Communication Settings
Welcome to a new episode, this week I pick up again on the final section of settings…Communication. These settings are pretty important and may have changed since you last took a look!
But before that, I’ve been searching the internet for news about LinkedIn…
Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week
LinkedIn Revenue and Engagement increased, Microsoft says in report
The Long and Short of ROI: Why Measuring Quickly Poses Challenges for Digital Marketers
Feedback From Last Weeks Show
Thanks for the positive comments regarding my review of the new Events feature, someone mentioned that the filtering for invites (connections only) was woefully inadequate so I took a look and they are right.
You can either search for people by name or you can filter by location (useful), Current company (moderately useful) and Schools (unlikely to be useful for most). The key missing filters are Job title and keywords. I’m involved in a webinar series being run by the Association for Coaching starting on November 14th (you can register here) and I want to invite coaches from all around the world. I can do a search for the word ‘Coach’ for those numpties that have changed their name field to include keywords (they would definitely benefit from the training!) but that only gives me a limited list. Instead, I have to conduct a separate search away from Events and filter my first tier connections by job title and then manually each person by name – rediculous!
Communications Settings
To get to your settings;
Desktop
> Click on the ‘Me’ menu
> Select Privacy & Settings
Mobile
> Tap on the small round profile pic top left
> Tap View profile
> Tap on the cog – top right
Now you will see there are four sections. Account, Privacy, Ads and Communications.
This week I am focusing on the fourth section, Communication.
This is broken down into three main sections, the first one being ‘Notifications by channel’
This section of settings is massive! Let’s start with the first part ‘On LinkedIn’
Each one of the above has many sub-sections covering a whole range of types of notifications. You can switch the whole section off or go through and select each one individually (advised). All notifications are on by default, so it’s just a case of going through and switching off those you don’t need.
Whilst it might be tempting to leave them all on, it’s worth noting that LinkedIn will limit the number of notifications you see so it makes sense to only have those on that you are really interested in.
The ones that require the most attention are Conversations, Network and Profile
Next we have the Email section
The ones to pay attention to here are Conversations, Jobs, network & profile
Finally, in this first section, we have Push (for mobile)
This section reflects much the same as the above two sections without the enterprise products, I find that being more selective in this section can be helpful. Mobile notifications are more likely to get our attention (remember to check your phone settings as well) and so I only want to see things that I consider especially important.
You will be pleased to know that the other two sections are a lot smaller and pretty easy to complete.
The next one is ‘Who can reach you’
Invitations to connect. Here you can choose to have it that people need to enter your email address to invite you or they have to be in your imported contacts list to invite you. Neither setting makes any sense to me, I would advise leaving this on the default setting allowing anyone to invite you to connect…you don’t have to accept!
Invitations from your network. Choose whether you wish to be invited to follow pages (I don’t!) or be invited to Events
Messages. This controls InMail, by default anyone can send you an InMail (message from someone not connected). Open profile messages are for those who have a premium account allowing others to InMail you for free. Finally you can select to not receive sponsored InMail (who would ever want that one enabled?!)
Research invites. BY default, you might receive invites to get involved in research carried out by LinkedIn or 3rd parties.
The final section is ‘Messaging experience’
Read receipts. You can choose whether your message recipient can see that you are typing a response as well as receive read receipts when you open their message.
Reply Suggestions. These are those, often comical ‘ quick reply’ options you see in messages. I occasionally find them useful so I leave them on, if they annoy you then you can switch them off here.
So there you go, a full rundown of all four sections of privacy and settings. If you missed the previous ones you can listen to them at;
I wanted to include this post from Tony because it’s not just a great post but also provides some valuable information for all of us.
This is very interesting and valuable data. The point Tony is making is that these highly active sectors present a great opportunity for people within that supply chain. Looking at it from a different perspective, It’s also worth noting that the majority of people watch and don’t engage (in every sector) but that doesn’t mean you aren’t influencing them. In addition, some people engage but very rarely post and some others that post frequently do so via automation and rarely engage. So if you sell to Accountants, don’t stop posting!
Tony then followed that up with this sister post;
Again, very interesting and to some degree, surprising results. It would appear that senior decision-makers are much more active on LinkedIn than people think.
The only word of caution I would give is that this set of data was researched via Sales Navigator and I’m currently working on some analysis myself about the accuracy of Sales Navigator search results…and it’s not looking good so far!
I recently received this great question from a listener called Paul.
Mark twice a month I commute 7 hours in my car and each time I listen to your podcast episodes the whole way. Absolutely love it!
I struggle with this question and wonder what your answer would be?
I can pay LinkedIn to automate and target with an ad. If automation is okay for LinkedIn, why are you so against automation for people on LinkedIn? I am targeted on LinkedIn all the time with an automated ad. Maybe you are against LinkedIn using automation too?
My answer:
I’m not sure I see advertising as a form of automation. Automation has nothing to do with posts and it’s only harmful when people use it to send direct messages or invitations to connect.
The nearest LinkedIn get to automation is sponsored InMail, which is definitely a form of spam but to be fair, they do regulate it very tightly. InMail campaigns can’t be sent too often and as a recipient, you are prevented from receiving too many in a short period of time.
Ad’s are either sponsored posts or display ads on a page and whilst I’d rather not have them, I don’t think they are anywhere near as annoying as spammy inbox messages or random, un-personalised invitations.
Hope that explains it.
That’s it for this week. I’m taking a week off to rest and laze around in the sun!
Catch up again soon.
