LinkedIn Changes Roundup

Having been away for a few weeks, partly holiday, partly family health issues…I needed to catch up with what’s been happening so who better to call than our good friend John Espirian .

Here is a summary of my conversation with John.

This article has also been recorded as a podcast which you can listen to at

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

Or just click below to listen to the full interview

Reposting. It’s now over a month since I’ve had this feature and I’m undecided if it’s worth bothering with.

It’s impossible to know if my repost has particularly helped the post get more eyes on it or whether the repost was more effective than a simple reaction. It does trigger a notification of a repost (which is labeled as a reshare in notifications!) but some people have commented that this puts them off viewing it.

John made the point that this could also result in people unfollowing you if you repost too much. I guess the upside of the notification is that it brings attention to the post (for those that have clicked the bell). John added that he is using this feature to repost his own personal posts from his company page.

All the same, it's clearly much better than a reshare.

Hashtags and tagging in Articles. I now seem to have this feature although I’ve only been able to use it this week so we will see if it has any impact on impressions and view numbers for this weeks article.

I’m still not convinced that hashtags have any significant impact on the effectiveness of a post. Richard van der Blom has reported that they are seeing a change in the impact of hashtags in this excellent post

My experience is very different, I hardly ever see a post in my feed due to a hashtag being used, and then only if it’s from a 1st tier connection, this happens a bit more on mobile but still rarely. A 25% increase (15% mobile) in posts due to hashtags alone seems excessive. All that said, my advice stays the same - you may as well use them…just don’t expect significantly better results!

John is also slightly worried that hashtags in this longer form of content could be abused with ‘walls of blue’ hashtags in articles.

I would be amazed if using hashtags in Articles makes much difference either but @mentions should…let’s see what happens, John will send me a screenshot of the notification of his tag (@ mention) in this article.

Audio Events rollout. It seems that many of us are now getting access to run audio events now…including me but not John! I’m quite excited about this and I’m considering running a live version of LinkedInformed which will be recorded live and posted as a podcast as well. What do you think, would you get involved?

John is frustrated that Audio events do not allow for private rooms because he would love to run audio events for his membership community. Large companies will probably have the same issue with internal staff sessions. Maybe this will be added as a feature in the future.

I’m thinking about using this feature to record a LinkedInformed episode live.

The API will now allow better 3rd party content scheduling. LinkedIn have announced that they have opened up access to post polls and multi-image posts and this apparently went live on June 14th but I’m not aware of any tools that are utilising it yet, there appears to be no mention of these changes by Buffer or Hootsuite, I suspect this API access might only be open to Enterprise tools that the vast majority of organisations won’t have access to.

John thinks this is a good idea, provided people still engage with the comment thread on their post.

Scheduling content is pretty harmless in my view, I follow several people who clearly schedule hundreds of posts every week but because they don’t engage, I never see these posts and so they cause no harm - they might believe they are achieving something but in reality, it’s just a pointless exercise!

Share your post in Groups. Sometimes when you post, you'll be prompted to share that same material in other groups that you're a member of or it might even suggest groups that you're not a member of that you could join.

John thinks this is a terrible idea and encourages thoughtless spam in groups, I completely agree! LinkedIn abandoned the ‘share to groups’ applet they used to have for articles outside of LinkedIn and this was a positive move - if you encourage people to post things into groups like this they will do it without thinking and that will create more noise in the group and as a result, less engagement!

I suspect, LinkedIn’s intention here is to match relevant groups to the topic covered in your post with the aim of motivating you to join the group - this would make sense as it would help with relevance but if so, the wording is wrong because it’s encouraging them to post in these groups, not just join them and the inference might be to publish this post in that group, irrespective of whether it's relevant to the group.

Extra prompt to re-share a post you’re tagged in. This is an odd one, yet again LinkedIn seem intent on encouraging reshares for some reason and yet we all know that this is not good practice. John has noticed that when he @mentions (tags) himself in his own post, it still triggers the prompt!

The ‘Funny’ reaction to posts. Whilst long overdue, this introduction seems to have attracted far too much attention than it deserves, it’s just another reaction at the end of the day! John is slightly concerned that it could be misused by someone ‘laughing’ at a serious topic as a way of taking a shot at the author although we haven’t seen that yet.

