Welcome to episode 192 and a very merry Christmas to all of you.

There has been very little news about LinkedIn this week but I did native the following two related articles;

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

What we got right — and terribly wrong — in our 2017 predictions
The 50 big ideas for 2018

LinkedIn are, as always, keeping very tight lipped about their plans for 2018 so I thought it would be fun to take a stab at what I think the likely trends for LinkedIn in 2018 will be.

LinkedIn in 2018

Increased use of #Hashtags. Hashtags re-emerged in 2017 but next year they will become mainstream and ‘trending hashtags’ will become an important feature that we will all be using extensively by the end of the year.
Livestream Video. This one has been on LinkedIn’s roadmap for a while and I predict 2018 will be the year it is finally implemented. Native video will be fully rolled out by the end of the first quarter and I believe Livestream video will start to become a feature (mobile only) by the middle of 2018. As with Native video it will take a while for users to figure out the best way to use Live streaming so I don’t expect it to have a big impact in 2018…but it will start to roll out.
More spam. As the number of users increase and spammers (not just cowboys but also the uneducated) start to realise that they risk big fines due to the GDPR legislation (effective from May 2018). LinkedIn messaging and InMail will become a more widely used tool for spammers.
LinkedIn Hangouts. #LinkedInLocal will continue to grow and people will start to see the benefits of meeting their connections face to face…but not every business operates locally so LinkedIn will respond to this need by introducing a live video hangout feature - this will use the same platform as Livestreaming and be closely linked to the New groups feature.
New Groups. I know that LinkedIn are working on a complete re-design of groups and this will be implemented during 2018. Expect to see something completely different - possibly even renamed and rebranded that will include the hangouts feature mentioned above.
Increased Engagement. This was the big surprise of 2017 and LinkedIn users will continue to learn that broadcasting content without attracting comments is a waste of time. Expect more and more comments on posts and articles as content producers get to grips with better quality (engaging) content.
Engagement Analytics. Following on from the increase in engagement I predict that 3rd party tools will appear that allow you to find and assess people based on their comments and Likes as well as their content.
Voice commands. 2018 will be the year of Alexa type voice controls everywhere and it will become so mainstream that LinkedIn won’t be able to resit getting involved. We could see voice commands on the mobile app such as “search for marketing managers in Birmingham, united kingdom” or “accept my new invitations”.
Personal Branding. This will become more important next year and more and more people move away from corporate employment and become self-employed experts in their field. Another possible trend is that corporates may move away from ‘enterprise/corporate brands and encourage employees to develop their personal brands on behalf of the company.
LinkedIn Stories. Stories are big on Snapchat and Instagram and are now becoming more popular on Facebook. LinkedIn have a long tradition of adopting popular features from other social media platforms and I see stories as being no different. Native video, text and image posts can be combined and collated into stories. Expect to see this as a new feature in the second half of 2018.

Please note that ALL the above predictions are total guesswork on my behalf. I have no inside knowledge on what might actually happen!
What do you think of the above predictions? Can you think of others?

Thanks to everyone for contributing to the 2017 LinkedIn User survey.

I will compiling the results in January and expect to announce the results on either the first or second episode of 2018.

If you didn’t get time before, way not help out now by taking a few minutes to answer the questions below;

That’s it for this week and for this year!

We will be back with the first episode of 2018 on January 13th

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas to you all, enjoy the break, open time with your families and switch LinkedIn off for a week or so!

See you next year.

Welcome to episode 191, this week I’m going to cover a topic I tackle almost on a daily basis at the moment…..How to know what subjects to post about on LinkedIn.

But before I get onto that……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

The Crappy Handbook of LinkedIn Profile Pics
LinkedIn Top Voices 2017: The must-know people inspiring today’s professional conversations
Stay on Top of In-Demand Skills with New Notifications

#LinkedInLocal

I originally covered the LinkedIn Local phenomenon in episode 166 when I interview Erik Eklund who was a founding member of this movement along with Alex Galviz, Anna McAfee and Manu Goswani.
Since then the founders have been joined by Ryan Troll and Brian Almeida to form an organisation that co-ordinates LinkedIn Local meet ups throughout the world.
They have now set up a new website

Click on the image above to visit the website

If you are thinking of running a LinkedIn Local event in your area then take a look at the website to understand how you go about it.

Please Do The Survey! And if you have done it….please share it widely!

I was aiming to get to 1000 responses by Christmas but at the time of writing, I’m still below 500!
It has been much harder than I expected to get people to complete this short (5 mins) survey but I really feel we need to get at least 500 to make the results viable.

So please share the link http://bit.ly/Linkedin2017 with your LinkedIn network, Twitter and Instagram followers and Facebook friends

If you haven’t yet done the survey, here it is

This weeks question also forms the main topic for this week;

I hear you talk a lot about techniques for posting which is very useful but my problem is ‘what’ to post about. Any tips?

I get asked this question so much and I also regularly have to tackle the subject when I am working with customers that are currently posting promotional content.

Here are my guidelines;
The McFly Syndrome - It’s all about you…STOP SELF PROMOTING! This includes talking about events you have organised, new members of staff or awards you have won. You might not see it as such but others only see this as self promotion. These posts are OK occasionally but need to dominated by less selfish content.
Understand your relevant followers. You don’t need to ‘speak’ to all your followers but you must focus on gaining a deeper understanding of what interests your followers;
> What motivates them
> What frustrates them
> What worries them
> What excites them
> What content do they read?
> What sort of posts are they Liking, Sharing or Commenting on
Experiment with different subjects. What works and what falls flat. Try not to make too many assumptions and judge by results.
People on LinkedIn are much less ‘stuffy’ than you think! Try people orientated content and use stories where possible. Think about light, fun subjects as well as subjects that people are likely to have strong opinions about.
The ‘gold standard’ measurement is comments.

These guidelines refer to content rather then technique. You can learn more about technique, plus some other content tips in episode 178

Welcome to episode 190, it seems that many people are talking about the mysterious LinkedIn algorithm, myself included! I can’t believe how many of these people are still blaming the algorithm for the poor performance of their content, it’s not the algorithm folks, it’s your content!……

But before I get stuck into that, here are a few things I came across this week

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

People Are Flooding LinkedIn With Strange Stories. We’re Calling Them Broetry.
7 Next-Level Sourcing Tips From the Master, Glen Cathey
Can Linkedin Save Slideshare?
LinkedIn Plans Improvements, Including Changes To SlideShare
New LinkedIn A.I. Is Now Judging Your Content. Sorry, What Content?

Native video problems

A number of people have been seeing error messages on native LinkedIn videos this week

It would appear that simply refreshing your page often sorts this out, if not then try clearing your cache.

Blaming The Algorithm

I enjoy the challenge of ‘outsmarting’ the algorithm as much as anyone, more than most probably but I really think that people are getting a bit carried away with it’s importance.

Let’s be clear - Content will always be king!

I recently came across this post from someone complaining that the algorithm favoured posts over Articles - the argument seems to be that he spends longer crafting an Article so the algorithm should reflect that…..what?!!

I checked back and he hadn’t created any posts linking to this article so how did he expect people to find it?
It’s also worth noting that Article ‘views’ are not the same as post ‘views in the feed.

All the algorithm does is reflect what it sees as being interesting and engaging amongst LinkedIn users. Yes it initially decides how many people see a post and that is important but that alone won’t ensure many people see your content - the most critical factor is how people react to it and for that to happen you need to write interesting content.
Interesting does not equate to ‘interesting to you’ or ‘appropriate for LinkedIn’ it means it need to resonate with your followers.
Do you know what resonates with your followers?
Maybe you do but you don’t ‘approve’ - well thats up to you but don’t blame the algorithm, blame your followers….or dare I say it….take the blame yourself!

My observations are as follows;
People prefer short form content on LinkedIn
People don’t always want to talk about business, lighter subject matter is surprisingly popular
Posts are seen on our home page and with one click that does not require opening a new page we can read more…that is just more user friendly
Posts should gain the attention of a reader within the first 3 lines - the spacing argument is not proven and makes no sense to me. It just needs to be long enough to trigger the ‘see more’ and good enough to motivate someone to click on it.

So rather than blaming the algorithm, perhaps it’s time to start taking notice of what your followers really want and providing them with that?

Competition Winner

In episode 181 I interviewed PR expert Janet Murray and she kindly offered a free 60 minute PR strategy call with a lucky winner of a free prize draw.

This was some weeks ago but the responses have been dripping in ever since so I haven’t made the draw until now.

And the lucky winner is……..(drum roll)

Mark Barlow from Dirty Marks Cleaning services. Mark runs a window cleaning service as well as being an online marketing strategist!

Welcome to episode 189, not much news this week but I do have a couple of new features to share with you and a cool thing plus I feel the need for a rant!…..more later.

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

‘LinkedIn degrees’ from global providers ‘could leave UK behind’
Russian accused of hacking LinkedIn, Dropbox to be extradited to US
Oops: LinkedIn country subdomains SSL cert just expired

New Features

Double tap to Like

This new mobile feature is copied straight from Instagram and is definitely aimed at millennial who tend to move through their streams much more quickly and ‘thumb tap’ rather than finger tap as us ‘oldies’ tend to

New Magnet Posts

This feature is in the early stages of roll out so you may not see it yet but it’s a good one!

When you create a post on a mobile app you now get the option to specify to send it to the homepage of (and potentially notify) followers who have specific skills - via a magnet icon.
By tapping on the magnet below you are given the option to pick up to three skills.

This means that the distribution of your post will initially only be to targeted followers - it may of course reach further as they like or comment on it.

When you receive such a post in your feed you will see which skills you have that match the specified ones and you are encouraged to ‘Add your thoughts’

The only problem is that the skills you pick have to be skills that you also have on your profile. This seems like an unnecessary criteria to me and will result in people adding false skills to their profile just so they can target people they are interested in.

You can tell these posts said because the skills specified and those you match are clearly identified

All that said, it’s a great new feature and hopefully we will all have the opportunity to use it soon.

Are You Stuck In The ‘Content Marketing’ Past?

Whilst conducting some research this week I was stunned by the amount of people that are still wasting time and resources in posting external links.

Its a waste of time….virtually no-one see’s it!

I’m somewhat puzzled by this. Do these people not care that there is zero engagement and views?

Maybe I’m wrong and they are getting huge numbers to their website….I doubt it!

It seems to me that it is taking people a long time to shift their habits from the ‘share relevant content to build trust’ into ‘build trust through engagement.

I suspect much of this is just people who have set up automatic sharing via aggregate and scheduling tools so they don’t really notice - the problem is that it messes up their ‘ranking’ with LinkedIn algorithm making it harder to reach many people, even if their posts are better.

Maybe it’s just extremely hard for people to break long established habits? The ‘post interesting content and bring people to your website’ mantra has been around for a long time but does it really work?

I personally found that it didn’t

What do you think?

Are you still posting links?

If you want to post a link you need to do it manually as I showed recently in this video

Evernote Business Card Connecting

This isn’t actually a new, just something I had forgotten existed!
I was reminded by someone about it this week, I honestly thought the feature had disappeared when LinkedIn severely restricted access to third parties but I was wrong.

This is a great tool to use when at a physical networking event.

This video shows you exactly what to do

Before you can use this you need to make a few adjustments to your Evernote app and account.

This feature is only available to Premium Evernote users

Go to Account > Settings

Now tap on Camera

Now tap into ‘Business cards’

And now you will see the option to connect the app with your LinkedIn account

You can’t customise the invitations so I would only use this whilst you are actually with the person but it can be a great way to ensure that you always quickly and efficiently remember to connect!

How can I see who is following me?

This feature is exactly the same on desktop and mobile but it’s not where you would expect it!

Go to your profile and scroll down to your activity and you will see a blue link ‘Manage Followers’ next to the number of followers

The following list will always start with your followers (as opposed to connections who are followers). If you see the option to follow them back then you know they are not a connection, scroll down until the option ceases and it states that you are already ‘following’ these will (mostly) be your connections.

Welcome to episode 188, this week I had some very sad news, one of the clipper race crew was swept overboard and tragically lost his life - devastating for his family and also extremely unnerving for all the other crews. I can’t begin to imagine how they carry on from this.

It highlights just how dangerous this race is and impressed on me even more just what Brendan Hall had to go through when he won the race previously.

Brendan incidentally released his new speaker showreel this week;

I had an interesting chat with Stoke School student Tim Collins who has been using LinkedIn along with some of his friends recently and has been impressed with the authenticity and kindness shown to him by LinkedIn members……(give it time Tim!). You can hear that interview later in the episode but firstly.

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Trends in marketing investments: LinkedIn starts to establish status?
Women Are Reminding People That LinkedIn Is Not A Dating Website Following "Creepy" Messages
LinkedIn pledges $10 million for affordable housing. A charitable act or protecting their own interests?

New Features

Some people have reported seeing a new design to the search page. This is clearly of on LinkedIn annoying A/B tests but doesn’t it look awful?

You can now embed posts into your website, just as I have done several times in this post, including the video below. This can be done on anyone’s posts including your own but isn’t available to everyone yet (roll out).
Simply click on the 3 dots as seen below and then copy the HTML code

LinkedIn are now officially launching their new ‘Career Advice’ feature which is closely allied to the mentoring feature. More in this video;

What You Saw On LinkedIn This Week

This could become an interesting new feature if you get involved!
The best way to improve the quality and reach of our content is to observe other successful posts. So why not use LinkedInformed as a place to share any great posts you saw last week.

I really liked this one sent in my listener Carl this week.

I can’t wait to see how that develops!

So from now, when you spot something interesting, take a note of the url and send it to me.
That way we can all learn from each others feeds

My LinkedIn Survey

I announced this last week and I was terrified that my target of 1000 respondents was going to be too hard to reach…..I might have been right!

Over the last week I have managed to gather 300 respondents but that leaves me woefully short so….
I NEED YOUR HELP!

Please take a few mins out of your day to complete the survey and then share it with your network.

A Millennial’s view - LinkedIn is Authentic, collaborative and refreshingly ‘real’

Listener Anna McAfee pointed out to me a video posted by 3 school kids made while they are waiting for parent evening to start.
The person that posted it was Tim Collins, so I thought it would be interesting to get him on the show!

I really enjoyed hearing what an 18 year old makes of LinkedIn, especially in comparison to Facebook (old and dated) and Instagram (lacks authenticity)

This is Tim’s Video post

I love the way he was brave enough to know that is was far from ‘perfect’ or ‘professional’ and post it anyway…….if an 18 year old can then why can’t you? (assuming you have video)

And this is the post he referred to when talking about ‘it’s about who you know’

No questions for this week. Please feel to drop me a line or leave a voicemail of you want your question featured on the show.

Welcome to episode 187, this week we are back to the normal format after a few weeks of interviews. I would really appreciate your help with compiling a survey of how LinkedIn users have changed their behaviour over the last 12 months or so.
More of that later but firstly……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

60% users from Russia remain on LinkedIn after year of blocking
Creating Your Resume Just Got a Whole Lot Easier with Microsoft and LinkedIn

New Feature

Active status is coming to your home page feed. We are used to seeing the green dots in messaging but they will soon be seen elsewhere on LinkedIn, which is a great move.

There does seem to be some confusion as to what each one means so just for clarity;
A green dot means that person is active on LinkedIn (desktop or mobile)
A green circle (Jo below) means they have push notifications enabled on their mobile app.

This will also show in profiles, here you can see that Kate (featured in episode 185) is not active but does have push notifications enabled on mobile.

You can adjust your settings for active status if you wish under ‘privacy’ in your settings

I had this for about 2 weeks but it has disappeared again now, it’s a great feature though and I’m looking forward to it becoming permanent once they have completed their testing.

How many profile views do you get? I’m amazed to see how many Gretta gets!

Posting External Links - New Method

I saw this Article from Andy Foster and decided to make a video post about it.

The bigger question is whether posting links at all makes any sense.
Maybe the content marketing / bring people to your web site method is no longer the best way to generate new business?
What do you think?

