Welcome to episode 167, this week I’m going to take the opportunity to catch up on questions which have been building up recently as well as discussing the issue of influence and followers vs connections.

But first…..

I had some great feedback from last weeks episode including this message from Kurt Shaver

Plus Leif Carlsen contacted me from Denmark. Leif considers himself to be the ‘Mr LinkedIn’ in Denmark! Leif and his partners run the Social Selling company and even have their own podcast called Social Selling Radio!

The reason Leif contacted me though was regarding #LinkedInLocal. They have been holding similar event every month for the last 3 years which they call Social Friday’s

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• LinkedIn have released a new Sales Navigator course on LinkedIn Learning and it is available for everyone. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learning-linkedin-sales-navigator-2
• Google’s next big feature is to scrape LinkedIn
• Data scraper’s case v. LinkedIn pits free speech against CFAA, DMCA
• Sex technology industry accuses LinkedIn of censorship

LinkedIn have introduced new Search statistics….but are they of any use?

How would you use this stats? Please let me know if you can think of any useful insight from them.

Are you Influential?

I was speaking to someone this week about what makes people influential on LinkedIn, the answer is mostly to do with credibility but there is no doubt that some people get a wider distribution of their posts and this in part, must be effected by what I call the influence equation.

This can be broken down into two separate equations. Firstly the number of actual followers you have as opposed to the number of connections. A follower has chosen to see your content whereas a connection may have connected for different reasons.

What can you do to increase your ‘real’ followers?

• Produce great content on a regular basis but quality beats quantity
• Ask people to follow you. Most users don’t really understand it
• Get active with comments and likes, this increases visibility which will bring you more followers
• Write articles designed to get into pulse channels

The problem with this is that most LinkedIn users simply don’t understand following! Very few people actually follow so this somewhat nullifies the above equation.

There is however a second, more important equation

As an example Kate Lister has 3851 followers and 3832 connections, so not many ‘pure’ followers but on average she gets 21,000 views of her posts! that is an influence rating of 5.45.

These figures are heavily influenced by the amount of engagement she achieves with her posts and that is perhaps a more accurate definition of influence

What do you think?

How does 21k compare with your post views and what is your influence rating?

I’m way behind with my questions so I have decided to catch up this week.

The first question is from long term listener Jaz Greer;

I just wanted to check with you about which parts of Linkedin are indexed by Google

I have always held to the headline in the profile is indexed by Google as it is basically set up as an H1 tag in SEO terms and that is the only part of the profile. The rest feature in Linkedin search and not necessarily indexed by Google hence why only the headline shows in the SERPs

Also, I have always been led to believe that Published Posts or now Articles are indexed by Google and can show in search

However in something recently from Viveka Von Rosen, she states Articles are not indexed unless they get into Pulse - am I missing something?

Answer: Oh the dark mysteries of Google!

Here’s my take…..based on experimentation.

The most indexed field is the name, well that’s two fields - first name and surname but Google definitely picks up headlines as well and that is where your keywords should be.

As for articles, there is no doubt that ones in Pulse channels are far more likely to be picked up by Google. I have tried searching for fairly unique phrases in headlines of Articles that are not in channels and had no success unless I state Site: LinkedIn.com in the search.

I’m not sure where Viveka gets her information from but my experience reflects her views.

The next question is from Rob Curley

I’m using sales navigator very efficiently (at least I think I am!) and want to target my key contacts (leads) in a Facebook ad campaign – a technique I first heard you talk about. Of course I can’t see an email address for a lead unless I am connected but fortunately many of my leads are 1^st tier connections. I can use Sales Navigator to quickly filter leads which are 1^st tier connections but this is where I run into problems as I don’t think I it’s possible to export from Sales Navigator?

I can of course export from LinkedIn but I can only export ALL my connections. I think my only option is to manually go through all my exported connections and handpick the ones I’m wanting to target, i.e. those which are leads in Sales Navigator. That would be a rather painful exercise, thought I’d run it by you in case I’ve missed something or you can think of a workaround.

PS – The LinkedIn connections export spits out a sheet with a “Tag” column so I thought I could tag the connections I’m targeting before exporting but of course we can no longer tag in LinkedIn!

Answer: Unfortunately there is no solution in Sales Navigator but I do have a workaround for you.

I don’t know how many leads you have that you wish to download, if a lot, this might be too time consuming

There is a Chrome extension called LinkedBack https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/linkedbacktagsnotes-for-l/khndohpgoadmhacgkoknincgfjiipclh

This works with Sales Navigator and allows you to add tags and notes (duplication I know), the key thing though is that you are able to search for those tags and download them.

