2021 Review

Christmas is almost here and this is the last episode of 2021 so let’s take a look back at what’s been happening on LinkedIn this year.

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

But as always before we get into the main topic, here’s some…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn has teamed up with the personalised video message company Cameo to offer a free (to a limited number) Christmas out-of-office singing message.

Here is an example of one;

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I’m a fan! I’ve filled in my application and will wait to see if I’ve been lucky enough to get a free one! I did apply under the name ‘Mr LinkedIn’ so it’s highly unlikely!

If you want to apply you can do so here;

https://on.cameo.com/linkedoutofoffice/

LinkedIn have now launched their cop-out solution to China! Introducing InCareer: LinkedIn's new app to help professionals in China find jobs.

As covered in episode 340, LinkedIn are offering this app as a replacement to the full LinkedIn site due to censorship issues with the Chinese government. It’s a great shame all-round but I suspect this is more the work of Microsoft than what LinkedIn wanted.

You can now apply for support as a Creator from outside the US. This link allows you to apply for help as a creator, it doesn’t specify that it’s the Creator Accelerator program although I suspect this will also be used to select those people. It certainly won’t do any harm completing the form at this link anyway;

https://members.linkedin.com/linkedin-creators

CAP Progress report

As mentioned in episode 344 I am going to keep track of the content of 5 creators who have been selected for the Creator Accelerator Program (CAP). It’s still very early days and so we can’t really read much into their content (or lack of) so far but here are my thoughts on the five so far;

Alexander Gonzalez - Nothing so far which is a bit disappointing as I’m excited to see what this video/filmmaker comes up with. The nature of his work might require a longer lead time hence the lack of posts so far.

Brian Fung - Our friendly Pharmacist has been pretty active with 4 posts since the announcement including a Livestream which only attracted 29 attendees, a native video that was exactly the same style and quality as his previous ones (he has a YouTube channel) and also received about the same amount of engagement.

Plus he has relaunched his Newsletter which received pretty good engagement levels and much better than his first two articles from August.

He also posted a link to a YouTube video which didn’t do very well…Will the CAP coaches discourage him from posting external links in the future?

So in summary, no significant change from Brian so far but let’s see what develops.

Brittani Hunter This is the creator with 117,000 followers but little or zero engagement on her content. It seems like she is still using LinkedIn as a funnel to get people to her website!

Her posts are not designed to engage at all - either the CAP advisors don’t realise what she is doing wrong or she is not listening to their advice…or perhaps her program hasn’t yet started. Either way, there is no evidence of any improvement yet.

Giovanna González-Chávez As a successful TikTok creator, she should be able to bring something to LinkedIn but at the moment she is making the basic errors of using external links and re-sharing lots of posts…including this one! ??

Taylor Long No new content from Taylor. She has previously been hyper-promotional so clearly has a lot of adjustments to make on this platform from her main home on Instagram. It’s probably a wise move to take her time and take on board the advice she is receiving before posting in haste (assuming she is getting advice yet).

Summary Not a lot seems to be happening in a couple of weeks since the announcement. Maybe the program hasn’t really started yet. I will report back on the five again sometime in January.

Update from last week

Good news! After several (perhaps many) people raised a ticket, LinkedIn have now restored the communications on LinkedIn settings page and it has been updated with many new sections.

It’s actually hard to figure out exactly how many changes there have been but based on the screenshot John Espirian sent me last week of the conversations section, it had 10 settings and that has now expanded to 24! The good news is that we now have far greater control over what notifications we receive. The two main areas are Communications and Network.

On the Network page you will find ‘Newsletter invitations’ but be warned, this does not stop you from receiving invitations, just being notified. You will still get them on your ‘My Network’ page unless you change the following setting found in the ‘Who can reach you’ section of your communications settings.

Here is a screenshot of my conversations page, showing which of the 24 I have deselected. I’m not suggesting you do the same, everyone will have different priorities but I would strongly advise going through this list and updating it to suit your needs.

Deselecting any notifications that you don’t really need will free up your notifications page and make it much easier to see those most important to you, including those new post notifications!

New features

The first one is great news! It appears that LinkedIn is not automatically removing messages it thinks are spam into our spam folder.

This could have happened for a number of reasons. It might be based on my previous actions as I tend to mark such messages as spam or it could just be based on ‘red flag’ words or the url used in the message or it might be because other recipients have reported it as spam.

Whatever the reason, it’s a welcome addition!

You can report a message as spam by clicking on the 3 dots at the top of the message.

Incidentally, did you know that you can forward a message reply via email? Simply hover over the message and you will see another 3 dot menu as below

I’m not sure how new the email share feature is but I’ve only just noticed it. Another message feature I haven’t previously mentioned is the reminder when you haven’t replied. I’ve seen this only once and it was triggered after 4 days as with this example sent in by John Espirian. Have you seen one at less than 4 days?

If you ever spot any new features, please let me know so that I can amplify the news.

Review of 2021.

Well, let’s start with my predictions. I think I will have to throw my crystal ball away and get a new one! Pretty much all of my predictions didn’t happen including where I stated that there would be very few changes due to covid…I couldn’t have been more wrong on that one!

The only one I got right is that groups would be in exactly the same place as they were a year ago bar some tinkering of features. Groups continued to be largely deserted in 2021!

Jo Saunders put together a video of many experts predictions, it amused me greatly to see how spectacularly wrong I was about stories! Some of the others did pretty well, especially Jo when she talked about a video introduction in messages which was spookily close to the cover story feature we got this year!

So here’s what did happen in 2021;

January saw the introduction on more controls over who can comment on our posts and more additions to the ‘Add to post’ section appeared throughout the year.

