Here’s a confession: for a while there, I was really bored with LinkedIn. It hadn’t really evolved much since the launch; most people seemed to be sticking a glorified CV up and leaving it, apart from the dedicated Group spammers which we’ve written about before.

Most importantly, compared to the other big social media sites, the opportunities for “natural” exposure to a wider audience were really limited.

Getting seen without shouting

By natural exposure, I mean the ability to come to the attention of your contacts’ wider network without sending the equivalent of a cold calling email. That works for some, but many people are uncomfortable with being on either end of it, and it’s artificial compared to, say, your content being shared on Facebook.

LinkedIn should be a goldmine

That said, LinkedIn is the single biggest gathering of professionals on the planet. Over 187 million members, of which in the UK, almost 60% are management level or above. They just needed to learn some lessons from the other social networks to really liberate the potential of that gathering – and I think that’s what we’re now starting to see.

A LinkedIn revolution

Over the last few months, LinkedIn have introduced a handful of new features which are nothing short of a revolution in how effective the site will be. The opportunities for exposure, and the value provided by LinkedIn, is now really exciting. If you’ve not checked it out lately, here’s a rundown of the features which have made the difference.

1) Re-vamped Company pages

LinkedIn’s Company pages used to be minimal, to say the least. Now, they’ve got a new look, the opportunity to include richer content especially around your products and services, and improved analytics. It’s been possible to send out status updates from a Company for a while, but they’re being used more and more, supporting a Company-specific audience of followers.

For our Wish List, it would be great if there was some way to integrate Company and personal audiences. For example, if everyone in an individual’s network could opt in or out of receiving their employers’ updates as well as their own. That would remove the challenge of building a separate Company audience, and would be great for smaller businesses. But for now, and certainly for larger organisations, the additional functionality is a great start.

New Personal profiles are coming soon, too, with a lot less emphasis on the CV and a lot more emphasis on social connection. You can see a preview, and register for the new format here.

2) Interactive Home pages

Your personal Home page now has a Facebook-style activity ticker, highlighting what other people in your network have been doing on LinkedIn – including when they’ve commented on articles posted by others. You can also add your own comments to those discussions directly from the home page, for the first time  allowing you to converse easily with your network.

Quick tip – We all have people in our networks who overshare, and can’t let a moment go by without posting yet another link, or whose area of expertise you’re just not that interested in. You can tailor what you see on your Homepage simply by hovering over one of the offending articles and clicking “hide”, and Shazam! you’ll not see any other posts by that person.

3) LinkedIn Today

Another huge change is the launch of LinkedIn Today. This is a combination of two areas: a more traditional publishing model with content  from “Thought Leaders” – experts in their field who’ve been selected by LinkedIn’s publishing team – and community generated content. It’s still evolving as more people get active, but has clear potential to become a real go-to source for any given industry. You can fine-tune the topics which are presented to you, as well as keeping up with the business “big guns” like Harvard Business Review and the Economist.

From a marketing and visibility perspective, both of these are big news. A handful of our professional services clients are eminent enough in their field to have applied for Thought Leader status. As well as the enhanced profile, this allows individuals to build up a Twitter-like “Follower” audience, but without connecting at the network level.

For everyone else, the community-driven content is a massive opportunity. It’s selected according to a number of factors, but mainly by the level of activity surrounding posted content. So if you post up a link to free materials, a blog post, a webinar invite or anything else on LinkedIn and it’s widely shared over a short period of time, it’s very likely to be featured on LinkedIn Today. That means huge exposure to everyone interested in your industry sector.

There’s also a section for articles trending in your network, so you can easily see what’s interesting and engaging to your contacts.

And this adds up to…

The way that both the home page activity feed, and the LinkedIn Today sections in particular are working, is much greater than the sum of their parts. It’s starting to liberate the real power of individual’s Networks. It also enables  industry-based conversations of a much higher quality than are found in many LinkedIn Groups – because content is filtered by activity level, all those spammy “look at me!” posts which nobody’s interested in, automatically drop out of sight.

As a result, we’ve seen a huge increase in relevant activity for both our own profile and our clients’: a big increase in opportunities to interact, leading to greatly increased profile views and responses to posted contant. These recent changes amount to a massive shift in the utility of LinkedIn for B2B marketing.

So if you’ve not reviewed your LinkedIn presence for a while, or aren’t using the new features to benefit your business, we’d recommend that you spend some quality time with it – or get some training to help you.

Is there something funny going on with LinkedIn?

It’s been niggling me for a while that I seem to get inconsistent results within LinkedIn when viewing others’ personal profiles. Sometimes, everything seems to be available; but other times I’ll be in the middle of a process and suddenly be denied access.

I’ve only just gotten around to checking this out and now have proof – LinkedIn appears to be opportunistically demanding that you pay for something which is actually freely available, if you know how.

Profile viewing restrictions on LinkedIn

I’m pretty sure that it used to be the case, that not all profiles were available in full to every LinkedIn user. If you wanted to check out someone who was more than one step removed from your network (third level connection or no connection at all) then most of the profile was hidden.

Initially I think this was to encourage people to connect widely – the theory being that the more connections you have, the higher the chance of any particular individual being in your second level network. That certainly seems to have worked, and is one of the main reasons given by the LION (“LinkedIn Open Networker”) brigade for connecting with all comers.

