Informed Podcast by Mark Williams The podcast for LinkedIn™️ users

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.

Direct download: LinkedInformed20102.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:30am UTC

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;

 

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.

Direct download: LinkedInformed20101.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:30am UTC

News

 

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Direct download: LinkedInformed20100.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:30am UTC

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