LinkedIn Changes & Updates
77 LinkedIn Marketing Tips and Tricks for 2022
Every year LinkedIn changes dramatically and 2021 has been no exception, with massive changes to how our LinkedIn profiles look, a roll out that began in November. But there have been changes and updates all year and this article reflects these. How the 77 Tips work This checklist has been set out in sections that each relate to a separate aspect of the platform. It covers everything you need to know to make LinkedIn work for you – whether that’s becoming known in your industry; developing as a thought leader in your business; generating leads for your company; widening your network of peers, colleagues and leaders; or enhancing your profile to boost your chances of being spotted when a potential client is searching for someone with your skills. Here are the topics covered: 5 Important Changes to LinkedIn in 2021 Profiles Company pages Publishing Engaging Connecting Direct messaging 5 Important Changes to LinkedIn in 2021 Providing Services is no longer a section to ignore. The Services section sits in the top section of your profile, making it highly visible. From here you can add a short About section, list your services, request and display client reviews and send and receive requests for proposals. It also has an impact on how easily you can be found in searches. Choose wisely about turning on Content Creator The upsides of switching on this function are that your Activity section shows 6 of your most recently published posts, and your follower number and nominated hashtags display in your Intro section. The downsides are that your follower number displays in the intro and that your Connect button changes to Follow. It has been reported that any improved visibility of your posts – the intent of this new feature – takes two months. Understand the latest profile changes and implement them on your profile. In late 2021, LinkedIn revamped our profiles which changed how a number of sections display and slightly reorders them. Update your profile to take these into account. There’s a brief overview of the changes here: https://bit.ly/2YOY0Dc Planning an event? Use LinkedIn’s ever-improving Events feature to promote it. LinkedIn has made Lives available to most company pages which is an excellent place from which to host an event. The event page has its own URL and news feed, you can invite 1000 connections a week whose attendance is added to their Highlights section, and if it’s a Live, the resulting video drops neatly into the Video tab under Posts on the page. Newsletters allow you to send value-added content direct to subscribers’ inboxes. The newsletter function began rolling out in earnest in the 4th quarter of 2021, resulting in a deluge of invites arriving in members’ mailboxes. That unfortunately meant many invites to good ones were turned down simply because of the sheer volume. If you want to produce a newsletter, wait until the flurry has subsided or until they become available on company pages which, we are reliably informed, is not very far away. Company pages have undergone significant change and are more useful than ever. From LinkedIn Lives to product and service pages, LinkedIn company pages are now more valuable to businesses large and small than they have ever been before. If you have not looked at pages in the past 12 months, take another look at what’s available – you will be pleasantly surprised. Personal profiles Update your profile image to include the cover video. LinkedIn now makes it possible to include a short video in the Introduction section to your profile. When someone visits your profile, it plays on mute for 3 seconds. Record this in portrait mode and include captions. Make your profile banner eye-catching and information rich. This adds visual interest to your LinkedIn profile, helping you stand out. When you include a tagline, web address and relevant background image to your cover, it grabs attention. This is valuable and important real estate that is often overlooked. Ensure your profile image doesn’t hide an important part of your profile banner. Profile photos sit at the left of your banner so don’t place critical information where it will be hidden. Cover image words need to be BIG. The dimensions of the cover image change, depending on the device being used so always look at how it will display on both desktop and mobile to ensure the text can be clearly read. The size ratio between profile image and cover image also changes; on mobile the cover image becomes smaller than on desktop. Claim your personal LinkedIn URL. Having a personal URL allows you to use it neatly and tidily in your marketing without a multi-digit suffix. The result is then your version of www.linkedin.com/in/lynnairejohnston rather than www.linkedin.com/in/lynnairejohnston-a9b16343. Update and complete your contact information so people can easily find you. LinkedIn allows you to add a physical/postal address, an email address, your phone number, three websites, your Twitter handle and a range of instant messenger platforms including Skype. Include as many as you have. Write a meaningful, impactful, attention-grabbing headline. This should not be your job title. A good formula is what you do, who for and the benefits they gain. Headlines can be 220 characters long so there’s plenty of space to include any key words that help you to be found in searches. Use all three website listing opportunities offered in the Contact Info section. Even if you have only one website, choose three different pages, list those URLs and describe what visitors will find there. There are 30 characters available for this. If you haven’t checked the websites you have listed for some time, do so to see if they need updating. Display the university you attended. If you have a tertiary qualification from a recognised university or polytechnic, tick the box that asks if you wish to show Education in the top section of your profile. If you don’t have a tertiary qualification but went to a ‘good’ school, add its name. Connect…
