Welcome to episode 193 and a very happy and prosperous new year to you all. I trust everyone had a fantastic break over Christmas.

Towards the end of last year, I conducted a survey of LinkedIn users to see how behaviour had changed on LinkedIn. I had a sense that the results would be interesting……and I wasn’t disappointed! 

In this episode I will go through the results with you but before that….

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• LinkedOut: The 7 Stages of Grieving a Breakup
• LinkedOut Update: what to do if your account is restricted?

New LinkedIn Feature

Invitation Sorting

You can now sort your received invitations. This is probably only going to be useful for people that get a lot of invites or get behind with dealing with them but it’s good to see an improvement anyway.

I think an additional category of “customized with a message” would also be helpful as, when I do have a lot to go through, I always prefer to read those with messages first.

Magnet Posts

It would appear that the ‘magnet’ post feature has been improved in that you no no longer need to have any of the skills you specify in your post – as previously covered in episode 189, this makes much more sense!

Thanks to Jillian for the heads up on this

I still don’t have the feature but if you do and have been using it, I would love to hear how well it has worked for you.

Interesting Post

Thanks to Carl for sending this one in.

This is actually pretty easy to do yourself, but only if you have access to a Sales Navigator or Recruiter account. For some reason the url’s on those interfaces ignore the customised version and show the original source url with your number in it

The 2017 LinkedIn User Survey Results

We had 780 responses in total, thank you to everyone who took the time to complete the questions.

One of the questions asked for the date you signed up to LinkedIn…one person apparently signed up in the year 1800! This individual apparently signs into their account on a weekly basis but has only managed to amass 8 connections in all that time – in addition they have 0 followers so presumably all 8 connections have chosen to unfollow them!!

Fortunately this was the only spoof entry we received.

The average number of connections was 2178

The average number of followers was 2748

We had five people who had reached the maximum 30,000 connections.

The highest number of followers was 205,000 (11,658 were connections) and equally impressive was someone who had 165,231 followers including only 1903 connections!

As for the rest of the questions, the full results can be seen below;

Two voicemail questions this week, both of a similar nature;

I didn’t cover AI in my predictions for 2018 but it could very well be possible. If they do introduce them I can see three areas where a simple chatbot might be useful;

• Company pages – allowing viewers to ask some simple questions about the company
• New Groups – I can see bots being useful as a way of screening new member applications
• Jobs – This one is the most likely where it could be used to cover FAQ’s in a more interesting way plus potentially screen applicants by asking some simple questions.

What do you think, can you see them being used elsewhere on LinkedIn?

If you want to know more about how bots are being used in Facebook, this article may be helpful.

5 Ways to Use Facebook Messenger Bots for Your Business