Two main subjects this week;

How do you feel about your home page these days?

The future for LinkedIn?

Firstly there was one small news item worth a mention this week;

• LinkedIn CEO donating his multi-million stock package to staff

Your LinkedIn homepage

We see it every time we log in but how much notice do you really take?

If you haven’t done so recently take 5 minutes to scroll through, you might be surprised, disappointed, amused or even angry at what you see!

Last week I talked about how to respond to an inappropriate posts

In this episode I discuss various aspects of the content of our home page feed;

• What are your thoughts about the views expressed in this status update below? Should LinkedIn be blocking content and should we have a ‘dislike’ or not business button?

• Are you taking the opportunity to engage with your home page stream? These updates are from real people and everyone of them is an opportunity to build better relationships and raise your visibility.
• Engagement can be very effective but when does it become counter-productive? Take a look at the list of comments below. What impression are these people creating? Where is line between good conversation/debate and petty arguments that reflect poorly on all concerned?

It seems to me that our homepage are being taken over by the loud and crazy minority. Sensible, mature business people are making the mistake of low activity - possibly because of all the idiots but this actually makes the situation worse!

Is LinkedIn under threat from Facebook?

The second subject this week concerns the future for LinkedIn. The following article by the highly respected sourcing/recruiting expert Jim Stroud really got me thinking about how LinkedIn are so exposed due to their reliance of Recruitment for dealt ⅔rds of their revenue.

How Facebook could destroy LinkedIn in a year by Jim Stroud

We know that LinkedIn is becoming a better social selling tool than a recruiting tool, business owners and sales people are starting to take the place of the recruiters who are leaving, or at least using other tools instead.

But this will not work out well for us unless LinkedIn find a way of becoming significantly less reliant of their Recruiting revenues.

How are they going to do that?

I discuss the options and would love to hear your ideas.

Cool Thing

This week I want to share (excuse the pun) a really useful tool I have started using called ShareLinkGenerator

This is only relevant if you have a blog or write content somewhere other than on LinkedIn. It works in a very similar way to ‘Click to Tweet’ does for Twitter.

By creating a unique share link you can create an option within your copy for a quote to be the headline for a share of that specific page on LinkedIn.

Again it’s another free tool and I have found it very useful.

Update:

Save to contacts hasn’t quite gone yet….for some of us anyway!

LinkedIn AFQ

Question:

One thing that is puzzling me is how I can send a message to someone who is not a first level connection who has commented on one of my Linkedin Longposts or updates without using up my In-Mails.  I can’t find a way of doing this without connecting with them which I don’t necessarily want to do at such an early stage of contact. If you can help I would really appreciate it. 

Answer:

The way to do is through using group messages, I made a video to explain how;

Back from a week in the sun and raring to go, this week’s show I address some important considerations about LinkedIn’s future direction.

Main Story

“LinkedIn is now, at best, a business card holder. At worst, it’s a delivery service for spam”

It’s been a tough month for LinkedIn, disappointing results have led to many commentators really questioning their strategy and direction.

Amongst the many negative (sometimes harshly so) articles I read this week I found the following one from Techcrunch which includes the horrible quote above the most interesting;

LinkedIn Problems Run Deeper Than Valuation

In response to al the negative press LinkedIn’s CEO gathered LinkedIn staff together to give them a motivational talk, amazingly they filmed it and released it on Slideshare!

They didn’t go so far as to reveal the 7 year plan he refers to but I still have to applaud the openness of sharing this talk.

On a more positive note LinkedIn are running their first advert at the Oscars this weekend to an estimated audience of nearly 40 million.

Narrated by Jeff Weiner himself, the commercial, called "You’re closer than you think," tells the story of when NASA used LinkedIn to look for its next astronaut. The networking website says its data found 3 million users who were qualified to apply for the role.

https://youtu.be/V_cz6Xt-SZM

Save to Contacts has now been retired, the ‘relationship’ tab still shows for first tier connections and anyone you have previously saved (minus the ‘who introduced you’ section) but you can no longer save 2nd or 3rd tier connections. Disappointing but not at all a surprise.

Interview with Joe Pulizzi

The king of content marketing!

You can listen to the full episode here, or simply search for Winbusinessin on iTunes

Cool Thing

This weeks cool thing is a free web tool that allows you to collate content relevant to specific connections for sharing with them via email or LinkedIn message.

The site is called Grapevine6 and this feature is the ‘engage’ feature which can be accessed below;

http://engage.grapevine6.com/

Sharing highly relevant content is a great way to build trust and this tool makes it really easy.

