LinkedIn?? adopt a 'Pay to spam' policy!

LinkedIn?? are restricting us to just 10 customised connection invitations per month. Presumably to restrict spammy invites...

Unless you upgrade to a premium account

Then you can spam invite as much as you like!

In this weeks LinkedInformed, I discuss why they might have done this and why I think it's going to cause more problems than it solves.

That plus;

• New message inboxes ??
• New content search filter ??
• Added feature to new custom buttons ??
• Name pronunciation goes backwards ??
• Does verification make you more visible? ??
• Added value author comments ??
• 'Top' emerging creators (not) ??
• Is it wise for LinkedIn?? to be 'all in' on AI? ??
• Screw the views! ??
• Post of the week ??

LinkedInformed is a free podcast that you can find and subscribe to on all main podcast platforms and apps. What follows is a brief summary of all the topics covered on this weeks show. If you want to listen to this episode, please click below

New Features.

Now that company pages can receive messages, LinkedIn?? have added a link to that inbox, plus a Sales Navigator or Recruiter inbox into our main messages inbox. Great new addition.

My favourite type of search has just got better! Post searching has been given a new filter.

It's not exactly a game changer but a useful new filter all the same.

Custom buttons on your profile have also got better. I was fairly unimpressed with this new premium feature instead I prefer the Creator mode link which is completely 'custom' rather than using one of the 5 options shown below.

I might have to change my mind on this though as apparently LinkedIn?? are going to show this button on name search profile previews as well as posts. The latter of those makes it a much more attractive option although from the screenshot I've seen in this article it doesn't stand out much. I don't have the feature yet so for now, I'm sticking with the Creator mode link until I have been able to take a good look at these features myself.

The massively under-utilised name pronunciation feature has been somewhat downgraded, which is a real shame. Previously you could simply click or tap on the speaker icon to hear the recording of the name but all this does now is open a 'About this profile' dialogue where the speaker icon appears again and you have to click on that to hear it.

Making this valuable feature a two-step process is definitely a backward step.

Profile verification is still gradually rolling out and I've noticed LinkedIn?? making some interesting claims about the benefits of verification to your visibility.

Is this genuine or one of LinkedIn?? 'tall tales' designed to incentivise us to get verified? I suspect the latter. What do you think?

I saw a post this week from David Sardi about how top creators such as Justin Welsh are using the comments section to add more value, encourage more engagement and potentially extend the life of the post by holding back some of the original content and adding it later as a comment.

Commenting on your own post isn't new as such, it has been the preferred way to feature url links in your content for some years now but this approach is different.

I've noticed that Justin doesn't do this on every, or even the majority of his posts and there does not appear to be an upsurge in engagement when he does. This post is one example, it's done well but not as well as other posts when he hasn't adopted this technique.

All that said, I like this idea and think it's probably worth trying.

Write your post and hold back one or two key points for the comments. It might have greater impact because others that have previously engaged with it will be notified and may well take more notice of your comment than they did the original post!

Somebody asked me a question this week about what constitutes an 'Emerging Top Creator'? I must admit I hadn't come across such a thing before!

This is one of those sections you find when you scroll down under 'My network'

So I thought I would take a look to see if I could work out why these people were given such an honour!

I spent some time analysing the posts of the above 6 over the last month and I really can't figure out why they have been selected. One of them has only posted once in that time and another has posted 12 times with an average of 2 comments and 23 reactions per post.

Half of them have enabled creator mode and the range of topics they posted about have very little, if anything to do with my interests.

Conclusion - another feature to be completely ignored! No offence to the above individuals who won't have asked or even be aware of this status but there was no indication whatsoever that any of them are worth following.

LinkedIn?? have announced a range of new AI tools for learning, recruitment, marketing and sales as detailed in this article .

The changes to Recruiter are detail in this post;

And this is a segment from Ryan Roslanskys talk at Talent connect

At this stage, the details of these changes are fairly scant, especially those affecting Sales Navigator.

• Learn with AI. This will be a new AI-powered LinkedIn Learning experience. Through a chatbot interface, you will be able to ask questions about personalized profile or content solutions.
• LinkedIn recruiter AI tools. This AI will assist with manual tasks of recruiters, for example: candidate discovery, simplified candidate outreach, smarter criteria suggestion, and creating data-driven reports to analyze performance of recruiting campaigns. The use of more conversational language in their searches will be interesting to see - the end of boolean strings?
• There will be a new AI-powered marketing product called 'Accelerate'. The idea will be to let people run campaigns on LinkedIn more easily bypassing the heavy lifting. One drawback is that Accelerate is limited to campaigns and data from within the LinkedIn walled garden.

It's clear that LinkedIn?? are totally committed to pushing AI onto us and feel it is the way forward.

