Informed Podcast by Mark Williams. The podcast for LinkedIn™️ users

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. 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; 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’