LinkedIn Search Results

When searching LinkedIn you will get results from anyone that meets your criteria but they won’t all be visible to you, however there are some people beyond your 3rd tier that are still visible.

Welcome to episode 186, this week I really enjoyed chatting with Leif Carlsen, A social selling expert and podcaster from Denmark.

Leif and I chat about a range of things in the episode;

ROI - Return on Investment

It's difficult to measure
Statistics are often merely a vanity measure
Social selling will always be a ‘long game’
Some ways you can measure RIO;
Post comments, likes and views in the feed
InMail / message replies
Profile views
Invitations received
True followers (followers minus connections)
SSI (social selling index)
Successful referrals
The influence formula as discussed in episode 167
LinkedIn should be added as a lead source in your CRM

The future of social selling

Less about content marketing and more about engagement
Sales people will need to grow their own following and influence
Think of yourself as being a DJ Broadcasting to a wide audience of listeners
The attributes of sales people will change;
Less selfish, more motivated to help others
Driven to help people even when there is no chance of doing business with them
Better at written communication
Are LinkedIn moving in this direction? The design of Sales Navigator might suggest not!
InMail is, in many respects, a form of cold calling via LinkedIn!
Does cold calling really work any more?

Company Pages

I believe that company pages have very limited use, primarily because people do business with people.
Most company page posts get the very little, if any engagement
Leif Took a more positive stance but believes that Company pages can only work if you deliver high quality educational and interesting updates.
Check out Leif’s Company page below

Articles

Leif has found that Google will find articles but only if the content is of the highest quality.
A good technique is to write with a specific person in mind
Articles give you credibility, they don't need to be written very regularly but it's important that your prospects and followers can see that there is more to you then just the "Gift of the gab”
Writing good articles will make you think more about your market and inevitably make you a better salesperson.

Welcome to episode 185, this week I’m doing my annual ‘escape from the wet and cold of Britain’ week in Spain so I thought I would treat you to one of the most popular podcast episodes I have ever produced.

I’m sure many of heard you have heard me talk about the florist from Grimsby who is killing it on LinkedIn….well this is the interview I did with her in May 2015 on a since retired podcast called Winbusinessin…..enjoy!

Welcome to episode 184, this week I’m expanding on the subject of the meteoric rise of LinkedIn in terms of engagement and activity and I want to to focus on some of the key characters behind that change - the class of 2017!

But before I get to that…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

HiQ turn to crowdfunding to fight LinkedIn’s legal appeal of a recent court decision
LinkedIn announces the ‘Most socially engagement employment agencies’ but the get the measures all wrong!
Native video is coming to company page updates. Currently only a few have access including Mashable. See one such update here. Mashable video update
Huawei and LinkedIn announce a new phone collaboration embed https://youtu.be/C5gXjyGimRA
As reported recently ‘smart replies’ are improving in LinkedIn messaging and here is the Engineering blog on the detail of how it is done.

The Class of 2017 (plus Oleg!)

When we look back in years to come we will see 2017 as being THE year LinkedIn really became a mainstream social media platform. 2008 was a similar year, that was when LinkedIn initially became widely used but this year is different. It’s not so much that LinkedIn are attracting new members, it’s more that more users are engaging on LinkedIn.
A 60% increase in engagement levels vs the same period last year is pretty phenomenal so how has this happened?
I mentioned recently that a big part of this has to be attributed to the new design and LinkedIn deserve a lot of credit for that but another big part of this has been down to a new generation of LinkedIn users who have started to use the platform in different and more ‘socially connected’ ways.
I have been studying this for some time now and I just love the way the class of 2017 are challenging the status quo and rewriting the rule book on how to use LinkedIn.

Here is a list of some of the most impressive and influential members of the class of 2017 (in no particular order)

Michaela Alexis
Janet Murray
Tim Queen
Mike Morgan
Josh Fechter
Jonathan Pollard
Gretta van Riel
Eli Hochberg
Chris Williams
Ben Rea
Alexandra Galviz
Matt Wilson
Lila Smith
Tom Mallens
Simon Dodson
Josh Quigley
Erik Eklund
String Nguyen
Amy Blaschka
Anna McAfee
Manu Goswami
Simon Chan
And last but not least, I can’t go without giving a mention to the honourable ‘mature student’ of the year Oleg Vishneplosky who consistently continues to set the pace with some of the highest levels of engagement ever seen on LinkedIn!

I’m sure I have missed some important names, so please do not be offended if I have not listed you!

I’m not stating that I agree with everything these members do on LinkedIn but they are definitely pace setters in this new age of LinkedIn engagement. Take a look at their posts and you will see similar patterns;
Storytelling, often of a personal nature
Use of hashtags
Lots of @mentioning
Large, diverse networks and followers
A sense of community - many comment, share or Like each others posts
A sense of fun about their LinkedIn activity
Rarely, if ever, promote themselves or their businesses
Use of native video
Many long, text only posts

As I have stated before, some of them post things that I think are not always suitable for LinkedIn but who am I to argue with the level of engagement those posts get?
Many (not all) of the above are millennials and one concern I have is whether they are likely to drop LinkedIn like a stone when something ‘new and shiny’ comes along - this is very typical of how this generation use Social media and it could happen to LinkedIn.

This weeks questions are all regarding last weeks topic of GDPR and were all aimed at Jeremy Kajendran following his interview. Jeremy has been very generous in answering all the questions I sent him by recording his answers.

Topics covered were;
Do subscribers on pre-GDPR email lists need to opt-in again to be compliant?
If I work under the name of another company as a Consultant and promote them as a company etc. Do I still need to register with the ICO?
Am I still able to send InMails to 2nd and 3rd degree contacts under GDPR?

Welcome to episode 183, this week I am dedicating the whole episode to this much requested subject. GDPR is coming next year whether we like it or not so it’s time to start educating ourselves on the dangers and opportunities this presents.

With that in mind I have taken time to speak with three individuals, two of which are interviewed on this show.
As a result, I am skipping any news, cool things or questions this week and will revert back to our normal format next week.

My first interview is with Privacy, Cyber Security and Risk Advisor Jeremy Kajendran who is the UK Privacy Practice Leader for EY

Key points from Jeremy;
GDPR = General Data Protection Regulation
Data protection act has been in place since 1998 but GDPR is intended to bring the legislation up to date with today’s technology and business practices. Fines are greater and organisations are now having to ensure they are compliant.
Fines can be for up to 4% of global turnover or £20,000
It is a criminal offence in the UK to not be registered with the ICO (Information Commissioners Office)
Individuals have a right to access to their data (this hasn’t changed)
Individuals can now ask you to delete their data and stop processing their data as well as asking you to send it back to them.
The ICO is concerned in protecting individuals from abuse of their privacy.
The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations also run in tandem with GDPR and also worth being familiar with because they could be more onerous.
Continual opt-in is not a requirement of GDPR. People have to be asked to opt-in to something which is explicit just once but are always given the option to opt-out.
It’s unlikely that the ICO will be interested in one off unsolicited emails. If however a recipient asks to receive no more emails then you must respect their wishes and could be in trouble if you don’t.
There will be lots of publicity in May next year which may increase the amount of complaints the ICO receive and in practical terms they are unlikely to be able to follow all of them up. They will prioritise on a risk basis.
If you are an organisation that processes data on anyone within the EU then you are subject to the GDPR
LinkedIn Forms are a way of collecting data on people so you are the data controller once you take that information from LinkedIn. The form should make it explicitly clear that by adding details an individual is agreeing to receiving more than just the information advertised (ie an e-book). A double opt-in is helpful but the days of signing up for a giveaway is not permission to send them anything else, unless they explicitly opt-in for ongoing communications. Ideally this should be included in the sign up form on LinkedIn
Explicit opt-in can be a very positive thing because your list open rate is likely to be much higher.

TOP 10 Questions To Ask A GDPR Expert by Jeremy Kajendran

Jeremy’s InfoRisky Podcast.

I also had a chat with Kim Bradford who also specialises in GDPR but tends to focus on it from the perspective of small businesses and solopreneurs.

Advice from Kim;

If you process data on anyone, you need to register with the ICO in the UK. Data can in theory include keeping their email asking you to take them to remove your data!
Registering with the ICO (UK only) may help to mitigate any issues. Put simply a good analogy would be that being investigated and fined by the ICO is like getting caught speeding but not being registered is like getting caught speeding without a valid drivers licence!
Email providers are slow to react and some appear to be trying to push responsibility onto their customers - perhaps LinkedIn may do the same.
The ICO are going to issue very clear guidance to people on what businesses can and can’t do regarding their data and clarifying their rights on data. This may lead to some people reporting you and even if you have done nothing wrong, the ICO may want to investigate how you hold and use other data (opening a can of worms)
It’s possible that LinkedIn may remove or at least significantly change the feature that allows you to download your connections.

Advice from Kim;

If you process data on anyone, you need to register with the ICO in the UK. Data can in theory include keeping their email asking you to take them to remove your data!
Registering with the ICO (UK only) may help to mitigate any issues. Put simply a good analogy would be that being investigated and fined by the ICO is like getting caught speeding but not being registered is like getting caught speeding without a valid drivers licence!
Email providers are slow to react and some appear to be trying to push responsibility onto their customers - perhaps LinkedIn may do the same.
The ICO are going to issue very clear guidance to people on what businesses can and can’t do regarding their data and clarifying their rights on data. This may lead to some people reporting you and even if you have done nothing wrong, the ICO may want to investigate how you hold and use other data (opening a can of worms)
It’s possible that LinkedIn may remove or at least significantly change the feature that allows you to download your connections.

Welcome to episode 182, lots to tell you about this week so no main subject as such.

Firstly I want to correct something I mentioned in last weeks show under the title ‘The State of Groups’ It seems that, on closer examination, the stated number of pending members isn’t actually accurate! Thanks to Carl for putting me right on that one!

Another correction from last week regarding GDPR. Asked if you had any questions and a number of you did. I will be interviewing an expert on the matter soon so I will make sure all your questions are answered (keep sending them in).
The thing I got wrong was suggesting that this would only be a subject of interest to European listeners - apparently this isn’t the case as anyone who holds data on people who are in a country under GDPR could be liable for fines (quite how, I don’t know!)

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn opens it’s new EMEA HQ offices in Dublin.
It’s a bit ‘cheesy’ as always but here is the video of the new offices. They do look pretty amazing!

Welcome to episode 181, this weeks episode is focussed on an interview with Janet Murray from Soulful PR. I appeared on her podcast recently and since then she has been achieving great things with LinkedIn so I thought you would all like to hear from her.

But first…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Bumblebizz is now live!
LinkedIn to launch Talent Insights in 2018

Janet Murray spent 17 years as a freelance journalist before setting up her Soulful PR business.
She now focusses on helping people to ‘pitch’ into the media to get better exposure for their business.

Key things I took from this episode;

• Traditional PR is not enough anymore
• Four areas of PR you should be paying attention to on a regular basis;
• • Publishing content on your website
  • Email marketing / newsletter
  • Social media posting and activity
  • Press coverage (show the results on your website)
• To build relationship with journalists you have to read the papers, show patience and work at getting to know them.
• Be aware of what is going on and when a story breaks that is relevant to your specialism, contact relevant journalists via Twitter or call them. They are always looking for stories so you are potentially being really helpful.
• Make a list of relevant journalists on Twitter and LinkedIn (mainly Twitter) - find them via a Google search/alerts.
• #journorequest on Twitter can be helpful
• Media enquiry services such as Response source, help a reporter out and source bottle
• Journalists like to call (for speed) so put your telephone number in your profile (summary not headline) and Twitter bio
• Make sure you have relatively recent Articles and videos in your profile so that a journalist or producer can see that you can write and appear comfortable in front of a camera.
• Clarity in your headline is key….journalists needs to see quickly exactly what your niche is (arguably this is true for everyone, not just journalists)
• Journalists always ask “Why do people need to hear this now?”
• ‘Everything is potentially content’ If others care about it then it will probably fly on LinkedIn.
• People are more interested in ‘how’ you work than what you do but PR about the ‘how’ allows you to talk about the ‘what’

Win a free 60 minute PR strategy session with Janet (worth £300+vat).
You can read more about these sessions here

You can enter this free prize draw by entering your details below

Links to other things mentioned in this interview;

Cara Mackay’s LinkedIn profile
Book - Your Press release Is Breaking My Heart
Media diary
Soulful PR Studio
The Soulful PR Podcast

If you have any questions that you want me to ask Janet, I will be happy to do so if you drop me a voicemail (link on the right edge of this page) or email me at mark@linkedinfomed.com

Welcome to episode 180, it’s been a busy week for me, I nearly didn’t get time to put this episode together but I’m glad I managed to because I want to talk about the revolution that is happening before out very eyes.
Stay tuned for more about that but first……

Clipper Race Update

They won!!

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• LinkedIn Engineering Blog - Serving Top Comments in Professional Social Networks

Interesting article, although a bit technical! Quote ‘we’ve built a scalable comment ranking system that uses machine learning (ML) to provide a personalized conversational experience to each member visiting the LinkedIn content ecosystem.’

Previously LinkedIn had a very basic way of ordering the comments in a thread;

‘The default mode for ranking comments on the feed was rank by recency: if you were the last person to post a comment on a popular thread, your comment would show up first. We had no understanding of the comment’s content, no notion of personalization, and no knowledge of the engagement that these comments were drawing.’

Comments are now assessed via machine learning where factors such as;

• Actual comment content
• Level of engagement (likes and further comments)
• Who posted the comment

It would appear that you only see a comment from one of your connections on a thread that is already attracting plenty of engagement. This shows the importance of getting quick traction to any post…once you get early engagement then the algorithm will share subsequent comments to more of each commenters connections (interestingly they use the term connections and not followers).

Comments, Likes and Shares are up by more than 60% in 2017 - wow!

The machine-learned model below shows what affects what you see with regards to comments

This tells us that to gain greater visibility on LinkedIn we need to think about;

• How many followers we have
• Connection strength
• How many profile views we get
• Poor performing posts can have a detrimental effect on the visibility of future comments and posts
• @mentions and #hashtags in comments can increase visibility

Overall, whilst a bit ‘techie’ this is a valuable insight into how LinkedIn programme their algorithm.

• Adding LinkedIn’s Profile Card on Office 365 Offers a Simple Way to Build a Professional Relationship

This seems pretty similar to the ‘Rapportive’ Gmail plugin and the Sales Navigator Gmail plugin although from the screenshots, it does appear to provide a little more information. With the amount of people who use Microsoft Office 365 this doers highlight just how important your LinkedIn profile is to you!

The State of Groups

Many groups have been left to fester by their owners as can be seen by these shocking numbers of ‘pending members’ in some of the groups I am in on LinkedIn.

Not all groups are this bad and some are still well, run and valuable but the engagement on LinkedIn is now all in the stream and not in groups.

Let’s Not Get Too Honest!

Have you seen the trending #hashtag on LinkedIn #letsgethonest?

LinkedIn have even feature it in this new feature as seen below;

This involves posting something honest and vulnerable about yourself and nominating others to do the same. Here are some of the things people have been posting about

• Speech impediments
• Sick relatives
• Relatives passing away
• I’m homeless

And the list goes on…. If you click on the image above you can read more.

I’m typically enjoy genuine, authentic posts and I’ve always been a fan of showing vulnerability but this feels like a step too far for LinkedIn.

Maybe I’m wrong but this feels too self-indulgent to me and I find myself wondering about people who feel the need to share such deep personal issues with the whole world in this way.

As I’m about to explain in the next section, the engagement on LinkedIn is phenomenal these days and maybe this is part of what comes with that but at the end of the day, this is still a professional network and there are boundaries. Posting about feeling vulnerable in the workplace because you do not have degree is one thing but talking about more personal issues such as bereavement feels wrong to me.

Maybe I’m wrong…..I’d love to know what you think.

Drop me an email to mark@linkedinformed.com or even better why not leave me a voicemail

Something Special is Happening

That’s the fourth time in the last 2 weeks that an audience on one of my seminars have told me that they are astonished as to how much better LinkedIn is than they thought it was (based on previous experience).