I'm not one to disagree, AI is very exciting and it's clearly not going to go away. The problem however is one of widespread misuse and that's likely to get worse and worse as more uneducated users jump onboard the AI bandwagon! My concern is that LinkedIn?? are encouraging this through their apparent enthusiasm for all things AI.

I thought it was ironic that Tomer Cohens post on the topic this week attracted an immediate response with an obviously AI generated comment!

Hereby lies the problem. You can't really encourage users to adopt AI and at the same time not expect bland, meaningless comments such as the one above.

This sounds like I'm anti- AI but I'm really not!

Correctly used, it's a fantastic aid to help with content and comments. I've been looking at some of the external tools and have been pretty impressed with Commenter.ai who appear to be encouraging their users to act ethically and professionally.

I don't currently have any AI features on my LinkedIn?? account although they are beginning to rollout, I just hope they include such advice as the above. Parent company Microsoft don't do anything like that via their Bing AI feature! As you can see below when I asked it to respond the Ryans video post.

'This is a very insightful post' as a first sentence is a very clear ?? to any AI generated comment!

I do hope LinkedIn?? act cautiously and responsibly with their implementation of AI because this is a people to people networking site, not a robot to robot one!

Screw the views! I really enjoyed reading this excellent post from Matt Barker this week. I don't really agree with his first point about sales coming before content.

"Building a successful business must come first. Content is created from that. Not the other way round."

If you apply this logic when you first start out on LinkedIn?? you will quickly fail because you have no visibility, credibility and authority. Great content gives you the foundation on which you can focus on sales more - this is actually what Matt has done. From his perspective he now realises he needed to switch the focus but that doesn't make that the right choice for others.

Point 3 I do agree with... 'Created targeted content only' although I might replace the 'only' with 'mainly'! Chasing high impressions by only producing content with a wide appeal is not going to pay the bills. As Matt succinctly concludes...

Do not optimise for views or virality. If you create content because you want to get leads and sign clients: Post. Targeted. Content. Screw the views!

As a side note, for me, the impressions stat is just a fantasy number plucked out of the sky by LinkedIn and I never spend any time worrying about it. I'm really only interested in hard evidence of 'views' AKA engagement!

Customised invitations limit

Non-premium users will only be able to send 10 connection requests per month that include a message.

You can send as many blank invites as you could before (there is a limit but it's much higher) but if you want to professionally introduce yourself and explain why you wish to connect, then you have to pay for the privilege!

Virtually* all experienced LinkedIn?? trainers, coaches and experts will advise customising your invites yet LinkedIn have decided to make that a premium feature...crazy!

*Some experts still claim blank invites get a higher acceptance rate - don't believe this rubbish, it's based on faulty research.

Experienced users who have invested years in building their networks already are unlikely to be impacted by this - they probably don't invite that many people per month. The impact will be on inexperienced users who are just starting to build their networks

• Job seekers
• Students entering the workplace
• Small start-up businesses

None of the above are really in a position to pay for an expensive LinkedIn?? premium account.

Spammers do use this feature of course, we've all received that cheesy pitch message with an invitation to connect but that can't be why LinkedIn have done this because those invitations are easy to reject and actually helpful in avoiding being connected to spammers and anyway, if that strategy does work, the spammers will have no problem in upgrading their account!

So the question is why on earth would LinkedIn?? think this is a good idea?

The answer is Recruiters!

LinkedIn?? really detest recruiters who think they can get away without paying to use LinkedIn??. They limit their searches, profile views, invitations and now they are clamping down on their invitation messages. Here's how such recruiters operate;

• Search on keywords, job title etc
• Filter the search to provide them with a list of under 50 people
• Send an invitation to connect to all of them
• Each invitation includes a copy & pasted note 'selling' a fantastic new opportunity they would like to speak to them about.

This is very poor practice by the way

LinkedIn?? want to put a stop to this.

They would prefer them to purchase a Recruiter licence but accept that many/most won't be able to afford one so this move will make them at least upgrade to a Business premium account.

So it's OK to send spam in an invite message, or approach people about a job...if you pay.

So it's about money

It's not about members - the overwhelming majority of which are not Recruiters on a free account...even amongst recruiters they are a minority!

'Members first' they say ????...a pay to spam policy if I ever saw one!

Post of the week

This is a belter from Ash Rathod and very much inline with the 'Screw the views' topic already covered above.

I especially love the line...

Real connections, honest chats, and stuff that actually matters - that's what really counts.

Amen to that Ash!

It's well structured (unless your are Daniel Roth - see last weeks LinkedInformed), clever, relatable and great advice.

Great work!

That's it for this week, let me know if you have any nominations for post of the week or suggestions for topics to cover in future episodes.