But if I say, hey, can you just create two variations here? It's really easy to create two variations and that keeps it going. Plus, I know if I upload more than three creatives into a campaign, LinkedIn is going to wholesale ignore at least one or two. But if I put two ads or maybe three ads, I can fully expect LinkedIn's going to give each of those enough impressions. ([Time 0:19:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8bd14f22-af4d-4b24-b3a3-fff5dfe3297a)) - **Multiple Creatives Break Frequency Caps And Raise Costs** - More creatives can break LinkedIn's 24-hour frequency cap, allowing ads to show multiple times per day and raising auction competition. - AJ uses extra creative only for time-sensitive campaigns where higher frequency is desirable. Transcript: AJ Wilcox And you can totally tell exactly why they have that recommendation because when you have five to seven ad creatives in a campaign, it breaks the frequency cap. So now they're able to show your most active target audience on LinkedIn, your ads more often making the auction more competitive and making everyone pay more. Michael Stelzner So I understand what frequency cap means just for people that know what that means. Yeah. AJ Wilcox Yeah. By default, LinkedIn is only going to show one of your company's ads to one person every 24 hours. But as soon as you have four or more, they get to start breaking that frequency cap and now they can show it to all the way up to three and a half times per 24 hour period. Michael Stelzner Do you think that that's a good thing or a bad thing from the advertiser side of things? AJ Wilcox If I have something coming up that is time sensitive, I want to hit that audience as often as possible. So I will break the frequency cap when the clock is ticking. But otherwise, I don't like to super tire an audience out from my ads. ([Time 0:20:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6fc1dc3e-891d-48c1-b157-9760347f4247)) - **Use Campaign Manager Not Boost For Serious Ads** - The new LinkedIn small-business premium offers AI-assisted outreach, auto-invite on engagement, and $50 monthly ad credit but the boost feature is limited; manage ads in Campaign Manager instead. - AJ warns boosted posts lack granular targeting, pause controls, and consolidated reporting. Transcript: Jerry Potter And they've launched a new premium all-in subscription package specifically for small businesses, solopreneurs, and quote, founders juggling sales, hiring, and marketing. And so some of the features here, one, you get unlimited prospect searches, advanced filters, AI assisted in-mail writing, which is the internal, obviously, mail messaging system, Daily lead suggestions, auto invite for people who engage with your posts, a $50 credit each month to boost posts, and then a centralized dashboard where you can track outreach, hiring Efforts, and a couple of other things. So starting with this, you know, the $50 credit, because that seems like a good idea. It costs more than $50 a month, but this $50 credit for boosting your visibility is interesting. Will a small business be able to make any meaningful impact with $50 a month, or is it more like a coupon to get you to spend more on ads? AJ Wilcox More like a coupon for sure. Yeah. The kind of boosting that you can do, just to give you some background here, the kind of boosting that you do inside of a post itself is super limited. You only get a few different ways of targeting your audience. So you can't get down to the level of granularity that you can through LinkedIn's campaign manager. You also can't stop your ad. There's no pause button. You have to delete it. If you want it to stop spending your money, you don't have control over how it spends. And then the real nail in the coffin is all of the performance from that boost lives inside that post itself. So there's no one dashboard that you can go and look at everything that you've done. It's super limited. So my plea, even if you are using this feature, please don't boost your posts this way. Do it inside of campaign manager where you can control budgets, control all your posts and see everything all together. Jerry Potter Do we have a sense of what something like this costs? I looked it up when we were setting up the show and I want to say it quoted me, it was about $75, $80 a month, I think, which is a little bit more than the regular LinkedIn premium, which I think For me, and it's different everywhere in the world, of course, which I think was more like $60 a month. Michael Stelzner So AJ, in your professional opinion, like just help everybody understand what the premium, what you get with the LinkedIn premium. And maybe that would be valuable because I bet you most people are like me and they're just on the free account. Yeah. AJ Wilcox If you're on free, it's great. And I suggest keep using the free. If you get really invested in LinkedIn and you start searching for more people and sending messages, at some point you're going to get hit with a paywall and the paywall is going to say, If you want to keep doing this this month, you have to sign up. That's when I tell people shoot for premium. Michael Stelzner So this new all-in is it like a premium plus almost, or do you feel like you're better off just sticking with premium? AJ Wilcox Yeah, it's kind of a plus. It's really good for the solopreneur or the small business owner who's very busy. If they just want to spend a few minutes on LinkedIn and have everything fed to them, this is pretty cool. If you're a sales rep, you're doing a lot of professional outbound. You're gonna want Sales Navigator. You're gonna have your own flow for what you do. But this is pretty cool. Like someone engages with your post, it automatically sends them an invite to connect. I would sure love to know how that connection goes out. Is it just like without a message or customized with AI? If so, I would want control over that. ([Time 0:26:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5c319db6-9501-495a-b333-9edee49c4dad)) - **LinkedIn Embraces AI But Penalizes Automated Engagement** - LinkedIn is pushing AI features while simultaneously restricting automated comments because inauthentic automation reduces real engagement quality. - The platform will de-prioritize automated comments in Most Relevant and limit their distribution outside the commenter’s network. Transcript: Jerry Potter If you don't post often and