I’m sure something really special is happening to LinkedIn this year and I’m not the only one who thinks this

As previously mentioned, engagement levels are exploding - a 60% increase is beyond amazing!

Is this down to the new design?

Partly, but it’s mainly down to a new, younger demographic who are leading the way in showing us how to engage more effectively.

The algorithm behind the new design has played it’s part and the new, more user friendly design has helped to attract this new audience but whatever the reason, I really senses a step change in the way LinkedIn is being used.

As someone that has been training LinkedIn best practice for nearly ten years, I can’t begin to tell you how happy that makes me.

Finally……finally!!

Greater engagement is certainty bring with it more success whether you are a job seekers, recruiter or looking to grow your business.

The future is LinkedIn!

I've listened to at least 2 episodes about Groups, but I have a question that you haven't discussed. I've found about 5 groups that are really directly related to the kind of folks I'm trying to get to know, but all of them are really like advertising boards. People don't try to engage anyone in the groups at all, and every once in a while people will have a conversation around a post.

My question is - how can I, as a member of a group, help to move the group more toward conversations? When I post to them, I post with questions that I really would like to engage (mostly with no response), and I'm starting to comment more in the groups (but mostly with no responses from anyone). Is there a way that I, as a member, can up the engagement, or when the culture of the group is set to be an advert board, is there really nothing I can do?

I really appreciate your podcast and appreciate any thoughts you might have on this subject.

Answer;

The reason why this happens is that the members of these groups are simply not turning up! They may be members but they have long since 'disengaged' from these groups. This reflects the serious problems that exist in groups - too much spam and irrelevant 'noise' has led to people ignoring groups. They are still members but they never check emails (or they have switched off notifications) and they don't bother checking into their groups.

So the answer to your question is to not bother with groups, at least for now anyway.

Groups will be re-launched (probably early next year) and I suspect they will become relevant again but for now there are better ways to engage with the sort of people you wish to get to know.

Most of the conversations on LinkedIn have moved to the homepage stream, meaning that people are commenting and engaging with peoples posts rather than in groups. The good news is that these conversations are better and more prevalent than they ever were in groups.

Here is what I would do in your situation;

• Identify people you are interested in via search - people and posts search.

• Follow these people

• Clean up your own homepage by unfollowing those that don't interest you and hiding irrelevant posts

• Engage with people via their posts

• Post interesting and engaging posts 3-5 times a week and @mention relevant people (sparingly) to bring others into the conversation

Communication strategy and techniques are something I cover on a regular basis on the podcast, in fact, the last episode (178) is a recording of a talk I gave on that very subject.

There is a place for groups on LinkedIn and I'm sure we will see the re-emergence of community discussion forums next year, but for now, I would advise concentrating your efforts on post engagement.

Welcome to episode 179, this week the main topic is something I seem to be coming across a lot…employee advocacy on LinkedIn.
For those who haven’t come across this before, it simply means utilising the employees of a company to be ‘advocates’ of the organisation to help with marketing, sales and recruitment.

The problem is, I’m really not sure it works on LinkedIn….I will explain more later.

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Artificial intelligence just made guessing your password a whole lot easier

Carl who sent this article in uses Password Safe https://pwsafe.org

I also noticed another two key people at LinkedIn have recently left the organisation.
I have met many LinkedIners in my time but the one who has impressed me the most was Wade Burgess. Wade is a massive talent and will be a huge miss to LinkedIn.
Keep an eye on his new employer Shiftgig, if Wade is convinced enough to join them as CEO, they are likely to be going places!

If you are listening Wade (highly unlikely) - my very best wishes for the future.

LinkedIn have also lost another key person who is highly respected. Pat Wadors was the SVP of global talent.

Both individuals were key players for LinkedIn, these must be testing times for the CEO Jeff Weiner.
This got me thinking and I checked back at my connections at LinkedIn and remarkably another 10 (in addition to the above) have resigned since the announcement of the Microsoft takeover.

Employee Advocacy. Does It Really Work on LinkedIn?

I have had several conversations recently with companies who want to know how to use LinkedIn more effectively as an employee advocacy tool.
This got me thinking about the whole subject and I have to say, I’m somewhat sceptical as to whether this really is a good idea on LinkedIn (possibly anywhere).

• My thoughts;
  Does it actually work? It seems a hot subject but I remain sceptical that is actually has any tangible benefits.
• Most content seems to be external links which are pretty much a waste of time posting on LinkedIn anyway.
• Sharing company page posts doesn’t seem to work either - company posts get very little engagement. Average figures for Cisco (number 4 in LinkedIn top company pages for 2017) are 135 likes and 3 comments and Schneider Electric (number 2) get 300 likes and 2 comments. The vast majority of likes are from employees (advocates). A comparable set of stats from a really strong personal user is 135 likes and 15 comments!
• Experts in this subject talk about providing ‘guidance’ to employees but I suspect this either puts them off being active or means they feel ‘directed’ which leads to a huge lack of authenticity.
• Why not educate employees to use LinkedIn (voluntarily) in a way that allows them to be authentic individuals and not mouth pieces for the marketing or recruitment function?
• Most companies (and advocates) are guilty of the McFly syndrome …It’s all about you!
• If employees are happy, motivated and active on LinkedIn then they will naturally be advocates. They actually don’t need to talk about the company at all…just show that they are interesting, switched on individuals.

Here is the post I did on this subject (click on it to see the comments);

You can see the LinkedIn #LifeAtSAP posts here and the #WeAreCisco posts here

These week we have a first! ….a live question recorded today!

Lorraine Bow is a Ukulele instructor based in London and has been struggling to find ways of using LinkedIn to win new clients.

She asked me to help her and this is what you can hear in the episode

You can view Lorraine’s recent activity by clicking here

Here is her original ‘Goosebumps’ post which, as you can see didn’t get much traction

Welcome to episode 178, it’s been a busy week for me with several training sessions and a speaking gig. I knew I wouldn’t get time to produce an episode this week so I thought it might be interesting to hear the talk that I gave this week.

First and relevant to the subject of my talk, I saw this article and wondered what you would make of it.

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Seriously, Please Stop Trying to 'Go Viral' on LinkedIn

My thoughts;
What does ‘viral’ actually mean?
You really don't need a ‘killer’ inspirational story. People mostly respond to interesting but ‘normal’ stories that they can relate to.
Views are not a vanity metric. Your post ‘views in the feed’ number is a clear indication of how the algorithm distributes your post and this is an important thing to keep a check on.
The point about creating a community makes perfect sense to me but this has nothing to do with posts on Linkedin - different issue.
The headline of this post does strike me as being classic ‘click bait’ as the article isn’t really about why you shouldn't be aiming for high views from your LinkedIn posts.

My talk

You can view a copy of my slides below

Welcome to episode 177, this week I want to focus on research….not stalking! The problem is that everyone seems to want to refer to it as stalking so whatever…I’m going with that in the headline.
There is so much valuable information to be gleamed from someones LinkedIn profile and yet most people barely scratch the surface.

More of that later but as always I’m starting with….

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Once a Running Joke, LinkedIn Is Suddenly a Hot Social Network. Here’s What Changed
LinkedIn Is Going to Start Serving Native Ads to Outlook Users’ Inboxes

LinkedIn Update

Not so much an update as just some feedback. Native video appears to be fully rolled out now and the numbers of videos in my feed has increased dramatically.
The net result is that ‘View’ numbers are dropping like a stone!

I posted a video yesterday that so far has 32 likes and 12 comments...not bad in 1 day......but only 186 views!!
When native video first arrived, that amount of engagement would have shown a view number 10x that!
DON'T PANIC!
Here's why;
1) View metrics are not as important as Likes & Comments
2) A 'View' for native video only counts if someone pauses on your video for a minimum of 3 secs
3) Everyone now has native video and many are experimenting with it. This means there are lots of videos appearing in our feed so we skip past them within 3 secs.
4) In time, the number of videos will drop again as the novelty wears off.

Stalking

LinkedIn can be used in many different ways as we all know but in my experience, one of it’s most common yet also most under-utilised uses is people research.
That may seem like a contradiction…..let me explain.
Even the most sceptical, ‘once in a blue moon active’ LinkedIn user will look at someone’s profile on LinkedIn to check them out before a meeting or telephone conversation. It’s become the de-facto tool to find out information about people but most people just take a cursory glance at the profile. In doing so they miss so much valuable information.

Here’s what I do before meeting someone;

Read their headline, summary and experience
Check their personal and contact info section to when we connected, check out their website links and look to see if they are on Twitter <contact info>
Search for relevant keywords in their Tweets (from:Twittername AND keyword OR keyword)
Check their media and watch any videos (especially if it’s of them) and any presentations.
If they have Slideshare presentations in their profile, hop over to Slideshare and check out their other uploads.
Check for mutual connections and contact them if appropriate
Also check for mutual groups in Highlights and see if they have been active recently.
Check out their articles and read the most recent plus any that are highly relevant to your meeting. Pay particular attention to their response to comments.
If they are a connection, thoroughly search (filter) their connections looking for highly relevant connections including your competitors!
Click on ‘See all activity’ and then ‘posts’
Then move over to ‘all activity’
Click on the companies they have worked for during the last 3 years and see if you have any connections that were at the company at the same time. If so, consider contacting them.
Read their current job description for any relevant information.
Check their education, click on Alumni and see if you have any connections that might know them from university (depending on their age)
Volunteer experience can also be enlightening
Read all of their received recommendations (if possible)
Now the real golden nugget….read their given recommendations to really understand what they truly value in people they know.
Follow them if not already connected
Check other social media channels (such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Google+)
Use Crystalknows to get a psychometric assessment of them

The more research you do, the better. You won’t use 90% of the information you find but the things you do use could make a huge difference.

Question from Magnus Unemyr from Sweden:
Assuming my posts are educational and giving value, how often can I post without becoming annoying? I currently post once a day, are two posts a day considered too much or where is the limit to be just active and not annoying?

Answer: Great question. One post a day is good going, especially if you are also engaging with people throughout the day.
That said, I don’t think 2 per day is over the top. In terms of whether this annoys people, well that assumes they see every post you do…which is unlikely! The algorithm helps in this regard as it won’t feed everything you post to the same followers every time.
Personally I think it is more about engagement than the number of posts. You could achieve a lot more from one post a week that created extensive engagement then 5 posts that don’t!
I hope that makes sense.

Welcome to episode 176, this week I am going to share my thoughts on the demise of content marketing and the rise of engagement as a much more effective tool to influence and build trust.

But first…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Bumble’s CEO Takes Aim At LinkedIn
18 Enormously Useful LinkedIn Hacks by Andy Foote or just shortcut to the fancy text generator here
If You Wanna Crush It On LinkedIn's Hot New Video Addition, Do This

New LinkedIn Feature

Invitations. This week saw the introduction of significant improvements to the way we manage our invitations to connect.

The ‘select all’ feature will save me loads of time. Thanks to Perry Van Beek for informing me of this.
Great feature, I love it when they give us more but it’s not all good news….

Search. LinkedIn have, for some strange reason, decided to take away the keyword search field from search results.

In addition the ‘search for people with filters’ has been replaced with ‘People’. ‘Jobs’ and ‘Posts’. Selecting People is still a ‘filters’ search but you can’t then subsequently add in keywords to your search. You either start with keywords or have none….odd move!

This has a knock on effect with search alerts because you cannot create one unless you have performed a keyword search.
The workaround is to do a search with filters and then create a new search by adding the job title string into the main search, it’s not as accurate but you can at least create the search alert.

Engagement

This has been playing on my mind recently as I think we are seeing the start of a significant change in the way people use LinkedIn.

Traditionally we always thought that sourcing relevant content and sharing it on LinkedIn was a great way to build relationships. This led to scheduling of link based posts using tools like Buffer or Hootsuite.
I’ve covered this extensively before and had decent results from it……but everything seems to have changed.
The LinkedIn algorithm is now penalising external content so much so that it is very difficult to get past 1000 views in the feed whereas text or image based posts are flying as covered recently.

On reflection we have been posting all these links to external articles but is anyone reading them? Probably not!
And even if they were, the algorithm is preventing most people from seeing them anyway.
So this feels like a sea change to me.
No more external links
Stop scheduled posting from Buffer / Hootsuite

Instead we should be focussing our time on creating effective posts, good quality articles and engaging with other peoples content.
That feels like a much better way to use LinkedIn.

Can you see where I am coming from here?
Is this the beginning of the end of content marketing?
Let me know what you think

Welcome to episode 174, this week I want to return to a subject close to my heart and also one that I think is really important to all of us.
18-25-year-olds and their use (or lack of use) of LinkedIn!
This episode features an interview with John Morley about the work he has been doing with school leavers.
More of that later …

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn launch a new ‘Welcome to the team’ prompt
A LinkedIn Editor Reveals How to Get Featured and Go Viral on the Site This is a real clickbait headline but worth a read anyway.

Last Friday I had a wonderful day with three other LinkedIn Trainers in the UK.
Steve Philip
Angus Fraser
Greg Cooper

We had a really productive day sharing ideas and expertise in a very open ‘nothing to lose, everything to gain’ atmosphere. If you get the chance to get together with your competitors, take it. You will gain a lot from the experience.

On Sunday I attended the start of the Round the World Clipper race. I really knew very little about it beforehand but I found the whole thing incredibly inspirational and it’s really helped me get some new focus into my business.

Click on the image below to find out more about the race

Company Page Followers Hack

It’s very annoying that LinkedIn prevent us from seeing who are followers are but thanks to Glen Smith I have a cool hack to show you.
This might not last long but if you use the url;
https://www.linkedin.com/company/company-name
You will be able to view them. Remember if your company name is more than one word you must separate the words with a dash -

It’s a useful hack but my advice is to focus all your engagement efforts on your personal page anyway.

Is this poor communication?

This fascinates me. Is this good communication or not? Is it good design by LinkedIn? What are they hoping to achieve by this?

A Focus on Youth

This week I chat with John Morley about the work he has been doing with school leavers via the National Citizen Scheme in the UK.

Key Points
Most Teenagers don’t even know what LinkedIn is
Most teenagers are ‘socially engaged’ on other platforms
We need to help teenagers understand the importance LinkedIn can play in their professional personal brand.
Teenagers should be thinking about their career and they need to understand that LinkedIn will be very useful to them when looking for an internship or job
A great technique is to get them to focus on what they want to do and then visualise what their LinkedIn profile will look like.

I would strongly encourage you to spend some time with your teenage kids, family members or family friends and encourage them to think about LinkedIn. You could be doing them a real favour.

Welcome to episode 174, I’m going to share an interesting chat I had with AJ Wilcox this week. AJ heard me talk in sceptical terms about the new website demographics feature that LinkedIn are currently rolling out and contacted me to say he was very enthusiastic about the feature. So I thought I would record our conversation and share it with you.

More of that later but first…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Judge rules against LinkedIn in legal fight over its members' public data
Another great article on the same subject is in the Washington post: Is LinkedIn trying to protect your data — or hoard it?

This ruling could have interesting ramifications for other current and potential 3rd party products. I’m not sure it ‘opens the floodgates’ for plug-ins and extensions but it will be interesting to see what develops.

Feedback

This a great point from Sandra. Sharing a post, with attribution does allow someone to add their own perspective that is suitable to their audience.
Fair comment, I was probably a bit harsh about sharing, it’s not stealing likes and comments although I do think that you should always comment on the originators post as well to assist their distribution of that post.
That of course is not the same as the copy & pasting, which is always wrong, even with attribution.

If you want a copy of the cheatsheet that outlines how to achieve high post views and engagement then fill in your details below, it’s completely free.

New LInkedIn Features

Native video on desktop is now being rolled out, it doesn’t allow you to record unfortunately but you can upload a video from your computer

The video feature has suffered some problems this week as a new tranche of members have been given access which has caused uploads to be very slow at processing.
On that point, if you are adding video from your computer, these are the dimensions it needs to fit;

We now have a new ‘Connection’ filter in search results (mobile and desktop). This is different to searching a connections connections which is done from their profile. This is designed to be more of a secondary filter to an existing search result. For example you may be searching for prospects and then want to know if one of your good business contacts is already connected to anyone in the result. Thus revealing the opportunity for an introduction.

