Informed Podcast by Mark Williams The podcast for LinkedIn™️ users

News

    China passes 10 million LinkedIn members
    Google+ share link disappears from published posts
    There is a bug with skill endorsements
    You can no longer download your connections! Well you can but it comes as part of the archive and takes a couple of days to arrive.
    New LinkedIn Slideshare lead generation feature
    Slideshare presentations are appearing in some channels

Commentary

    LinkedIn ads could work if you combine them with Google re-marketing.....and you have a decent budget!
    Lottery ticket updates have no place on LinkedIn
    How often do females get harassed on Linkedin? This is the blog post I refer to.
    Keeping your profile up to date. These politicians show varying levels of accuracy
        Jo Swinson - good work, lots of information and fully up to date
        Esther McVey - Not updated at all.
        Frank Roy - not much information to start with but it has been updated
    Lynda.com advertise their courses in Linkedin Pulse.....and manage to get into a channel!

Direct download: LinkedInformed20075.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:37am UTC

News

Commentary

  • Positivity works!  I am a great believer in the power of engagement on LinkedIn. Too many people post updates that receive no comments or further interaction but it has been an observation of mine that when you do engage on other people's posts you often attract negative comments and people even start to attack you!
  • People become very brave online and are often unnecessarily rude, something they would be highly unlikely to do to your face! I see this on a regular basis and find it quite depressing because all this does is discourage people from engagement.
  • When commenting on LinkedIn keep your comments positive, encouraging as well as challenging if necessary but never stray into an argument or points scoring. This reflects very badly on you.
  • Don't feed the trolls! People that regularly post negative comments do so because they enjoy winding people up. Don't give them the airtime and just ignore their comments.

 Here are my tips to get more views of your status updates;

  • Always post image updates with a link rather than text updates with a link.
    • Pick a suitable image that has bright colours.
    • Make sure the image file has a suitable name (this will be seen!)
    • Always ask a question to encourage engagement
    • Reply to comments including quoting the person by name to encourage the conversation to continue. Keep asking questions!
    • Make sure your settings allow anyone (public) to see it.
      • Timing is critical. Find out (by trial and error) when your audience are most likely to respond and stick to that time.
      • Topical subjects work - think about how a recent news headline could be applied to your business ie Zayn leaving One Direction = How to cope when a key member of your team leaves.
      • Comparison questions are most powerful in terms of engagement but they need to be relevant so you can't do it all the time
Direct download: LinkedInformed20074.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:58am UTC

News

    Two new LinkedIn apps are rumoured to be in the works. A new Groups app and one called 'LookUp'.
    Instant messaging may finally be coming to LinkedIn!
    LinkedIn's new marketing podcast
    Check out the LinkedIn profiles of your website visitors with this hack. Disclaimer - Do this at your own risk, I'm giving it a try on a dummy account and will report back next week.
    Over 1 million users are now publishing on LinkedIn
    How being a 'hot girl' on LinkedIn attracts attention.
    The Prophet Chrome extension has been working really well.
    You can now add any skills you want, including made up silly ones!

    This podcast has been running for 18 months now and over that time we have built a strong community of loyal listeners and followers. I really enjoy collating all the weekly news, thinking of interesting topics, interviewing guests and getting your feedback (typing up the show notes is less thrilling but I console myself that the alternative would be writing a longer blog post every week!).

    I really hope you enjoy the podcast and get real value from it every week.
    The show has now been nominated for an award at this years New Media Europe conference held in Manchester on the 12/13th September and I would massively appreciate it if you would vote and nominate LinkedInformed for a prize.


Question

    Why do people who don't really know me endorse my skills?
        ANS = Some people do it because they believe they are helping you although I suspect most people simply endorse because they are asked to and they figure it isn't going to do any harm. In truth skill endorsements add little value to a profile because they have been so misused by most people.

Direct download: LinkedInformed20073.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:57am UTC

Plenty to talk about in this week's show from Web clippers and extensions to LinkedIn admitting they too hate quiz updates!

 

News

 

Lynda.com shareholders cash in on LinkedIn takeover and cause LinkedIn's share price to fall.

Evernote updates its web clipper allowing very useful integration with LinkedIn profiles.

LinkedIn are now ranked as the 2nd largest job board in the world....even though they are not a job board!

LinkedIn wins case against Irish domain registrant.

Searching a connections connections is now back! You now can also search the shared connections of a 2nd tier.

3rd tier connections can now be saved to contacts.

You can now follow anyone from the front page of their profile (see below)

Interesting interview with LinkedIn's VP of Engineering. In this piece he reveals that LinkedIn do not look kindly on quizzes and other Facebook type posts (as discussed last week). See clip below and you can read the whole article here.

Questions

 

1.      Sanity check: I got really excited about the tag system at the bottom of the LinkedIn blogs – thinking I could choose what channels I might get into … but I noticed that the tag options don’t match the channels! Am I correct in thinking that the tags don’t feed directly into channels, but are, in fact, just subsections/buckets from which some posts might be chosen to go into a channel (based on the LI algorithm and editors)?

 

2.      Question: I would love to post a blog on LinkedIn re ‘How to blog on LinkedIn’ summarising everything I’ve found – but there don’t seem to be any posts like that on LI. Do you think the LI editors would frown on/penalise a blog that actually gave people info into best LI blogging practices – not just headlines & writing – but info into the algorithm/best ways to post etc?

 

ANS= Sanity check - You are correct. The tags merely help the algorithm pick up the relevance of a post but by no means guarantee that it will appear in a channel, keywords also help but I also believe there is some human involvement in deciding channel content (I suspect it is approval rather than selection). Question - LinkedIn have no problem with this sort of content and there is even a relevant 'LinkedIn tips' channel for it!

 

 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/channel/linkedintips

Direct download: LinkedInformed20072.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:48am UTC

1