How ‘add to post’ looks now after several additions throughout 2021

We saw several additional features to Stories through the first half of the year although they made very little impact on the effectiveness of the feature resulting in them closing Stories completely! I still think this was a total fail by LinkedIn who will no doubt claim that it just wasn’t right for the LinkedIn community whereas the truth is that their half-cocked version of Stories wouldn’t have been right for any platform!

LinkedIn also consistently offered free courses on LinkedIn learning, partly to help with the pandemic but also to encourage more people to subscribe, I’m not sure how successful learning is but they still seem to be supporting it.

We also saw the introduction of the ‘mute’ feature on posts where those posts from people you are not following appear in your feed due to engagement from your connections. This initially didn’t work but it seems to be functioning OK for some but not others so still very glitchy. Also, they use the mute terminology when a connection mentions you in a post/comment so it’s difficult to know the difference between mute and unfollow now!

One of the strangest changes this year was the introduction of the ability to create a re-share post from a comment you make on the original post! Maybe this was LinkedIn’s attempt to encourage more re-shares. The problem is however that they still fail to engage so anyone with any sense is just ignoring the feature. I suspect it will disappear in 2022.

Basic ‘all’ search results got a lot better with a much more detailed breakdown and a preview of the different types of results, this design change was also used in an update on the results of a quick result of a name search with information about their activity & posts as well as a link to see their full profile. Also searching for companies got easier with the addition of the ‘size’ (number of employees) filter

Company pages continued to develop with more pages/tabs including the ‘My company’ employee engagement page and an enhanced employee advocacy feature.

Sales Navigator has also changed considerably throughout the year crowned with the introduction of a completely new, alerts focussed home page.

LinkedIn announced in February the introduction of Marketplace would happen in September but we are still waiting for that one, at least in the UK anyway! Service reviews have been introduced and you can now search for services but I don’t think either of those constitutes a full-blown marketplace and we still don’t have a digital wallet although they have said it will be introduced for Events soon.

Probably the biggest change this year has been the Creators initiative, this was first hinted at in February when Dan Roth started advertising for a Head of Community and subsequently, many community managers were recruited. The guy who got the head position is Andrei Santalo who came from Instagram and he has been instrumental in setting up and launching the Creator accelerator program together with the Creators showcase page. He is definitely worth following to see posts like this;

Dan Roth launched his Creator Weekly Newsletter which continues to be a great read. Creator mode was introduced later in the year and whilst that has been a fairly unimpressive change so far (adding hashtags and changing the profile in some ways) it’s clear that this is just the start and those that want to grow their following and engagement will see more and more additions to this mode. They have already allowed access to posting Livestream and the newsletter function for Creators and there will be more things like that to come.

Profiles changed quite a bit this year with the introduction of pronouns and a few mainly cosmetic changes in November.

The biggest and most important change was the introduction of Cover story, a video introduction previewed and accessed via your profile photo. I still think that as feature improvements go, this is the best one this year.

Posts became longer with the character limit more than doubling from 1300 to 3000.

LinkedIn first started having issues with China when they stopped all new account sign-ups in March and this culminated in closing LinkedIn down completely for all Chinese users in December. A great shame.

The Trust and Safety team have become extremely twitchy this year with a series of very harsh temporary and lifetime bans, some being overturned but many have not. It’s a difficult line they have to walk, we all want less spam and hassle from idiots on LinkedIn but innocent people are regularly getting caught in their nets!

Livestreams got a refresh although LinkedIn are still relying on 3rd party providers. There was also some minor improvements to LinkedIn Events.

We have seen an increase in TV ads from LinkedIn this year and on the subject of ads, their own revenue from advertising on LinkedIn has become a really significant contribution this year - this is the main motivation behind the creator support initiative.

After months, maybe even years of speculation Dark Mode finally came to LinkedIn. I don’t currently have this feature and I can’t say I’m too worried about that but I guess you don’t know until you give it a try.

Native video meetings were introduced as an alternative to Zoom or Teams in messaging in August.

And finally, just this month, we got the bell appear on profiles of those we follow allowing us to set notifications for when they post. This is definitely in my top 3 changes this year together with the whole Creator initiative and the Cover story.

So there you have it, what a year it’s been for LinkedIn and how utterly wrong I was in predicting a quiet year for changes!!

Let’s hope they keep this pace up in 2022. I will be making my predictions for next year in the next LinkedInformed which will be out in early Jan…let’s hope I do better than last year!

Post of the Week

Thank you all so much for your nominations this week, you really are making my decision so difficult each week!

I had 4 very strong contenders all with well over a thousand comments and tens of thousands of reactions!

Given that this episode is the last one for a few weeks, I feel I can get away with having two winners.

The first is a heart-wrenching personal story from Lea Watson. It’s timely in that this is the time of year when people are most likely to drink and drive and it’s also an important reminder to us that not everyone will be as happy as they used to be on Christmas day.

The other winner is also a personal story (no surprise there!) but a completely different message and shows how you can approach business-related subjects in a very personal way. This text-only post from Mark Cuddigan is inspiring, thought-provoking, and poses a fascinating and important question about how we view older people in the workforce.

In the next episode, I will be revealing the post of the year and this time I have two very strong contenders so I need your help in deciding which one should win. Please go to this poll and vote which one you think is the deserving winner. Remember that whilst the engagement numbers are important (especially comments), it’s also worth considering what can be learned from the success of the post…the more we can learn, the higher the score.

That’s it for this week and for 2021. Thank you all so much for being with me this year, I appreciate all of your comments, questions and support.

Have a wonderful Christmas holiday break and look forward to catching up with you again in 2022.