Welcome to episode 152, this week I’m going to cover the new Neptune design quite a bit as there have been quite a few developments.

Firstly a big thank-you to Kurt Shaver, Darrel Griffin and the mysterious ‘LoveWeb’ for giving the show 5 star reviews on iTunes - I massively appreciate your support.
Darrel Griffin can also be found on Instagram and is my ‘go to’ contact on anything to do with graphics - especially those we use on LinkedIn. So I have a question - what size should we be making our LinkedIn profile background image?
The official dimensions from LinkedIn are 1536 x 768px but this doesn’t seem to work as it zooms into the image.

New Desktop Design Update

It would seem that there is no way to see your sent invitation messages - this is crazy!
When someone has a paid account and the ‘open profile’ feature enabled, it is free to send them a message, this used to be shown on their profile by changing ‘send InMail’ to ‘send message’ but now they have removed this.
Video autoplay has been deprecated…which is odd because every other social media channel is moving towards video!
LinkedIn have removed the link ‘structuring your search’ which explained how to use Boolean operators. This might be because they now realise the information they were providing was actually incorrect! Irina Shamaeva (who knows her stuff) has exposed LinkedIn’s advice in this article below.
LinkedIn Tip Sheet Error And a New Hack - Irina Shamaeva
So it would appear that we now need to use the operator Title: in front of every job title in an OR search string!

The Great U-Turn

LinkedIn have had to face an enormous amount of negative feedback about the new design.
There was the online petition I mentioned last week which got c1800 signatures plus a huge response to their various posts asking for feedback.
Sometimes people are so rude and negative, it really is unnecessary and if there is one comment that annoys me more than anything it’s…
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”
What a load of crap!
We should never wait for things to break before improving them. All the best ideas and progression come from taking the complete opposite view.

Anyway the good news is that LinkedIn are listening and David Flink published this article this week;
We heard you: we're making some changes to LinkedIn Search

It would also appear that they are seriously considering bringing back postcode radius search…which would be massive!

I really applaud LinkedIn for their approach. Taking criticism is not easy and to take this approach is refreshing and progressive. But……
Why did it ever get to this stage in the first place?

I could have told them about all these faults in October but no-one was listening!

LinkedIn say they survey members before making changes but either;
They are asking the wrong people
They are not listening.

Such a massive u-turn on so many features should not be necessary at this stage. Waiting until almost full roll-out before listening means they have lost a massive amount of credibility.

Thanks to Sandra Clark for her voicemail question about Sales Navigator.

For me the three key benefits are as follows;
Focussed home page feed. This massively improves your chances of engaging with those people you are especially focussed on.
You can filter search results by ‘posted on LinkedIn in last 30 days’. I have found this to be really useful

Saved searches are better, partly because of the above filter. You can receive daily email alerts about people who meet your criteria and are active

Question:
How do I create a showcase page in the new groups design?
Answer
You can’t!
But you can if you revert back to the old design where you will find it in the menu on the edit button.

Question:
The messaging segment sends the message by pressing enter (which is not a good thing as the enter key is often used to insert a line-feed for starting a new paragraph). You leave no clue how to insert a new paragraph so my message is on solid block of text. How do I start a new paragraph in a message?

Answer
This depends how you are messaging.
If you go to the specific messaging page you can change the default as seen below

If however you are using the ‘in page’ messaging feature then you are effectively using a chat feature and every ‘return’ is a ‘send message’. This makes sense to me. If you want to construct a nicely laid out message, using the Messaging page.

Welcome to episode 151 at the end of another traumatic week for LinkedIn and it’s new design!

Following on from last weeks episode, I want to dig a bit deeper into what communication techniques work and what really don’t work on LinkedIn.

But first…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Workplace from Facebook is now live…..will it cause LinkedIn problems?

Are LinkedIn understaffed and overworked?….or just low quality or ignorant? I suspect they are severely overworked and understaffed….ironic for a site that makes 60% of its revenue from recruitment!

LinkedIn Salary - Did you know that premium users no longer have to add their salary to be able to use the salary feature.
Salary can be found in the ‘More menu’

New Desktop Design Update

Now that the majority of users have the new UI, the heat is really turning up on LinkedIn…members are really not happy!

Someone has even created an online petition!
New LinkedIn - Petition - Bring Back Tagging, Advanced Search and Rankings!