LinkedIn A F Q

Question - I'm looking to transition into a variety of industries and would like to leave my industry space blank. I see many posts in your Help Forum regarding this issue but I don't see any solutions. Is it possible to leave the industry section blank?

Answer - I understand your frustration but at the moment, it is not possible to leave your industry field blank.

I can assure you though that this is a field that Recruiters are advised to ignore when searching because it is notoriously unreliable. Many people select the wrong industry either by accident or misunderstanding its meaning - for instance an HR Manager in an Accounting firm puts 'human resources' as their industry rather than 'Accounting'.

Recruiters are usually aware of this and therefore avoid the field when searching.

Provided you complete your profile thoroughly and use the correct keywords, I am sure you will be found for the right opportunities, irrespective of industry.

Now that we have passed 100 episodes, I thought it was time to give LinkedInformed a makeover. You will notice we have a new logo and the introduction music is different but more importantly we have a new format for the show.

I will no longer have a specific news section but I will obviously always talk each week about any important events that have occurred, if nothing important has happened I will focus the episode on a specific subject.

This will never be an interview show as such but I do plan to conduct more interviews from now on.

I hope you like the changes.

Main Story

This week I focussed my attention on LinkedIn’s Q4 and full year financial results.

A quick overview

• Q4 revenue increased by 34% (vs 2014 Q4) to $862m and that brought the full year to $2,991.
• Talent solutions contributed 62% of revenue (this includes Lynda) compared to 57% last year
• Talent solution showed a 32% increase on last year - mainly coming from the field sales team.
• Online job postings continued to drop.
• Marketing solutions contributed 21% of revenue achieving a growth of 20% (25% last year)
• Sponsored updates are effectively holding this revenue stream up, showing growth of 85%!
• Display advertising continues to plummet, now only contributing 15% (30% last year)
• Lead Accelerator product has failed and will be retired this year.
• Premium subscriptions (including sales solutions) contributed 17% of the revenue
• Sales Navigator is the only bright light in this revenue stream and now represents 38% of all premium subscriptions.
• More than half of Sales Navigator sales are generated by the field sales team.
• As a results Sales Solutions will now be reported separately (at last!)
• General subscriptions have fallen to an all time low, single digit % growth.

You can read the full report here.

Here are a variety of articles about the results;

• LinkedIn stock plummets 43% on tepid outlook
• SHAREHOLDER ALERT: Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC Announces Investigation of LinkedIn Corporation
• Five Reasons LinkedIn Had Its Worst Day Ever
• I also mentioned this article from Itai Leshem

When talking about the results I also mentioned a report in the FT about how Glass door may be thinking about competing with LinkedIn.

Cool Thing

This weeks cool thing is a Google Chrome extension called ‘LinkedIn Connection Revealer’

As you can see, this handy tool allows you to see how many followers (not connections) your first tier connection has. I’m not sure why it only works for connections because you can see followers for all LinkedIn users by going to their ‘View recent activity’ but it’s still pretty cool anyway.

And best of all….it’s FREE!

You can download it from the Chrome store here

LinkedIn A F Q

Question - I have posted a status update to inform people about my up coming training course. I would like to be able to send a note to specific members of my network to share it. I've had people do it with me but I can't see how. Any tips on how to share it with them?

Answer - Rather annoyingly you can't do it that way for an image update, You are only able to send status updates directly to people if they are web link updates or just font updates. For some reason an image update does not allow this option.

My suggestion would be to produce an update linked to the page that promotes your training event on your website or perhaps Eventbrite and then you will be able to send it to your connections.

News

• LinkedIn retire their Connected app.
• Meet the homeless beggar who accepts credit cards and has a LinkedIn page. The Sun show their normal level of accuracy - just look at his profile 
• Manchester needs cameramen and Twitter experts, says LinkedIn

Comments

1. Episode 1
2. Episode 2 
3. Episode 6
4. Episode 7
5. Episode 12
6. Episode 14
7. Episode 18
8. Episode 25
9. Episode 36
10. Episode 38 
11. Episode 40
12. Episode 50 
13. Episode 67
14. Episode 68
15. Episode 73 
16. Episode 81
17. Episode 87
18. Episode 91
19. Episode 98

News

• LinkedIn is once again driving big traffic to publishers
• LinkedIn sees jump in referral traffic to publishers after app redesign
• The most read person in human history
• LinkedIn release a free e-book on social selling
• LinkedIn ask app users for feedback

Commentary

With all this controversy about how LinkedIn reports its post views numbers and how it distributes published posts I thought I would share my thoughts on readership, distribution and engagement.

