2022 LinkedIn Updates

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There have been a LOT of changes, updates and new features added to LinkedIn so far in 2022.

Some of them have been awesome ?? and others not so much... ??

In this article I'm going to cover what I believe to be the most important ones if you're a coach, consultant or you run a service business.

Let's start with the elephant in the room...

Newsletters

OK, so theoretically this one wasn't in 2022 as it got added last November.

I'm including it here though because first of all I had pretty much overlooked/ignored it until earlier this year, as I think a lot of other LinkedIn members did too (as always LinkedIn didn't make a big deal of it). And secondly because it's a bloody great feature!

This is only the second edition of my newsletter (the first was 6 days ago) and I'm already at 2,402 subscribers at the time of writing this article.

So why is that awesome? Well, it means that every time I publish an article for my newsletter 2,402 people (and rising!) will get a notification from LinkedIn that it's available to read.

This means I get to reach, and hopefully help, way more people than I could by just publishing another article, sharing about it on my feed and hoping people notice it.

If you're interested in publishing your own newsletter, I'll be writing an article on it next week that will walk you through step-by-step on how to do it AND more importantly on how to prepare to make sure you get the highest number of subscribers out of the gate, so look out for that!

Add a Link to Your Profile Intro Section

This is huge! The folks at LinkedIn historically haven't made it easy for people to leave their platform to visit other pages. I guess they're worried that we won't come back? ????♂?

For example, whenever you add an external link to the body text of a post the reach of your post will be throttled back by the algorithm.

So the fact that they now make a clickable link readily accessible in your intro section is a big shift away from this and great news for us!

Clickable links make it easier for people to find out more about you by visiting your website, or taking whatever next action you want them to take.

If you want to know how to set this up for yourself, click here to read a post I made to walk you through exactly how to do it a few weeks back.

The Algorithm

The only constant on LinkedIn is change!

And the algorithm is at the heart of it. There were some big changes to the LinkedIn algorithm in May this year.

The aim of the algorithm is always to ensure that users have the most engaging experience when visiting the platform.

Of all the changes, there are 2 big ones to be aware of in my opinion:

1. Polls

So, as I predicted last year when they were introduced, the popularity of using polls rose significantly and the novelty factor has now worn off for most users. LinkedIn gave priority to polls in the newsfeed previously while it was still a 'new' feature.

Users have since started to complain about the quantity of them in their newsfeed however, and as a result their visibility has now been throttled back. I can confirm this having recently posted 2 polls that the reach was a fraction of my other posts. So I guess polls are dead... ??

Now, I only use polls if I really need some feedback on something or I'm doing research on my audience.

2. 'Bribing' People to comment on your posts

Stuff like "say 'me' in the comments and I'll send you a copy of the white paper" or "like, comment on and share this post to get my free guide" is going to be picked up by the algorithm and penalised by having its reach cut back.

The big question is, how far will this go? I often add stuff like "let me know what you think in the comments" to my posts, because I'm interested to hear feedback and ideas.

To be honest I haven't been tracking if this has been hurting my post reach or not but I'm going to start!

And for that matter, will it also detect when I say "click the link in the comments" to avoid the reach of my post being throttled by putting links in the body text? I'll be keeping a very close eye on this and reporting on it in the not too distant future...

Add a Lead Gen Form to Your Company or Showcase Page

I'm not a huge fan of using company pages if you're a coach, consultant or small business when you are the face of the business.

The reason for this is that company pages just don't do as well as personal profiles on LinkedIn.

It is, after all, a social media platform and people are way more interested in people than in companies.

Having said all that however, I may be persuaded to change my opinion, at least a little bit now that you can collect leads from a company page.

Total transparency: I set up my company page just to be able to upload the logo to LinkedIn and add it in my intro and experience section of my personal profile. That's it!

However, without any effort whatsoever I have generated 81 page followers in just a few weeks. So by my reckoning, if those 81 people have been curious enough to go and find my page and click the follow button, then at least some of them are probably curious enough to click the lead form and leave me their details - as long as what I offer in return is of high enough value of course. I'm working on that! ??

Currently my enticing offer is "Learn How to Use LinkedIn for Your Small Business" followed by "Get all the latest updates, tips and advice on how to best use LinkedIn to generate leads for your coaching, consulting or service business". Let's see how that works out. I'm sure it could be better! ??

If you'd like to set up your own Lead Gen form on your company page just click here to find out how.

That's it for this week. I hope you find this of some value. If you know of others that could also benefit from the content I publish then please share the newsletter with them.

As I've said before - there is nothing to sell here. Just trying to help others use LinkedIn as well as I know how to. ??

See you next week when I'll be sharing my experience on how to create a newsletter that gets traction out of the gate and gets you the highest number of subscribers you can get!

One last thing... if you'd like to know how you're performing on LinkedIn then take my LinkedIn Health Check. It will score you in the 3 key areas you need to be proficient in to successful generate leads on LinkedIn.