Whilst I think it’s important to provide LinkedIn with feedback, I don’t think ranting helps (other than the person that wrote it might feel better!).
The above petition does not really tackle the most important or realistic issues.
Let’s be realistic, LinkedIn are not likely to bring back advanced search and tagging (which is not actually related to the new UI) has moved to Sales Navigator so they are not going to reverse that and rankings (a pointless feature anyway) are hardly worth raising a petition about!

I’m not happy with the new design either but I am trying to be constructive and find realistic solutions.
The biggest issue for me is quality - there are just far too many bugs or features that seem to have been accidentally forgotten! This is unforgivable and LinkedIn need to ‘up their game’ and sort these quickly.

Here is my list of bugs, it is worth noting that this list was almost double the length in November, so things are slowly getting better.

Bugs or ‘forgotten’ features

• Hovering over names (quoted in updates) does not open up a preview box.
• You can’t see who shared your article
• Notifications do not take you to the exact place in a thread
• Typing responses to comments is impossible to see
• Recommendation order can’t be changed - despite appearing though it can views of post’ on homepage is totally out of sync with the real number.
• Page load times are slow for many
• When someone comments on an image update you can’t see the image in your feed…making the comment often impossible to understand

Have you found any more? Let me know if I have missed any.

New UI fact: Did you know that emoji’s in name fields make the person impossible to find in a name search?
Remove all emoji’s from your name field (they should never have been there in the first place!)

Communication. The Mirror Effect

How many times do we receive a message on LinkedIn or email that shows a clear lack of understand as to our interests and needs?
How often do we see a message that is clearly a standardised format, sent to multiple recipients?

What is going on here?
People find it harder to communicate online because they have no signals to read, or at least they think they don’t…..so we get the mirror effect! The computer screen acts like a mirror and all we see is our own need and wants….net result is poor, ineffective communication.

Let’s consider a better example;
Mike Richards is specialist treasury recruiter.

Mike noticed that following an article he wrote on LinkedIn (aimed at being of value to treasury professionals) he was getting a lot of new followers.
He sifted through these followers and picked out those that were of particular interest.
He found 22 interesting followers, all potential clients or candidates.
He then sent them all a personalised invitation to connect which read as follows;

I noticed you recently reviewed my profile maybe after reading one of my articles, you may also have seen this post about improving your LinkedIn profile if it helps you?
http://www.treasuryrecruitment.com/10_linkedin_tips/
Feel free to connect if you want to?
Regards
Mike @ MR Recruitment

All 22 accepted!

This is no surprise because he acted on a clear signal that they were interested in him, rather than assuming they would be.
In addition he provides value in the link with some LinkedIn tips and the very ‘non pushy’ line ‘feel free to connect if you want to’
Mike knows his market and the tone of his invitation is perfectly suited to Treasury professionals.

This is what I mean by effective communication.
Move beyond the mirror effect and communicate in a compassionate, person centred way.

I would love to hear about more examples, both good and bad.
Please drop me a line on LinkedIn or to mark@linkedinformed.com

Welcome to episode 150, that seems like a pretty good milestone to have reached but I think the main celebration will be at number 200!

Something interesting I saw this week

Well there hasn’t been much news at all this week, it seems everyone is so pre-occupied with the new desktop design (which I am trying to avoid covering in this episode).

LinkedIn did announce that they had re-vamped their premium accounts, I’m not sure they have changed much to be honest and Business account holders are still getting a raw deal but there are a few changes worth noting, especially to the jobseeker account which is now called ‘Career’.

Here is the article;
What’s New With LinkedIn Premium?

Coaching

If you are interested in a one to one coaching session or just want to have ask for some quick advice, you can book a free 15-minute consultation with me at;
https://mrlinkedin.youcanbook.me/

New Book - I need your help

I’m starting to research the topic of online relationship building a communication for a book I will be writing.
Please drop me a line to mark@linkedinformed.com if you have any examples of good or bad online communication.

Social Media Content. What matters most - When or What?

I read a great article this by Jay Baer that really got me thinking about what matters when posting content on LinkedIn.

The Truth About How Often To Post In Social Media

I did some vary crude research myself on 6 posts I did last week on LinkedIn.

Jay makes some great points but I also think that consistently high engagement will lead to more people seeing your posts initially (before the algorithm can judge how interesting it is).

His main advice is spot on;
“Post when you have something to say”

I would just add - also at the right time, with an image and ask a question!

Lars asked via voicemail which browser I thought worked best with LinkedIn.
I use Chrome mainly but I have a feeling that LinkedIn behaves better in Firefox these days. I like Chrome because of the various extensions I use but LinkedIn don’t approve of extensions so perhaps that is why they favour Firefox.
Of course that all might change when Microsoft gain more influence!!

