Welcome to this weeks episode after a break for a week in the sun, I’m back fully refreshed and raring to go…oh and hating the cold, wet UK weather!

I have had a couple of listeners contact me this week to tell me about a strange message they received from LinkedIn regarding missing InMails, at first I thought it must be a hoax…it wasn’t!

More of that later, firstly though I’ve been catching up on LinkedIn news…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week.

Maintaining the Trust of Our Members

Industry Execs Now Actively Research Profiles Of Others, LinkedIn Dominates

New Features

Sales Navigator Puts Data to Work

The new Alerts list in Sales Navigator

Company Page invitations to follow return but this time we can opt-out in our settings (covered in episode 258).

This is not fully rolled out to all Pages yet and you also need to have a fully complete page in order to see this option under ‘Admin tools…although it didn’t make any difference for me when I completed this page!

Do You Need To Get To 30,000 Connections?

I saw this excellent post this week from Shay explaining that by reaching 30k connections (the max) your posts automatically get a +follow button

She states that this allowed her to grow her followers by 3.5x! As a result, she now has over 134,000 followers and growing!

Is she right to state that getting to the max 30k connections is the best way to use LinkedIn?

My take is that for the vast majority of us, the answer is no. Having 30,000 connections has some serious downsides;

 Significant risk of spam
 A confused algorithm hence a useless home page feed
Increased time commitment dealing with invites
A requirement to disconnect every time you find someone you really do want to connect with. I know of someone who had to employ a VA to do this for them!
A massive following is no guarantee of success, content still needs to be excellent – and Shay’s is!

I really admire Shay, she is still the best video content producer on LinkedIn and she has built herself a great business through her LinkedIn success but I really feel strongly that this is very poor advice for 95% of LinkedIn users.

The InMail Scandal

When a connection of mine contacted me this week about an email they had received from LinkedIn, I genuinely thought it must be a hoax!

Unfortunately, it wasn’t!

On further investigation I found this article in the help center;

LinkedIn refer to an issue with ‘LinkedIn messaging’ which might suggest it’s the free messages to connections (or group members) however, the information I have seen proves that it’s not!  It turns out that this person has had nearly 80 InMail messages that had been sent over the last 3 years that were not delivered!

InMails are a paid-for service and you lose a credit if someone doesn’t reply…which clearly they couldn’t because it never landed!!

To be fair, LinkedIn could have kept this to themselves and nobody would know. It’s a credit to them that they have taken this step to let those affected know about it. Some of these messages could have been important but that’s not the point. Many people upgrade their account purely get InMails…that’s what they are paying for and LinkedIn failed to deliver the product!

What really annoys me is the pathetic compensation offered..just another 30 InMail credits which have a lifespan of 3 months – woopdedoo! This suggests to me that this must have affected a significant number of users.

In my opinion, they should be offering those affected, a free 3-year extension of their premium account, that’s the least I would expect. In addition, I wonder if they have also contacted the admins of large enterprise accounts? If the issue is related to InMails then it’s fair to assume that some of LinkedIn most valuable customers have been affected. If I was one of them, I would be asking for proof that there had not been an issue.

Something I’ve been pondering

Would this be nice?

I do enjoy Janine’s posts, which are mostly videos but she has shown more variation here with a text-only post.

• It’s relatable
• It’s funny
• Well structured
• Highly engaging

Please let me know if you have seen a post that is worthy of being post of the week (min 50 comments)

Great question and there is an answer…sort of!

Daily rundown is found in your notifications and it’s very similar to the ‘Todays news and views’ you will see top right of your home page.

The problem is that you only see links to news items for your specific country or region

The solution:

LinkedIn have created ‘Daily Rundown’ company pages for each of the 6 regions. Simply type ‘Daily Rundown’ in the search box and you will see this result. You can then follow each page but I would simply bookmark each one you are interested in to make it easier to return to the page.

Please get in touch if you have any questions about LinkedIn either by sending me a free message on LinkedIn or by clicking on the orange ‘ask me a question’ link on the right edge of this page.

That’s all for this week, have a great week ahead and I look forward to catching up with you again soon.