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Welcome to a new episode of the LinkedInformed podcast.
I have had an exciting and rewarding week with the successful launch of mine you social selling and business development e-learning programme.
The 5C Business Development System is now for sale!
….and for a limited time it’s discounted by a massive 63%!
I’m really proud of this course, I was looking at some of the earlier lessons and I actually started recording the videos 9 months ago! It’s taken a lot of work to get to this position and it doesn’t end here as I will need to update all the ‘settings’ lessons with the new design.
The 5C system contains 5 modules as below;
In total there are 65 videos covering every aspect of using LinkedIn as an effective business development tool.
I’m very excited to see how people react to this course and I hope you can take advantage of the limited time launch price (just £146 but only for the next 7 days, then it will be £396).
I am also giving away a free e-book to those who expressed an interest in the 5C System.
Published posts lose view numbers….Does it matter?
I noticed this week a change to publish posts in both the main mobile app and the pulse app.
Publish posts are no longer showing the number of views in these apps.
Interestingly for now anyway, posts on the desktop version of LinkedIn are still showing view numbers
This got me thinking….. Does it really matter how many people view our posts? Surely a post that has a low number of views but a higher number of comments and likes is better than one with high views and low engagement?
Maybe this is where LinkedIn are going with this……. Or maybe it's just a glitch!
I think I would still like to see the number of views but I definitely think we should all be concentrating for more on engagement statistics.
I also refer to this is the AFQ section below.
Interesting stuff I saw this week
Cool Thing
Profile views extension
Especially useful if you are notion a premium account but you are also able to see past 90 days so potential of use to premium members as well.
And of course, it’s free!
AFQ
Question: How do I get more views of my published post. I am averaging about 100 per post which doesn’t seem very much.
Answer: Firstly referring to my point earlier, views are not the key measurement to worry about - the aim with content is to develop relationships and trust and this is largely done through engagement (comments).
That said, you need the views to get the engagement so here are my thoughts;
Getting more views involves a planned 'marketing' exercise that should look something like this
In summary, posts need to be widely distributed via a series of status updates plus Twitter and Facebook posts if appropriate.
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.
It’s been a very quiet week for LinkedIn, no news to report whatsoever, the bickering about Facebook type posts and inappropriate content continues of course but to be honest, I’m really bored of that now!
LinkedIn have been sending out a survey which suggests that they might be considering having adverts in groups, not display ad’s but in the stream of ‘conversations’ - please no!
We finally have new settings!
The only news of any note is that the new settings design has finally arrived in my account, I’m going to write a full report that will be sent to subscribers of my LinkedIn updates service this weekend so if you haven’t already signed up, now is the time to do so!
The 5C Business Development System is now for sale!
….and for a limited time it’s discounted by a massive 63%!
I’m really proud of this course, I was looking at some of the earlier lessons and I actually started recording the videos 9 months ago! It’s taken a lot of work to get to this position and it doesn’t end here as I will need to update all the ‘settings’ lessons with the new design.
The 5C system contains 5 modules as below;
In total there are 65 videos covering every aspect of using LinkedIn as an effective business development tool.
I’m very excited to see how people react to this course and I hope you can take advantage of the limited time launch price (just £146 but only for 7 days, then it will be £396).
Just click here for more information.
Social Selling & LinkedIn.
Standing out from the crowd is increasingly difficult these days…on and offline and especially on LinkedIn….have you seen just how much ‘stuff’ appears on your homepage?!
I believe the key to standing out involves 2 things;
Once you have gained views and reader you will gain more followers and most importantly you will be on track to develop greater trust and this is much more likely to result in winning more business.
Social Networking in Real Life - SOCIAL EXPERIMENT
Have you see this great video from Jena Kingsley? It really made me chuckle, especially the bit about endorsements and the anonymous viewer on the subway!
https://youtu.be/_pyJlERCrJE
Cool Thing
This weeks cool thing comes from a listener, Carl Whalley who found that when linking to his site, LinkedIn often didn’t find the right image on a post - or at times no image at all. This works seamlessly on other sites but LinkedIn seemed to be having problems.
