Haven’t been on LinkedIn in a while? Some things you might want to check out…

by on June 22, 2014

I have to admit that I’ve kind of dropped off the LinkedIn train lately. You can’t be everywhere at once and sometimes you just have to pick and choose where you will focus your efforts. My top 3 social media channels are Twitter, Facebook and then Google Plus. I sprinkle LinkedIn in when I have time, which hasn’t been the case much lately, apart from sharing my latest blogs.

For businesses selling to or providing a service to other businesses, LinkedIn is a super important channel for connecting with their target market.

So to hop myself right back on to the LinkedIn train, I’ve taken a look at what’s new and what I’ve noticed lately, sharing it here for your benefit as well.

Sponsored posts

Sponsored posts are a paid option to promote any post on your LinkedIn company page to specific people directly into their newsfeed. This is a rather unobtrusive advertising technique, as sponsored posts will appear in the newsfeed like any normal post. Yes, just like what you see on Facebook. Behind the scenes, you are controlling the details of who sees this post by geography, specific company/industry, company size, job title, etc. Like with all paid social media options, you chose your budget and payment options.

Publishing postsHaven't been on LinkedIn in a while

I have pretty mixed feelings about this. In my opinion, if you’re going to the trouble to create content, you should be publishing it on your own site. So that you get all the benefit of it – traffic, SEO etc… But, as you can see, published posts are given lots of prominence on LinkedIn, they are right in your notifications! This kind of visibility is gold. People that might not see your blog post in their feed will be much more likely to see your published post.

When my assistant was putting up this post for me, she was a little confused by this strategy. She’s not a professional internet marketer, so I always love getting her ‘from a regular person that knows a bit about this online stuff’ feedback. She said:

“So publishing posts on LinkedIn is like a completely separate sort of blogging? Could you maybe just copy what you have on your own blog and post it onto LinkedIn? Or would this be considered spammy or  like cheating and duplicating material?”

As you can tell, she’s been learning from working with me 🙂 She hit the nail on the head – duplicate content. Google does not like this, as we have discussed many times before. So no, you shouldn’t publish something on your own blog, and then copy and paste it word for work into LinkedIn.

Would love to hear from you on this one – have you used published posts? What kind of response have you gotten?

Check your email notifications

For whatever reason, I stopped getting email notifications from LinkedIn. Just figured nothing was coming in for me, but when I checked in, sure enough messages waiting for me. One from a former colleague from January – eek! Embarrassing. I’m not sure why, but it seems that LinkedIn wants me to verify my email address again and in the meantime is not sending me anything. I saw the notification below, I just thought it was a security thing and I ignored it, since I obviously had already confirmed my email address ages ago when I set up my account. Bad idea I guess 🙂 So it might be worth it for you to log in and just make sure you’re not in the same boat, especially if you’ve noticed that your LinkedIn related emails have been quiet of late.

Haven't been on LinkedIn in a awhile email notification

Not sure where and how to set up your notifications? Check out this video from my friend Sarah at Simplicity Small Business Solutions.

Manage your newsfeed updates

You can exercise some control over your newsfeed updates, so that what’s popping up in front of your eyes will be most beneficial. You can hide updates from particular companies or contacts (and no worries, they will not be notified that you have done so). You can also hide those “so-and-so is now connected with so-and-so updates” that are rather dominant in the newsfeed.

Showcase pages

Showcase pages are extensions of a LinkedIn company page for separating or individualizing parts of your business. It exists as its own little page that is linked back to your company page. It’s like a little “niche” page that can communicate with a specific audience. Their big draw is that LinkedIn is getting rid of the whole “Products and Services” part of your company page – they want you to use these new “Showcase pages” instead.

Warning: this will be like taking care of a 2nd LinkedIn page! Not recommended for a small business owner (probably already too bogged down with social media maintenance) because you will need to take care of posting and engaging on this second LinkedIn Page. Perhaps this would be something to consider if you have a branch of your small business that is very specific and would concern a particular group of LinkedIn contacts.

Important to note: if you already have a different company page going to a branch of your business then you can’t transfer that now to a Showcase page!

Want to learn more? Check out this article from social media today.

Recommendations vs. endorsements

While these aren’t new, thought they are worth a mention here. These 2 recognition tools are often confused, but work differently. Recommendations are something written about you that you can then highlight on your profile – they are testimonials specifically for the LinkedIn platform (very powerful and credible!). Endorsements are  really quick, one click compliments where someone can chose pre-determined descriptions to shoot your way. There’s opinion that these quick endorsements aren’t really of any concrete relevance. However, endorsements are so much easier to use – sky high numbers of these are sent daily. My beef with endorsements? I get them from people that really don’t know anything about me and don’t know me personally.

Who’s checking you out?

Who's checking you out LinkedInYou can now see who’s checking out your LinkedIn profile – in the right hand sidebar. It sums it up into all sorts of handy graphs including how people found you and at what time people where checking you out. This could be a good tool to use to reciprocate contact with people who’ve been in touch. Or to see what kind of posts initiated contact. The flip side to this (that is aggravating some users), is that this could also be considered a breach of privacy, erasing the freedom of most social media networks that allow you to search anonymously.

With your free account, you get some of the basic info. The paid LinkedIn Premium gives you more. Anyone out there using Premium? Would be awesome if you could share your feedback in the comments.

Also to note that there is some sort of an error with the LinkedIn system with the who’s viewed your profile thing. I keep on getting the error I’ve screen captured below. Apparently lots of other people are getting it too and it doesn’t really make much sense. Glitch that will be fixed I’m assuming. I do see in my notifications if someone has looked at my profile. While it is interesting, it is kind of creepy to think you’re not anonymous. And you can sense that this might be abused or result in a bunch of unsolicited, do you need my services type communications. At least that’s what I think. What’s your opinion?

Who's viewwed your profile error message LinkedIn
As a wrap up, here’s an infographic from Entrepreneur with the 17 step sum-up on how to rock your LinkedIn profile.

What else have I missed that should be added here? Any new features or updates in the last little while that you’re excited about? Share in the comments…

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Sarah June 22, 2014 at 10:30 pm

thanks so much for the link to my video, Martina ! Also, little ninja trick for your viewers with the free account: if you’re a Chrome browser user go check out the chrome extension ‘Who’s Viewed Your LinkedIn Profile’ at the chrome webstore. It gives you the history of your profile views, for FREE !
Sarah recently posted..The LinkedIn Challenge Hangout on Air – Grand Finale

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Martina Iring June 23, 2014 at 8:38 am

Thanks for the awesome tip Sarah! Really appreciate you sharing that with us 🙂

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