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;

LinkedIn CEO donating his multi-million stock package to staff

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;

• What are your thoughts about the views expressed in this status update below? Should LinkedIn be blocking content and should we have a ‘dislike’ or not business button?

• Are you taking the opportunity to engage with your home page stream? These updates are from real people and everyone of them is an opportunity to build better relationships and raise your visibility.
• Engagement can be very effective but when does it become counter-productive? Take a look at the list of comments below. What impression are these people creating? Where is line between good conversation/debate and petty arguments that reflect poorly on all concerned?

This stream now exceeds 40 comments, mostly like those above but I will spare you from having to see them!

I am sure you have seen much worse on your homepage, this is just a classic example of how these things can get out of hand.

It seems to me that our homepages are being taken over by the louder minority. Sensible, mature business people are making the mistake of low activity – possibly because they want to avoid situations like the above but surely the opposite is true, the more positive and sensible content on our home page there is, the less we will have to see petty arguments and all the other inappropriate posts.

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 on their Recruiting revenues. (share this with your connections)

How are they going to do that?

I discuss the options and would love to hear your ideas. Click on that orange/yellow bar on the right that says ‘ask me a question’ and send me a 30 sec voicemail with your views on this on any other topics from this episode.

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. You can see how I have used it above in the Facebook piece.

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!

If you perform an advanced search you may still find the option to save in the menu under the disclosure triangle to the right of a search result. If it is there, get saving because all previously saved profiles will be able to be tagged in the future!

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;

Thank you so much for listening. I value your support and interest.

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