LinkedIn HUGE Change! ➕ On-Demand is Dying? ➕Goodbye Gossip Magazines? What’s Up THIS WEEK| Ep. 347

Jay Schwedelson: We are back for what's up this week from the Do This, not that Podcast presented by Marigold. This is our short episode where we break down what's going on in marketing and business and in life, and then we still have our longer episodes later in the week. So hopefully you check it all out.

Jay Schwedelson: So what's going on? Well, first let's talk LinkedIn. LinkedIn just had a. Major, major update to some analytics that we should all be looking at. This is not some sort of advanced thing where you need to be like a super duper LinkedIn user, but if you are, that's great too. And this applies to your company pages and your personal pages as well.

Jay Schwedelson: And the game changer is this. Now you can see on any post that you've put on LinkedIn, even if it's a post from a year ago, it could be an older post, a post you just did, a company page post. You can see if that post generated any profile viewers. So if somebody saw your post and then they visited your profile, it can also show you in the analytics if the post that you put out generated any new followers, either for you personally or for your company page, and it's on a post by post basis.

Jay Schwedelson: And when you click on View Analytics, it will then show you for that post specifically. How many profile views, how many people then went after you posted and viewed your profile because of that post? Or how many new followers you got because of that post? Why does this matter? So I went back and looked at all my old posts and what blew my mind, I thought, okay, if a post gets a lot of impressions, a lot of views, those are the posts that are gonna get the most new followers or the most profile views.

Jay Schwedelson: And as it turns out, that wasn't the case. I would have posts that I did that might have a hundred thousand views and get, you know, a handful of followers, a handful of profile views. I might have another post that got 10,000 views and it had. Exponentially more profile views and followers that, uh, resulted from it.

Jay Schwedelson: And then we looked at our company pages and we saw the same thing. And what you should really be thinking about is bucketing the type of content that you're putting out on LinkedIn. Are they carousel posts? Are they informational posts? Are they post promoting a new product or service? Uh, are they, uh, polls that you're doing?

Jay Schwedelson: And then looking at. Is this generating profile views? Is this generating followers? This is allowing people to make a content roadmap on LinkedIn that we couldn't do before. And this is now rolling out. It's not on everybody's feed yet, but I think it will be in the next few days. And this is not just for premium users, this is for all users, free users, premium users, everybody.

Jay Schwedelson: So really this is a game changer as people look to expand out on their LinkedIn content strategy. So another thing going on this week, and this is not a promotion for my event, but I wanna tell you a tactic that we're doing. So we have a big event this week, my company called Event Astic. It's this giant free virtual conference that we put on and we got about 11,000 people signed up.

Jay Schwedelson: But I, I've been getting a lot of heat. People angry at me about something. But it's a tactic that I love and I wanna explain to you why we do it. 'cause I think you could steal from this and do it for your own business. And we're seeing this as a big trend. So it's this giant live free virtual event and it's two days long.

Jay Schwedelson: But what we are doing and what we've done in the past is we don't have on demand, right? It's not one of these things where you, the event occurs and afterwards everybody that registered just gets the on demand link. We don't do that. What we do is something called earned. On demand, which means that in order to get the on demand link for the event, you have to show up to the event for 60 minutes in total over the course of the two days of the event.

Jay Schwedelson: And if you do, our system triggers and you get the on-demand link for everything. And it's this idea that for free events, um, you're not paying any money. What you are paying with is your time. And if you're willing to invest a little bit of time, we're willing to give you all the content that we're putting out there.

Jay Schwedelson: Why do we do this? So. We used to play the on-demand game like everybody else for our events, and we said, okay, when the event's over, we gets the on-demand link. And on average we had about a 40% show up rate for our virtual events. When we moved to this, uh, earned on-demand model, our show up rates hit 70%.

Jay Schwedelson: And here is the reason you might wanna be thinking about, you're like, I don't put on events, but maybe you put on webinars, maybe you put on whatever. I don't care if you're a consumer brand, a business brand, whatever, and here's some of the data about why you should be thinking about this. On demand is really no demand because we're trying to basically turn the planet into Netflix where everything's available all at once, but you even see it now with a lot of the TV shows that are out there.

Jay Schwedelson: You know, apple TV releases episodes on certain days. Netflix now releases not all their episodes as at once. Why is this trend moving away from just. Pure on demand for all things at all times. Well, first of all, availability of on demand for webinars, for example, has dropped. It used to be that 80% of all webinars were also then available on demand.