LinkedIn active status in Messages. Many users seems to have got this useful new feature this week but the way LinkedIn explained it can lead to some confusion. Hopefully the below video clears that up

It’s a positive enhancement to the messages function but I think this feature could be improved with;
Filtering by who is active in the Messages page
Active status to show in a connections profile

What do you think. Any other ideas on how they could improve this?

Website Demographics

Let’s hear what the world’s nicest social media expert has to say about this new LinkedIn website demographics feature

AJ explains how this tool can be used to get a much greater understanding of who visits your website. Not just your domain but each specific page so you should be able to get a much clearer idea of who is interested in certain aspects of your business or products.
It may even give you guidance of how those pages should be designed (to suit the audience).

Also you can combine custom audience advertising with website demographics by targeting the demographic of the people that are typically going to your relevant website pages. This should make your custom audience ad’s much more effective.

You might already have this feature. Go to your ad’s account on LinkedIn

Then click on an account and you will see website demographics if you have it. I didn’t have it when I spoke with AJ but as you can see, I have it now!

Apparently only 25% of members have it but it is currently rolling out to all.

Welcome to episode 173, this week it’s just me (no interview) and I want to talk about the controversial but also very important topic of plagiarism.

But before we get to that I need to catch up on some things I wasn’t able to cover last week plus some other articles I saw this week…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Hackers catfish tech execs on LinkedIn
Putin passes law that will ban VPNs in Russia
HOW RUSSIA IS USING LINKEDIN AS A TOOL OF WAR AGAINST ITS U.S. ENEMIES
Why LinkedIn will Never Tell You When to Post on LinkedIn

You can hear my interview with Janet Murray on the Soulful PR podcast here

LinkedIn Updates

Think twice before you reply to an InMail with a shortcut ‘No Thanks’!

This is very sneaky and I’m not sure it’s been properly thought through by LinkedIn. When you receive an iMail from someone you have the opportunity to reply with 3 shortcut phrases

On the face of it this looks like a time saving convenience feature similar to those inBot responses you see in normal messaging.
Beware, it’s not what you think!

When your ‘no thanks’ reply is received the other end the sender sees this message

So they can’t continue the thread….that makes perfect sense to me but what happens if they try to subsequently send you a new InMail?

So you have inadvertently ‘blocked’ this person from ever InMailing you again which could be disastrous for jobseekers and others who don’t wish to cut off communication altogether, it seems absurd to me that LinkedIn don’t make it clear what you are doing!

Long text posts are ‘killing it’ on LinkedIn

I have reported on this before but since then I have tested this further and it is clear that the algorithm that decides how many of your followers will see your post is massively favouring posts with a lot of text and really penalising any posts that include a link (unless it’s a LinkedIn article).

Here is a post I did last week about a news item regarding Sports Direct. As you can see below, this story was widely covered on LinkedIn by individuals and companies but everyone else made the mistake of including a link to the online article.

Knowing what I know, I simply took a screenshot of the letter and posted it as an image accompanied with some long text (triggering the ‘see more’.

As you can see, the results speak for themselves!

As I typed the above post I paused as I wondered if what I was doing was in some way a form of plagiarism. In the end I decided it was OK as the story had been widely covered by many sources in the national press….but that got me thinking about the main subject of this weeks episode!

LinkedIn Plagiarism - Is copy & pasting posts OK?

This seems to have become an increasing trend on LinkedIn, especially as text only posts have become more popular and successful.

Here is a classic example of what I’m talking about. This text only post from Ryan Cummings was phenomenally successful with nearly 40,000 likes and approaching 3000 comments.

Those are great numbers but could have been so much more because others decided to copy and paste his post and re-post it on their own feed. I actually found 27 posts like this.

This is the most blatant example and is classic plagiarism

The majority were like this, I even found someone who had made it into his own LinkedIn Article!

And someone who tried to be clever by changing the copy, ever so slightly!

And another who just copy & pasted a section

Some fool even had the cheek to add their product picture to the copied post!

It’s hard to defend these people. They clearly have extremely low ethical standards and will never find success by operating that way……..These losers are annoying but not the ones I’m most concerned about.

I also saw plenty of examples like this;

Whilst Ryan’s name is shown, it is not a link back to his profile.

There were other examples where Ryan is mentioned and linked (@mention)

Whilst this is an improvement, is still wrong in my opinion for this simple reason;

They are stealing views, Likes and Comments from Ryan!

and I think that is totally unacceptable!

Every post offers us the opportunity to Like, Comment or Share - using these is quicker and ensures that all credit, views and further engagement belong to the rightful owner.

Not everyone however would agree, look at this post from a CIO claiming that this practice is ‘standard behaviour’ across all social media - really? If this is common practice then that would suggest to me that it’s ‘common practice’ to behave unethically, surely that isn’t true for most social media users - is it?

Admittedly Bill also makes a good point about unwarranted blocking but his original comment is ludicrous!

This topic was also covered  and extensively commented on in a recent post by Simon Chan

I agree wholeheartedly with Simon’s comments but who cares what we think. How does it feel to be copied in this way?
Well I reached out to Ryan Cummings and asked him for his thoughts and this is what he had to say;

“When I first noticed that some people were copy and pasting my post, I was a bit flattered. However, when one particular post began accruing several thousand likes and gained momentum, I then had people commenting on my post saying that they think the story was made up or that I was the one who copied it.

LinkedIn can easily determine who the original author was, and I believe they should step in and take down posts/suspend users who do not give proper attribution when posting others' content.

So to directly answer your questions:
1. I don't like it, they should cite their sources. Those who don't will be exposed and look like clowns anyway.

Welcome to episode 172, this week I’m going to introduce you to a very interesting and somewhat entertaining character. Jon Buchan is a digital marketing expert who has a unique way of getting fantastic responses to cold messages (mainly emails) he sends by using humour.

But first we had some feedback from last weeks episode on Native video.

Native Video

My friend and fellow LinkedIn trainer Sandra Long sent me this voicemail

Gary Stockton also got in touch;

“I'm looking forward to creating videos for important job openings and new thought leadership content. Check out Screenflow for Mac. You can record screen from iOS devices and make great looking mobile demo videos. I think current release of Camtasia also allows for mobile screen recording”

Great points Gary. I think highly of both those products but they might be out of the budget for the average user who occasionally wants to post a video. In those circumstances, simply record on your phone.

The Charm Offensive with Jon Buchan

This is an intro’ from Jon that nicely sets the scene for the interview

“One night, I got drunk and wrote an email. I woke up and still thought it was a good idea to send this completely absurd email to very busy, Senior Marketing Directors at large brands.

I sent 6 emails manually. It wasn’t long before I got 2 replies. Both of them were highly complimentary but telling me they already had agencies in place. Then I got another response, and they wanted to meet me. I couldn’t believe it. The email I created should in no way work. It was out of the ordinary and weird and ridiculous. Yet it did.”

Here is an example of the kind of response that Jon frequently gets to his messages;

In this interview Jon takes time to explain the structure of his cold emails. This is equally applicable to LinkedIn messages and even posts. Below is an example of a recent LinkedIn post from Jon

You can check out Jon’s LinkedIn profile by clicking on it above.

The best information can be obtained in the Charm Offensive Facebook group

This weeks question is from Jennifer Holloway

Answer - Two options;

1. Upgrade to Sales Navigator and import your tags…….for the delightful price of £72 per month, which probably isn’t a good investment for tagging alone.
2. Use the Dux-soup Chrome extension. It’s free and allows you to add tags and notes and then search by tag.

Welcome to episode 171, well I’m back from my holiday and fully refreshed albeit missing the sun, crystal clear sea, wonderful beaches and amazing sunsets……oh well!

As always seems to happen, as soon as I go away LinkedIn decide to unexpectedly launch a new feature….well I guess that happens all the time but this one happened to be a very big one……native video has finally arrived!

More of that later but there has been other news whilst I’ve been away

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• CRM Zoho announces integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• LinkedIn is testing a new feature that matches you with a mentor
• Woman gets thousands of messages on LinkedIn after getting rejected from dream job. This isn’t much of a story but her update at the end of her post reflects a growing trend of plagiarism on LinkedIn
• William, Kate & Harry advertise for a Communications Officer (terrible title!) on LinkedIn
• Veterans get a free ‘Career Premium’ account for a year….a nice gesture but why is it only for US veterans?
• Microsoft quarterly results show LinkedIn are making a $361m loss

LinkedIn Updates

There have been some other changes as well as native video whilst I have been away.

Hover over name feature returns and it’s better than ever!

You get the option to send a message to 1st tier connections, invite 2nd tier to connect and InMail anyone else. Don’t use the connect though as it doesn’t not allow for personalisation.

Website Demographics - coming soon.

An interesting looking tool that will give you information about your website visitors, we will have to wait and see exactly how useful it is.

Multiple image posts. This could be very handy for visual storytelling, I also suspect the algorithm my favour them. Only available in the app and iOS only for now.

Reshares of your posts now show in your post analytics.

This is definitely a step in the right direction but one of the =main reasons you want to see who shared is so you can thank them and the ‘hover over’ feature does not work in pop-ups so you have to click and open the profile to see more about the person a send a message. Bizarrely you can actually see the ‘hover’ pop-up opening in the background!

Native Video is Finally Here!

I noticed this feature whilst sipping my Mojito by the pool in Greece! Fortunately I had only just started my drink so was able to immediately give it a try;

This feature is currently only available on the mobile app

Very few users currently have it although it is being slowly rolled out to all.

You can record your video directly into the app or upload a video that is saved on your phone, simply tap the video icon to start the process

As you can see a ‘view’ is only counted when the video has appeared on someone’s screen for 3 secs without scrolling, this is therefore not comparable to other posts which are simply ‘views in the feed’. Therefore a view count of over 10,000 is pretty good and suggests that the algorithm is favouring video posts.

I have tried various formats, if you are recording directly into the app I would suggest holding your phone in landscape mode, this will look better when seen on desktop. It is worth noting that you cannot edit your video in the app.

Native video will autoplay in the feed on both desktop and mobile.

The problem with video is that few people will have sound (or sound switched on) on their computers and many mobile viewers won’t bother with sound so it may be wise to use subtitles.

In my tests the best results were when I used the free Clips iOS app, it records in square format so it doesn’t matter which way you hold the phone, you can edit before posting and it has a very effective subtitles feature that can be edited but often gets it right first time.

My first video above was made using Clips

I have been looking in the Google Play store for a suitable equivalent and I found Videoshow, I’m not sure how good it is but it maybe worth a look for Android users. If you know of a better app that allows editing and subtitles then please let me know.

So how can we use native video effectively?

It’s early days and we will have to wait and see what works but here are my initial ideas;

• Talking head (as above) expressing an opinion and asking for feedback or just asking a question. Use subtitles.
• Show an event you are attending or something worth noting at work. If you would think of taking a picture and posting that then now you should think video as well or instead.
• News. If you want to announce or share some important news, do it by video - this gives a much greater sense of urgency and makes it more of an event for the viewer.
• A brief interview with someone
• Teach others how to do something
• Make a video from a powerpoint as a ‘moving words’ video to grab attention
• A weekly tips or Q&A feature
• Recruiters - why not experiment with posting your new hot vacancy via video
• Storytelling - produce a series of short videos to allow others to experience something with you
• I would advise keeping videos less than 3 mins length
• Remember the view only counts if they pause for 3 secs so your opening (without sound) needs to grab immediate attention to make them stop scrolling.

I’m sure other ideas will develop in time.

How will you use video on LinkedIn? Please share your ideas by sending me a voicemail or email.

No time for any questions this week but I will make sure I catch up an any unanswered ones next week.

Welcome to episode 170, I’m still away this week but rather than go two weeks without an episode I thought I would pre-record an interview with the amazing LinkedIn Trainer from London called Alex Galviz.

We cover a lot of ground in the interview and I hope you will agree that Alex’s approach to LinkedIn is both refreshing and inspiring.

But first I thought you might find these interesting…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

The British Prime Ministers ex PR guru makes her feelings known in her LinkedIn headline…but doesn’t know how to update her profile properly!

Migrating Groups is not as easy as some people suggest!
This is a really interesting post about the difficulties in persuading people to migrate away from LinkedIn. This re-enforces my view that the answer to online communities still exists within LinkedIn but that LinkedIn need to work hard to re-invent groups.

Interview with Alex Galviz

I really enjoyed chatting with Alex, a millennial LinkedIn trainer and coach for millennials from London.

We covered a lot of ground in our chat;

Challenging your definition of success
Finding your ‘Why’
LinkedInLocal events
Millennials on LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s editorial calendar
Crowdsourcing your headline
5 tips for a great headline
1. Don't tell show
2. Think about how you want people to feel when they enter your virtual home
3. Do you give them enough teasers that they want to get to know you more?
4. Is your WHY clearly explained?
5. Why are you different to someone else doing the same job?
Personal branding and authenticity

This is the post Alex referred to that kickstarted her career as a career coach and LinkedIn specialist.

Welcome to episode 169, lets get personal this week……or maybe not! Is is right to chat about non-business matters on LinkedIn?
That is the main focus this week but first….

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

When is public information not public? When LinkedIn says so
What LinkedIn Will Look Like In The Future
Posting Job Opportunity On LinkedIn Profile For New Employer Did Not Violate Non-Compete

Should we get personal on LinkedIn?

This subject was instigated when I saw the following post. It’s a very interesting thread and really got me thinking about this subject which many people seem to feel very strongly about.

Rather than just share my views I thought I would gather some views from LinkedIn and boy did you respond! This post is currently averaging 1000 views per hour!

I’m actually quite happy to share topics that are not strictly business with my network. There is almost always a tenuous link to business in everything I do but I believe people are more interesting in you than what you do. They can easily see from your profile what you do but the key difference in deciding if they want to work with you (or employ you) is who you really are.

In contrast I utterly detest using my Facebook profile for business. I’m not saying it’s a detestable thing to do…everyone to their own but I personally find it excruciatingly uncomfortable to either talk about work and business on my Facebook or alternatively ‘friend’ work related contacts and have them looking at things that are entirely personal.

I can control what I reveal about myself personally on LinkedIn, whereas using Facebook for business feels like I am opening my front door to people who are not appropriate share such things with.

I wondered if that was a contradiction…..

On balance I don’t think it is but maybe you disagree. I would love to know what you think about this subject.

There will not be an episode next week as I will be here;

The podcast will return the week after (22nd July) with a pre-recorded interview with Millennial LinkedIn Trainer Alex Galviz

Welcome to episode 168, last week’s show seemed to go down a storm……it seems everyone is checking their influence score and comparing them which can only be a good thing in my opinion.

As a followup to that and on a similar track I wanted to focus on article clicks this week, or rather the lack of article clicks many people seem to be battling with!

I’m getting a lot of comments like;

“I think I will move to posting rather than articles as they get better views”
Or
“Why doesn’t LinkedIn alert my followers when I post a new article”?

So in this episode I’m going to try to fix that…but first

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn China president resigns

New LinkedIn Features

Here is the new ‘What people are talking about’ feature. This seems to be based on trending stories but when you click on it LinkedIn encourages you create a new post with a pre-written hashtag on that subject. Could this be LinkedIn trying to get # moving?

Images are fixed! At last LinkedIn have fixed the issue regarding posting images. No longer do we need to worry about turning our phones horizontal to take a picture for LinkedIn we can now add images in portrait!

What To Do If Nobody Is Reading Your Articles

Years ago published posts (now renamed articles) would get thousands and at times tens of thousands of views. It seemed like LinkedIn was the perfect place to produce content…a ready made audience that would be alerted to your content.
Many people got in early and started to get amazing results, this attracted more and more new authors and in no time at all over 1 million people had written an article on LinkedIn.
This number massively increased the amount of notifications LinkedIn was sending out to people and this became a big problem….countless people objected to ‘spam’ from LinkedIn - too may notifications and too many emails.
So LinkedIn changed things and rapidly reduced the amount of notifications.
The net result was that article view number plummeted. What would have been 10,000 views 2 years ago became for like 200 views and this is where most people are with articles.

