LinkedIn and AI

Chris Castanes:
Welcome to You're Going to Be Great at This, the podcast where we help entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners, sales professionals, and other self-employed folks turn prospects into customers and grow their businesses. We deliver practical tips and tricks with plenty of humor and dumb stories to keep things fun. I'm your host, Chris Castanes. So let's get going and make your business thrive. Hello, and welcome back to yet another episode of the You're Going to Be Great at This podcast. Today we have a return guest. I don't know how lucky we can be sometimes, to have someone this much fun in two episodes at one time. This is Miss Judi Hays. Judi is, I don't want to say a LinkedIn guru, but you're a strategist and a speaker, you've written a book, and you're all about LinkedIn. You're also a marketing and corporate communications expert. So thanks for coming on and honoring that legal document we sent over for you to sign. I'm glad you didn't have to sign it under duress. How are you doing today?

Judi Hays:
Well, this is my digital twin, still here.

Chris Castanes:
This is just Judi's avatar. This is not Judi.

Judi Hays:
I'm doing great. It's just a fine day, Chris. It's really nice to be on your show, and I just enjoy talking with you. So yeah, hi, everybody.

Chris Castanes:
We've been having a good time here. Today we're going to pick Judi's brain a little bit about using AI and LinkedIn, how LinkedIn uses AI, and all that fun stuff. Say we're not really all in on LinkedIn yet. We're just starting out with LinkedIn, or maybe we're a seventh grader trying to figure it out. Give us a little bit of where AI fits into all that.

Judi Hays:
Well, it's hard to escape it. In every aspect of everything we do, we're touched by it, from Alexa to Siri to everything. That's all AI. As far as LinkedIn is concerned, there was a major shift in the last quarter of last year, around November. LinkedIn has spent the past year and a half training its AI on all the activity of the members on LinkedIn, and it has built what they're calling 360Brew. That's the name of it. Think of 360 as a whole, a full circle. What that means is that LinkedIn is essentially evaluating you, and it's deciding whether you are visible or invisible.

So let's say you have a dog rescue business. That's really your primary business, you work with different entities, and you want to meet entities like that. But the stuff you write about on LinkedIn has to do with sports and other things, and you have a lot of other activities on your profile. When the AI that's built into LinkedIn looks at that, it's confused. It doesn't know what to do with you or where to put you. Whereas if everything is focused on a strong topic, a niche, a specialty, say you're a strategic CFO, and you're talking about exit strategies and valuation, you have accredited degrees and everything in your profile, and your network is aligned with people who use your services, LinkedIn looks at you as an expert. It says, "Hmm, this person knows their stuff." So the AI on the back end of the platform pushes your content and your profile out to people it thinks would benefit from knowing you. You'll notice this. It's very subtle.

I have to tell you that up until recently, people were using engagement pods, which were terrible. I would post something, and at 8:32, everyone goes on and says, "Great post, great post, great post." All these random people from all over the world. Sure, I got 5,000 reactions, but nobody who is really the person I want to reach. Those pods are now a thing of the past. Other people would use hashtags, and you'd see posts with 72 hashtags. They don't work anymore. It actually suppresses things.

So now LinkedIn is looking for what it calls trust signals, and I love this, because it's all about being authentic. It's like, you're the real deal. You're a podcaster, you interview people, you're an author, you're doing things, and here are the topics you talk about. So now LinkedIn is saying, "Oh, this is a very interesting person. Let me introduce this person to a wider audience." That's how it's working now, and that's why several parts of your profile are critical. Number one, your photo. It's got to be you. It's got to be real. It can't be a logo. It can't be you in a shot from somebody's wedding. It's got to be you, and it's got to be current, within the last three years. The other thing is your headline. The default is your job title and your company. That says nothing. "CEO, XYZ Company." I don't know what that means. What I like is to have your headline be outcome-focused. Instead of saying, "I help so-and-so do this," which again doesn't really say as much, talk about the outcome you bring. Whatever that outcome is, that's what your headline can be. And then the banner, that billboard behind your profile photo, you can use to convey your area of expertise.

I think I said this before we were speaking: the whole idea of a niche. I was very niche-resistant. I didn't want to claim a niche, because I thought if I say I just do this, and somebody wants that, they're not going to come to me. No, claiming a niche makes you even more valuable. When you are very specific, people know exactly what you do. I look at so many profiles, and I have to be honest with clients and prospects. I say, "I have no idea what you do. I'm looking at this thing, and I don't know where I'm going with this." People have no attention span. You go to a website, it doesn't load right away, and you're out of there. You want immediate gratification, and that's where LinkedIn really comes in. I think it's great. It's a rented platform, though. It's rented.

Chris Castanes:
Yeah, it's rented real estate. We get that. And Judi, you were talking earlier about how LinkedIn's algorithm, or AI, wants people to narrow their focus and concentrate on their niche to strengthen their personal brand. I want to add that the same principle applies to your real-life business and in-person networking. You meet somebody at a networking event, and you ask, "What do you do?" "I'm an attorney." Great. I know that when I talk to Bob Smith, I'm going to talk to an attorney. But then Bob says, "Oh, now I'm selling these protein shakes on the side," or, "Now I've got this little side hustle." It waters down your brand, and it confuses people. Is he an attorney, or is he selling protein shakes, or is he into electronic devices? What are we doing this week? That sounds so familiar when you say LinkedIn seems to get confused when you've got too many things going on. So that makes perfect sense. When I hear Judi Hays, the first thing I think of is LinkedIn marketing, or something to that effect. I'm not thinking protein shakes.