Know How This New LinkedIn Algorithm Research Will Work for You
Know How This New LinkedIn Algorithm Research Will Work for You Social selling and LinkedIn expert Richard van der Blom recently published new LinkedIn algorithm research. His findings provide some surprises and some reinforcement of current understanding. This is my take on his research, which can be found at https://bit.ly/32pWfem How post formats are impacted by the new LinkedIn algorithm research For as long as I’ve been publishing on LinkedIn, text-only posts have generally performed best. But according to van der Blom’s research this is not now the case. Document posts (with text), do even better. That’s likely to be because of the algorithm change to rewarding dwell time – which takes into account the time someone spends looking at, reading or watching your post. Now, the new LinkedIn algorithm research shows the performance of posts by format is (from most to least effective): Document posts Text and text/image (I disagree with the image post results, these generally perform badly for me) Native* video (which now includes videos hosted on Vimeo weirdly) Polls Posts with external links Pre-programmed options (eg Celebrate an occasion or Find an expert) YouTube videos Articles (* Video which is uploaded from your computer or phone as opposed to being hosted somewhere like YouTube.) A view on a video post or article equates to six seconds of time on the screen. Using external sites to add bold, italics and funny fonts to your posts can have a negative impact on reach. Videos and the new LinkedIn algorithm research For some time, native video has outperformed video embedded in other platforms such as YouTube. This is still the case unless the video happens to be hosted on Vimeo, where apparently it is treated differently. The takeaway: use native or Vimeo videos in your posts. Views of and engagement on videos are now 20-40 percent higher than they were in 2019. For best results make your videos no longer than 30-40 seconds, in square format and with captions. This last is because half of your viewers will watch your video with the sound off. LinkedIn Live receives very poor engagement levels at just 2.2 percent, much lower than other forms of video. Engagement We’ve long known that comments give better reach than likes (also known as reactions) or shares. The new LinkedIn algorithm research confirms this is still the case with comments returning twice as many views as likes and eight times as many as shares. However, authors of posts need to respond to comments within two hours of their being uploaded for maximum return. And comments that receive likes within 24 hours do better, especially on company pages. All the different like reactions (love, celebrate, curious and insightful) seem to carry the same weight with the algorithm except the recently introduced support, which returns 10 percent more views. Shares are seen by LinkedIn as duplicate content and are penalised accordingly. The way around this is to have the original author comment on the shared post which will return 3-4 times more views as a regular share. However, I cannot see this working. A better solution is to write your own post about the content, referencing the original post, but offering your take on the issue. The golden hour in which a post needs to receive engagement for wider distribution by the algorithm is now extended to two hours. The author of the post needs to engage on comments in the first 24 hours to have the most positive effect. If you do not engage on others’ posts, it has no palpable effect on your own content. Dwell time When LinkedIn changed the algorithm to take account of how long posts were looked at, as opposed to how often, it threw many previously long-held beliefs up into the air. The new LinkedIn algorithm research confirms that the goal is now to hold attention, not just gain it. To that end, when compared with 2019, document posts receive 40-60 percent more views, followed by video (20-40 percent) and external links 15-30 percent. This last seems counter to logic as they take people off the platform but it’s the basis of the comparison that likely makes this possible. Posts with fewer than three lines of text (that trigger the see more button) perform exceedingly poorly. Hashtags For most of 2020, LinkedIn experts have generally agreed that 3-5 hashtags per post are as many as it is possible to use for maximum reach. LinkedIn uses these hashtags as part of the post URL which backs up this view. However, in his new LinkedIn algorithm research van der Blom suggests that 3-9 hashtags per post gain the most reach. It doesn’t matter where in the post these are placed (although convention dictates at the end). Hashtags should have a minimum of 100,000 followers except for a few that might be specific to you such as your company name. Van der Blom says hashtags have the power to become the new communities. I take this to mean that people who follow certain hashtags are more likely to see posts in their feeds carrying the same ones, so they become familiar with these people, but van der Blom may see an even greater future for them than this. Post frequency The number one question I am asked about posting is how often to do it. And on this the research is most interesting. Instead of deciding in advance how frequently to post (eg three times a week), use the response to your posts to guide you and don’t post new content until your current piece receives a drop in engagement. Van der Blom says that only two pieces of content from any one person will be shown in the timeline at once on any given day (check this). More posts reduce visibility. If your second post scores well, your first post will lose 50 percent of views. If it doesn’t, you still lose 20 percent – which is a very good reason to post only…
Long profile headlines now available to everyone!
A 220-character profile headline is now available to everyone on desktop and app.