Skip to content →

Tag: linkedin

5 new linkedin features you probably are missing

LinkedIN pays a lot of attention in enhancing services in order to incentive people to subscribe Premium accounts.In the past days Linkedin has stared to roll out new features aimed to enhance the visibility of the profile. The main ones are related to: Profile design, a support system to optimize the profile summary, a better outstanding in search results, an “open profile” option and more enhanced “Who Viewed Your Profile” Profile design The profile design has 2 significant changes. The first one is the opportunity to set a “background header image”. Following the major trend in social media tools design, a premium member now can set an header background image to customize the profile. You can choose your custom header from a set of preloaded background images or upload your own. The second one is the larger profile photo and the expanded profile header. Is it really necessary? Until people don’t reach your profile, probably it doesn’t. Anyway if you are used to share your Linkedin Profile link on your email signature, business card or other social media profiles, a customizable header can be helpful to enrich your personal or business brand. Companies paying for the employee’s premium account can ask to their employee to upload a branded header in order to aware their brand. Summary Optimization Summary is among the most important parts of your profile because it is used by LinkedIN Search Engine to discover you when people is searching by keywords. Now LinkedIN Premium Users has an assistant helping to find out the most suitable keywords to use while writing the summary. How It Works? Linkedin finds out profiles similar to you and looks at the most effective keywords used suggesting  you to include them in your Summary. About my summary, for example, LinkedIn suggests to use some keywords such as Media Planning, Marketing Communication, media communication and so on. In choosing which one to include, it must be kept in mind what is your positioning statement and which one of the suggested really fits your skills. Don’t be seducted by the siren inviting you to “appear”.  It’s important but it isn’t enough. You must be consistent with your real competences. Better outstanding in search results When you will appear in search result your profile will outstand better than non premium member. The listing will be twice as big as other results and offer more tidbits from your profile: Past and Current Jobs and the latest education degree. Open profile As a Premium Member your profile is Open. That’s mean that anyone, even who is more than three degree away, can message you for free without the need to be connected to you or to use a InMail Message.…

Leave a Comment

Save your reputation, don’t endorse me on Linkedin

Linkedin’s skill endorsement is a powerful tool. It lets you have people saying: “hey, this guy is very fond in this. I know!”. Your network becomes a reference of your expertise and attitudes. Unfortunately, this is true only if your network’s members are all or almost people you have worked with or people knowing you in real life. Becoming Linkedin a more and more open networking tool, people searching to be endorsed, following the reciprocity rule, endorses you for skills suggested by LinkedIN also if you’ve never worked on that topic. So, for example, it happens to me to be endorsed by connections as skilled in “Startups”. I’ve no real experience on startups but this skill has been suggested from LinkedIN because I’ve shared some links about StartUps. Result: I’m “certified” in a skill that I don’t really know and my profile is giving misleading informations. But you can help me to keep my profile “clean” and “trustful”. If you don’t know me, if we never worked together, if you’ve never read what I wrote… Please, don’t endorse me. You’ll preserve your reputation too. What if I’ll be contacted by a prospect or employer because, according to my LinkedIN profile, I’m skilled in Startups and I’ll tell them that it’s not true? Your face is there, and you’ll appear as the the one that has endorsed me on that skill. How much you’ll be trusted by that employer/prospect in the future?

Leave a Comment

LinkedIN, how to use who’s viewed your profile

Even if Linkedin is still missing a true and useful data insight for our network, it seems it’s moving on the road of offering more and more functionalities able to find out your potential contacts. The new WHO’S VIEWED YOUR PROFILE WHO’S VIEWED YOUR PROFILE is the useful feature helping to discover new potential contacts. Originally the features gave you a list in reverse chronological order of latest visits your profile received, the frequency of visits and appearing in search. Premium accounts could also see aggregated data about industry and location (if available). Since some weeks, a new layout with new insights has been released. The enhancements bring a interactive graph of the previous data. The main section gives you an instant pic of what’s happened in last 3 months: the number of total views, shown with a weekly graph and a weekly change expressed as percentage. Each point in the graph shows you how many people looked at you profile and, clicking on it, you can gain the list of people seeing your profile on that day. Previously the same information was available but not in an interactive way. The section “Viewers who searched for first name” shows people who reached your profile by a your name direct search through the search box and gives you the amount and the list of people reached you with that tool. Drilling down into this function, we can discover all the sources used by “viewers” to reach our profile. Those sources are classified as: Linkedin Search. The query made through the search box at the top of the page or the search tool within Linkedin app. Groups. Who reached you from a group you are member of. Homepage. People who reached you from a post you publish and they saw on their linkedin home page. People similar to you. Viewers who reached you from the “People similar to <name>” list suggested by linkedin when you are visiting a profile. Others. As other source, Linkedin aggregates searches coming from Yahoo, People you may know list and general “unknown” and “other” categories. In the same tab, type of searches and keywords are shown: search by first name search by second name search by summary or job description “Unknown” keywords, telling you how many people reached you without a specific search. Last two tabs give you specific insights about the professional profile of viewers. The third one offers you information about contact’s industry and title. The last one, instead, an aggregated view of companies they’re working for. As early mentioned, each graph is interactive and clicking on a single element you can obtain a list of users included in the aggregated data.   How to use the Who’s viewed your…

Leave a Comment

What Linkedin is still missing

Linkedin is still today the number one business networking site and counts about 260 million users worldwide. In last years the company made a lot of investments tin order to improve corporate offering, focusing on empowering the corporate pages and introducing a lot of marketing tools such as the targeted updates, targeted contents, company page and group insights. From a personal use perspective, I mean the professional profile management, except the restyling of profiles and the introduction of some rich media enforcement, the efforts were not so big. Also if you subscribe a premium account, the features enabled by subscription are very limited. You can see a more detailed list of people visiting your profile (according to their privacy policy) and you have some insights about how they’ve reached you and the most visiting industries. What it is still missing today is a tool able to analyze the network. Many years ago, Linkedin offered you some insights about your 1st degree connections telling the trending industries, the trending role and something like that. Those data had been removed and now, also if you are a Premium member, aren’t available. More: if you download your connection list, you can’t gain any useful data set more than the email address, company and descriptive (not by category – department and level) roles. In a business networking strategy such information are as important as the breath and it could be an added reason why to, eventually, subscribe a premium account. Also if you look for a third-party application for linkedin profile insights the offering si very limited and not so complete. 3 Applications you can use to manage your networking 1. INMAPS   Linkedin InMaps is a network visualization tool able to show the structure of your network. Pros easy to understand the structure of the network clustering Cons No given insights Manual coding color Difficult to decode for large and dense network 2. Can We Network Can We Network is an application for Apple and Android based devices able to profile the most interesting contacts (actual or potential) near you. It analyzes your profile and search the linkedin network those contacts matching your profile better. Pros Act as a decision support system to identify new prospects Gives you a radial graph to understand the suggestion Profiles can be visualized directly within the app Add people directly from the app Cons No insights about your network Based only on your profile. I.e.: if you are a Social Media Manager in UK, the app shall suggests other social media manager in UK 3. ProInsights ProInsights is the only application I found that responds to the need to have some insights about your network. The app goes through your…

Leave a Comment