This weeks episode is all about something that is right in front of us, every time we log in to LinkedIn but it's something that most of us take very little notice of......and I think that's a missed opportunity. I'm talking about data - about companies and their employees. Companies that are our competitors, customers or prospective customers. I think we should all be taking more notice of this data, more of that later but first........

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Unveiling Translations in the LinkedIn Feed

When you click on 'See translation' you see this

And here's how it compares to Google translate

Conclusion:

A fantastic feature that will be really beneficial to people who operate in countries like the Netherlands where you want to reach an English and native speaking audience with your posts. It will also be very handy when someone @mentions you in a post that is written in a foreign language - this happens to me at least twice a month!

It's not as accurate as Google yet but should improve with time.

At First VidCon Summit, LinkedIn Video Creators Celebrate “Special” Community

Good to see LinkedIn recognised by the wider video creating community and given a spot at VidCon. I find it fascinating that these LinkedIn video creators, who seem to have come out of nowhere, are gaining almost 'YouTuber' like cult status!

I do think that a feature like Instagram stories would be great for Linkedin, such as this;

The only issue is that she has had to make this is IGTV (Instagram) so the portrait format looks awful on LinkedIn - hence the need for a way of making this type of video in the LinkedIn app.

I believe that the next stage for video on LinkedIn is the combination of video and stories - live streaming is probably the next stage after that but I'm not sure the LinkedIn community is ready for live just yet!

LinkedIn Data

I was recently sent this article by a listener to the show;

Recruiting on LinkedIn adds analytics and pointed questions

I'm really not sure I understand the question about the ethics of using this analytics tool to raid a competitor - isn't that what everyone does? This tool just provides better information to allow recruiters to 'poach' those that are more likely to be interested. The ethical question around headhunting has always seemed bizarre to me, to suggest it is wrong would suggest that a company somehow 'owns' its staff - that seems to be on much thinner moral ground (ice) to me!

Interestingly enough, someone else had mentioned LinkedIn's new Talent Insights feature to me recently and I had made a note to check it out.

If you want to hear LinkedIn talk about it, the video below is set play at the part where they announced Talent Insights at their Talent Intelligence Summit earlier this year.

LinkedIn describe Talent Insights as their most exciting product since Recruiter!

It will be launched next summer (2019)

There are two reports that it provides;

1. Talent Pool which includes analysis based on a search by Job title/skill/location as follows;
   1. Total numbers plus or minus
   2. # that changed jobs in last 12 months
   3. How many jobs advertised
   4. Hiring demand index
   5. Location comparison
   6. City migration
   7. Main employers
   8. Which companies are increasing or losing staff in these areas
2. Company Report.
   1. A deeper analysis of companies identified as main employers in point 7 above
   2. Skills
   3. Company locations
   4. Where they recruit from (employee source)
   5. Where do they go to after they leave

This all seems pretty exciting for Recruiters and it got me thinking about how useful such data could be for other purposes. As I started to think about it I realised that much of the useful data can easily be extracted from Sales Navigator!

Take this example;

Account search by location, industry and number of employees, then I used the headcount growth slider to identify which companies had seen the highest growth over the last 12 months

Furthermore, I can go into that company a drill down to a list of employees, here I can see exactly how long they have been at the company and in their role. This easily highlights those that are new.

This can be very useful data used for the following;

• Competitor analysis
• Recruiting opportunities
• Business development
  • Fast growth = increase need to buy your product/service
  • downsizing = potential for financial assistance, interim services etc

Conclusion

As is often the case LinkedIn are demonstrating a lack of joined-up thinking. Much (not all) of what this new Talent Insights product provides can be found, quite easily within Sales Navigator already!

I'm assuming this new product will come with a hefty price tag and we have to wait at least a year to get it!

I've been quite disappointed with Sales Navigator recently. It's pretty hopeless as an engagement tool and LinkedIn.com is easily my preferred tool for posting, commenting etc but the data you can access is really very useful.