• Build your audience by doing the following;
• Write great content that your followers find interesting and useful.
• Build a strong and diverse network
• Ask people to follow you if a connection is not appropriate
• Get more profile views via activity including auto viewing
• Engage with other peoples content more, show people you are interesting.
• Promote your posts by sharing them via image status updates on at least 5 occasions.
• Promote you posts on other social media channels - Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc

At the end of the day we should take responsibility for our own success with our posts and it is always most important to remember that engagement is more important than views.

Questions

1,

How do you add recommendations to your profile with the new messaging system? I previously added it from the message but this seems to have changed.

ANS = Yes this has changed. You can only manage recommendations from the desktop version on LinkedIn.

> Go to your profile and scroll down to recommendations.

> Hover over the section and click on ‘manage’

> You will see the received recommendation under pending where you can accept it and show it on your profile.

2, How do I move my main current position up to the top of my profile?

ANS = You can do this, provided both position are current (to date) by grabbing the ‘grip’ on the left hand side of the relevant position and dragging it up (see below)

You may also need to manually amend your headline in this circumstance because it will have changed automatically when you added the new position.

I will be covering more questions in my YouTube channel soon.

News

• LinkedIn hits 20 million members in the UK 
• How many users are actually active though? I estimate the figure is nearer to 6-8 million that are regularly using LinkedIn - still an impressive number!
• LinkedIn announce UK top 10 power profiles (most viewed) in 6 categories
• Is a LinkedIn takeover of the Financial Times as crazy as it sounds?
• Top Seven Stupidest Titles on LinkedIn

The 5C System.

For a limited time I am allowing free access to module 1 of my new e-learning LinkedIn business development programme.

All I ask for in return is some constructive feedback and, if you like it, a testimonial.

Sign up for FREE access here

Commentary

How do you become a top ten power profile on LinkedIn?

I might argue that Charlotte Proudman must have been in one of those top ten lists but she was excluded - maybe for good reason but who else was excluded?

So what do you have to do to get profile views;

• Being famous obviously helps!
• Laura Chetcuti isn’t famous and her posts are not very well read but she is very active and has 14,000 followers (presumably mostly connections
• Ian Moyse (previous guest and LION) has a massive number of connections (33,772 followers) and came in the top ten technology list.
• Bianca Miller - not especially well read but fairly active and has nearly 11,000 followers. She managed to get into the Leaders list alongside Richard Branson and David Cameron!

Question

is there a polite way to let people know that you are NOT an open networker / LION?  Our marketing strategy has led me to be featured by LinkedIn as "someone you might be interested in following" as part of the on-boarding process of the new app, and this has increased my exposure hugely and I've gone from 3,000 followers (2,500 connections) to 16,000 followers in the last 2 months. Nice. But it also means I get invites from engineering graduates from every corner of the globe.... Can I stop that?

Answer = The best way to deal with this would be to prevent people from inviting you to connect, unless they have your email address.

Go to settings > Communications > ‘select who can send you invitations’

Welcome to a new episode of LinkedInformed, here are the main topics covered this week.

News

• New feature coming - videos are starting to autoplay (without sound) in the homepage feed. This is not something I have seen first hand but John Nemo covered it in a recent post
• This guy wrote to all 1,109 of his LinkedIn connections last year.
• Are LinkedIn falsely reporting their page view numbers? Itai Leshem thinks he knows how they are doing it.
• The new social network called beBee (awful name!) that practices ‘affinity networking’ as detailed in this post from the excellent John White.

Episode 100

I really want to do something different for our 100th episode, I am still open to suggestions but one I had recently was that someone (maybe a listener) could interview me! Any volunteers or suggestions as to who would be a good candidate.

Let me know at mark@linkedinformed.com

Commentary

The 5 things you may have missed on the new app.

I have written a more detailed published post <Rehj, ask me for this link, not done yet> about this but as a summary, the 5 things are as follows;

• Individual Message Notifications.
• Advanced Search
• Desktop Search History Visible
• Invitation To Connect Replies
• See How Many Connections You Have

Questions

1. How do I find my sent invitations so that I can withdraw some of them?

Go to the area where you view your invitations (see all) and then click on ‘Manage invitations’

<add pic ‘manage invitations’

2. A voicemail from Gary Stockton regarding searching for connections with a specific job title.

The bizarre behaviour of LinkedIn users!

