I Love LinkedIn But Bring These Features Back!

Over the years there have been many changes to www.linkedin.com with new features appearing and others disappearing and just recently LinkedIn launched a whole new design for the desktop version. As a frequent user of LinkedIn and publisher of content, it’s very important for me to know exactly how I can best use the platform to share my content and engage with my target audience. Similarly in order to track the effect of my efforts on my personal as well as my corporate brand I am also dependent on LinkedIn making some benchmark tools available for me to see if I’m moving anywhere. I love LinkedIn for all the opportunities the network has provided me with, however, with all the changes in recent years sharing, engaging and benchmarking is, unfortunately, becoming increasingly difficult. I, therefore, wanted to use my 2017 Q1 quarterly update to discuss what features it would be great if LinkedIn could bring back and I’ll share a few ideas on which of the current features you can have them replace.

Bring these 4 features back

So which are the features LinkedIn should bring back and why? Similarly what principles should LinkedIn abide by?

• Notify my connections and followers when I publish content: This is one that has sent many active bloggers to other sites as LinkedIn took away the notification you received when one of your connections published an article. In fact, your followers never received such a notification despite them actually actively subscribing to your content. All of this seriously limits the reach of one's content and has led to dismal views for many writers. I do two things to try and compensate for this: 1) I’ve downloaded the LinkedIn Pulse App which will actually notify me whenever someone in my network publishes an article and 2) I share my content like crazy on my news feed (sorry for that!). It’s definitely not the same as it used to be where content could easily get to 100 views for notifying one's network alone.
• Allow me to see who shared my content: Having someone share your content is fantastic and humbling but with the latest change to the user interface it’s no longer possible to see who shared your content. That means two things: 1) you lose a chance to engage with your audience and 2) you lose a chance to activate your content once more when liking or commenting on the share.
• When you send me a notification I should be able to see what has happened: Too often on the new interface you would receive a notification but you can’t actually see why. The notification could be related to someone liking your content shared in a group or someone wanting to join your group (if you own a LinkedIn Group). There are even some notifications you can see on your mobile but not on the desktop version (it used to be the other way around). So please stop sending these notifications (actually please don’t) or start showing me why I get a notification.
• Notify me when something happens in a group discussion I participate in: You used to be able to subscribe to a group discussion to ensure you would be notified when someone else commented on the thread. Now you only see this if you started the thread. Since you can unsubscribe to any discussion why not allow people to subscribe in the first place? Then you don’t have to go back into the group all the time to check if someone commented.

If you can do this for me LinkedIn you’re more than welcome to stop notifications for people’s birthdays or sending me 10+ notifications to tell me how many people viewed my shares. All of this is useless so take that away and the overall number of notifications will stay the same. I get that you’re trying to clean up people’s news feed but sometimes you forget the power you’ve already given to your users. Anyone can unfollow someone whom they feel are spamming them (in happens to me once in a while). Anyone can hide a particular update or discussion they don’t want any more notifications on. You’ve already given your users all the power they need so there’s really no need to babysit them like this.

Enough with the complaints, doom, and gloom

Despite all of the frustrations caused by useful features being disabled or receiving a ton of useless notifications, this quarter has like most of the previous ones given me plenty of reasons to continue to love LinkedIn. I’ll share one example with you before I share the stats for Q1 2017. I recently announced a job change (albeit within my company) and posted it on LinkedIn. You know what it has to date been showing up in other people’s newsfeed more than 55,000 times!

That’s essentially like putting an ad in a mid-sized newspaper or having it featured on a busy website. That kind of promotion is worth 1,000s of dollars and on LinkedIn, you get it for free. Btw I posted the update in my native language (Danish) as well and to date, it has 13,000+ showings. That’s almost 70,000 in total! Putting aside the visibility this give in your network the update landed me 40-50 new connections and some 500-600 profile views. So going back to the basics of what LinkedIn was founded on it indeed still works!

Another record quarter

In Q4 2016 I posted a new record for views in a quarter despite not being featured a single time on Pulse. That changed a bit in the start of 2017 with two new features and the first in roughly a year but even without these it still turned out to be another record-setting quarter with 24,377 views. This was 31% above the previous record. Now, who wouldn’t want a blog with 270 views/day? Further to that, I grew my follower count with 30% split almost evenly between new connections and new followers so that it now stands at 3,800. It was also a good quarter for my LinkedIn Group “Finance Business Partner Forum” which grew more than 70% vs. the previous quarter to 674 members. You can see all the stats I track below and they are certainly causing further encouragement. In the coming quarter, I will focus my writing on the career path of finance professionals which is changing as the finance function is changing. I hope you will join this discussion and keep engaging. I know I will!

Last but not least I want to thank all of you for following and reading. Without you, it wouldn’t be worth much! Until next time and oh please do like, comment and share as usual! That’s always appreciated! For previous quarterly updates and other posts on personal branding feel free to continue reading below or click here to follow me on Twitter.

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Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Senior Finance Business Partner for Maersk Line Europe Region and is working with the transformation of Finance and business on a daily basis. I have participated in several transformation processes among others helping Maersk Drilling to go Beyond Budgeting and transformed a finance team from Bean-counters to Business Partners. I would love the chance to collaborate with you on your own transformation processes to help you stay out of disruption. If you are looking for more advice on how to get the most of LinkedIn I also have a few tips to share as well as if you want help in your job search. Don’t be shy! Let’s get in touch and start helping each other.