What are your thoughts? How else could this data be used?

You are 100% correct Rose, a company page is required to ensure that your company logo appears in your experience section which in turn ensures that it appears at the top of your profile.

I would never suggest that people don't have a company page, you also need it for advertising and it can be useful as a way of getting people to your website. It's a good feature for branding and providing information about your company - it's just a very poor feature for engaging with people.

Welcome to episode 214. Due to time constraints, this will be a much shorter episode than normal but I did want to focus on company pages and specifically the issues that I have with them.

But first.....

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• WikiLeaks publishes identities and information about ICE employees amid intensifying anger

LinkedIn Kudos - My thoughts

The day after I published last weeks episode, I got the new kudos feature (and the Q code, see below).

Having played with Kudos for a while, I'm not that impressed.

• The graphics are truly awful. Who do LinkedIn employ to do this stuff?
• It's purely an activity, a post so there is nothing permanent about it. It doesn't show on your profile and there it's not searchable.
• I haven't seen many Kudos posts, my guess is that it will be largely ignored and fizzle out.

I also got the new QR code feature

• This is pretty useless until it's full rolled out to all users.
• Once the above has happened it can make connecting easier when you meet someone. People often say they can't find me on the app (there are 3500 Mark Williams'!) so it would be handy to simply let them scan my Q code
• Could this be useful for events? I sense it might be but I haven't quite worked out how! Any ideas?

This not only went viral but it's also a really good post that asks a great question. I like to think I make some good videos but this guy is a real pro (and a listener to the show)

Company Pages

This subject came back into my view this week when Tony Restell posted this;

Can you believe it?!!!

The more I thought about, the more I realised that this was a major weakness of the job posting and company page process on LinkedIn. So I decided to try it out myself!

Firstly I took one of my fake/testing accounts and changed their employment to my company on LinkedIn. This has always been a frustration for many of us - literally anyone can say they work for your company!

The next stage was to try posting a job

As you can see, I made it clear that this was a fake vacancy!

The interesting thing was that I was able to use the email address associated to the personal profile so all job applicants would come to that emails inbox!

I then set the PPC rate and bingo, the job posted!

The only caveat is that despite the above, I actually couldn't find the job on LinkedIn! Could this be because they have blocked the ad?

That is possible but I suspect it is actually just a current glitch with job postings.

I also had an interesting conversation this week with someone who was advocating the use of their company page

"What are you getting from your page" I asked. "We get a high number of page impressions" was the answer.

"And what do they give you?"  pause...... "It's good brand exposure"

Is it really?

Company page posts gain almost zero engagement - they often attract Likes (mainly from employees) but very few posts attract comments. If you get comments, you know for a fact that someone is paying attention to your post, in addition it gives you the opportunity to build a relationship with them. It's the main reason to post and by far the most important metric - Likes are 'two a penny', Shares simply don't work and page impressions are a meaningless figure (how do we even know they are true?).

If you can prove that your posts (updates) are sending a decent number of people to your website. I don't mean LinkedIn per se, I mean specifically updates. If they are then your activity has some value but otherwise, without comments you are achieving very little (apart from showing that your page is active).

Why don't people comment?

• People on LinkedIn are much more interested in engaging with people
• Company page posts are usually promotional and less engaging
• Even when you do comment on a company page post, it's highly unlikely you will get a response because the administrators are not alerted (unless they are on the page)
• Have you ever @mentioned a company in one of your posts?......What response did you get?

Welcome to episode 213. A big thanks to everyone who contributed with ideas of LinkedIn mistakes/disasters that I can use in a book I’m considering writing. If you have any other stories, please let me know by either sending me a message on LinkedIn (it’s free even if we are not connected) or leave a voicemail (link on the right side of this page) or email me at mark@linkedinformed.com.

