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!

Mentioned in this episode:

This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.