don't get a lot of comments and you occasionally get a comment, you're like, oh, I got a comment. And then you read it and you're like, oh, this was, and now I got a reply to it, because they asked a question, and I'm going to look bad if I don't reply to it, even though I know they're not There. So LinkedIn has clarified that comments submitted via browser extension, scripts, or third-party tools without a human clicking the comment button are not allowed. So they are taking a stance on these automated comments. And they're doing three things. One is they're removing the automated comments from most relevant, which is I think usually the default sort on most posts, right? Is that accurate? Most relevant is the default usually? Yeah. AJ Wilcox Okay. Jerry Potter Yeah. So they wouldn't, they're obviously getting much less visibility. They also won't be shared outside of the commenter's network. So if they didn't have a big network, other people wouldn't see it anyway. And they said if someone continuously automates low-quality comments, they may restrict their usage of LinkedIn. So I feel like we're seeing two ends of a spectrum here. Like on one hand, we're hearing to use AI to create more content, create more ad variations, you know, automate invites with that premium all-in subscription. And the other hand, relationships can't be automated. So you better hang out on LinkedIn and give thought to every single comment. So as time-strapped marketers and business owners, like how do we prioritize what's important or how do we listen to what they're saying here and make sure we're doing it right? AJ Wilcox Oh, it's so hard because, you know, LinkedIn, they swung that pendulum so far that one way because they're owned by Microsoft that's in bed with open AI. And so right out of the gate, it was a, we're going to put AI into everything we do and try to fully accept it. But then the pendulum swing the opposite way was, oh crap, whenever people are using this, it becomes less personal. It becomes disingenuous and people are now out of the equation and it lowers the amount of engagement that they're actually getting on the platform. So that pendulum, it's got to swing somewhere and stay in the middle. ([Time 0:32:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/be7a4780-e3b2-4bc9-a161-bfc2dd39543d)) - **Prioritize Human Replies And Call Out Bot Comments** - If a comment looks AI-generated, ignore or call it out; respond only when you believe a human is behind it and you can give a meaningful reply. - AJ suggests concise, personal replies and calling out blatant automation to protect relationship value. Transcript: AJ Wilcox Know, if it's related, I do feel like I owe my network a response and an actual human response. But so many of the times the comments are like you say, like it's, you know, vague comment on what you wrote. And now it's a question diving way into a different edge case of LinkedIn ads. And I'm like, oh, if I have to go and answer this, it's going to take me 20 minutes to answer. And I don't even think there's a human on the other side. So personally, I'm a big fan of like, Hey, if it's, if you can tell it's absolutely AI, just ignore, or like you do call them out, try to make it as intensely personal as you possibly can. Michael Stelzner Do you recommend keeping the comments relatively short or do you recommend like using narration tools like on the desktop? Like there's a cool tool called Whisperflow, which I use. You use that one as well, AJ? Just started using it yesterday. It's really cool. So is it also a best practice to tag people? I don't even know if you can do that on LinkedIn with comments or do they get notified? Like help us understand like just a little bit of best practices for, for commenting etiquette. Yeah. AJ Wilcox It used to be that you couldn't really tell if a comment did anything or went anywhere, but about, I want to say it's been about a year ago, LinkedIn started reporting to us the number of Views on our comments. And that made a whole bunch of people go, Ooh, I need to make sure I'm strong on my comment game. And yes, you can mention people. The notifications are kind of spotty. Sometimes they see it, sometimes they don't. Depends on how busy their notifications are. But yeah, I do. I think now because you can actually see what your comments are getting, it's totally worth giving really like complete answers and just test. Does the complete answer get me more views than just a quick, thanks, bro. ([Time 0:36:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0de767ca-4e1e-4d19-8057-7879eab1b157)) - **AJ Is Training An AJBot For Transparent Help** - Michael and AJ both experiment with branded AI assistants; AJ is actively training an 'AJBot' to handle certain inquiries transparently. - AJ says disclosing it's AI reduces the sense of being deceived compared with undisclosed automation. Transcript: Michael Stelzner So some of the gray hairs that have been around for a while are going to understand what I'm about to say, like on your Facebook page, typically like you would have someone sign it like Jason or Mike or whatever, right? Because it's a brand and you don't know who the person is and you'd personalize it. Who's to say that the response isn't going to say AJ bot. You know what I mean? And you sign it, AJ bot or AJ assistant. You know what I mean? And that way they know it's not really you because you've got a lot of huge YouTubers, don't you, Jerry, that are doing this with their comments where they have assistants that are in There like commenting because there's so many darn people. So I would imagine that this, if you were to train up a knowledge base, AJ, on everything you know about LinkedIn and LinkedIn ads, and it was pretty darn comprehensive, I don't think Anybody would be upset. Because right now, we have a bot that is our customer service bot on Social Media Marketing World sales page. You know what I mean? And people ask questions all the time. And it's really good. And it's really accurate because it's been well trained. I would imagine people would respect that if they knew that this was not AJ, it was AJBot. And it actually might lead to some interesting things because it's been trained on your knowledge and wisdom. What do you think about that, AJ? You see that coming someday? ([Time 0:39:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/73bdaf2f-c4cd-42a9-87d7-6ea923fb8ea2))