Some ideas so far;
Employees using LinkedIn to get their own back on former employers and vice versa
Political posts or comments from someone who is in business - what does this achieve?
Posting pictures in factories that may include commercially sensitive material that contravenes an NDA (commonplace in China).
Overly religious posts or comments. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs but LinkedIn is not the place to preach!
@mentioning someone who does not speak your language!
Keep them coming!

I have been spending some of this week getting familiar with the new communities feature on LinkedIn and I’m so excited by it that I’ve decided to feature it on this weeks episode.

More of that later…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Groups update - nothing to get too excited about but a recent post in a group managers forum confirmed that progress is still being made and that they see that “success is largely defined by the quality of the discussions and connections formed within Groups”. That sounds promising although at the same time they also suggest that they are working to help group managers in 4 areas - building, growing, engaging and managing. The 2nd one ‘growing’ worries me as I believe that large groups are what caused the problem in the first place.

Cisco report. I mentioned this last week but admitted that I hadn’t read it. I have now and it makes for an interesting read;
Globally, IP video traffic will be 82 percent of all consumer Internet traffic by 2021
Live Internet video will account for 13 percent of Internet video traffic by 2021
Smartphone traffic will exceed PC traffic by 2021. In 2016, PCs accounted for 46 percent of total IP traffic, but by 2021 PCs will account for only 25 percent of traffic
It would take an individual more than 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2021!
You read the full report here

New on LinkedIn

LinkedIn debuts Your Commute, navigation and maps to evaluate jobs based on how far they are

This is quite a nice feature, if it works! My experience was that very few jobs in the UK had a stated location postcode, perhaps because they were added prior to this feature. The couple that I did find both stated the car journey was ‘2+ hours’ - not very helpful!

Introducing LinkedIn Kudos: Say Thanks and Show Your Appreciation

I don’t have this yet so it’s hard to comment without playing with it properly. How will it be used? Will you be able to search for it - perhaps via a Recruiter account.
More importantly, will anyone use it? I suspect it will be missed by most users unless LinkedIn do something to really highlight it.

LinkedIn are either rolling out or testing QR codes for your profile.

I can see myself using this as QR codes really haven’t taken off here but it will be an important feature in other countries.

Giving Companies More Ways to Learn with LinkedIn Learning Pro

This seems like quite a useful feature for large companies

Introducing Carousel Ads on LinkedIn

These look nice and help with storytelling, although videos are a better way to tell stories.
If they can do it for ad’s why not allow us to post ‘story images’ as normal posts?

#Communities

Having played for almost a week now, I’m convinced this new feature has the potential of being a game changer for LinkedIn.
I’m not saying it will….that depends on how many people use it but if they do, it will fundamentally change the way we use Linkedin.

As you can see above the feature is accessed in the left side bar.

The first thing to note is that your feed has changed. Instead of being ordered by ‘top’ from those you follow who the algorithm thinks you might be interested in, it now shows posts from those you follow who have posted, Liked or Commented with and on #topics you follow.

This is much better but only of you refine what you are following. To do this;

> click on the ‘Discover more’ link (see arrow above)
> Unfollow those Topics LinkedIn has assumed you are interested in or those you no longer see as key.
> Check the other topics for any you wish to follow

To do this on mobile you need to tap on the 3 lines shown below

It is really important to get this right - only follow topics that fall into one of these categories

Something your prospects and customers are interested in
Something very closely related to what you do (product or service you provide)
Something that interests you.

These Topics will define the relevance of your feed from now on.

You can decide to filter your feed by just one specific topic by selecting it from your list of #topics

To make this quicker on desktop you can ‘pin’ your main topics.

Once you have set your feed up correctly you should see much better content that gives you plenty more opportunities to engage.

The premise here is that we should be focussed more on conversations around relevant topics than around specific people we wish to do business with.
When you focus on people, it leads to direct messaging and unwanted invitations to connect - these actions kill engagement and lead to lower levels of activity.
My belief is that, if people adopt the right approach to this, that those less active members will start to get more involved - that’s potentially amazing and why I believe this could be a game changer!