The second question was regarding viewing the activity stream of followed companies in the new UI.

This is a bit crazy and complicated to explain so I made a video to explain

Welcome to episode 149, it seems that the roll-out has now reached about 75% if users so I thought it would make sense to get through some of the many questions I have been receiving.

It’s funny for me, I feel like I have been talking about this for so long with very little feedback and then all of a sudden….everyone is talking about it and asking questions!

Before I get into that tough, I have a couple of updates for you;

Published Post Comments

Firstly LinkedIn have officially announced a new feature within published posts - the ability to switch off comments and report inappropriate comments - woop-de-do!
Not only is that tame but the blog article announcing it is very annoying!
Giving You More Choice Over Your Content on LinkedIn

Maybe it’s just me (probably) but I find it hard to read those ‘corporate’ type posts that say nothing at all for the first two paragraphs!

Update to Mobile App

LinkedIn have quietly added an interesting new section to a personal profile, it’s on on mobile currently but I suspect it may come to desktop eventually.
When you next go onto the app you find you are asked this question;

When you tap on add topics you are given a list of topics (presumably based on your profile & network) from which you can pick 3.

Then you add them to your profile

And this is what they look like

I’m not sure if these are searchable yet but that could become an option. It’s certainly worth adding them for now.

Your ‘Neptune’ Questions answered.

How do I create a new company page?

This is a bit hidden but you will find up at the bottom of the ‘more’ menu (you do need to scroll down).

How do I find my own company page or one I’m an admin for?

For some reason this is in a different place to the above!
For this you need to go to the ‘Me’ menu and you will see the pages you own or manage in the list.

How do I personalise invitations?

Don’t invite someone from anywhere other than their profile! If you click ‘connect’ from a shortlist or ‘people you may know’ it just sends a blank invitation.

Has the recommendation button gone?

No but it has moved. See below

How do I conduct a search within my first tier connections?

This actually hasn’t changed, the best way id via an advanced search…..wait! Advanced search has gone!! No worries, you can still do it, this video shows how;

How do I sort my homepage feed by ‘most recent’

Unfortunately you can’t but I believe there is a strong possibility that this feature may be coming and that it will be much better than before…let’s hope so!

How do I revert back to the old UI?

Sorry you can’t! My suggestion is that you focus on making the most of Neptune, it has it’s faults but also some good points and I’m certain it will improve in time.

Welcome to episode 148, this week I interview a young chap called Jack Parsons who is the CEO of an exciting start-up called YourFeed.

Jack and he team are about to launch a brand new website and social network called YourFeed, here is how they describe themselves;
Yourfeed is a disruptive online platform that helps ambitious professionals find employment, network with like-minded individuals & gather advice through experienced mentors. The platform connects hiring companies with ambitious professionals favouring skills & ambitions over experience when recruiting.

I found this a fascinating conversation about the challenges that LinkedIn face with the younger generation.
How can LinkedIn become more interesting to this demographic?
How can LinkedIn structure their premium accounts to avoid alienating the younger generation?
Is the solution within LinkedIn or is it too hard to cater for such a wide demographic?
Do you think this is seen as an important issue to LinkedIn?

I would love to hear your views on this. Please leave me a voicemail or send an email to mark@linkedinformed.com

New User Interface Update

LinkedIn announced (after I recorded last weeks show) that they are up to 50% roll-out of Neptune (internal name for the new UI) but if you are in the half that doesn’t have it, I may have a genius solutions for you!

So long as you keep open the tab that this opens, you have the new UI…as well as the old one!

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work for everyone, some are getting 404 error page and others see an earlier version of Neptune that is completely useless.
I’m not sure why this happens but I wonder if it is because those people haven’t imported contacts previously.

This weeks question is about the new user interface.

Question: Where have groups gone?

Answer Groups are now accessed via the ‘More’ matrix menu

Welcome to episode 147, this week, I had planned an interview but that didn’t happen so I thought I would talk about something that I know is very important to many of you…..advanced search in the new desktop design.

But first….

New Desktop UI Design Update

LinkedIn have changed the way the data archive operates. Now you can download a smaller set of data more quickly, this is presumably meant to replace the connections download which has been deprecated in the new UI.

Update

On last weeks show  I explained that you can create a custom audience on Facebook from your downloaded LinkedIn connections. I still think this is a good idea but it is worth noting that this is against Facebooks rules.