As Carl explains “The heart of this issue is "Open Graph" support, which Googling for will provide more details. Typically, the source site will be Wordpress or Joomla etc, and it’s actually the sites fault by not identifying the images as Open Graph compliant”.
The fix for the site is usually simple - just install a plugin and the correct meta tags will be automatically added to the page, allowing the user to choose the image they want.
So if your blog icon Wordpress and you find you have had this problem you might find adding the plugin to your Wordpress site sorts it out.
Thanks Carl.
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.
Another LinkedIn week goes by and not much changes….the share price keeps dropping and I see numerous articles about the drop in standards and unprofessionalism of LinkedIn!……Tough times for Mr Weiner and his gang!
AFQ
I’m promoting this section up the agenda this week!
On the subject of inappropriate content on LinkedIn, I got this question this week;
It has come to my attention that some porn stars/sex workers are appearing in my profile!! How can I stop this?
ANSWER: They were of course referring to the ‘people also viewed’ section of their profile, here is an example of what can happen;
Not great! The problem is you would see this yourself, the only way you would find out is if someone told you!
The solution is to switch off this feature in your settings.
Go to the main ‘profile’ section of your settings and you will see the link as shown below.
Next question:
How do I a) Get more profile views and b) Get more invitations to connect?
ANSWER:
Cool Thing
Profile Views extension.
If you are using LinkedIn on a free account you are only able to see the last 5 people who viewed you profile……unless you use this very useful Chrome extension.
This extension saves all your LinkedIn profile views and stores it for you to see the full history at anytime
Take full advantage of who's viewed your profile on LinkedIn. This extension saves every individual that viewed your profile.
-See beyond the 5 recent views limit
-View full histories of every profile view at any time
-No upgraded profile needed
-No limit on 90 days if upgraded account
And of course, the best bit is….it’s FREE!
The 5C Business Development System is now for sale!
….and for a limited time it’s discounted by a massive 63%!
Just click here for more information
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.
Hello and welcome to episode 105. It's great to finally be seeing signs that winter is behind us, I love the spring it's probably my favourite time of the year!
There have been quite a lot of interesting articles about LinkedIn this week so the news segment is somewhat longer than normal.
The articles I cover are:
I also mentioned about the changes to LinkedIn contacts and how the "How are you met" feature has been moved into the notes section.
LinkedIn are about to release a completely new look design to their settings page, it's clearly taking its design from the mobile app.
LinkedIn’s to do list
This week linkedIn's most popular feature ‘who viewed my profile’ broke down and at the time of recording it hadn't been fixed. I'm sure this feature will be fixed very soon but it got me thinking about all those areas and features of LinkedIn that have been left broken.
It strikes me that LinkedIn are very keen to keep introducing lots of new shiny features but perhaps they ought to draw a line in the sand and fix or completely remove there broken features before adding anything new.
Here is my list of things that LinkedIn need to fix;
Cool thing
This week's cool thing is a Gmail plug-in that is owned by LinkedIn called Rapportive.
This will show you information about the person who has emailed you from their LinkedIn profile and provides a link to view their profile.
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.
Well what a week I have had! Lots of interesting sessions with a variety of types of businesses this week.
I’m so grateful to the driver from Uber who saved my skin!
The main subject I want to talk about this week is ‘Followers’ but first a few quick bits of news;
And you think you are getting bad service from LinkedIn…….
This week I had a conversation with a senior manager from a very large enterprise in the UK. To my astonishment he told me that LinkedIn refused to offer any training or tech support for Sales Navigator because they had less than 50 licences!
This is an organisation that was spending £20,000 per year alone on Sales Navigator licenses plus a significant amount on Recruiter licences.
So if you think you are getting a poor service as a free user or a low spend premium user, just think how it feels to be spending £20k and get appalling service - shocking!
LinkedIn Followers
I was asked this week about how to handle followers on LinkedIn. I wasn’t exactly sure what they were asking because I had never really considered the issue of having unwanted followers.
Firstly let’s look at how we see who is following us;
How to see who is following you
2) Click on the ‘followers’ tab
3) Scroll down to see your followers. The first ones in this list will always be followers but unfortunately the list also includes your connections but you cannot tell the difference until you click on them and open up the profile. Once you find your first connection you can be assured that all the rest will be 1st tier connections.
