Episode 269: 5 LinkedIn Changes… On-the-Way and Already Here

Bob Woods

Welcome sales marketing and business professionals to making sales social live. Coming to you from the Social Sales Link Virtual Studios. I’m Bob Woods, and joining me is the Co-host of Making Sales Social Live. She is a fellow LinkedIn social selling and AI strategist, consultant, trainer, coach, and just everything extraordinaire, Brynne Tillman. Sup, Brynne.

Brynne Tillman

And Bubby. Yes, hi.

Bob Woods

Yeah, that too, exactly. I can’t say that, But Brynne certainly can.

Intro

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live, as we share LinkedIn and Social Selling Training Strategies and Tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, every week, Making Sales Social Live! This is the recorded version of our weekly Making Sales Social Live Show.

Bob Woods

Sounds good.

Brynne Tillman

Yeah. Let’s get started with today.

Bob Woods

We are going to get straight into it because we got a lot of stuff to talk about today. So if I’ve said this before, I’ve said it quite a few times. If there’s one thing about LinkedIn that’s constant, it’s change. And I know that’s a cliche, but in this case, it really is true. Thing is, when it comes to LinkedIn and change, the company doesn’t always do a good job of communicating them. 

That’s why Brynne and I are here to talk about five changes that are either coming to LinkedIn or have already hit it. So before we get into the changes, I just want to make sure everybody knows all the credit for the content of this in terms of keeping track of the changes goes to a friend of the company and a past guest on our podcast, Kevin D. Turner. He goes by Kevin D. Turner on LinkedIn. He keeps track of these. 

Sometimes he discovers them, other times people are sending him the changes they’re seeing in the wild. So to see the latest, he actually has a hashtag, which we’re actually going to talk about hashtags as well as one of the changes coming. But search the hashtag new LinkedIn feature, and if you want, go ahead and give him a follow and ring his bell on LinkedIn, because it’s definitely worth it. He has all of the changes. He has his pulse, literally his finger, rather, on the pulse on the neck of LinkedIn.

Brynne Tillman

That is true.

Bob Woods

That is very true. So the first one we’re going to talk about, it’s one that has both, Brandon, myself, more than a little upset about because it was a great feature and now it’s almost going away, but not quite. And that is creator mode. And creator mode was great for so many different reasons. And just like certain things with LinkedIn, they give us something and then they take it away. Although they’re not taking quite everything away in this case. Right, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman

Yeah, I mean, creator mode, one of the things that I loved is the way that they positioned your profile. So if you were a creator, your content went to the top. You were also given newsletters and the ability for LinkedIn live. So those abilities are now going to everyone. So everyone is now going to have, whether you’re in creator mode or not, you can have a newsletter, you can have all the audio rooms and all the things that were originally just for creator mode. 

Unfortunately, we don’t have a choice on the positions of our profile, and that was something I really liked. and what that ultimately meant was our content was above our summary. So currently now, if you’re in creator mode, your content is high. If you’re in traditional mode, your about section is high. Now, the about section or the about summary will now be at the top for everyone.

I find that slightly disappointing, because if you’re a content creator, you want to have that up at the top. The question I have, and I don’t know if we know the answer to, is if you’re in creator mode, or it may be a premium mode, I am not sure you can have a call to action hyperlink in the top of the fold of your profile. So I’m hoping that that just gets rolled out too.

Bob Woods

In all the documentation that I’ve seen, either from Kevin or a couple other places myself, I haven’t seen anything about that. So, the one thing that LinkedIn has kind of, sort of corrected about this, though, is that originally, when you used to go into creator mode, the default connection button switched to follow, and you really couldn’t do anything about that. 

Now, as of March 2024, it kind of goes back to the future a little bit, although they’re actually making it easier to find whether or not you are going to have people follow you or connect with you. That main on your profile.

Brynne Tillman

As the default. 

Bob Woods

Yeah, that is the phrase I was looking for. Thank you very much. 

Brynne Tillman

Yeah, we can read each other’s minds.

Bob Woods

As the default. So that’s like, one thing. And then besides what Brynne mentioned, the other thing that they’re actually keeping from creator mode is that, you still will have access, to the analytics that you had with creator mode, too, which I think is important, because they really did roll out some good analytics in terms of who’s following you and just really able to dig in a little deeper into, the types of data that creators would want to know that’s going to be available to everyone now.

Brynne Tillman

Awesome. So what’s the second change that we’re talking about?

Bob Woods

Chatting about, speaking of hashtags? So hashtags. So, they’re going to continue to be available, but Kevin says that they are not recommended or they won’t be. I’m not sure when this is going to happen. This is a coming soon.

Brynne Tillman

They’re no longer recommended in a post, right? 