So let’s be clear…….publishing articles on LinkedIn is not what it used to be. The article feature is no longer a distribution network for your content, it is merely a library for your content….just as other blogging platforms are such as Wordpress and Blogger.

That however, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be writing articles. It simply means that you need to use posts to distribute your articles to your audience…and hopefully beyond.

First let me make something clear;

We do need to be careful when comparing posts to articles. They are completely different and the stats are measured in different ways (clicks vs views in the feed).

A posts ‘view in the feed’ is simply a page impression ie it appeared on someones feed - it doesn’t mean they saw it. An Article click does mean they saw it - completely different things

The best way to view them is that they work together. An article is long form content but just that - static content. If it gets into a pulse channel it might get clicks outside of your followers but the best way to achieve clicks is via posts which are short form, viral content - see posts as the 'vehicle' to distribute your articles. Your ability to gain high view numbers on your posts is down to a variety of factors but most important of all is to show the algorithm that you are 'interesting' through regular comments & likes.

So here are the 3 key areas to focus on;

Aim to get it published in a Pulse channel

Make sure it is over 500 words
Ensure you have the right keywords in your headline
When you publish send a tweet to @LinkedInEditors

2) The Headline is Critical.

Create intrigue that makes some want to click on to see more
Test 5-7 headlines with friend or co-workers
Try to make it personalised
Lighter subjects work best - avoid serious/boring headlines
If one headline is clearly not working…change it!

There is a free course on Lynda from LinkedIn editor in chief that includes many great tips from someone that should know more than most!
https://www.lynda.com/LinkedIn-tutorials/Paying-attention-headline/433721/443465-4.html

3) Generate your own traffic

• Create engaging posts, ask questions and encourage responses
• Post at the right time of day (commuting and lunch time)
• Extend the shelf life of your post by replying, commenting and liking over several weeks
• @mention relevant individuals asking for their feedback
• Use appropriate hashtags in your posts (and articles)
• Don’t just use LinkedIn to promote your article. Try all relevant channels
• Send a direct message with a link to the post to influential connections asking frothier input
• Consider emailing the article to your email list
• Ensure your post reaches the widest possible audience by improving your ‘Influence score’
  • Engage with others frequently
  • Avoid too many external links on other posts
  • Text only posts work really well, images are good but mix it up.
  • Focus most of your posts on interesting and ‘human’ stories and anecdotes

If you want to tag and download profiles, the best tool out there is LinkedInBack. It is only for notes and tags but the download feature is the killer for me.

I also discovered a new video tool this week. Loom is very similar to Viewedit that I mentioned in episode 162

This weeks question came from Avi and it’s all about that ago old problem of multiple or dual objectives and whether you should create 2 profiles or not.
Listen to the episode to hear my thoughts on that.

Welcome to episode 167, this week I’m going to take the opportunity to catch up on questions which have been building up recently as well as discussing the issue of influence and followers vs connections.

But first…..

I had some great feedback from last weeks episode including this message from Kurt Shaver

Plus Leif Carlsen contacted me from Denmark. Leif consider himself to be the ‘Mr LinkedIn’ in Denmark! Leif and his partners run the Social Selling company and even have their own podcast called Social Selling Radio!

The reason Leif contacted me though was regarding #LinkedInLocal. They have been holding similar event every month for the last 3 years which they call Social Friday’s

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn have released a new Sales Navigator course on LinkedIn Learning and is available for everyone. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learning-linkedin-sales-navigator-2
Google’s next big feature is to scrape LinkedIn
Data scraper’s case v. LinkedIn pits free speech against CFAA, DMCA
Sex technology industry accuses LinkedIn of censorship

LinkedIn Update

LinkedIn have introduced new Search statistics….but are they of any use?

Are you Influential?

I was speaking to someone this week about what makes people influential on LinkedIn, the answer is mostly to do with credibility but there is no doubt that some people get a wider distribution of their posts and this in part, must be effected by what I call the influence equation.

This can be broken down into two separate equations. Firstly the number of actual followers you have as opposed to the number of connections. A follower has chosen to see your content whereas a connection may have connected for different reasons.
<equation>

What can you do to increase your ‘real’ followers?
Produce great content on a regular basis but quality beats quantity
Ask people to follow you. Most users don’t really understand it
Get active with comments and likes, this increases visibility which will bring you more followers
Write articles designed to get into pulse channels

The problem with this is that most LinkedIn users simply don’t understand following! Very few people actually follow so this somewhat nullifies the above equation.

Another way to look at it is this equation

As an example Kate Lister has 3851 followers and 3832 connections, so not many ‘pure’ followers but on average she gets 21,000 views of her posts! that is an influence rating of 5.45.
These figures are heavily influenced by the amount of engagement she achieves with her posts and that is perhaps a more accurate definition of influence
What do you think?
How does 21k compare with your post views and what is your influence rating?

I’m way behind with my questions so I have decided to catch up this week.

The first question is from long term listener Jaz Greer;
I just wanted to check with you about which parts of Linkedin are indexed by Google

I have always held to the headline in the profile is indexed by Google as it is basically set up as an H1 tag in SEO terms and that is the only part of the profile. The rest festure in Linkedin search and not necessarily indexed by Gooogle hence why only the headline shows in the SERPs

Also, I have always been led to belive that Published Posts or now Articles are indexed by Google and can show in search

However in something recently from Viveka Von Rosen, she states Articles are not indexed unless they get into Pulse - am I missing something?

Answer: Oh the dark mysteries of Google!

Here's my take…..based on experimentation.

The most indexed field is the name, well that's two fields - first name and surname but Google definitely picks up headlines as well and that is where your keywords should be.

As for articles, there is no doubt that ones in Pulse channels are far more likely to be picked up by Google. I have tried searching for fairly unique phrases in headlines of Articles that are not in channels and had no success unless I state Site: LinkedIn.com in the search. 

I'm not sure where Viveka gets her information from but my experience reflects her views.

The next question is from Rob Curley

I’m using sales navigator very efficiently (at least I think I am!) and want to target my key contacts (leads) in a Facebook ad campaign – a technique I first heard you talk about. Of course I can’t see an email address for a lead unless I am connected but fortunately many of my leads are 1st tier connections. I can use Sales Navigator to quickly filter leads which are 1st tier connections but this is where I run into problems as I don’t think I it’s possible to export from Sales Navigator?
 
I can of course export from LinkedIn but I can only export ALL my connections. I think my only option is to manually go through all my exported connections and handpick the ones I’m wanting to target, i.e. those which are leads in Sales Navigator. That would be a rather painful exercise, thought I’d run it by you in case I’ve missed something or you can think of a workaround.
 
PS – The LinkedIn connections export spits out a sheet with a “Tag” column so I thought I could tag the connections I’m targeting before exporting but of course we can no longer tag in LinkedIn!

Answer: Unfortunately there is no solution in Sales Navigator but I do have a workaround for you.

I don't know how many leads you have that you wish to download, if a lot, this might be too time consuming

There is a Chrome extension called LinkedBack 

This works on Sales Nav and allows you to add tags and notes (duplication I know), the key thing though is that you are able to search for those tags and download them.

This question is from Fabio Alonso

I've got a question for job seekers on how to improve their "past experience" fit to a role advertised.
When looking for a job post, I (under a premium account) am able to get a competitive intelligence report automatically.

Welcome to episode 166, this week I have been inspired to spread the news about #LinkedInlocal, a movement that is gaining momentum around the world and it’s all about meeting your connections face to face.

More of that later but first….

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• Windows Phone LinkedIn app no longer available for download How ironic! I suspect this will return when new Windows phones are released.
• It’s probably not OK to send naked pictures on LinkedIn This is actually quite interesting because the employer is the one being sued. In theory this makes no sense because the account belongs to the individual but the flip side of that is that employers see it differently when someone resigns claiming their connections ‘belong’ to the company!
• LinkedIn is the worst of social media. Should I delete my account? Well it’s hard to know where to start with this one! I’m not surprised by the quality of this piece of journalism. The British press has never been great but the demise of that industry has led to poorer journalistic standards year after year and it seems Australia must be the same!

Elle Hunt has been a journalist since she graduated in 2012 so I suspect she knows very little about how a business works - apart from a business that makes it’s money (less and less fortunately) by publishing garbage like this with clickbait headlines intended to drive advertising revenue…advertising we don’t wish to see.

Perhaps she might be better served changing careers into a business model that seeks to drive revenue and growth by developing relationships and genuinely providing a valuable product or service - perhaps then she would appreciate the benefits LinkedIn brings.

This was a bit of a rant I know so here are the main points I covered;

LinkedIn Updates

Images can now be added to comments on desktop (it’s been on mobile for some time), simply click on the camera icon as seen below;

I doubt you will need to use this much but where appropriate, it can be quite handy and will often allow you to ‘lighten up’  thread with humour

Introductions are finally being rolled out on the desktop now.

Did you know you can now see the date you connected to someone in their contact and personal info sections?

#LinkedInLocal

I was first introduced to this idea by listener Anna Mcafee from Australia.

OK so the idea of networking offline is hardly new! The point here though is to take those connections you have made online and meet them offline. LinkedIn is so mainstream these days, the chances are that many of your neighbours will be on LinkedIn and I think it’s a great idea to arrange local meet-ups.

Anna talks about her recent experience in this great article

So why not organise your own event, it doesn’t have to be anything big, just 10-15 people meeting in a local pub or coffee house.

• Conduct a search for 1st tier connections in your area (try using your town/village as a keyword and then filter by your main location) and send a message to them all asking if they think it’s a good idea
• Post using the #linkedinlocal hashtag promoting the idea and then again once you have enough interest and have a date organised.
• Write up an article after the event and @mention everyone that was there.

This is exactly what Erik Eklund did in Brussels and he has now run two events. Listen to the podcast to hear how he went about it and what the results were.

Here is the post Erik published after his event;

Feel free to contact Erik on LinkedIn or you can email him at erikeklund@outlook.com

London #LinkedInLocal meet up on 22nd June.

Alexandra Galviz is also organising a #LinkedinLocal in London this week

Click on the image below for more details

Let me know if you need any help with this, let’s get this movement to gain more momentum and start shaking hands and meeting people

Question: I want to be able to add my linkedin profile link to my CV - I believe you can find a shortened link - how do I do this?

Answer: Your url is pretty easy to find but you might want to personalise your url first. This video explains how you do it.

Welcome to episode 165, this week it’s that old nugget again…Skills and their annoying little brother endorsements!

But first……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

One third of respondents to a recent survey said they lie about themselves in their LinkedIn profiles
Relay have now updated their LinkedIn cover templates
LinkedIn Deprecates it’s Groups API
Get Ready to Give Up on LinkedIn for Marketing - Good riddance!
The New recommendations settings are awful!

• Notifications could be about to improve
• Has the new UI attracted a higher number of premium users? Research from Chris Zaharias would suggest so.
  
  

Skills & Endorsements. A valuable feature or a waste of space?

Skills have been with us for over 5 years now and they still frustrate me. What exactly is the point?
Endorsements are even more irritating, a senseless action in my view but I know my views are not ones that everyone agrees with so I thought it worth exploring the real benefits of skills and endorsements.
I searched the internet and found these two articles about the subject.

The Case Against

The first article is by Neil Patel and pretty much summarises everything I hate about skill endorsements.
Whilst his intention is to highlight the positive aspects of endorsements he actually does the exact opposite!
It’s clear that this guy is all about pointless numbers and he places no value on quality whatsoever..then again he is an SEO expert so what can we expect!
This attitude is surprisingly prevalent and articles like this are extremely popular. The idea of ‘hacking’ endorsements is utterly ridiculous and has led to an increasing irrelevance of the feature.
Wildy endorsing anyone you can, for any skill (who cares what) just to encourage them to reciprocate is frankly infantile and there is no proof whatsoever that it actually improves your effectiveness on LinkedIn.
How to Get 99+ Endorsements on All Your LinkedIn Skills

The Case For

This is more difficult for me so I have asked some of my LinkedIn training buddies to help me out plus I found this article from a very well respected LinkedIn expert, Wayne Breitbarth

Are You Still Confused by LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements?
I don’t personally know Wayne but he is highly regarded and puts an interesting argument forward for Skill endorsements.

Some other benefits;
Keywords. I have found little evidence to support this but some people believe that endorsements ‘power boost’ the value of a skill as a keyword.
Essential for jobseekers as people with Recruiter accounts can filter their search by skills. I doubt they do, but they can!
Credibility. It’s possible that someone will read your profile and scroll down to your skills and study who has endorsed you. I doubt it but I can’t deny it’s possible.
Engagement. If someone endorses you it gives you an opportunity to thank them and start a conversation. This one makes perfect sense to me.
Dopamine effect. If you endorse your connections it might make them feel good and why wouldn’t you want to do that? (fair point)
Research. They allow you to see who a target/prospect has been endorsed by - these people must be connections so that might give you an opportunity to get to know them and potentially use that relationship to help you get into that prospect. This is actually the smartest use of endorsements I have ever heard (props to Marcus Boswell)

My Conclusion

By all means have skills and let people endorse you and maybe even endorse other people if they are someone you want win favour with.
Are they important?…..NO!
The only way endorsements could have worked is if they had made them an extension of a recommendation so that when someone recommended you they were asked to endorse your skills. This would have meant that they had some real, credible value.
Unfortunately the feature was poorly thought through and it’s too late to change them.

Hi Mark. I trust you are well. Is there a way of tagging a post so you can go back to it later?

You can save (bookmark) any post with a link on mobile but not image or text posts. On desktop you can't at all.

The workaround on desktop is to click through to the post from your feed and then save it in your browser bookmark/favourites.

On mobile, (if it's not a link post) it depends on your operating system. On the iPhone I tap into the post and then on the 3 dots (top right) and click 'share via' and then 'add to reading list'

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

Welcome to episode 163, it’s been a terrible week for me with the shocking news coming from Manchester and being personally touched by the tragic events, it’s made it really hard to focus at times.

This week I want to focus on managing your home page feed on LinkedIn.
It’s a critical aspect of using LinkedIn effectively and most people ignore it so it’s time for a good clean up! But first…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn have changed the wording from ‘Try premium for free’ to ‘Reactivate premium’ and whilst it was a good idea to change it, I think the wording is terrible!
<Reactivate>

I listened to a very interesting and revealing interview with ex LinkedIn social selling guru Koka Sexton on the ‘Linking into Sales’ podcast this week.
You can listen to the interview here, it’s definitely worth an hour of your time.

The most interesting part for me was when Koka revealed that LinkedIn are driven by data and this is why they drop features that many ‘superusers’ love (Answers, Amazon Reading List, Signal etc) which is, in my opinion, absolutely nuts!
It makes sense to be informed by data but to be obsessed with it shows just how dumb LinkedIn can be!
If a feature is not widely used, it normally means that people are either not aware of it or do not know how to use it. Many of these features added a richness to LinkedIn that it now sadly lacks….all because they only listened to data!

LinkedIn introduce ‘Pregnancy Pause’ a feature that allows women who are taking a career break to add a Pregnancy Pause period into their experience section.
This is a good idea, it’s hardly groundbreaking as all they are doing is effectively creating a company page for Pregnancy Pause.
I wonder how long it will be before baby care products or nurseries start targeting Pregnancy Pause ‘employees’?!

The new photo filter feature has finally appeared on our desktop profiles this week…it’s OK but I can’t see much point in it really.

LinkedIn have introduced an improved InMail analytics tool for their Recruiter and Recruiter Lite customers. It looks great but why on earth wouldn't they introduce this for Sales Navigator customers…probably because LinkedIn work in ‘silos’ and it will no doubt make its way to Sales Navigator soon.

LinkedIn have also released a handy step-by-step guide to Sponsored InMail. If you are considering paying to send inMails to a targeted audience, this is definitely worth a read.