Latterly, the restriction was linked to the Premium account option; if you were paying for a monthly LinkedIn subscription, you got a higher level of access.

…or no profile viewing restrictions

Recently though, I’ve noticed that on some occasions I’m able to view full profiles even for people who aren’t connected to me in any way, and yet sometimes I still get the annoying “upgrade to premium” prompt.

So I decided to test it out with someone who’s (unfortunately for me) definitely not a close contact: David Cameron.

And sure enough, under two different circumstances I get completely different results.

Here’s me being denied access, on the grounds that the PM is only a third level contact and therefore I absolutely must pay LinkedIn money to view his profile:

and here’s me, logged into exactly the same account, being able to view the whole thing:

Note it still confirms that he’s a 3rd level contact, so nothing’s changed there.

What makes the difference?

In this case, the page I was on BEFORE I clicked onto Mr Cameron’s profile. In the first screenshot, I’d done a simple Google search for “David Cameron LinkedIn”. In the second, I’d searched from within LinkedIn itself, using the People Search function.

Strange, and not obvious why this is happening – the conspiracy theorists might like to assume that LinkedIn thinks those coming in from Google are more susceptible to being tapped for an upgrade, but it could be a genuine mistake by LinkedIn or some other technical glitch. However, I can confirm that it works consistently – searching from within LinkedIn allowed me to see full profiles of a number of other people which had been hidden when coming in via Google.

As a quick extra tip, LinkedIn’s internal search seems to be much better at producing a colossal list of like-named people who you *aren’t* interested in, so searching via Google and then using the information you can see on the top part of the profile, really helps. For example, the exact spelling and format of their employer’s name, which you can then enter into the appropriate additional criteria boxes on the left side of the search results page.

Mystery solved – and one more reason to connect indescriminately on LinkedIn shot down, too!

This week, we’ve been attending Social Media Week London – a fantastic biannual week of free events and seminars on all things social media and online marketing related. One of the sessions was themed “Using LinkedIn to drive B2B community, collaboration and sales” and included no less than LinkedIn’s Director of Marketing for EMEA, Henry Clifford-Jones.

The session was excellent and went into considerable detail about the way global brands like Phillips go about building LinkedIn groups of 50+ thousand members.

Along the way a couple of incredibly powerful features were mentioned which we hadn’t been aware existed, and a quick straw poll of our fellow social media professionals showed most of them hadn’t either!

Search the whole LinkedIn datastream

So, did you know that it’s possible to search the whole of LinkedIn – all the public Group and Update content – for conversations around keywords which are relevant to your business? And not only that, you can also refine the search results by geography, industry, job seniority and more?

This is SO powerful for finding influencers, relevant groups and hot topics for your business…and yet it’s hardly known about by most.

The “Signal” function

Here’s how to do it.

Log in to your LinkedIn account, and under the “News” heading in the main menu bar, you need to choose the option “Signal” from the drop down, so:

That will give you a feed of everything that’s being published, content wise, from people in your personal network – quite useful in itself, as it effectively allows you to apply search filters and keywords to your home feed.

The real power is in the filters on the left hand side, though. There’s a set of filters under the heading “Network”, which by default are set to restrict results to your own updates and those of your immediate contacts.

By unchecking those options, you are able to search through everything happening on LinkedIn.

Now…choose your target

And there’s more!

If you scroll down a little further, in the same left hand section you’ll  find a complete set of filters which allows you to select the contributors of the content by a vast range of attributes.

Some of these are the same selection functions available when setting up a targeted LinkedIn ad, so can be used to pick out very precise combinations of location and industry, but there are more, too.

Which groups are talking about my key topics?

You can filter by how recently the content was published, and even more interesting, LinkedIn suggests a number of groups and “hot topic” hashtags you may want to search within – which basically means, it’s showing you which groups contain conversations about your keywords.

This is great because, although you can search through groups by keyword, in popular areas you may get tens or even hundreds of groups which aren’t very active.

Using the Signal search is a much faster way of locating groups which are active and actually discussing the topic you’re interested in participating in.

Let LinkedIn do the hard work for you

A quick example of how valuable this can be. Let’s imagine we’re developing a campaign on behalf of a cleantech startup. They want to raise their profile with relevant industry leaders, and become known as a knowledgeable resource for their peers. Putting “cleantech” into the search box, and clearing all the other filters, gives the results shown on the right in the “Group” section.

Note, many of these groups wouldn’t have shown up under a basic search for “cleantech” – some smart thinking out of the box would be needed, and a lot of hit and miss searching, to find them.

Having identified those groups, we can take a look at the specific content within each, see who the active influencers are in each, and include that data in our campaign planning.

Building your campaign

Here are a couple of stand-out statistics from the session. LinkedIn reached 150 million members last week, of an estimated 640 million professionals worldwide.

Of the most senior folk, 15% log in to LinkedIn at least daily.  So for B2B companies who want to connect with influencers, positively influence industry perceptions of their products and services, and increase their influence during the research phase of those long and complex sales processes, a well executed LinkedIn campaign offers fantastic possibilities.

If you’d like some help developing yours, give us a call!