With hundreds of social media platforms already existing and new ”“ and sometimes exciting ”“ ones appearing seemingly on a daily basis, my favorite is still LinkedIn.
In the six years I”™ve been a LinkedIn member, I”™ve met many people, become friends with some of them and done a significant amount of business. Not surprisingly, I”™ve only met a handful of my 20,000-plus first-level connections in person. Yet, despite my long term and regular usage, I am increasingly puzzled by LinkedIn”™s ability to continually shoot itself in the foot and needlessly upset many of its members.
Customer support ”“ or nonsupport ”“ is critical to the success of most companies, and LinkedIn has somehow managed to grow despite incredibly poor support that has infuriated many of its users. For more than a year, I”™ve been unable to accept more than 60 percent of my invitations. I also can”™t delete a contact or export contacts, the latter being a significant problem since this function would double as a backup and a way of importing people into my CRM (contact management) system. (In general, it”™s a good idea to regularly export your LinkedIn data to your hard drive for backup purposes.)
When technical support deigns to respond to my problem ticket ”“ a rare occurrence ”“ their response is that I have a known and common problem they are working on. After over a year of working on this common problem, you would hope they would fix it.
Some of their recent design decisions that affect all LinkedIn users are also disconcerting. The removal of the global question-and-answer feature was a major blow to the idea of being able to easily reach out to people. It was a feature that many people, myself included, used to meet new people and start great conversations. I”™ve asked several LinkedIn experts about this removal and every one of them is dismayed and puzzled by LinkedIn”™s decision.
Since this decision follows another lamentable decision by LinkedIn to remove LinkedIn events, my guess is that LinkedIn is attempting to force its users down specific networking paths that unfortunately make the service less unique. The saving grace is that these paths can be quite powerful. One of my favorite features is the ability to follow people or have people follow you. Members with a lot of followers ”“ usually as a result of great content ”“ can enhance their expert credentials and more importantly, drive potential business to their website and facilitate meaningful conversations both within and outside of LinkedIn.
Not all of LinkedIn”™s recent modifications are worthwhile despite LinkedIn”™s promotional intents. The worst addition is endorsements. I currently have 173 endorsements in just social media marketing alone, mostly from people who I don”™t know and who don”™t know me. This makes these endorsements worthless, and since they have so little value, having them in common with another person is also fairly useless. Endorsements are also prone to spam which further reduces their value. If I want to contact a person, I will briefly review their profile before I send them a message or respond to their message.
Recommendations, however, are still very important. You should have at least nine quality recommendations that articulate your expertise and knowledge. This greatly enhances your status as an industry expert. You should also have no more than 50 recommendations because that often indicates spamming. When people look at your profile, they often examine both the number and quality of your references. If they are really impressed, they might follow you or even tag you in their connections for future conversations. This is where LinkedIn”™s improved ability to add your content can be really effective.
One recent feature is the ability to incorporate video into different parts of your profile. This takes advantage of the rapid growth of video and provides another way of differentiating yourself from competitors. If you decide to use videos, make sure they do not exceed 30 seconds ”“ the shorter the better. People online don”™t have much patience.
Fortunately, the golden goose that is LinkedIn still retains its core strength ”“ to provide a social platform to meet people, have interesting and often insightful discussions and be able to generate business. It”™s still sufficiently versatile, interconnected and most importantly, regularly utilized by many interested and high-quality members to offer great value when used properly.
Bruce Newman is the president of wwWebevents.com, a division of The Productivity Institute L.L.C. in Carmel. He is a social media guru and a specialist on webinar creation and promotion. He can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.