Welcome to episode 96. Christmas seems a distant memory and I am very much into the swing of things again now.

News

• A lawyers LinkedIn profile is ‘not an advertisement’ states a US Bar Association.
• LinkedIn’s worst ever chat up lines.
• The new auto viewing tool called Profile Hopper
• I was interviewed this week for Motor Trader Radio. You can listen to the recording here

LinkedIn Publishing. What happens ‘post a post’!

Really interesting and revealing LinkedIn post from LinkedIn top publishing man Daniel Roth about what happens when you press ‘publish’ on your new LinkedIn post.

Key points for me are;

• LinkedIn now accept that it’s OK to connect with someone you ‘want to interact with’ rather than insisting you must ‘know them well’.
• A post always appears on the home page feed of ALL of your connections presumably at the time it is posted (timing is therefore very important).
• An algorithm filters out suspected spam by looking for keywords associated to jobs or events. These posts do not trigger a notification.
• Notifications are only posted to ‘strong connections’ determined by leveraging the connection strength score from the LinkedIn cloud service. Cloud service maintains connection relationships between members. This must be based on activities (profile views, messages, post/update/group interactions) and similarities (industry, company, groups etc).
• Quoting your post to  tip@linkedinpulse on Twitter will increase your chances of getting into a channel.
• There are now 66 Pulse channels including new country / location ones.

Winbusinessin Podcast

Next Tuesday’s new episode will be covering the 5 essential skills for creating great content;

Writing - People - Video - Audio - Visual

Why not subscribe to the show on iTunes or go to Winbusinessin to listen to the first 2 episodes?

Commentary

Are we lazy or just very reactive with LinkedIn?

Why are LinkedIn users so keen to use canned responses such as ‘great post’ or ‘Congrats on your anniversary’?

I think it looks terrible but that isn’t really my point, I’m more interested in why these messages seem to work so well. Any suggestions please leave a voicemail or email me at mark@linkedinformed.com

Suggested replies (such as I see when using Googles ‘Inbox’ app) are highly effective and useful but LinkedIn’s version seems very crude - yet clearly popular!

Finally I am still keen to gather more ideas for episode 100 (it’s fast approaching). Is there someone you would like me to interview? Perhaps a previous guest or someone who you have heard on another podcast.

Drop me a line at mark@linkedinformed.com

Welcome to episode 95 and more importantly welcome to 2016!

News

• French social network Viadeo has closed it’s Chinese LinkedIn competitor Tianji
• Data Shows How Google Drives Search Traffic To LinkedIn

A quick review of the main events of 2015

• The biggest story of the year involved Barrister Charlotte Proudman rebuking a senior solicitor for complimenting her on her LinkedIn profile picture. This story went global and is still being debated by many people today. <pic of Charlotte>
• 2015 was the year when ordinary LinkedIn users really took to publishing posts.
• LinkedIn made a significant attempt to improve groups, upsetting many users, especially group managers in the process

Winbusinessin Podcast

We are now in season 2 of my other podcast which focusses on social selling and business development on LinkedIn. On Tuesday we will be releasing episode 3 which is an interview with Christoph Trappe, a storytelling expert as part of our focus on content marketing.

Why not subscribe to the show on iTunes or go to Winbusinessin to listen to the first 2 episodes?

Commentary

Here are 5 things you can do this year to make 2016 your best LinkedIn year ever!

1. Refresh your profile.
1. Perhaps now is a good time to get a new profile picture
2. Revamp your headline. The new mobile only initially shows the first 68 characters of your headline so consider updating it.
3. Update your summary to express your goals for 2016, this is a great way to show people that you are actively using LinkedIn.
2. Produce more content.
1. Commit to writing more content, either LinkedIn posts or blogs on your own website.
2. Consider producing video content, I am focussing on developing my Youtube channel this year.
3. Perhaps this year could be the time to start producing radio content? If you want to start your own podcast I can highly recommend this free tutorial series.
3. Engage more with updates on your homepage.
1. Take more notice of your home page stream
2. Look for opportunities to comment
3. Try to comment rather than ‘like’
4. Cull your connections!
1. Take a look at your list of connections and disconnect from this that are no longer relevant and hide the updates those who post irrelevant content.
2. Disconnecting is easy, simply click on the link as shown below on their profile. They will not be notified.
5. Get out more!
1. Make the effort to go and meet some of your connections. If you have developed a relationship online, why not take it to the next level by arranging to meet them in person.
2. Take a look at what conferences or networking events you can attend this year and use the opportunity to grow your network.