Content & Creative Design Certification. John found this in a recent LinkedIn blog and completed the course so that he could add it to his profile. It took an hour or so to complete. You can do the same by clicking on this link

Is it worth the effort? John believes it could be useful to show on your profile, personally, I can think of better ways to spend an hour of my time! These certifications are usually focused on advertising on LinkedIn and seem very commercially motivated to me.

I guess there is a possibility it could be a search filter for Recruiters and might place you higher in search ranking…but we both doubt that.

Setting & Privacy Redesign. Both John and I have this now, it’s definitely cleaner and easier on the eye but as far as I can tell, the settings haven’t changed at all, just the way they look. John noticed that the url’s for each page have changed, which is very frustrating as we both use those urls to help people with their settings.

Whilst there is no doubt that the page does look better, the glaring omission is a search facility. With so many sections, LinkedIn need to add a keyword search which will help us find the section we want much more quickly.

Personal demographics. The link for this can be found in the Resources section of your profile, this takes you to a section of your settings where information about your gender, location etc.

However, this link seems to have been broken with the redesign of the settings and privacy page! Now, all that happens is that you get an error message “Hmm, this page doesn’t exist…Sorry, we couldn’t find the page you’re looking for”

Come on LinkedIn, you can do better!

Products on Personal Profiles. This feature is very limited in scope, to show products your company has to have products on its company page (few do), and then you can show them on your profile. Neither of us has ever seen a profile with products on it, I can’t even find a LinkedIn employee who has products on their profile - let me know if you ever see one!

Company Page Updates ‘Boost’ prompt This has been updated to include specific numbers of members you are able to reach by sponsoring the post/update, this is a sensible move and may result in more advertising revenue.

John is hoping that LinkedIn continue to resist the temptation to provide the option to boost personal posts, which would of course kill organic reach and that is one of the great strengths of LinkedIn in comparison to other social media channels. I’m much more relaxed about this, I really can’t see it happening as advertising, whilst important, still plays second fiddle to Recruiter and Sales Navigator subscription revenues and damaging the appeal of posting good content on LinkedIn by reducing organic reach would have a severely detrimental impact on the attractiveness of those subscription products. It also flies in the face of the whole Creator mode initiative.

LinkedIn will keep encouraging us to post from our company pages (and others will echo that message) despite the poor reach it will give you, this is simply a way of luring you into the false impression that you are going to gain great visibility of your brand and when you find your post results are disappointing they will sell you the option to boost your post in this way…it’s a trick folks!

Sharing your post outside of LinkedIn. This is a new feature that I don’t currently have but I have managed to get the below screenshot of what it looks like.

I guess this could be useful to some people, I’m never convinced about the benefits of sharing content from one channel into another, for me each platform should be treated separately but if you are not that bothered about Facebook or Twitter but feel that your LinkedIn post could resonate with those audiences, then there is no harm in using this feature.

A new ‘Follow me on LinkedIn’ button for external websites. This will allow a simple HTML embed of a button that when clicked will automatically enable someone as a follower (provided they are logged into LinkedIn). This is an update of previous tools that just take you to a profile, this is much more seamless and likely to be more useful. Only available, at least initially, for those on Creator mode.

This will be found under the resources panel and under the Creator tab - good feature (when it finally comes out)!

Invitations may be moving to notifications! John has heard from some people that invitations to connect are now appearing in notifications rather than ‘My Network’ and the net effect of this is that you can’t reply to invitations! This seems a very odd move, surely our notifications are busy enough without adding a whole bunch of invitations and the option of replying before accepting has always been something many users really value - why take that away?

We both agreed that this sounds like a foolish move from LinkedIn that would achieve very little, perhaps it’s just something they are experimenting with and it won’t receive a full rollout, let’s hope so.

Thanks again to John for generously helping me out this week with that roundup. this is the sort of thing John’s Expresso+ members get from him on a regular basis. Expresso+ is an online community for small business owners and solopreneurs who want to build an ethical, effective online presence. You can find out more here

Post Of The Week

I’m always giving company pages a hard time and rightly so, they are not the best way to promote the visibility of your brand but occasionally a company page post will break the mould and achieve fantastic organic reach without any sponsored boost. This weeks winner is one of those and I thought it was an interesting example to use because it reinforces what we have covered many times before on the podcast….The LinkedIn audience is interested in real stories about real people!

Well done to whoever manages the J Murphy & Sons Ltd page and well done to Shaun. Featuring employees with real stories about who they are or/and what they have done is great content and I wish more companies would do it!

Alright that’s all for this week, take care and I will be back soon.