Welcome to episode 222. I hope you find this episode enjoyable and informative.

LinkedIn have recently announced that their new re-designed groups section will be launched at the end of August It’s taken them over 18 months including much user consultation to get to this point so we are entitled to expect something special.

As of the time of recording, nothing has transpired so I thought it would be timely to create a list of all the things that we, as users want to see and then we can compare it to what we actually get!

More of that later but firstly;

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week.

• LinkedIn have produced a list of ‘Power Profiles of 2018’ but only for India. Why only India?
• LinkedIn to allow researchers to mine data This refers to this article from the LinkedIn Engineering blog

 

LinkedIn Tip

Refine your notifications so that you see what you need.

Many people complain to me that they don’t get notifications on LinkedIn. The reality is that LinkedIn will limit the number of notifications you see because if they give you too many, you will start to ignore all of them!

The best way to ensure they don’t block important notifications is to adjust your settings and switch off notifications for all those irrelevant things that clog up your notifications.

Here’s how you do it;

Step 1

Go to your settings

 

 

Step 2

 

Step 3

 

 

Thanks to Giles Davis for this one.

Over 200,000 views for a video is pretty staggering!

New Groups Wish List

The wait is nearly over…..6 months after they were initially promised, we are being told that the new groups design will be launched within the next few weeks.

LinkedIn very nearly binned groups….I know they seriously considered it but on balance they decided to set up a project team to evaluate what had gone wrong and completely redesign this once popular feature of LinkedIn.

Every possibility was on the table from starting again from scratch to more subtle ‘tweaks’. From what I am hearing the latter is what we are going to get but what that will look like is still a mystery.

So I sat down this week and wrote down my wish list - this is not what I expect but what I want. I also reached out to some trusted friends of the show for their wishes too.

My List

• Each new group should have an initial limit of 1000 members (inc existing groups with less than 1000)
• Group managers can apply to have this limit increased but must show a high % of conversations attracting engagement and a low tolerance for Spam (inc external links with no comments).
• Users are limited to a max of 5 groups each. If a member is seen to be ‘influential’ in one of their groups then this is increased to 10.
• Full integration into the main LinkedIn experience - an item in the main menu.
• Members are automatically removed from a group if they have not visited it for 2 months.
• If you have contributed or chose to follow a group conversation then activity will appear in your main homepage feed (option to mute)
• Managers are allowed to charge for membership (LinkedIn take a 10% cut)
• Video posts allowed and in time, live video.
• Live discussion events - effectively similar to a ‘chat room’ format where a live discussion can take place
• More Facebook group features, namely;
  • Polls
  • Ask for a recommendation
  • ‘Conversation Starter’ type label for highly active members who post engaging conversations.
  • The ability to ‘thumbs down’ as well as Like comments or conversations
  • Events
  • Suggested other groups made very prominent “members of this group are also active in’
• Links can only be posted as a conversation if they are accompanied by at least 3 lines of text.

 

Wishes from others

Vic Williams

• Post to groups directly from the homepage feed
• Tagging of popular subjects and suggesting new members (as in Facebook)

 

Steve Phillip

• Unlimited member to member messaging
• #topics or channels as seen in Slack

 

Charlie Whyman

• Full and clear integration into the main mobile app
• Group management features in the mobile app

 

Greg Cooper

• Group analytics for Managers
• Better information available to potential members such as membership and activity statistics

 

Richard Van Der Blom

• Continuation of Announcement possibility for Group managers
• More tools for Groups managers to moderate and manage the Group
• Better integration between Groups and Individual Pages or Company Pages

 

Giles Davis

Luca Bozzato

• A more user-friendly user interface similar to Facebook
• Visibility of conversations in the feed but only from highly influential group contributors (such as ‘Conversation Starters as mentioned above)
• The ability to follow # topics across all his groups in one place.

 

Angus Grady

• To be able to search for people within the group for job title etc
• Add media to replies and be able to share group posts
• Remove the limit on member to member messages

 

Sandra Long

• the ability to pick your top groups and have them very visible on your main home page.
• Be able to search and sort group members better.

 

So how about you, what features would you like to see?

Drop me a note on LinkedIn or email me at [email protected] or even better, click on the orange button to the right and leave me a voicemail.

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That’s it for this week. If you enjoy the show, feel free to spread the word on LinkedIn and an iTunes review would always be gratefully received!

Until next time….