Introductions are making a return! At the moment this feature is only available on the mobile app but it actually works pretty well. Lets hope it comes to desktop pretty soon.

LinkedIn are changing their profile background images….again!

I don't mean the change that occurred in line with the new desktop design, this is another change!
If you are using a background/cover image in your profile (and you should be!) then you may find it looks pants once this new design has been fully rolled out!

The previous size was 1536x768. The new size will be 1584x396.

Here's what the new dimensions will look like;

And this is how my profile currently looks with the old background image dimensions (the image is exactly the same).

I actually think my background image looks better with the new dimensions although when it is fully rolled out I will need to drag the image a little lower.

"Why have they made this change?" I hear you ask. Well, whilst frustrating, it does make some sense actually. The wide 'stretched' image when optimised for desktop, didn't look great on mobile (where 60% of your viewers are). This change fixes that and looks great on all devices and screen sizes.
Free background Image
If you don’t mind having a generic, cool looking image I have made 20 images that are exactly the right dimensions for you. Complete your details below to get access to the download page and pick the one you like the best…..with my compliments!

If however you would prefer to make your own image with your images and text then I would recommend using Relay. It's free and their 'LinkedIn Cover' templates will work OK with the new dimensions - they are still set to the old dimensions but will work, to a degree, with the new and they will no doubt update the templates once the roll-out is complete (I have made contact to give them the heads up).

It’s Time For A Clear Out!

Your LinkedIn homepage feed is one of the most important features on LinkedIn

So what do you do?

You ignore it!!!

Why? Well because 90% of what you see there is of no relevance or interest to you!

And you blame the algorithm…which is partly correct but what are you doing about improving your feed?

It’s time to take control and get your house (homepage) in order!

To do this effectively you will need to be brutal. It’s like clearing out an attic or your wardrobe of old clothes….it only works if you are really honest with your self and admit ‘I’m never going to wear that’ but your ‘inner doubt devil’ will keep whispering in your ear “but maybe you will….perhaps if this happens or you go to this event”!

Your LinkedIn feed is the same…..”Oh maybe they will post something important one day”…Really? I doubt it….dump them and unfollow!

Ignore the little devils warning and unfollow…unfollow…unfollow.

Trust me, it’s very liberating!

More importantly you are taking control and commanding the algorithm. Rather than being it’s victim, you are now it’s master!

And now you can enjoy your feed..and engage..and build relationships…and build trust and start to really benefit from LinkedIn.

Here are the five questions you should ask for every post you see on your homepage feed;

Do I personally know this person?
Is this relevant to me?
Is this useful to my followers (inc connections)
Do I wish to engage with this person?
Does this person normally post relevant content?

If you can’t answer yes to one of the above questions then unfollow them…..be really honest with these questions - are you sure?

Be brutal!

You won’t regret it

This week we had another voicemail question. Click below to listen to Jaz Greer’s question about post notifications.

This is clearly a design fault in that I can see no logical reason why LinkedIn wouldn’t want you to see who shared your post.
I’m sure they will fix it soon but a short term workaround would be to add your own unique hashtag to every post and then search on that hashtag to see who has shared it.

I’m using #MrLinkedIn on all my posts until they fix the problem. What will your hashtag be?

Welcome to episode 162, well I’m still standing!

I’m approaching the end of my second week standing and my legs and feet finally seem to be adjusting! I definitely feel a lot fitter and have more energy so I’m going to stick with it.

So this week I want to return too the subject of LinkedIn Articles (formerly known as published posts) because I sense that many people are holding back and the main reason for that is that they don’t know what to write about.
So this week I’m going to go through my 12 point plan to removing LinkedIn writers block!

But first…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn are adding a ‘suggested summary’ to your profile and it sucks!
This solicitor has one of the best LinkedIn profiles we’ve ever seen…Really?!
Sham Uddin’s LinkedIn profile
Is Facebook Replacing LinkedIn as the New Professional Network?
Alerts Issue: A Listener sent me the thread of an issue they had with job alerts recently. I also think search alerts are playing up at the moment

Referral Request Posts

It seems as though some people are subversively misusing this type of post to generate leads!

It’s an interesting point, I have asked for referrals and it can be very effective but I have never thought of going back to say I had sorted it.

LinkedIn Article Writers Block

I was helping a client this week who was reluctant to write articles on LinkedIn. My advice is that;
“Everyone should write an article on LinkedIn”

When pressed she admitted that the main thing blocking her was thinking of what she could write about. I think this is a pretty common problem so I have produced a 12 step approach to generating ideas for great LinkedIn articles.
You can access the step-by-step guide by completing the form below

New Video recording and sharing Chrome extension.

Thanks to Darrel Griffin for highlighting this one. It’s free and works really well.

This week we have a voicemail question from Greg;

Firstly I have never tried it but I am sure you can have a Sales Navigator account as well as Recruiter Lite account. It would be cheaper than going for the full blown Recruiter account but probably unnecessary.

Let’s first exam why LinkedIn believe you need to upgrade to Recruiter. Below is a table explaining the difference and I have highlighted the advantages that are relevant to you

You could make an argument for the extra filters but I’m not convinced. Therefore it comes down to InMails. Do you really need 150 a month?
If you need some more InMails you could always consider upgrading your basic account to one of the following premium accounts which would also be cheaper than Recruiter.

The question on whether Sales Navigator is the right option for you is probably answered in this post I wrote;

Sales Navigator Vs Recruiter Lite

Welcome to episode 161, I’m recording very early this week so please excuse me if any news that broke this week isn't covered!
I had a very interesting conversation this week with someone who was sharing their experience with being found by customers on Linkedin. Whilst this mostly happens via visibility through content and engagement, it can also happen via search…ie a potential customer searches for you via a LinkedIn search.
We know this is most common in recruitment but it got me thinking about how often if happens outside of recruiters searching for candidates and that in turn made me realize that I hadn’t done any optimization testing for quite some time.

So that is the main topic this week, I hope you find it useful.

But before that…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Weekly Roundup: Message and Share Comments, Calendar Sync, Personalized Job Insights

I also heard a rumour this week that the infamous “I don't know” induced restricted account is no more!
It's hard to know if this is true, on the one hand the article regarding a restricted account has been removed from the help centre but at the same time the "I don't know” response is still available when you ignore an invitation.
I have also spoken to someone who has a restricted account, and it has not been lifted.
What is your experience with this?

There has been much talk about the disappointing numbers of views that people are getting for the articles on LinkedIn but this week I spoke with an ex-colleague who has almost 150,000 followers. They are getting an average of 5000 views per article and a staggering 150,000 views of their posts in the feed!
Clearly, some people are still gaining great benefit from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn seemed to be really pushing growing networks at the moment. To celebrate reaching 500 million members they have been displaying information such as this on your homepage (mobile and desktop).

In addition to this, they are also diverted new to the ad connections page (from importing contacts) after you have sent someone an invitation to connect.
This is really bad practice by LinkedIn and is encouraging the wrong behaviour!
I can only assume that new membership numbers have decreased and they are trying hard to get back to 2 new members a second.

LinkedIn search engine optimization

It has been a long time since I tested profile optimization and with the new user interface I thought it was about time I had a look again.

The search that I undertook was for the keyword “copywriter" and I compared the results between my account, an account with no connections, and accounts with circa 100 connections and my account on a Sales Navigator lead builder search.

• The areas that I assessed were as follows;
  Keywords throughout the profile
  Keywords in the headline
  Keywords in job titles
  Keywords in company names
  Network (the effect of 1st tier, 2nd tier etc)
  Shared connections
  Location
  Skills/endorsements
  Interests
  Profile strength

This can by no means be described as a thorough, scientific evaluation but when I add it to previous tests that I have undertaken, it did bring some very interesting results.

From what I can gather there are 5 important elements to ensure that you rank high in a search result.
Enter your details below to download my report and get access to the video showing the actual search and results.

For the first time in a long time, I have a cool thing to tell you about!

As you know I am a big fan of using Google extensions that allow you to expand prewritten text from short snippets but did you know you can also do this on mobile?

TextExpander 3 will create a custom keyboard for your iPhone which will allow you to use snippets that can be created with the app or in the desktop version.
It works fantastically well and is a massive timesaver.

 
Question: I'm getting very low views on my articles and posts and subsequently very little engagement. What can I do to improve things?

Answer:
Ask more questions (in the post as well as the article itself) to stimulate engagement
Use # in your posts and articles. Currently, you seem to be getting # confused with @mentions.
@mention relevant people/companies. Not the crazy lists you see but 3 or 4 people who are either quoted in the article or someone she knows will find it interesting.
Find 'high score' influencers on LinkedIn and make friends with them (engage with them share their stuff etc) so that it would be appropriate to @mention or share an article directly to them.
Experiment with posting at different times of the day. Commuting times are often effective but her audience are CEO's so I might try evenings and especially Sunday evening when she might get their attention.
Make sure the images in posts are the right size (3x2 ratio)
Make your articles a little more punchy, challenging and debatable. Some are a little too long for most people's attention spans!
Tweet @LinkedInEditors for each article
The algorithm clearly doesn't like you for some reason. This could be based on previous activities (spamming, overposting in groups etc) or just that you haven't got it's attention yet!

Welcome to episode 160, the wether has improved in the UK this week and it looks as though spring has finally arrived so I thought that would be a good excuse to take a fresh look at our LinkedIn profiles and see if they are in need of a spring clean

But first, I did see a couple of things this week you should know about…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Oracle links to LinkedIn so its salesware can sniff you out
What the EU’s new data protection laws mean for UK industry

Profile Spring Clean

1. Is your background image effective? Consider using Relay for this
2. Is your profile picture close up, current, professional and optimised for circular?
3. Are you using your 120 characters in your headline effectively?
4. Make sure your start your summary with contact information (for mobile views)
5. Ensure the first two lines of your summary act as a ‘teaser’ to incentivise the viewer to click on ‘see more’

6. Make sure your most relevant and important media is shown under your current position.

Tip of the Week

How to reveal the full profile of people of people outside of your network (in a search result)

Three questions this week;

“Hello Mark, hope you are doing well. I have another question for you. How can I remove the university information from the top of my profile, between the headline and the location? I see your profile and others do not show it, thought education is listed in your profile. What's the trick?”

This is actually easier than you think, simply add a new item under eduction (anything you like) and it will automatically appear in the education section at the top of your profile (see below)

“I had a quick question in regards to LinkedIn and was hoping you may be able to point me in the right direction given your expertise. I was told a little while ago that when Microsoft purchased LInkedIn they disposed of "linkedin jail" where you have sent too many requests and they then ban you for sending additional requests unless you have an email. As a result, I went about diligently expanding my network (only 2nd degree connections). I have now noticed that I am unable to send any further requests. Does linkedin jail still exist? would there be a reason for freeze thats been placed on me? And is there a way around it?”

I think you might be confusing two different things.
A 'restricted' account is where you have to have the email for everyone you invite to connect - this was triggered by 5 'I don't know' this person responses.
LinkedIn have not publicly announced anything but the 'restricted account' article in the help center has gone so you might be right, it does seem to have been stopped (that won't have anything to do with Microsoft though).

If you are not able to send invitations at all then that could either be a bug or you may have reached your limit of 3000 invites.

“How do I send out a group announcement?”

This has recently changed. The solution is not in the management area but simply click on ‘Start a conversation with your group’ on the main page and (as a Manager) you see the option to send an announcement

Welcome to episode 159, following my trip to Social Media Marketing World something has been bugging me…..video!
I saw so many people broadcasting live video and recording short snippets plus many talks on the subject, I realised that I really needed to ‘up my video game’ and more importantly I realised that LinkedIn users generally need to use video content more.

So that is the subject of this weeks episode but before I get into that……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn hits 500 million members
Interesting to see the average number of connections stats. They are lower than I thought but on reflection, with only 22% of members active on LinkedIn it’s probably about right. I would love to see the number for active users.

Check Out the New Podcast Hosted by Reid Hoffman with the most annoying name ever!
Check out AJ Wilcox’ article: LinkedIn’s new Matched Audiences feature just blew Facebook Custom Audiences out of the water for B2B
Microsoft plans summer CRM war opener against Salesforce

Video

A big thanks to Una Doyle-Love for coming on the show to share her knowledge of video.

Una mentioned using a light that simply clicks on top of your phone such as the one at the below link;
http://amzn.eu/6pt4I9K

She also mentioned headphone extension cables such as this one;
Hama Headphone Extension Cable - 3.5mm Jack Plug

and a selfie stick such as the one below;
Bluetooth Selfie Stick, Mpow iSnap X
You can get Una’s FREE Guide: ’21 Tools to Increase Sales’ at this link;
http://www.creativeflow.tv/21tools

Where video can be used on LinkedIn
Profile - media under current experience.
Articles. A section of an article could be an embedded video.
Posts. When you share from YouTube (as opposed to pasting the link into LinkedIn) the video will autoplay in the feed, this increases view rates because it is effectively like a ‘moving image’ post. Sound will not play automatically though so if you are talking to camera you might want to consider adding subtitles but it doesn’t have to be a video of you, an easy way to make a video of pictures and moving words is to use Powerpoint and save your presentation as a video and upload it to you tube. Here is an example I made for this episode

Messages. I am most excited about this way of using video because video messages are so much more powerful and effective. When some one receives your video on their mobile app (tip - send it in the evening or at the weekend if you want them to see it on their phone) it looks like this;

See below for a couple of simple examples of videos I made today, the first one was taken on my laptop and took about 4 minutes and the second one was taken on my iPhone and took even less time

Welcome to episode 158, it’s been a very ‘buggy’ week this week, firstly connections were in reverse order in the ‘My network’ list then the ability to recommend someone disappeared. Both are now fixed but it is clear that something is going on behind the scenes.

I thought I would lighten things up a bit this week and relay a funny story I heard from a listener in the US this week.

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Google quietly takes on LinkedIn with its own job listings site

New Feature
I’m impressed with this new Sales Navigator Lead Builder filter;

New Privacy Settings

I was alerted to some changes in this article from LinkedIn this week;

Updates To Our Terms of Service

I was interested to see the ‘Using public data to improve your profile’ setting with the option to switch this off, this is a mobile only feature but when I tapped on it, I got this;

Genius! Back to the drawing board LinkedIn!

I also noticed a new setting that allows you to merge accounts, this has only previously been something the help centre could do for you. You can find this setting in the ‘Privacy’ section of your settings;

Productivity messaging bots can be switched off, a relief for many I’m sure but I’m sticking with them to see if they improve and become useful.

I’m very curious about the ‘Easily meet up with members’ feature. I can’t see any reference to this in the mobile app settings on iOS but it sounds like a pretty cool feature.

Groups Follow Up

Thanks for all your feedback following last weeks topic of what to do about LinkedIn Groups, I especially liked this input from Carl Whalley who runs a massive Google Android group on LinkedIn.

The story for me creating the Android group is legendary, I just wanted the badge by my name which is pretty much all they had back then. When I thought a bit more though, I was assuming they would grow into something much more - the phrase I hear often is "centres of excellence". Linked In already had a massive pool of business oriented individuals which alone is unfocussed. Groups are a way to segment those skills and interests into a more manageable system. They really had the potential to take on what many specialised forums on the external internet were doing. So if you were say an accountant, a lawyer etc using these specialised forums - why were you there? The immediate answer is "because thats where the others like me are" - which is the biggest chicken and egg problem anyone trying to grow one of these faces. For Linked In though, that issue never arose.

What else then? I can only go off my own experiences. I had as issue with my Audi recently, so I searched a few Audi forums. I'm not a mechanic, but I know if I phrase the question properly, or even search properly and the content is already there, I'll get my answer. I go to a centre of excellence relating to the subject I am interested in.

What makes a centre of excellence, and what keeps it that way? It's the knowledge of the people contributing. At the start, Linked In groups were like this. They were small enough to be able to keep up with, and there was a genuine enthusiasm from the members to share their knowledge, for free, because they valued the community spirit and assumed the quality would remain high because everyone else seemed to thinking that way too. This pattern is the same for external forums.