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Here are the articles I refer to in this weeks episode;
LinkedIn Data Reveals the Most Promising Jobs of 2017
Human bot hybrid finds LinkedIn email, phone number-filching holes
Microsoft Promotes LinkedIn's Kevin Scott to CTO

Advanced Search With The New UI

LinkedIn released anew video this week showing how you can search for people in the new UI, it’s very basic but they did go on to explain that for more advanced users they have brought back some important boolean operators.

The five operators you can use in the search field are;

firstname: Finds members based on first name

lastname: Finds members based on last name

title: Finds members based on their current title (this one is likely to be the most useful)

company: Finds members based on their current company (keyword search)

school: Finds members based on schools attended (keyword search)

Search operators complement the filters on the right-hand side of the results page and the AND, OR and NOT boolean operators.

Here’s a quick example: to search for current software engineers not named Doe, who have attended either Harvard University or Stanford University, try: title:"software engineer" NOT lastname:doe school:(harvard OR stanford)

When using search operators, remember to use quotes for multi-word search terms, and parentheses for AND, OR and NOT phrases.

If you don’t have the new UI yet, you can still start practicing this technique in the old UI by simply using the main search field at the top of thee page (rather than advanced)

Question: Can I adjust my Sales Navigator Lead builder search results so that I see someone’s headline rather than their job title?

Answer: No you can’t but don’t forget that for the vast majority of profiles, the two are the same.

It is worth noting that job seekers might want to consider making their current job titles a little more descriptive.

As you can see in this screenshot, the information highlighted is my current job title and not my headline.

Click here to get your step by step guide on how to download your connections and upload them to Facebook.

Welcome to episode 146, this week I have an idea to share with you about what you can do with your LinkedIn connections on Facebook. More of that later, but first…..

New UI Desktop Design Update

Saved searches are returning (end of Jan)
Interests will show in your public profile
Contact & personal information will return (end of Jan)
Post searches are now available including hashtag searches.
It seems as the though the roll-out has accelerated this week and the rumour is that everyone will have it by end of January!
LinkedIn Announcement: LinkedIn Desktop Redesign Puts Conversations and Content at the Center

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner Shares How to Effectively Scale a Business in a New LinkedIn Learning Course
LinkedIn may move its 10,000 employees off Google Apps – and not because of Microsoft
LinkedIn Gives Access to B-to-B Insights Through DataSift Deal
The announcement of the above deal from DataSift
“Now I’m raging” — LinkedIn ban for “swearygate” Perthshire shed-maker
Cara Mackay’s F***** LinkedIn posts!

Here’s What You Can Do With Your Downloaded List Of LinkedIn Connections

I’m always encouraging people to regularly download your list of connections and it’s even more important now as you won’t be able to directly download them in the new UI (you can via the data archive). The question has always been…What do I do with them now?

Well the answer to that is not to add them to a newsletter email list, that is not something they have given you permission to do and it’s actually against the law!

I would however consider uploading them to Facebook and creating a ‘custom audience’. That way you can run a low cost ad campaign specifically directed at your LinkedIn connections - genius!

Click here to get your step by step guide on how to download your connections and upload them to Facebook.

Welcome to episode 145, this week I want to revisit something that so many people ignore or underestimate the importance of….your LinkedIn profile picture!

But first a few interesting things I saw this week;

An open letter to Jeff Weiner by Oleg Vishnepolsky

The main highlights from this were;
Anonymous like and dislike buttons
Managing your feed
Better management of followers/connections
Who is most active
Who engages with you the most
Bookmarking of updates and posts

LinkedIn tell Windows app users it is no longer supported…and then say it was a mistake!

Russia completes LinkedIn ban by demanding Google and Apple remove the app

No Fake news from LinkedIn. Really? These comments are very misleading from Daniel Roth, Editors do not control all published posts and certainly not all updates. That said, fake news is pretty rare on LinkedIn.

New Desktop UI Update:

There are strong rumours that LinkedIn have had to put the roll-out on hold due to problems.
One of the problems seems to be that users are getting their account suspended for no reason, just as I did!
According to this interesting post from Andy Hawkins, it would appear that Boolean does still work in the new UI….despite LinkedIn previously stating it didn’t! It’s hard to know what to believe, my experiments suggested it didn’t but maybe they have changed this since.

Is Your Profile Picture Up To Scratch?

I found an excellent article this week that reminded me of the importance of this subject;
Can an AI perfect your LinkedIn profile picture?