I personally have no issue with competitors following me (many do) but some people would prefer to prevent this. Unfortunately the only way is to block each individual - either because they are already following you or because you wish to prevent them from doing so.
Step 1
Step 2
This seems a bit drastic to me but it’s the only way to prevent followers.
Cool Thing
LinkedIn Storage.
It seems that LinkedIn Contacts is going to either completely disappear or be replaced with a newer feature but the chances are it won’t be free so this week I thought I would tell you all about a great little (free) extension called LinkedIn Storage.
LinkedIn AFQ
This week, in line with the main subject of this episode I thought I would cover a question I get at least a few times every month.
Question - I have followed a number of people (not influencers) on LinkedIn but I can’t recall who they all are. How do I find the list of people I follow?
Answer - Errrr you can’t! Sorry about that, I must admit it’s pretty embarrassing for LinkedIn that they don’t have such a simple facility. I can assure you that this feature has been requested many times over a prolonged period of time, clearly they have other priorities!
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.
Two main subjects this week;
How do you feel about your home page these days?
The future for LinkedIn?
Firstly there was one small news item worth a mention this week;
Your LinkedIn homepage
We see it every time we log in but how much notice do you really take?
If you haven’t done so recently take 5 minutes to scroll through, you might be surprised, disappointed, amused or even angry at what you see!
Last week I talked about how to respond to an inappropriate posts
In this episode I discuss various aspects of the content of our home page feed;
It seems to me that our homepage are being taken over by the loud and crazy minority. Sensible, mature business people are making the mistake of low activity - possibly because of all the idiots but this actually makes the situation worse!
Is LinkedIn under threat from Facebook?
The second subject this week concerns the future for LinkedIn. The following article by the highly respected sourcing/recruiting expert Jim Stroud really got me thinking about how LinkedIn are so exposed due to their reliance of Recruitment for dealt ⅔rds of their revenue.
How Facebook could destroy LinkedIn in a year by Jim Stroud
We know that LinkedIn is becoming a better social selling tool than a recruiting tool, business owners and sales people are starting to take the place of the recruiters who are leaving, or at least using other tools instead.
But this will not work out well for us unless LinkedIn find a way of becoming significantly less reliant of their Recruiting revenues.
How are they going to do that?
I discuss the options and would love to hear your ideas.
Cool Thing
This week I want to share (excuse the pun) a really useful tool I have started using called ShareLinkGenerator
This is only relevant if you have a blog or write content somewhere other than on LinkedIn. It works in a very similar way to ‘Click to Tweet’ does for Twitter.
By creating a unique share link you can create an option within your copy for a quote to be the headline for a share of that specific page on LinkedIn.
Again it’s another free tool and I have found it very useful.
Update:
Save to contacts hasn’t quite gone yet….for some of us anyway!
LinkedIn AFQ
Question:
One thing that is puzzling me is how I can send a message to someone who is not a first level connection who has commented on one of my Linkedin Longposts or updates without using up my In-Mails. I can’t find a way of doing this without connecting with them which I don’t necessarily want to do at such an early stage of contact. If you can help I would really appreciate it.
Answer:
The way to do is through using group messages, I made a video to explain how;
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.
Back from a week in the sun and raring to go, this week’s show I address some important considerations about LinkedIn’s future direction.
Main Story
“LinkedIn is now, at best, a business card holder. At worst, it’s a delivery service for spam”
It’s been a tough month for LinkedIn, disappointing results have led to many commentators really questioning their strategy and direction.
Amongst the many negative (sometimes harshly so) articles I read this week I found the following one from Techcrunch which includes the horrible quote above the most interesting;
LinkedIn Problems Run Deeper Than Valuation
In response to al the negative press LinkedIn’s CEO gathered LinkedIn staff together to give them a motivational talk, amazingly they filmed it and released it on Slideshare!
They didn’t go so far as to reveal the 7 year plan he refers to but I still have to applaud the openness of sharing this talk.
On a more positive note LinkedIn are running their first advert at the Oscars this weekend to an estimated audience of nearly 40 million.
