Revisiting Skills

For years I've been telling anyone that will listen that Skills are one of the worst features LinkedIn has ever produced...but is that still true? I decided to take a fresh look at Skills to see whether they have improved.

Also covered;

• Headlines still count for search results - confirmed!
• The new 'About this profile' feature...is it any good?
• New LinkedIn AI goes head to head with AI-based image generators
• Will LinkedIns new 'suspicious message' feature be a help or a hindrance?
• Microsoft quarterly financial results show continued growth for LinkedIn
• Should we stop Liking before we comment?
• How can you accurately measure the impact of Dwell time (posts)
• Finding your old posts
• New types of links for image, video and template posts

This article is a summary of my latest Linkedinformed podcast which you can listen to below

Profiles

An update from the last edition of LinkedInformed where I reported that Richard van der Blom had recently posted that headlines were no longer indexed by the search algorithm. At the time I found some evidence that keywords only found in headlines were still appearing prominently in search results but I also wanted to test this out so I got the headline on this profile changed to just one unique word 'kadinx'. I searched for the keywords every few days and eventually the profile appeared after a week.

It's interesting that the search algorithm takes a full week to index, I would have expected it to be much quicker than that but it does confirm that it is still the best advice to optimise your headline with important keywords.

A New 'About this profile' section has been announced in an attempt to help us spot fake profiles.

As you can see this is found in the more menu on profiles and shows us when someone joined LinkedIn and when they last updated their profile plus whether their work email and tel number have been verified. This is potentially good news but only potentially! So far the examples I have seen are only for first tier connections where the feature is obviously less useful, in addition, this only applies to US profiles at the moment apparently due to privacy laws elsewhere. Hopefully other countries will soon be added but it does strike me that people who create fake profiles can easily create their profiles in countries that have privacy laws that prevent LinkedIn from showing this information by simply using any basic vpn tool. I guess the solution to that would be for LinkedIn to insert a standard line 'We are unable to show this information from profiles created in this country' - that potentially penalises other users from that country...but I guess that's the cost of being obsessed with privacy!

Whilst I applaud this initiative, I still think that the most impactful change they should make is to make it impossible to add an employer to your profile without having a verified email address from that company, or in circumstances where that wasn't possible, a manual verification from a company page admin. LinkedIn still refuse to do this and have never (in the 10 years I've been calling for it) given a plausible explanation as to why this can't happen.

In some respects this feature does help in that it shows (not some countries) that the email has been verified (a feature that thus far only been applicable to the My Company tab in company pages) but this feels to me like LinkedIn are putting the emphasis on us to spot fake profiles, rather than making it harder to create them in the first place!

In the same article LinkedIn also announced that they have launched a deep learning model to better catch profiles made with AI-based synthetic image generation technology. These tools create completely unique headshots by 'blending' multiple real images which can occasionally lead to headshots which show discrepancies such as earrings that don't match etc. The problem is that many of these headshots are totally convincing so I'm not sure if this new initiative will be completely effective but at least it's another step towards catching more.

They are also implementing new warnings in direct messages (I assume DM's not InMails) as seen here;

Again this could be good but I'm a little concerned about it's efficacy. Merely suggesting moving the conversation off LinkedIn appears to be a red flag, or perhaps that, plus the subject of a well known scam/spammy topic? Either way, it does seem a bit tenuous and could lead to a wrong conclusion. I'm no fan of cold messages like this but it does feel a bit harsh to penalise the sender in this way, I'm assuming a few 'reports' and the sender will be in deep trouble with LinkedIn!

Microsoft Results

• LinkedIn revenue increased by 17%, this time last year it was a 42% increase so growth is definitely slowing down but this result was described as 'better than expected' largely driven by Talent Solutions but hit by poor ad revenues. I know you always expect % increase to drop as revenue grows but 42 down to 17 seems more extreme than I would expect. Microsoft don't release actual revenue numbers for LinkedIn, so it's hard to be accurate. Revenue growth is however expected to drop to single digit levels over the next quarter.
• Membership number now exceed 875 million
• Session grew by 24% with 'record engagement' but still no explanation of what counts as engagement.
• There are now more than 150 million subscriptions to newsletters on LinkedIn, up 4X year over year. Is this an indication of saturation? I wonder how many articles are published in those 150m newsletters per month and what % of those are actually read?
• There was a reduction in advertising spend in the last quarter.

You can read the transcript of the full earnings call here if you wish.

Comment rather than Like has always been good advice in my opinion but this post from Richard van der Blom goes further.

This is potentially interesting because it has become a habit amongst many to like and then comment later, perhaps when time allows but we know from Richards previous research that comments are 4x more powerful than Likes (or any reactions) in terms of the visibility of the post.

Now as I have explained before, we do have to be careful making conclusions from limited research. Richards research is extensive and must take forever to do but it's always going to be limited in comparison to the whole network and potentially deliver different results from your network of followers. That said, evidence such as this is really useful because, even if it isn't true for your network, it still makes sense to comment before reacting...just in case.

