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...