This question is from Fabio Alonso

I’ve got a question for job seekers on how to improve their “past experience” fit to a role advertised.

When looking for a job post, I (under a premium account) am able to get a competitive intelligence report automatically.

In the past I’ve managed to include job skills that were required by the position (and which I may have not included before on my profile) and it would point out a better match. Although in this case having only 6 out of 10 desired skills gave me a 5 point scale for skills.

My question is: how to improve the “past experience” score. I haven´t tried to tweak my past experiences to match exactly the same name as the one advertised. Would you think that it would work? Any ideas on how to improve this area (if at all relevant for job seekers)?

Answer: This feature is actually nothing like as important as you might think! The reality is that Recruiters are highly unlikely to take any notice of it!

The skills on a profile are self proclaimed and the experience analysis is probably a crude calculation based on years of experience/industry/role etc compared to other applicants so recruiters are unlikely to be influenced by it.

The way this feature works is that LinkedIn makes a crude assessment of how you compare to other applicants but what the LinkedIn algorithm thinks is actually completely irrelevant, in truth the only assessment of value is the one made by the recruiter!

The truth is that features like this are a bit of a con, the Career account is, in my opinion a waste of money!

That said, this report does give you some insight into how the algorithm is viewing you. This however, will only likely effect which jobs are suggested to you and remember this function only effects the jobs section of LinkedIn whereas the vast majority of jobs are found in the stream (posts) or in groups.

Fabio further replied to this with;

I do not have access to a recruiters platform, but was wondering if LinkedIn created a sort of funnel showcasing to the recruiter/job poster the candidates with more adherence to the posting. Like saying that I had 90% of adherence and another candidate only 80% would put my profile in the “top of the pile”, if I made myself clear…

And, personally, I rarely look at jobs on posts unless it is in my first page. As it would not appear on searches, and going to each group job section is a very manual process, I am not taking advantage of that. Not to mention that the quality of the content advertised in a company page vs post is way different.

What is your input on that?

Answer: Recruiter account holders do not see anything different in terms of the people who respond to their ad’s.

I also can’t speak for all recruiters but I would be shocked if any of them took any notice of how an applicants skills ranked against another.

In terms of where you look for jobs, I would advise checking groups and your home page feed more often as that is where you will find the vast majority of jobs! You can also search posts by keyword or/and hashtags.

The final question is from Tom Compton;

I manage our company page, and for a while now there are a number of ‘false profiles’ attached to our company page. I have contacted LinkedIn a few times but never got any joy, but the last time I tried the other day I did at least receive a response (see below)

The problem with this is that when I clicked on the URL, it asks you to cut and paste the URL of the bogus person. All bar one of them are out of my network so I can’t go on their page to see them so can’t complete the form.

I find it annoying because it distorts our company stats. We are a company of 36 not 48 people and it looks like we are creating fake profiles to make us sound larger than we actually are!

I suggested to LinkedIn that possibly the owner of the company page could verify an employee if they add that company to their profile, or at least have the power to remove a record. Do you have any thoughts on this or a way round it?

Why would anyone have created this profile and attached it to our company, what is the benefit? I can’t figure that one out, but I just don’t like it because if anyone looks through our employees and then sees a list of random profiles I don’t think it reflects well at all

Answer: This is a long standing problem and I’m amazed they haven’t found a solution to it yet!

Verification by a company page admin probably wouldn’t be the solution, it’s fine for smallers co’s but it would be impossible to administer for large employers. That said, I’ve always thought they should insist on all employees having an email domain from that company registered in their profile (not primary) to be able to say they work there….the only downside would be that people would not be able to update their profile until they have actually commenced employment, rather than during a notice period but that would be a small price to pay.

There is no workaround that I’m aware of, it’s only something LinkedIn can sort out and this has been a known problem for many years so I’m not hopeful of a solution anytime soon.

The issue is not just an image problem, it’s also dangerous. I could change my profile tomorrow to say I work as a recruiter for say Google and start approaching candidates (who would be very excited to hear from Google!) about an amazing job that requires them to submit some confidential information that hackers would love to see!

I really think LinkedIn to take action on this ASAP.

That’s it for this week, don’t forget to leave a voicemail or email me with any questions or suggestions, till next time.

Have a great week everyone.

PS New Service. I am now providing one to one coaching sessions. Click ‘Schedule a call’ and arrange a time to speak directly with me.

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