December 13, 2014

Episode 45. The New LinkedIn Home Page

36 minutes

show notes

News

LinkedIn have issued the following email to all premium members regarding the new InMail policy. This was originally announced to Recruiter and Sales Navigator users but as I suspected it is going to affect everyone (InMail is after all InMail!)

LinkedIn Introduces a brand new design for their home page. My thoughts are that it looks very sparse (minimalistic) and has a 'mobile feel' to it - one of the main people involved with the design was Joff Redfern who is the VP of Mobile so perhaps that explains it. I don't like the intrusion of the very prominent 'Jobs you may be interested in' (see below) especially as this account (Colin) has opted out of this in their settings!

In addition the difference between a status update with an image attached and one that simply brings an image across from a website link has increased making the attached image option much larger and therefore more effective.

Below you can see the same update done twice, the top one is via the paperclip 'attach image' and the second links to a webpage with exactly the same image.

LinkedIn Announce their top 10 company pages of 2014.

Update from last week

New Profile Edit. Moving a current employment to the top of your experience section isn't that obvious! You need to hover over and grab the multi dotted line (see below).

Question

Why are my status updates getting ignored?

Status updates can be a powerful feature when used correctly, here are my guidelines for effective status updating;

Always use an image by using the paperclip link in the update box. This will make your images larger and that is the most important thing, people have to see an update in the first place so large, eye catching images work. The new homepage (as shown above) makes this even more important.

Posting updates in isolation is unlikely to result in many connections seeing it. The algorithm seems to prefer showing your updates to connections whom you have engaged with on LinkedIn. This means that other activities - comments, likes, views, connecting etc all count.

Avoid posting links in isolation. Make your updates more interesting by making a comment to introduce a subject and support that with a link (rather than just posting a link).

Ask questions and encourage others to comment, this will help to spread your update beyond your first tier connections.

Avoid too many promotional updates (including vacancies). Promoting is OK so long as its not your dominant activity, for every promotional update there should be another three that are providing interesting, useful information.

Timing. Avoid weekends and mornings are better than afternoons. My experience has been that 8.15-9.15 aam works best for me but every market is different so I would advise you to experiment. I use Buffer to help me schedule some updates to ensure I hit the right time.

Consistency. Regular updates spread across a week are better than a 'surge' of updates across one day. This happens because we are all busy and tend to update when we can rather than in a considered, consistent manner. I also use Bufferto help with this.

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By Mark Williams

4.5

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