LinkedIn Tips, Tricks, and Issues

There is an untapped wealth of information to be found in the personal profiles of LinkedIn users that often explains what a company actually does, what the product line actually is, and how to leverage a company better than any other information available on the Company’s actual website. The “official” LinkedIn “company profiles” are usually just shadows of the actual company website, so I usually click through to the actual corporate website. But perhaps because marketing and web design staff are often promoting a “brand image” and want a flashy website, or perhaps because they don’t actually understand the technical details and nitty-gritty of what the company products and services fully offer, I’m amazed at the “real story” and insights I can glean from individual user profiles. Some details in personal profiles are almost like whitepapers because some people are really good storytellers. There is nothing improper or harmful about this – it’s good stuff. If you want to know about a company, you can often learn more from looking at current and past employee profiles than you can from the corporate website.

I use LinkedIn and Google to search for hidden gems in my areas of interest. Hidden gems can be companies, product lines, and more often, people like you. I can “follow” a company, and I can “connect” with people. Who knows what future business opportunity I might bring to your attention when a client wants to build and grow and needs your expertise? (Note: I am not a staffing recruiter.)

Nobody reading this, including me, can actually grasp the vast universe of small to medium companies with very specific, useful products and services. Discovering people and companies is like hunting for intelligent life beyond our solar system. Google and LinkedIn are my “Hubble Telescopes”.

Tips and tricks about LinkedIn:

LinkedIn continues to change their backend rules and policies as Microsoft tries to find more ways to recoup their $26Billion investment. Even though I pay for LinkedIn services, there seem to be arbitrary barriers that sporadically block my usage. What are the rules? What are the limits? Only LinkedIn knows, and they aren’t telling, which makes the game difficult to play when the referee blows his whistle and flashes a yellow-card for an unknown violation.

For instance, there’s a limit to the number of connection requests you can make over a certain period of time. What’s the limit? What’s the time period? Only LinkedIn knows. The only thing we know is that your total connection limit is 30,000 people. I do NOT aspire to have 30,000 connections. That seems ridiculously unmanageable.

The limits seem to be less for 2nd level connection requests than for 3rd level requests. LinkedIn generally suggests 2nd level connection invitations more than 3rd level possibilities.Therefore, it is good to have a lot of 2nd level connections. I don’t bother 3rd level connection people unless there’s a really compelling need.

LinkedIn counts and limits your searches. Whether you search for people or companies, LinkedIn has some “counter” in the backend that triggers a block once you have hit the limit on searching. Therefore, as much as possible, start with a Google search because jumping into LinkedIn from a Google search result doesn’t “count” as a search inside LinkedIn. For example, a search for “Microsoft Strategic Partnerships LinkedIn” in Google will give you a list of people at Microsoft with roles and titles in strategic partnerships with direct links to their LinkedIn profile page. Clicking on the Google search result links will land you on their profile. 

Resist the temptation to follow LinkedIn’s “people also looked at” listing of other people in the sidebar. If you see a specific person being suggested to you by LinkedIn, go back to Google and search “their name + LinkedIn” and you’ll get a link to their profile.

Note: This won’t be a problem for light users of LinkedIn. It only triggers for heavy users like me. But the search counter seems to also have a time period. So I have triggered blocks even while doing low to medium amounts of searching over a week. Then if I just walk away for a day or two, the block usually lifts.

If I see an interesting company on LinkedIn and want to research more, LinkedIn offers to show me “all employees” with profiles who work for or have worked for that company. But here is where the limits kick in. If I browse “too many” employee profiles, LinkedIn will block me and ask for more money. How many is “too many”? There are limits to viewing individual profiles, and there are even limits in seeing the list of employees. 

For example, a company might have 300 employees, and LinkedIn will indicate 10+ pages of profile listings, but when I click through to the 3rd page of LinkedIn search results, I get blocked and asked to upgrade. OTOH, Google searches will never block me. So leverage a search engine outside of LinkedIn to jump into LinkedIn for the actual profile.

Sadly, LinkedIn has some bugs in their search features. For example, I can search for current employees of a company and filter the results to just 1st and 2nd level connections. One odd bug is that often the list of 2nd level connections is incomplete. I might see only seven 2nd level connections at a specific company. Then if I clear the 1st and 2nd level connection filter, I’ll get the full list of all employees, and there will be 10 or more actual 2nd level connections in the larger list. The 2nd level connections are legitimate, we have mutual connections in common, but for some reason, some of these 2nd level connections are not included in the filtered search results within LinkedIn. And the frustrating thing is that LinkedIn counts my searches more strictly when I just scroll through the entire company listing of employees in LinkedIn.

I wish LinkedIn would allow me to “categorize” and group people connections together with tags of my own making – for instance “IoT” versus “media and entertainment”, and “Japan” versus “Brazil”. Yes, LinkedIn offers filters for a specific search, but again, I have found bugs in LinkedIn’s search results that miss people, even my own 1st level connections!

The other sad issue recently is that LinkedIn is suffering more outright downtime outages, and too often I get an excuse that says, “Ooops! It’s not you, it’s us. Please retry” even when I’m just trying to look at my own connections or news feed. I notice that it gets worse after work hours probably when more people are hitting LinkedIn. 

I wish LinkedIn would give me a world map with my connections shown as "pins" on the map. I'd like to use my own tags to filter for specific connections in my 1st level contacts when using this map.

I wish LinkedIn would let me tag companies as "doing business with company X". For example, Company A supplies products and services to Company B. I want an "associated with" tag rather than hunting through corporate websites for partners, resellers, and customer lists. Again, a mind map visualization like a geographic map would be helpful here.

LinkedIn does not seem to limit my browsing of my 1st level connection profiles yet. So my connection request to you insures that you’ll be in my contact list and I can find you when I need to -- and you can find me.