Content Collecting & Sharing

Welcome to episode 164, following on from last week’s theme of ‘cleaning up your homepage’ it struck me that you also need to make sure that you are not a victim of someone else cleaning up their homepage!
So this week I want to focus on the best ways to ensure that you remain visible on your followers homepage.
But first…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn snaps up Redwood City sales tech startup. Another sign that the key focus for LinkedIn these days is Sales Navigator. I suspect these features will only be added to their corporate ‘Team’ solution version of Sales Navigator which again reflects LinkedIn’s interest in enterprise clients. Heighten technology apparently provides three core areas of functionality: sales process tracking, hyper-efficient pipeline reporting and an intelligent notepad. Unfortunately they seemed to have deleted any trace of information about the product before announcing the news of the takeover.
It is suggested that Microsoft ‘could redesign LinkedIn for desktop and mobile’ in this article…..please NO!!! Firstly it’s just been redesigned and secondly who wants something designed by Microsoft?!!
Why Japanese Don't Use LinkedIn. Interesting article from someone who understands the culture. I may have to re-evaluate my international expansion plans!

I saw this bizarre Sales Navigator glitch this week. It would seem that you can save yourself as a lead!!

On the subject of mistakes, it seems I made a mistake recently by suggesting that you could track post shares by adding your own unique hashtag. Listener Darrel Griffin tried it out and it didn’t work!
This got me thinking and on reflection, it makes sense because when you share a post the text is never shown in the share…that is why you will see a shared image that makes no sense because the comments by the the person sharing it are referring to the text they saw with the original post.
The more I think about this, the more I realise just how messed up this is!
LinkedIn seem to have a blindspot of shares for some reason.
Here’s what they need to do;
Notify you when someone shares your post
When a post is shared, make sure the text they have written is included in the share

Come on LinkedIn…how hard can it be?!

Increase Your Visibility With Shared Content

Sharing content has two main benefits;
It is likely to keep you on your followers homepage and ‘front of mind’
It sends a clear and positive message to the algorithm - this member is ‘interesting’

It is also important to produce your own content and I have covered that extensively before but you are unlikely to have enough hours in the week to produce enough content of your own and in any case, you want to be seen as a helpful resource to your followers and not just someone who is always ‘pushing their own stuff’

Quantity

My advice is that you should post 1-3 times a day and 7 days a week, if that sounds a lot then one a day is perfectly OK and relatively easy to do.
Weekdays are definitely better than weekends but I have found that I do get activity and engagement at weekends.

Quality

This is really important and in my experience, the ‘make or break’ of visibility. It is critical to understand that you must not, under any circumstances share crap!
Never
Ever…..

This means that the content you share must;
Be useful and interesting to relevant followers
Have been read by you (scan read)
Not be promoting any product or service.

Source

There are plenty (almost too many) places to find great content on the internet. Here are some ideas;
LinkedIn Articles (post searching and following channels and influencers)
RSS feed services such as Feedly & Pocket
Other services such as Nuzzel, Quuu and my latest favourite Anders Pink are also worth checking out.
Google alerts

Scheduling

You can’t really have an effective sharing process without using a scheduling tool. Many scheduling tools also allow you to collate content as well, here are some options;

Buffer - This is what use for curation and scheduling - very simple to use which is why I’m a big fan! Content curation available on the paid plan (not expensive)
Hootsuite. A favourite with many people. Has the ability to show you ‘streams’ from your LinkedIn homepage alongside Twitter and other content as well as a scheduling facility (limited on free plan).
Drumup. Content curation, sharing and scheduling. Not one I have used but I have heard good things about it.

LinkedBack:Tags/notes for LinkedIn profiles
I came across this free (to a point) tagging tool this week and I think you should check it out.
Whilst LinkedIn discourage the use of Chrome extensions, I think they can really enhance the LinkedIn experience. I’m very wary (although not totally against) of automation tools but this one is not an automation tool, it simply replaces the tagging and notes feature that free users lost recently.

In addition you can download your tagged profiles onto a .csv spreadsheet and the information in the download is actually very good. including their Name, headline, location, industry (not visible on the profile), number of followers, contact info inc email & birthday(1st tier only), full summary, profile url, profile image url, current position, education, level of connection to you plus the tag and any notes you have entered.

The free version allows you to add notes/tags to up to 30 LinkedIn profiles (Basic and Sales Navigator). Subscribe to Premium at just $10/month for unlimited usage.

 

This week we have another voicemail. This question is from Alan Harper and it’s about profile updates.

Great question. I don’t have a Recruiter account but I am told there isn’t a ‘profile last updated’ filter and there definitely isn’t on any other level of account so the answer is no….but most recruiters would simply check recent activity which is very clearly shown in the profile on any level of account. So being active is very important.

In addition there is a feature in LinkedIn Recruiter called ‘Update Me’ which will notify Recruiters when you update your profile. This is only applicable if they have already found you and asked to be notified but it’s worth baring in mind.
LinkedIn Recruiter Tip: Use Update Me to Know When to Reach Out to Prospects