LinkedIn are making a major effort to ensure that #topics are widely adopted. Every post you do, as you are writing the text, you are suggested hashtags to use.

Having a more relevant feed should improve everyones LinkedIn experience allowing us to ;
Learn from others
Engage with a wider range of people
Expand and diversify our networks
Increase our own visibility

What I don’t like

The are several things that could go wrong. If people # incorrectly or misuse the function to ‘game the system’ our feeds could end up being poor again. The suggested tags feature could increase this issue as I have found it is often suggesting the wrong topics.

It is not possible to see what others are interested in. I think it would be better to show what topics someone is following in their profile. This will help us better understand the right topics to follow.

To my mind, engagement is at the heart of social selling and yet this feature is nowhere to be seen in Sales Navigator….go figure! Another example of a severe lack of joined up thinking at LinkedIn.

Welcome to episode 212. A big thanks for all the feedback from last weeks show. Most of you seemed to enjoy Marjorie’s information about ProFinder although I was surprised by a couple of people who felt I shouldn’t have been promoting a service such as ProFinder - the premise being that LinkedIn are creating a market that is free to use (even though it isn’t) and once people are dependent on ProFinder as a source of work, they will start to charge more for it.
I massively struggle with that mindset - I can remember people in recruitment saying exactly the same thing about LinkedIn “Don’t support a business threat” was a common view and look at where we are now? You can’t put your head in the sand on things like that, a perceived ‘threat’ can become an opportunity but only if you embrace it.

This week I’m looking for your help…
I’m thinking of writing a book about my famous ‘rants’ about LinkedIn - I want to focus on the things that people do wrong or the things that go wrong on LinkedIn. Ideally from a humorous perspective.

What have you seen happen on LinkedIn that is a good example of a mishap or poor practice?
You don’t need to name names, just tell me the story.

As a starting point, I though I would cover my 5 biggest mistakes I see on LinkedIn and hope that you can help me add to the list.

But first…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Airline sources a plane via a LinkedIn post!

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t consider LinkedIn to be a competitor

The Company (Drift) that did that cool video takeover thing on LinkedIn
Here’s an example of one of the videos posted by one of the team at Drift

New LinkedIn Features

New Sales Navigator profiles - a definite improvement

The people also views has gone but they do have an extra ‘Recommended leads at:’ section that isn’t shown above

Using Stickers and Text to Stand Out on LinkedIn Video

‘How You Match’ feature speeds up time-to-hire

Post of the Week

This one obviously resonated with me! Thanks to Gary Stockton for sending this one in.

Have you seen a post that you really enjoyed recently on LinkedIn? If so drop me a note on LinkedIn or via mark@linkedinformed.com with a link to the post.

The 5 Biggest Mistakes Made on LinkedIn

1. Poor quality profile. I’m amazed I still find myself saying this one! Bad profile pics, unedited headlines, non existent summaries, no background images….the list goes on and on. When will people realise that this is their professional identity online?!
2. Promiscuous Connecting. Whilst it once made sense to grow very large networks and adopt a LION philosophy, those days are gone….in fact they have been gone for at least 5 years! Oversized networks add little extra value to your visibility, confuse the algorithm and potentially expose your other connections to scammers. Many automation tools facilitate this behaviour and it’s a massive mistake
3. Inactivity. Linkedin are lucky to get 25% of their users to log in more than once a month….and that’s in a good quarter! There really is very little point in LinkedIn if you don’t at least engage in some activity every week. These ultra passive users are missing all sorts of opportunities. Even those that are active often ‘hold back’ on LinkedIn and are too scared or shy to post or comment on others posts, another missed opportunity.
4. Direct selling. Sometimes is just blatant spam but more common than that is the blunt ‘I want something from you’ messages, InMail or posts. It’s like trying to french kiss someone when you first meet them on a first date! Another aspect of this is the ‘McFly’ posts you see all the time ‘Look at me’ ‘Aren't we wonderful’ and ‘look how we can help you (at a cost)’ - it’s all about you!
5. Lazy Networking. Similar to the post of the week as shown above. Extensive use of short canned messages such as ‘congrats’ or only ever liking posts and never being bothered to comment, invitations that are not personalised or personalised with a message that is clearly sent to everyone (automation)
   