Judi Hays:
It's true. It's true. One thing to add to what you said: that attorney, maybe they do trusts and estates. Maybe they do litigation. Maybe they do immigration. There was a guy I met recently who does traffic tickets.

Chris Castanes:
Yeah.

Judi Hays:
Talk about a specialty. And then you become memorable, and people say, "Oh, you're the traffic ticket attorney. Can you really get me out of these red light tickets?"

Chris Castanes:
Yeah. And even there, when you get the guy who's the DUI and criminal defense attorney, and all of a sudden he says, "And I'm doing wills also," you're like, I don't know if I want that guy doing my will. I'd rather have the estate planning attorney. So niching down in person, in your real life, and on LinkedIn are both very important, and so is not watering down your brand either way. Right?

Judi Hays:
It's true. And the other thing about the AI getting confused on LinkedIn: anyone who has started to work with any of the LLMs, ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, knows that if you put in a poorly constructed prompt, you're going to get poorly constructed results. It's the same thing with LinkedIn. If you have a half-baked profile, LinkedIn doesn't know what to do with it, so it's probably not going to serve you at its best in its recommendations. There are about 10 different places where you show up on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn recommends you whether you comment or whether you do other things. It's all of those things factored together. I don't know what to call it aside from AI. It's what powers the platform, kind of like the brain behind the platform, and I think it involves a lot of mathematical computation, which is why I don't know much about it. In other words, it gives you more points for certain things, and it takes away points if you're missing things. So it's this computation of what counts as a fully optimized profile, and there are so many sections in a profile that people aren't even aware of. That's what I have fun with, working with my clients and really showing them. I just love seeing their eyes go, "Wow, I didn't know I could do that."

The most important thing, and I want everybody listening to this podcast to do this, is to download your network. On average, about 72% of the teams I train have not downloaded their network, and I'll tell you why it's important. There's about 20% job turnover every year, and somebody you are connected to may now be that ideal prospect for you. They may be at a company you weren't aware of. When you download your database and actually look at it, you sort it by company and by job title, and you think, "I didn't realize Chris moved to this company. I've been trying to get in there for years." "Hey, Chris, how are you doing? It's been a while. I noticed you're at XYZ Company. I'd love to catch up and hear what you're up to." Boom, you just re-engaged. That's the beauty of it.

Chris Castanes:
I don't think most people know you can download your database.

Judi Hays:
Indeed, you can.

Chris Castanes:
I've done it once, years ago, and there is a lot of turnover. You know the thing I really wish LinkedIn would bring back? They did away with it years ago: tags.

Judi Hays:
Oh my gosh, I loved that.

Chris Castanes:
Tags were the best. I'm an insurance agent in my real life, and I've got a lot of friends on LinkedIn who are insurance agents, people I've met. We're friendly competitors. We network amongst ourselves sometimes, and some people specialize in certain things. And then I've got a lot of people who aren't my competitors, and there are times when I want to market to them or put a post out to them and not tag my competitors. If I've got some brilliant idea, I don't want my competitors seeing it. So we need to bring back tags. That's going to be our new rallying cry.

Judi Hays:
I think so. That inbox is the one area LinkedIn has done very little to optimize. I call it a crime scene. A couple of tips I use: there's a tag called Jobs, and I put that on prospects and clients. I just tag them as Jobs. That tag is usually meant for people who are job seeking. There's also a star. You can star a conversation, so if it's somebody I want to remember for something, I star it. You just have to go back and review your stars; otherwise, everyone gets starred. The other thing people don't realize is that when you send a message, you can immediately archive it, because as soon as somebody responds, it comes back to your inbox. At least that keeps the inbox clean. My email is embarrassing, because I have so many emails, but my LinkedIn inbox, I do see things there. So those things help organize it. But I'm with you on the tags. You could also put in a note about where you met somebody. Remember those days?

Chris Castanes:
You could put whether they were a realtor or whatever they were, and then it just went away, and so did all my hopes and dreams at that point. So anyway, what are we going to do? R.I.P. tags for now, and bring the tags back. Judi, this has been awesome. This has been the most fun I've had in the last day. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. If anybody needs help with their LinkedIn page, I highly recommend you reach out to Judi and let her help you. She'll make you LinkedIn famous. And don't do like I did and spend two weeks in LinkedIn jail. Those were tough times, man. It was rough. If anybody needs your information, we'll put it in the show notes. And if you like this podcast, leave us a good review, and if you did not, just lie and say something nice anyway, like your mother taught you to. All right, everybody, go out there, have a great week, and we'll look for you next time.

Judi Hays:
Thank you.

Chris Castanes:
That was amazing. Be sure to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out on more useful information to help you and your business succeed. Thanks for listening, and if you like this podcast, leave us a review. And if you really like this podcast, go to the show notes and buy me a coffee. I love coffee. Until next time, stay positive and be productive.