Jay Schwedelson: Whatever you put on a webinar, 80% of webinars would just make the unavailable available. In the last 12 months, that has dropped down to 63%, meaning that a lot of people now, a lot of brands are saying you need to show up live if you want the content. 34% of webinars are now being offered as live only.

Jay Schwedelson: Live only that there's not even a snippet of on demand. And why? Why is everyone doing this? Number one show up. Rates are important, not just for the energy, but here's the STA from World Data Research that'll blow your mind. People who show up live to webinars and virtual events convert to pipeline 400% more.

Jay Schwedelson: Then those that just watch the on-demand version and you know, you feel that, right? You feel it because you register for stuff. Like I'll watch the OnDemand and then you never do. The secret sauce here is when you do this and you say, okay, uh, we're not gonna have any on-demand, or we're gonna have on demand only if you show up for the first 10 minutes of our webinar or however you wanna play that game.

Jay Schwedelson: You need to be very intentional in all of your marketing saying that this is live only. That if you don't attend in person, then you're not going to see it. And if that's too difficult for you to do, that's too big of a, a bite of an apple for you to take. You could do live only and then say something like, you know, the on demand really available 30 days from now.

Jay Schwedelson: So you're telling the person, listen, if you want this, you gotta show up now. 30 days, who cares? So you're not saying there is no on demand, but if you are just playing the game that you, the way you used to always play it, that everything's available on demand. Always. Yeah. You'll win the day. Everybody's gonna love you.

Jay Schwedelson: Yay. You've catered to everybody, but you're gonna get no sales, no pipeline, no growth. Okay? Uh, this idea that, that you should make all of your content so that way everybody has access to it. That is legacy. Thinking you want to make your content be the engine for your business. So that's why we do earned on demand.

Jay Schwedelson: And I get so much hate mail. I don't care. I don't wanna be for everybody. When you're for everybody, you're for nobody. Okay? So that's my vibe. All right, what else is going on? So this is slightly ridiculous information. I thought this was a kind of wild thing. I don't know if you saw this, but there's all these gossip magazines when you go to the supermarket, right?

Jay Schwedelson: There's us Weekly and Okay. Magazine and InTouch and Life and Style and all these magazines that always have the craziest headlines on them. You know, uh, Elvis is Alive or, or, you know, so-and-so is Dating So and so, and those have been a staple at the, uh, supermarkets forever. Well, a lot of these magazines are going outta business, so this week, InTouch Life and Style.

Jay Schwedelson: Um, and a few of their sister publications are all announced that they're ceasing publication. They're gonna be going away. And these are some of the biggest, uh, gossip magazines that are out there. And look, it doesn't surprise me because. Who's really buying those anymore? Just go on the web, whatever. I will tell you a wild story though, um, about one of these magazines.

Jay Schwedelson: I won't say which one. So, back in the day, I used to do a lot of work with all of the magazines, all of the gossip magazines were clients of mine, and we used to do a lot of their marketing. And one day I went to New York and I met with the publisher. One of the biggest ones in this category, one of the biggest, you would know the magazine.

Jay Schwedelson: Okay. And we were meeting and we were talking about stuff, whatever. And I said, I have a question for you straight up. I go some of your headlines and these celebrity stories are wild. I don't even understand. How do you get this information when nobody else has it? Like how do you actually get it? And he turned to me, and I'll never forget this.

Jay Schwedelson: He goes, well, um, he said. Did you know that Jennifer Aniston is secretly dating George Clooney? And I said, really? And this was before George Clooney was married. I said, what? I go, that is wild. I go, is that true? And he goes, I don't know. But it would sell magazines, wouldn't it? I said. I guess so he goes, yeah.

Jay Schwedelson: So what we do is we sit around, we come up with the most sensational ideas that are plausible, and then we all say, let's roll with that one. That will sell the most. I go get that. That is not okay. That can't be the foundation of a business. This is ridiculous. And I gotta tell you, as soon as I walked out of there, I went back to my team, I go, I don't know if I can work with these magazines.

Jay Schwedelson: This is ridiculous. What's going on over there? So. I lost my faith in humanity walking outta that meeting, but that happened, that blew my mind. Anyway, uh, appreciate you being here. Listen, if you, uh, dig this up, I would really appreciate it if you could leave this thing a review, follow the show. It really helps with the algorithm, it helps circulate it, and we have big plans for the show, so the more that we can get it out there, the better you are very awesome and um, yeah, keep it real later.