My advice now is to comment if you can and if you can't then Like or react but I'm not sure there is any point in doing both.

Another useful titbit in this post is that followers are treated the same (with regards to post visibility) as connections but only if you have Creator mode enabled. This one intuitively feels right to me given that creators have to have the follow option as primary on their profile.

Another titbit I'm less convinced about is that dwell time is apparently now only as important in text only posts and has diminished in all other types of posts. Intuitively this makes no sense to me, especially as one of the key motivators for dwell time in the first place was downgrade quick likes and especially on image posts (double tap). I'm really puzzled about how any research could establish this result - how on earth can you accurately assess the impact of dwell time, especially as there are so many other variables at play?

Finding your old posts

I'm often asked about this and if you don't use a product like Shield then it can be a painful process scrolling through loads of your posts, especially if the post was months ago! On that point, if you repost too much you will find this scrolling is 10x worse...a growing habit with the new repost option is to do it liberally - not a clever idea as it counts as your post and will show in your posts history (and alert those that set notifications for your posts).

The best way to find your content is to do the following;

• Select the search bar at the top and hot return (search on mobile)
• Now select 'posts'

• Now select 'posted by' and 'me'
• This will bring up your posts in order of Top match (whatever that is!) but you can now add keywords into the top search bar.

• In addition, if you recall mentioning a person or company in your post, you can filter by that in the 'all filters section'

There are limitations in that I haven't been able to find posts from over a year ago but that might be different for people who don't post as much.

So there you go, a much easier way than scrolling for hours! It's worth noting that you can also do this for any person or company on LinkedIn by selecting one of the 'from' filters;

New 'In image' links have been added to the mobile app. As well as adding a url to an image, template or video post on mobile, you can now add a person or company tag.

You have always been able to tag people in image posts but it definitely looks more prominent to use this method if you are posting from mobile. You can see the difference below on this post plus what a company tag looks like.

I just hope it's not too long before this is brought to the desktop version.

Skills

Traditionally this has been my least favourite feature on LinkedIn. Only useful to jobseekers and even then I would criticise Recruiters who gave skills and endorsements any credence!

But a recent speech by LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky made me think it might be worth a further look at skills, I've always felt that LinkedIn must have a long term plan for this feature and maybe one day they might improve...so have they?

Quick summary - Yes, a lot! Still only applicable to Jobseekers but now they are potentially really useful to Recruiters (and therefore jobseekers as well).

I go into more detail in the podcast but as an overview

• Selecting people based on education, background and job title is outdated and ineffective. Primary selection should be skills based. Whilst it's hard to disagree, I would add that personality and character are at least as important, if not more
• Traditionally skills have been a self selected qualification and endorsed in an insincere manner (who really thinks before they endorse).
• Skill assessments were previously very limited but have developed significantly.
• We now have a 'demonstrate skills' option.

• This includes two sections - Transferable and assessments

• Demonstrating transferable involves typing or recording a video to explain your skills in one of the suggested areas. This is then used in any future application to an applicable job. It is not shown in your profile, only in job applications when you chose to include it. Nice feature and gives more 'meat on the bone' to anyone considering your application.
• Assessments cover many topics, many software related and technical. You are given 15 questions to answer and each question has a time limit. If you don't pass you can redo the test and if you score in the top 30% you get a badge to show on your profile. The tests that I viewed seemed reasonably thorough but I'm no expert in those subjects. If you are and you have done an assessment, let me know your thoughts.
• The clever thing about this from LinkedIn's perspective is that it makes it pretty essential that any job seeker, anywhere in the world needs to have a LinkedIn profile and where possible, adds skills and takes assessments. Otherwise they are putting themselves at a huge disadvantage to others.

Skills are clearly here to stay and are likely to become more and more important to Recruiters and jobseekers. I'm excited to see what happens next!

Post of The Week

I had some great nominations but it's impossible to ignore the winner this week, you've probably seen it because it really went viral and has also been copied by many others.

This is an example of what I refer to as 'cool content'. It doesn't say much about you or your company, nor does it build a meaningful relationship with your audience but you saw it, thought it was cool and want to share it with your network...the chances are that some of your followers will feel the same way about it and they will appreciate you bringing it to their attention.

It's best not to dominate your content this these sort of posts (unless you are solely driven by getting high impressions) but the occasional one can only be a good thing.

As mentioned, this has been plagiarised by many since but I'm pretty sure Sasa Spasic was the original one to post it on LinkedIn. Note how he has taken the time to credit the original Instagram source which is good practice and better than those that have seen his post, gone to instagram or YouTube, downloaded the video and effectively copied his post. Yes Sasa has effectively copied it himself but from a different platform and before anyone else did and that makes it original LinkedIn content in my book.

That's it for this week. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, why not give it a try? It's completely free with no ads and you can listen to this same content at your leisure and multitask with other activities such as walking the dog, doing the laundry or working out in the gym!

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