Narrated by Jeff Weiner himself, the commercial, called "You’re closer than you think," tells the story of when NASA used LinkedIn to look for its next astronaut. The networking website says its data found 3 million users who were qualified to apply for the role.
https://youtu.be/V_cz6Xt-SZM
Save to Contacts has now been retired, the ‘relationship’ tab still shows for first tier connections and anyone you have previously saved (minus the ‘who introduced you’ section) but you can no longer save 2nd or 3rd tier connections. Disappointing but not at all a surprise.
Interview with Joe Pulizzi
The king of content marketing!
You can listen to the full episode here, or simply search for Winbusinessin on iTunes
Cool Thing
This weeks cool thing is a free web tool that allows you to collate content relevant to specific connections for sharing with them via email or LinkedIn message.
The site is called Grapevine6 and this feature is the ‘engage’ feature which can be accessed below;
http://engage.grapevine6.com/
Sharing highly relevant content is a great way to build trust and this tool makes it really easy.
LinkedIn A F Q
Question - I'm looking to transition into a variety of industries and would like to leave my industry space blank. I see many posts in your Help Forum regarding this issue but I don't see any solutions. Is it possible to leave the industry section blank?
Answer - I understand your frustration but at the moment, it is not possible to leave your industry field blank.
I can assure you though that this is a field that Recruiters are advised to ignore when searching because it is notoriously unreliable. Many people select the wrong industry either by accident or misunderstanding its meaning - for instance an HR Manager in an Accounting firm puts 'human resources' as their industry rather than 'Accounting'.
Recruiters are usually aware of this and therefore avoid the field when searching.
Provided you complete your profile thoroughly and use the correct keywords, I am sure you will be found for the right opportunities, irrespective of industry.
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.
Now that we have passed 100 episodes, I thought it was time to give LinkedInformed a makeover. You will notice we have a new logo and the introduction music is different but more importantly we have a new format for the show.
I will no longer have a specific news section but I will obviously always talk each week about any important events that have occurred, if nothing important has happened I will focus the episode on a specific subject.
This will never be an interview show as such but I do plan to conduct more interviews from now on.
I hope you like the changes.
Main Story
This week I focussed my attention on LinkedIn’s Q4 and full year financial results.
A quick overview
You can read the full report here.
Here are a variety of articles about the results;
When talking about the results I also mentioned a report in the FT about how Glass door may be thinking about competing with LinkedIn.
Cool Thing
This weeks cool thing is a Google Chrome extension called ‘LinkedIn Connection Revealer’
As you can see, this handy tool allows you to see how many followers (not connections) your first tier connection has. I’m not sure why it only works for connections because you can see followers for all LinkedIn users by going to their ‘View recent activity’ but it’s still pretty cool anyway.
And best of all….it’s FREE!
You can download it from the Chrome store here
LinkedIn A F Q
Question - I have posted a status update to inform people about my up coming training course. I would like to be able to send a note to specific members of my network to share it. I've had people do it with me but I can't see how. Any tips on how to share it with them?
Answer - Rather annoyingly you can't do it that way for an image update, You are only able to send status updates directly to people if they are web link updates or just font updates. For some reason an image update does not allow this option.
My suggestion would be to produce an update linked to the page that promotes your training event on your website or perhaps Eventbrite and then you will be able to send it to your connections.
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.
News
Comments
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.
News
Commentary
With all this controversy about how LinkedIn reports its post views numbers and how it distributes published posts I thought I would share my thoughts on readership, distribution and engagement.
At the end of the day we should take responsibility for our own success with our posts and it is always most important to remember that engagement is more important than views.
Questions
1,
How do you add recommendations to your profile with the new messaging system? I previously added it from the message but this seems to have changed.
ANS = Yes this has changed. You can only manage recommendations from the desktop version on LinkedIn.
> Go to your profile and scroll down to recommendations.
> Hover over the section and click on ‘manage’
> You will see the received recommendation under pending where you can accept it and show it on your profile.
2, How do I move my main current position up to the top of my profile?
ANS = You can do this, provided both position are current (to date) by grabbing the ‘grip’ on the left hand side of the relevant position and dragging it up (see below)
You may also need to manually amend your headline in this circumstance because it will have changed automatically when you added the new position.
I will be covering more questions in my YouTube channel soon.
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.
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