So what changed - i.e. the second part, "what keeps it that way"?

I think deep down people have to get value from something if they are to invest in it long term. With anything free, value is something other than monetary. Value *can* work in free forums on the internet - look at the programmers website, Stack Overflow. There is a badge and points system which members have to earn from their peers, but it's definitely recognised now in that industry and those with decent ratings are proud to trumpet them on their CV's. Imagine if Linked In groups were seen this way. You'd end up with people saying, for example, "I have 1000 points and the guru level in the Linked In Architect group". This clearly wouldn't work for all groups, or perhaps only a small minority, but without financial incentives the answer will be something like this. Also, the groups themselves must be seen to be credible, i.e. rated by Linked In. It's one thing having a zillion SEO web marketing groups, but we all know only a dozen or so would be well run - natural consolidation will have seen to that already. Having Linked In endorsing the group itself, or even rating it, instantly removes most of the noise we see today.

The software itself also plays a large part in all this. If you look at any successful internet forum, you'll see it just looks and behaves nothing like a Linked in Group. There are easy to identify sub groups, which Linked In did have at once stage but killed off. There are threaded discussions, often with user customisable views such as hierarchical, flattened, highest rated etc.

And why is spam so hard to deal with? As a first measure, any identical content posted in multiple groups is suspect. Let the group managers see what other groups and titles the poster has attempted before, so they can spot them right away. Again, external forums have smarter ways of dealing with this such as new members not being able to post anything until their "rating" is above a certain limit. This pattern keeps repeating - look  at what makes external forums successful and do it that way.

Is is to late to turn around? No. The members haven't gone anywhere, and the issue of segmenting them into useful areas will always be present, no matter what you call them. The solution is to focus on making them centres of excellence - giving them value - and putting in place everything needed to support that.

This week, LinkedIn also produced some new information about some changes to the management features of groups and confirmed they are committed to the groups feature.

You can read the detail here;

New Groups Management Experience - Frequently Asked Questions

I think these are just small incremental improvements and the big change that is required. I suspect LinkedIn, possibly in conjunction with Microsoft are looking into much more significant changes to groups, I certainly hope so, as I said last week - chipping around the edges is not going to solve this problem!

Angry Donald!

I received 6 emails from a listener in the US this week who I will call Donald. In these emails he outlines a long and clearly frustrating interaction with LinkedIn’s infamous ‘Help’ Centre… I was almost crying with laughter when I read them so I thought I would share this slice of comedy gold with you!
Play the recording at the top of this page to listen to it.

Welcome to episode 157. It’s about time we talked about groups again, A long standing feature that used to be great but seems to have deteriorated in recent years resulting in very strong rumours that groups are about to be dumped by LinkedIn.

But before we get into groups…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• More Features Coming to the New LinkedIn Experience
• ‘Conversations’ or ‘Smarter messaging’ is turning out to be a game changer! Here is the update I posted congratulating those that worked on this feature. Credit where credit is due.
• Introducing Lead Gen forms
• How to set up LinkedIn Lead Get forms and sync to your CRM
  Consumers predict only short term success for LinkedIn This is an interesting article and the survey results don’t look great for LinkedIn but we are assuming that the people surveyed are expert futurists! In addition the survey was commissioned by an email service provider who were obviously keen to show that email has a great future. My take is somewhat different, I’m starting to think that LinkedIn may actually have a better, longer future than other social media platforms including the ‘apparently untouchable’ Facebook! This is something I thought about after sharing the following video on LinkedIn;

Have a listen to the podcast to hear what I have to say on this.

What to do about Groups!

I can remember when groups were one of LinkedIn favourite features, now they seem to be the problem child. Should LinkedIn abandon them or is there a cure?

This is an infographic that LinkedIn put together in August 2013

In those days LinkedIn were proud of groups, so how did it all go so wrong?

My feeling is that they became a victim of their own success;

Too many groups were created (8000 a week in 2013!)
Group owners were primarily motivated to grow the number of members which resulted in many groups becoming too big to control
Groups became a spammers paradise
Anti-spam measures introduced by LinkedIn alienated group managers (rightly or wrongly) and this resulted in less control of membership by managers/owners
LinkedIn’s prevalent ‘them vs us’ attitude damaged the relationship with Group owners/Managers

Most groups have become like ghosts towns with very few new members and virtually no activity happening.
This article sums up the experience of many group managers;
Is LinkedIn Trying to Kill Groups? They couldn't succeed more if they tried

I first heard this rumour at Social Media Marketing World from experienced and knowledgeable commentators and this led to ex LinkedIn staffer Koka Sexton publicly asking the question to Ryan Rolansky (Head of Product and one of LinkedIn’s key decision makers)
See Koka’a post asking Ryan to confirm/deny the rumours

Samantha Bailey has since written this article; (Warning : Samantha researches her articles exceptionally well but as a result they are long……..very long!)
Separating Rumor from Reality in the Controversy Over LinkedIn Groups

Personally I really don’t believe the answer lies in monetising groups. LinkedIn’s monetisation strategy has always been largely indirect meaning that they design functionality to increase things like page views, number of members etc so that they can monetise those things.
Direct monetisation of groups would lead to more issues in my opinion. The whole point of groups is to serve the members, not the owners!

The Solution

Groups should be abandoned and replaced with a new, fresh feature that is named differently
Group owners should be given the option of converting their group to the new format.
The new format should restrict each ‘community’ to a max of 5000 members (maybe less)
Group owners who currently have more members will have to select the most active members or create more communities.
The new format should allow for discussion channels as we currently see in Slack
This should also include a feature like ‘conversations’ that is visible on the normal LinkedIn homepage
These new communities should be designed for owners and managers that wish to ‘serve’ a community, not gain personal commercial benefit.

It would seem sensible that this new solution would be developed in conjunction with Microsoft
Those are my views, possibly a bit controversial but I firmly believe that this issue will not be solved by ‘tinkering’ around the edges. A much more drastic step is required and this will inevitably annoy many current group owners.

New Udemy Course
Check out my brand new course Advanced Job Seeking With LinkedIn, it’s only £25 and includes the most advanced techniques I ever teach.

<AFQ image>

Question : “I'm Canadian and actively looking for my next job opportunity not locally but abroad.

What can one do to not be looked over because of their location? I've filled out the hidden job search function on LinkedIn but I'm not confident that most recruiters have access to this so I feel I could be doing more to make myself a more attractive candidate to foreign recruiters. The only issue for me is that I feel recruiters are turned off to my candidacy because of my location and the possible relocation costs involved.
What can one do to avoid this or at least minimize it?

ANS= Unfortunately there is no simple solution to this. Most jobs are filled (on LinkedIn) via search so what are the chances of someone searching in Canada?
Applying to ad’s is also tricky although you do have the option of making your desired location clear in your cover note.

One important thing to note is that applying for jobs without a permit to work is pretty much impossible. You won’t get a job offer first, permit second. It simply doesn’t work that way!

As far as LinkedIn is concerned you have two things you might be able to do;
If the location you wish to relocate to has a different language then you can create a profile in that language as discussed with Luca in last weeks show.
With the above and in circumstances where the language is not different you could change the zip/postcode location in your profile. This is not being entirely honest so you would need to make this very clear in your summary but it’s your location that will count you out of searches so changing that will make the biggest difference.

Question:
I saw this is my public profile settings. What does it mean?
<Public profile settings>

ANS = This one had me (and Luca) stumped but Luca found the answer in the good old LinkedIn Help centre!
Machine Translated Public Profiles on LinkedIn
At LinkedIn, we're constantly trying to improve our member experience. One of the things we're doing is launching a pilot program where we're machine translating certain parts of public profiles from English to a secondary language, which will be the profile viewer's native language.
If you're part of this pilot program and sections of your public profile are machine translated, you have the advantage of increased exposure in country-specific search engines, which may lead to more profile views, messages, networking and job opportunities.
Notes:
1 The machine translations will be limited to certain public profile sections, including the headline, position title, school degree name, skills, and language.
2 Currently, we're only launching this program in specific countries by machine translating sections of certain public profiles into selected languages.

Welcome to episode 156, this week I finally get around to discussing how LinkedIn works across different languages and seeing as I know very little about the subject, I called upon my good friend Luca Bozzato to help out.

But first a few updates for you…..

LinkedIn have finally clarified the difference between article and post ‘views’

Article views have always been ‘real’ views (ie someone clicked on your post) whereas post ‘views’ are just page impressions, ie it has just appeared on someone’s homepage feed and there is no guarantee that anyone has actually read it.

I wrote an article this week about the increasing amount of images posted to LinkedIn that are the wrong size and are therefore getting badly cropped in the feed.
The key thing to remember is that your images should a 3x2 ratio, ie 3 width and 2 height.

You can read the full article below;
Get Your Image Right

I also had all kinds of issues getting the thumbnail for the article to look right in my profile.
Plenty of attempts and failures later, I finally worked out that the middle 3rd (horizontal) go the cover image is what is visible in the thumbnail.

Something interesting I saw this week….

Who Has the Best (and Worst) LinkedIn Profile Photos?

So who would have guessed that Chile would have the best profile pics?!

This gave me the perfect excuse to re-test my score with Snappr now that I have a new profile, previously in episode 145, I found I had a rather disappointing score of 64 but I’m delighted to see a big improvement!

LinkedIn Languages with Luca Bozzato

I was delighted to welcome Italian LinkedIn expert Luca onto the show to share his knowledge, click on the image below to view Luca’s profile.

Some highlights of our chat
10 million users in Italy
LinkedIn is growing in popularity in Italy
24 languages are currently supported
You can create multiple profiles for each language, this is not translated by LinkedIn but written by you.
This allows the member to create different content in their profile, specific to each country/language. This is much better than a Google translation which can look unprofessional.
Be careful to check your profile on mobile because the language is dictated by where you downloaded the app.

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any further question about multi-lingual profile

A great question this week from Stan Robinson;

Q- Is it possible to duplicate a saved search in Sales Navigator?

ANS - This is a great question and the answer is that it can be done but not by duplicating a saved search directly. The workaround is to do the following;

Go to the saved search you wish to replicate & amend
Click at the top to reveal the full result (only new ones show initially)
Now ‘view all filters’ to alter in line with the adjustments you wish to make
Click on Save search on the left
Give this search a new name.

Welcome to episode 155, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to deliver an episode last week, the conference was so ‘full on’ I had no opportunity to put together the full episode although I did manage to record a few short snippets.

Now that I’m back, albeit somewhat jet lagged, I thought I would share with you my experiences last week in San Diego

But first……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week.

LinkedIn revamps timeline with Trending Storylines: curated, algorithmic news clusters
This seems like a good move on the face of it, note that the trends are personalised so not everyone will see the same posts. It’s currently only available in the US (desktop & mobile) so I haven’t had a play with it yet and I will reserve judgment until then.

LinkedIn could be moving firm's IP to Ireland after Microsoft's €24bn takeover
So, not happy with making more money from it’s members, LinkedIn want to pay less tax!!

Social Media Marketing World (#SMMW17)

So last week I made the trip to San Diego, a trip I had thought about making every year since this conference started. It was a big commitment both financially and in terms of time….so was it worth it?

The conference was held at the massive convention centre in downtown San Diego. SMMW had c3000 delegates but we barely took up ⅓rd of the convention centre!!

The conference began officially on Thursday but they ran a series of practical workshops on the Wednesday so my first experience was a practical session led by David H. Lawrence 17th and it couldn’t have been a better start!

How to create videos that build authority at a moments notice. David H. Lawrence XVII

I made more notes in this session than in any other. Very impressive speaker with a background as a Hollywood actor!

I met up with listener Gary Stockton afterwards to get his feedback

Key points;

• 
  Good lighting is important (2 in front, 1 behind)
• Use the rule of ⅔rds to position yourself. Stand slightly side on and turn your head towards the camera. Look through the camera, not at the end of the lens and look away occasionally.
• Never use your RBF (resting Bitch face!) instead always use your BFF!
• To correctly position your hands hold your left hand finger with your right hand and position then at the bottom of the shot.
• A good lavalier mic is the Audio Technica ATR335015 (I already use this)
• A good camera to use is the Canon LEGRIA HF R706
• If you are interviewing someone, position yourself on the right of the shot.
• Never tell an interviewee what you are going to ask them.
• Never explain a question, keep it short “tell me about…” and let the guest shine.

How to create highly shareable social media images - Rebekah Radice

I am a big believer in the importance of images in our posts and articles on LinkedIn so I had high hopes for this workshop……it wasn’t as insightful as I hoped but I still picked up a few tips;

• Understand what images do well in your market.
• When using text in an image, use 2-3 different fonts
• Infographics are still popular
• Carefully name your images with keywords
• Great quote “Learn rules carefully so you can break them properly”!
• Check out relaythat.com for producing LinkedIn images - some great templates and 10 free downloads a month.

Day two keynote - Michael Stelzner

• Rather than try to second guess the algorithm, focus on understanding the company’s objectives. If you know what LinkedIn are trying to achieve then you can be sure the algorithm will be programmed in line with that.
• 
  Facebook posts are not related to the time they are posted so scheduling at specific times does not have an impact anymore….this is definitely not true for LinkedIn though, not yet anyway.
  Great quote - “Become known as being helpful”

Artificial Intelligence - Christopher Penn

This was a very fascinating but complicated topic and I think I understood, at best about 20% of what Christopher covered! He was clearly a very competent, technical guy and as a result he communicated as you would expect of someone of such a ‘techie’! The main highlights were as follows;

• 
  Machines are very capable of understanding sentiment (in comments for instance)
• Google have developed AI that is more capable at lip reading than humans which sounds pretty scary from a privacy point of view!
• Machines will be able to write better content than humans within 2 years (Really?!!)
• In the future there will be 4 jobs in the workplace;
    Those that tell a computer what to do (subject matter experts)
    Those that are told what to do by a computer.
    Sales
    Entertainment
• Chatbots are this years big deal in the social media world. Try out Mitsuko and Growthbot

How to become an evangelist - Guy Kawasaki

Guy was one of the real ‘Superstar’ presenters at the conference and he didn’t disappoint! He can be pretty controversial at times but also very entertaining. He was talking about being an evangelist and the things I learnt were as follows;

Welcome to episode 154, it’s been a tricky week this week, I had planned an interview with an Italian LinkedIn trainer to tackle the important subject of multi-lingual profiles but due to a combination of illness and power cuts, I had to postpone that!

Instead I decided to cover a subject I am very enthusiastic about - research, specifically researching people.

But first…..

Interesting Stuff I saw This Week

LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman has been wondering what to do with himself since he found the the company he had a major stake in had been sold for $26.2B…..tough life!
Anyway new parent Microsoft have come to the rescue and offered him a role on their main board.
Personally, if I had $2.8B coming my way soon, I think I could find something better to do with my time!
The Mission Continues: Joining the Microsoft Board

Mobile Update

LinkedIn have updated their mobile app.
As is the norm, the app store information on the new update was full of interesting facts (note the contrast to Facebook)!

Instead we have to try to figure out the changes for ourselves although they did announce in their blog that the new version now has profile picture edit options;

There are some other notable changes. The ‘Me’ menu has disappeared….wait! I thought they redesigned the desktop experience to be more in line with mobile…but now they are dropping the Me menu from mobile?!!

This was how the menu looked before the update;

This is how it looks now

As you can see, the Me menu has been replaced with jobs (boo hiss!). So how do you get to the profile edit page?
…You now have to tap on your profile pic, top left as shown above.

They have also improved the controls you have over your feed. Now when tapping on the edit link (see below) you get more options.

One of these options is ‘Improve my feed’

This isn’t new but it then provides another new option ‘Clean my feed’

I wonder how it decides who is high up on this list…perhaps it is those you have engaged with the least?

Have you noticed any other changes?

LinkedIn Warn Cheaters!

LinkedIn are sending out emails to users who they spot are logging into another persons account, this currently only seems to happen when they are a Sales Navigator or Recruiter Lite subscriber.
I can only assume this means they are tracking IP addresses.