The new service this refers to is a fantastic idea - Snappr Photo Analyzer

Analyse your LinkedIn profile photo here (make sure you are logged into LinkedIn in another tab first)

Unfortunately I didn’t score so well!;

This is a subject I always cover in my training, as does pretty much every LinkedIn or social media trainer in the world - it’s the most obvious thing to get right and yet so many people get it wrong.

As a random experiment I ran a search on LinkedIn with the following criteria;
10 miles radius of my office
3rd tier +

Then I viewed the first 20 profiles and here are the mistakes I found;
Out of focus
Poor lighting
An action shot of 2 men playing football - one might be the profile owner?
Too far away - full torso in view
Two people in the image
Dressed for a night out on the town.
Looking away from the camera
Wearing a safety hat
Wedding photo
The grey ‘thing’ - no photo

So only 10 profiles had decent profile photos and out of those I would only give 4 of them a 8+ out of 10 score.

Other common mistakes I often see;
Holding or standing next to a product
Image includes or is only of their kids
Any obvious selfie, especially ones taken on a train!
Showing too much flesh - especially cleavage!
Looking too serious or miserable
Sunglasses

The 5 simple rules of a great profile photo

Close up - head and shoulders max
In-focus and current
Clothing you would wear for a business meeting
Smiling
Just you

With the new desktop UI design, all profile photos will be circular - across every section and on mobile so it is important to check what your current profile photo looks like in a desktop search result or on the mobile app.
I found this interesting

Question: What’s the verdict on showing other things as well as you in your profile, like famous people, awards, the FA cup you once stood next to in a football museum etc?

Also:
Should I have my LinkedIn profile picture taken by a professional photographer?

I answer both these questions in the podcast and refer to an episode of the winbusinessin podcast where I interviewed ‘The Headshot Guy’ John Cassidy

Season 1 Episode 5. LinkedIn Profile Photo’s with ‘The Headshot Guy’

Welcome to episode 144 and a very happy new year to you all. I hope you achieve great things this year and I trust that LinkedIn will be with you every step of the way!

I thought I would start the year with a focus on searching. As we know, the much loved Advanced search feature will be gone once we all get the new UI so it seems a good time to focus on the subject.

But before that I saw a few things this week that I thought you might find interesting….

The Twitter account you should use to get the attention of LinkedIn’s published post editors has changed!
I saw this from John White this week;

Worth knowing about if you publish a lot on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Censorship

Following on from my rant about LinkedIn censorship in the last episode I was reminded by someone of the infamous Candice Galek and how much her posts get censored by LinkedIn. I have to admit that many of her posts actually do need censoring as they often used to include inappropriate images but it seems she is now getting censored for criticising LinkedIn - not good LinkedIn, that really is Soviet style tactics!

The above post has now been removed by LinkedIn!

Searching in 2017

I saw a very interesting presentation this week from Shakhina Pulatova who is the Search and Discovery Product Lead at LinkedIn, based in San Francisco.

You can watch the full presentation from the Global Big Data Conference in August last year here;

Instant and Personal: Searching Your Network at LinkedIn

This presentation was about how LinkedIn design their instant search feature on the flagship mobile app. It’s especially relevant as the new UI seems to use the same system.

Highlights include;
Search results are effected by ‘global popularity’. This must refer to profile views so getting profile views will improve your search ranking.
Results are also personalised. Your activities and profile information will have an impact on who finds you.
Machine learning. It sounds like this is still a new area for LinkedIn but it’s clear that the algorithm is constantly learning what you want from your actions. We need to consider this when growing through our search results.

Results ranking: She gave us some interesting clues about how a search resulted is ranked with network distance, similarity of network (shared connections) and global popularity appearing to be important. She also referred to ‘spammy content in names and headlines’ counting negatively.

Recruiter Lite vs Sales Navigator

With the impending demise of advanced search in the new desktop design, many users are reluctantly having to consider upgrading from a free or Business level premium account.

So what option do you go for?

Why is this even a question?!!

Surely the clue is in the name - If you use LinkedIn to win new customers then Navigator is the correct solution (it is!) and if your role is to fill job vacancies then Recruiter Lite is the obvious choice (and it also is!).

But what if your role involves both?…..

That is the dilemma facing Recruitment businesses throughout the world and it's more than just a choice between LinkedIn products, it actually addresses a key question about how that business operates!

To help with this dilemma, I wrote a post on LinkedIn covering a comparison between the two;

Sales Navigator VS Recruiter Lite