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