Welcome to episode 211, this week’s episode is dedicated entirely to understanding LinkedIn ProFinder.

I haven’t used ProFinder as it is currently only available to users in the United States so I found an experienced (and award winning) user who could tell us all about it.

Let me introduce Marjorie Kavanagh

What is LinkedIn ProFinder?

ProFinder is LinkedIn’s own professional service marketplace’ where users can search for freelancers, small business owners or interim executives who can provide expertise in a variety of specialist disciplines.

You can access ProFinder by going to the ‘More’ menu on LinkedIn desktop

Freelancers can apply to be accepted as a ‘Pro’ in up to 10 of the 140 categories available in proFinder. These are broken down into 17 broad categories.

Freelancers can apply to be accepted as a ‘Pro’ in up to 10 of the 140 categories available in proFinder. These are broken down into 17 broad categories.

How to become a ‘Pro’

To be a successful applicant your main LinkedIn profile must satisfy five key requirements;
A good, professional profile photo
Experience and a headline that reflects the categories you are applying for
A clear summary that explains what you do
Strong recommendations appropriate to your application
Have published several articles relevant to your specialism

Once accepted, LinkedIn will create your ProFinder profile (you can’t amend this other then by changing your main LinkedIn profile).

Here is Marjorie’s profile;

You will then start to receive Request for Proposals (RFP). You are under no obligation to respond but you are advised to respond quickly as up to 5 ‘Pro’s will be sent the RFP and not all are sent at the same time.

What does it cost?

ProFinder is free for those who wish to appoint a Freelancer.

As a Pro, you get your first 10 RFP’s for free (not assignments, just proposals) after that you will need to upgrade your LinkedIn account to a Business Premium Account (currently $60/month)

The Process

As someone looking for services you can simply search for specific categories or go to an individuals page (strangely there is no link in their main LinkedIn profile).
If you click on the ‘Get free proposals’ link in Marjorie’s profile it takes me to the same predetermined questions for the category I have selected and that RFP will also be sent to 4 other people (despite starting this process from her profile!)

If there are more than 5 suitable pro’s then the algorithm will select what it considers the best ones (presumably taking into account the number of recommendations).

As a pro you will receive a notification by email and in your ProFinder Inbox - this is separate from your main LinkedIn inbox and there is no other way of knowing you have an RFP (this is very poor design in my opinion).

There is currently not a mobile app for ProFinder.

When responding to an RFP you have to provide a cost estimation or hourly rate and indicate whether you are happy to provide a free 15 minute consultation. Following this you have up to 1500 characters to present your credentials - LinkedIn’s advice is that short and concise works best. You can include links which could be a video introduction or an example of your work.

LinkedIn do not require that a client indicate that they have appointed you so it is not currently possible for LinkedIn to assess how successful you have been with your RFP’s in addition your recommendations are from your main LinkedIn profile and not specifically related to your ProFinder work.

Summary

LinkedIn ProFinder offer a fantastic opportunity to wide range of small business owners and freelancers. There is no doubt that it is still a beta product and in just one conversation I can see several obvious improvements that could be made.
ProFinder has been in existence for a couple of years now but there is currently no word from LinkedIn as to when it will be expanded beyond the US…if ever.

If you are in the US, I strongly recommend you check it out to see if any of the categories fit with your business. It could be a great way to outsource certain specialist projects and if you provide such services, an untapped lead generator!