A listener sent me this screenshot of an email they received recently

I Know You…..Profile Research

There are so many things you can find out about someone from their profile. In this section I talk in more details about;
Contact & Personal Info
Summary
Highlights
Articles
Activity
Experience
Recommendations
Psychometric assessment - CrystalKnows.com

No episode next week (probably)

I think it’s likely that I won’t get an episode out next week as I will be networking and learning like crazy at the Social Media Marketing World Conference in sunny San Diego….can’t wait!

Welcome to episode 153, this week I discuss my thoughts on @ mentions in LinkedIn posts. There seems to be a growing trend out there and I’m not sure it’s all good.

But first……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

It looks like LinkedIn are making no headway with Russia;
Russia says ‘nyet,’ continues LinkedIn block after it refuses to store data in Russia

Perhaps Jeff Weiner needs to have a word with his new President…..I believe he has some good contacts in Russia!!

Update

Last week I featured a question from Jamie…..firstly I used the wrong name! It was actually from Robert Curley….apologies Robert.
Giles got in touch with a solution to this issue. Apparently the URL;
http://www.linkedin.com/people/invites
still works and will take you back to the old sent invites page, this version allows you to see the message you sent (assuming you had personalised the message in the first place)

Thanks to Giles Davis for that.

New Desktop Design Update

LinkedIn are now rolling out more ‘advanced’ filters in search, I don’t have the feature yet but I saw this screenshot this week.
<adv filters back>

Whilst LinkedIn are clearing adding features back in, they don’t seem to be fixing bugs as quickly! Recommendations are still badly broken and I’m finding the lack of the ‘hover over profile preview’ really annoying.

@ Mentions. Are they being overused?

I’m noticing an increasing amount of posts that are using the @mention feature in what I feel is an inappropriate manner.
The above example is one but I have also seen it where someone posts something less promotional - maybe some content and @mentions a ton of people.

This would be OK if those people are asked to contribute or answer a question but in isolation it feels a bit pushy to me.
The hidden message seems to be ‘Please share my content’ but there are better, more personal ways to ask someone to share your content.

I have also noticed a growing trend towards @mentions in comments.
This can work very well for instance the below example where I am being asked to help or you might ask for someone’s point of view;

But I have also noticed a lot of people just tagging someone…no comment or question just their name.

This is being used as a way to share the post with someone, which is good but the right way to do this is to ‘share’ the post via a message

That is how I see it but I’m interested to know what you think.

Drop me a line at mark@linkedinformed.com or better still, leave me a voice mail by clicking on the link at the side of this page (see image below)

Q - Why don't I get notified when all my contacts post an article?

Previously we received a notification when one of our contacts had published a Pulse blog (now article). Now I only see a few notifications from my contacts publishing articles. This week I know of two people who published an article, but it did not show in my Notifications!

Ans - The algorithm has definitely changed on this front. The problem is that so many people are publishing articles and LinkedIn does not want to overwhelm you! I think they will only notify you when someone you have shown more interest in posts.
Activity and engagement definitely helps the algorithm to make better decisions for us so perhaps try engaging more with those members and their articles.

Q - Where do I go to browse through my draft articles. Is this missing from the new UI?

Ans - No the link you need is shown below;
<draft article>

Social Media Communication Talk

I’m delivering a short TED style talk this coming week in Manchester.
It’s not specifically about LinkedIn but more about how we are all learning how to communicate again with social media.
If you are in the area, why not come along and say hello. This is also a brand new talk so I would really appreciate some feedback.

TED Discussion Group Event. 14th March 7-9pm, Manchester

Welcome to episode 152, this week I’m going to cover the new Neptune design quite a bit as there have been quite a few developments.

Firstly a big thank-you to Kurt Shaver, Darrel Griffin and the mysterious ‘LoveWeb’ for giving the show 5 star reviews on iTunes - I massively appreciate your support.
Darrel Griffin can also be found on Instagram and is my ‘go to’ contact on anything to do with graphics - especially those we use on LinkedIn. So I have a question - what size should we be making our LinkedIn profile background image?
The official dimensions from LinkedIn are 1536 x 768px but this doesn’t seem to work as it zooms into the image.

New Desktop Design Update

It would seem that there is no way to see your sent invitation messages - this is crazy!
When someone has a paid account and the ‘open profile’ feature enabled, it is free to send them a message, this used to be shown on their profile by changing ‘send InMail’ to ‘send message’ but now they have removed this.
Video autoplay has been deprecated…which is odd because every other social media channel is moving towards video!
LinkedIn have removed the link ‘structuring your search’ which explained how to use Boolean operators. This might be because they now realise the information they were providing was actually incorrect! Irina Shamaeva (who knows her stuff) has exposed LinkedIn’s advice in this article below.
LinkedIn Tip Sheet Error And a New Hack - Irina Shamaeva
So it would appear that we now need to use the operator Title: in front of every job title in an OR search string!

The Great U-Turn

LinkedIn have had to face an enormous amount of negative feedback about the new design.
There was the online petition I mentioned last week which got c1800 signatures plus a huge response to their various posts asking for feedback.
Sometimes people are so rude and negative, it really is unnecessary and if there is one comment that annoys me more than anything it’s…
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”
What a load of crap!
We should never wait for things to break before improving them. All the best ideas and progression come from taking the complete opposite view.

Anyway the good news is that LinkedIn are listening and David Flink published this article this week;
We heard you: we're making some changes to LinkedIn Search

It would also appear that they are seriously considering bringing back postcode radius search…which would be massive!

I really applaud LinkedIn for their approach. Taking criticism is not easy and to take this approach is refreshing and progressive. But……
Why did it ever get to this stage in the first place?

I could have told them about all these faults in October but no-one was listening!

LinkedIn say they survey members before making changes but either;
They are asking the wrong people
They are not listening.

Such a massive u-turn on so many features should not be necessary at this stage. Waiting until almost full roll-out before listening means they have lost a massive amount of credibility.

Thanks to Sandra Clark for her voicemail question about Sales Navigator.

For me the three key benefits are as follows;
Focussed home page feed. This massively improves your chances of engaging with those people you are especially focussed on.
You can filter search results by ‘posted on LinkedIn in last 30 days’. I have found this to be really useful

Saved searches are better, partly because of the above filter. You can receive daily email alerts about people who meet your criteria and are active

Question:
How do I create a showcase page in the new groups design?
Answer
You can’t!
But you can if you revert back to the old design where you will find it in the menu on the edit button.

Question:
The messaging segment sends the message by pressing enter (which is not a good thing as the enter key is often used to insert a line-feed for starting a new paragraph). You leave no clue how to insert a new paragraph so my message is on solid block of text. How do I start a new paragraph in a message?

Answer
This depends how you are messaging.
If you go to the specific messaging page you can change the default as seen below

If however you are using the ‘in page’ messaging feature then you are effectively using a chat feature and every ‘return’ is a ‘send message’. This makes sense to me. If you want to construct a nicely laid out message, using the Messaging page.

Welcome to episode 151 at the end of another traumatic week for LinkedIn and it’s new design!

Following on from last weeks episode, I want to dig a bit deeper into what communication techniques work and what really don’t work on LinkedIn.

But first…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Workplace from Facebook is now live…..will it cause LinkedIn problems?

Are LinkedIn understaffed and overworked?….or just low quality or ignorant? I suspect they are severely overworked and understaffed….ironic for a site that makes 60% of its revenue from recruitment!

LinkedIn Salary - Did you know that premium users no longer have to add their salary to be able to use the salary feature.
Salary can be found in the ‘More menu’

New Desktop Design Update

Now that the majority of users have the new UI, the heat is really turning up on LinkedIn…members are really not happy!

Someone has even created an online petition!
New LinkedIn - Petition - Bring Back Tagging, Advanced Search and Rankings!

Whilst I think it’s important to provide LinkedIn with feedback, I don’t think ranting helps (other than the person that wrote it might feel better!).
The above petition does not really tackle the most important or realistic issues.
Let’s be realistic, LinkedIn are not likely to bring back advanced search and tagging (which is not actually related to the new UI) has moved to Sales Navigator so they are not going to reverse that and rankings (a pointless feature anyway) are hardly worth raising a petition about!

I’m not happy with the new design either but I am trying to be constructive and find realistic solutions.
The biggest issue for me is quality - there are just far too many bugs or features that seem to have been accidentally forgotten! This is unforgivable and LinkedIn need to ‘up their game’ and sort these quickly.

Here is my list of bugs, it is worth noting that this list was almost double the length in November, so things are slowly getting better.

Bugs or ‘forgotten’ features

• Hovering over names (quoted in updates) does not open up a preview box.
• You can’t see who shared your article
• Notifications do not take you to the exact place in a thread
• Typing responses to comments is impossible to see
• Recommendation order can’t be changed - despite appearing though it can views of post’ on homepage is totally out of sync with the real number.
• Page load times are slow for many
• When someone comments on an image update you can’t see the image in your feed…making the comment often impossible to understand

Have you found any more? Let me know if I have missed any.

New UI fact: Did you know that emoji’s in name fields make the person impossible to find in a name search?
Remove all emoji’s from your name field (they should never have been there in the first place!)

Communication. The Mirror Effect

How many times do we receive a message on LinkedIn or email that shows a clear lack of understand as to our interests and needs?
How often do we see a message that is clearly a standardised format, sent to multiple recipients?

What is going on here?
People find it harder to communicate online because they have no signals to read, or at least they think they don’t…..so we get the mirror effect! The computer screen acts like a mirror and all we see is our own need and wants….net result is poor, ineffective communication.

Let’s consider a better example;
Mike Richards is specialist treasury recruiter.

Mike noticed that following an article he wrote on LinkedIn (aimed at being of value to treasury professionals) he was getting a lot of new followers.
He sifted through these followers and picked out those that were of particular interest.
He found 22 interesting followers, all potential clients or candidates.
He then sent them all a personalised invitation to connect which read as follows;

I noticed you recently reviewed my profile maybe after reading one of my articles, you may also have seen this post about improving your LinkedIn profile if it helps you?
http://www.treasuryrecruitment.com/10_linkedin_tips/
Feel free to connect if you want to?
Regards
Mike @ MR Recruitment

All 22 accepted!

This is no surprise because he acted on a clear signal that they were interested in him, rather than assuming they would be.
In addition he provides value in the link with some LinkedIn tips and the very ‘non pushy’ line ‘feel free to connect if you want to’
Mike knows his market and the tone of his invitation is perfectly suited to Treasury professionals.

This is what I mean by effective communication.
Move beyond the mirror effect and communicate in a compassionate, person centred way.

I would love to hear about more examples, both good and bad.
Please drop me a line on LinkedIn or to mark@linkedinformed.com

Welcome to episode 150, that seems like a pretty good milestone to have reached but I think the main celebration will be at number 200!

Something interesting I saw this week

Well there hasn’t been much news at all this week, it seems everyone is so pre-occupied with the new desktop design (which I am trying to avoid covering in this episode).

LinkedIn did announce that they had re-vamped their premium accounts, I’m not sure they have changed much to be honest and Business account holders are still getting a raw deal but there are a few changes worth noting, especially to the jobseeker account which is now called ‘Career’.

Here is the article;
What’s New With LinkedIn Premium?

Coaching

If you are interested in a one to one coaching session or just want to have ask for some quick advice, you can book a free 15-minute consultation with me at;
https://mrlinkedin.youcanbook.me/

New Book - I need your help

I’m starting to research the topic of online relationship building a communication for a book I will be writing.
Please drop me a line to mark@linkedinformed.com if you have any examples of good or bad online communication.

Social Media Content. What matters most - When or What?

I read a great article this by Jay Baer that really got me thinking about what matters when posting content on LinkedIn.

The Truth About How Often To Post In Social Media

I did some vary crude research myself on 6 posts I did last week on LinkedIn.

Jay makes some great points but I also think that consistently high engagement will lead to more people seeing your posts initially (before the algorithm can judge how interesting it is).

His main advice is spot on;
“Post when you have something to say”

I would just add - also at the right time, with an image and ask a question!

Lars asked via voicemail which browser I thought worked best with LinkedIn.
I use Chrome mainly but I have a feeling that LinkedIn behaves better in Firefox these days. I like Chrome because of the various extensions I use but LinkedIn don’t approve of extensions so perhaps that is why they favour Firefox.
Of course that all might change when Microsoft gain more influence!!

The second question was regarding viewing the activity stream of followed companies in the new UI.

This is a bit crazy and complicated to explain so I made a video to explain

Welcome to episode 149, it seems that the roll-out has now reached about 75% if users so I thought it would make sense to get through some of the many questions I have been receiving.

It’s funny for me, I feel like I have been talking about this for so long with very little feedback and then all of a sudden….everyone is talking about it and asking questions!

Before I get into that tough, I have a couple of updates for you;

Published Post Comments

Firstly LinkedIn have officially announced a new feature within published posts - the ability to switch off comments and report inappropriate comments - woop-de-do!
Not only is that tame but the blog article announcing it is very annoying!
Giving You More Choice Over Your Content on LinkedIn

Maybe it’s just me (probably) but I find it hard to read those ‘corporate’ type posts that say nothing at all for the first two paragraphs!

Update to Mobile App

LinkedIn have quietly added an interesting new section to a personal profile, it’s on on mobile currently but I suspect it may come to desktop eventually.
When you next go onto the app you find you are asked this question;

When you tap on add topics you are given a list of topics (presumably based on your profile & network) from which you can pick 3.

Then you add them to your profile

And this is what they look like

I’m not sure if these are searchable yet but that could become an option. It’s certainly worth adding them for now.

Your ‘Neptune’ Questions answered.

How do I create a new company page?

This is a bit hidden but you will find up at the bottom of the ‘more’ menu (you do need to scroll down).

How do I find my own company page or one I’m an admin for?

For some reason this is in a different place to the above!
For this you need to go to the ‘Me’ menu and you will see the pages you own or manage in the list.

How do I personalise invitations?

Don’t invite someone from anywhere other than their profile! If you click ‘connect’ from a shortlist or ‘people you may know’ it just sends a blank invitation.

Has the recommendation button gone?

No but it has moved. See below

How do I conduct a search within my first tier connections?

This actually hasn’t changed, the best way id via an advanced search…..wait! Advanced search has gone!! No worries, you can still do it, this video shows how;

How do I sort my homepage feed by ‘most recent’

Unfortunately you can’t but I believe there is a strong possibility that this feature may be coming and that it will be much better than before…let’s hope so!

How do I revert back to the old UI?

Sorry you can’t! My suggestion is that you focus on making the most of Neptune, it has it’s faults but also some good points and I’m certain it will improve in time.

Welcome to episode 148, this week I interview a young chap called Jack Parsons who is the CEO of an exciting start-up called YourFeed.

Jack and he team are about to launch a brand new website and social network called YourFeed, here is how they describe themselves;
Yourfeed is a disruptive online platform that helps ambitious professionals find employment, network with like-minded individuals & gather advice through experienced mentors. The platform connects hiring companies with ambitious professionals favouring skills & ambitions over experience when recruiting.

I found this a fascinating conversation about the challenges that LinkedIn face with the younger generation.
How can LinkedIn become more interesting to this demographic?
How can LinkedIn structure their premium accounts to avoid alienating the younger generation?
Is the solution within LinkedIn or is it too hard to cater for such a wide demographic?
Do you think this is seen as an important issue to LinkedIn?

I would love to hear your views on this. Please leave me a voicemail or send an email to mark@linkedinformed.com

New User Interface Update

LinkedIn announced (after I recorded last weeks show) that they are up to 50% roll-out of Neptune (internal name for the new UI) but if you are in the half that doesn’t have it, I may have a genius solutions for you!

So long as you keep open the tab that this opens, you have the new UI…as well as the old one!

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work for everyone, some are getting 404 error page and others see an earlier version of Neptune that is completely useless.
I’m not sure why this happens but I wonder if it is because those people haven’t imported contacts previously.

This weeks question is about the new user interface.

Question: Where have groups gone?

Answer Groups are now accessed via the ‘More’ matrix menu

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