Bob Woods

Yeah. So they’re not recommended or supported. So Kevin said that it’s rumored that the depreciation of hashtags in other know, they’re not supporting them anymore is based on hashtags interfering with what LinkedIn feels. They can algorithmically say that three times fast deliver for the member. So in other words, hashtag with the algo, they want total control of the algo, which I think is really interesting. 

Mean hashtags, are they, I don’t know where they actually got started. They got popular because of a user move back when Twitter was Twitter, everybody latched onto them. LinkedIn was late to the party on hashtags to start with, and now they’re saying they’re there, but we really don’t care. And I think that’s a mistake personally.

Brynne Tillman

Well, it’s a mistake for the users.

Bob Woods

Yeah. Experience. Yes, exactly.

Brynne Tillman

So what happens is we’re giving up or we’re not giving up. They’re taking back more control over what we see. When you follow a hashtag, you have some control over that, although there is some control with who you engage with and who you message, generally upon topics. If someone followed a hashtag and you used that hashtag, they were more likely to see it. And that’s going.

Bob Woods

So that’s going away and there’s nothing we can do about it because LinkedIn wants control.

Brynne Tillman

What’s number three, Bob?

Bob Woods

Number three is the services provided section.

Brynne Tillman

I’m excited.

Bob Woods

Yeah, this one’s really cool. You can have a box on your profile that lets you highlight the services that you provide, and then people can actually go in, depending on how you have it set up, and actually ask you about the services and even have you develop a proposal, however you want to say it, for their inquiry. So the services provided used to be in a little box up in the top of the fold. They’re now breaking that out into its own box in the profile itself. So it’s much more prominent. 

And there’s also going to be additional features in there for premium members. So if you’re paying for LinkedIn on the business and sales side, you can actually add media to it that will link to external media for you. And it’s just another great way to bring the services that you provide to the forefront, but you have to have a premium to actually take advantage of the additional things. but services provided, we always recommended it before. Now I think it’s essential to have.

Brynne Tillman

Yeah. So I went through, because you could see your history and I had about, in the last however many years it’s been out there, about ten inquiries. I responded, nothing came out of it and I never took it completely seriously. About three weeks ago I got an inquiry and I responded as I always do, and I included my pricing. It’s all transparent. And Thursday, this past week, I had a keynote with Marquis Healthcare. Hi guys, had a wonderful time. 

Who found me through putting in providing services inquiry. So that was my first real fast converting client that didn’t come through a referral or someone that followed our content. She didn’t know who we were. And through providing services and having a conversation, I showed up and I think they really liked it. So the bottom line is it is obviously something that LinkedIn is pushing a little bit more and people are using it. It used to be profinder years ago.

Bob Woods

Yeah. And it used to be a little more formal because it was like separately searchable and everything, almost like in its own, I don’t want to say community, but like sections and things like that to where you could actually search for that.

Brynne Tillman

They kind of depreciated the searchability is coming back for providing services.

Bob Woods

Oh, that’s good. That I did not know. Well, that’s actually good to know. So it sounds like Profinder is probably going to be back in every way except for the actual name of Profinder is what it sounds enhanced.

Brynne Tillman

Yeah, it’s a hybrid of sorts. Yeah. I’m very excited about.

Bob Woods

Yeah. So, it’s very cool. So that’s another reason why to go into your LinkedIn profile, check out services provided, fill that out if you’re a premium member, take advantage of anything and everything that you have coming to you. That is premium. So premium is LinkedIn premium for business as well as any of the sales navigator levels.

Speaker B: Yeah. And by the way, on mine it’s live that if you go into your search, so if you have the free LinkedIn and well, everyone has the free LinkedIn. If you go into the search bar and hit enter. There is a new line item called services and when you click on that, it’ll say connections who offer services. So you’re beginning to there, it is to find people through there.

Bob Woods

Yes, there it is, brand new. So again, LinkedIn changes. We are discovering changes as we are live on the program right now. That is how often and how much LinkedIn just changes things without.

Brynne Tillman

When you click through, the services they offer will be under their name and when you click through, it will go to request services and then discover service providers. Is also now a search there. So yeah, it’s pretty awesome. So take advantage and optimize that. I would say that’s the biggest takeaway from today, is to go in and really optimize providing services. Maybe we’ll do a pop up training.

Bob Woods

That’s a good idea. Yeah, we should definitely do that. We should definitely do that.

Brynne Tillman

Check out socialsaleslink.com events. When we have a pop up training, it’ll be there.

Bob Woods

Yeah, keep checking that. And we’ll also do that on our newsletter. If you subscribe to our newsletter. So number four, this one’s a small one, but I like it because it shows that LinkedIn is actually starting to think a little more towards its members. Even though some of the things that we’ve said kind of sounds like it’s against that. This one is actually good. So this one has to do with, it’s called use camera. 

It’s been added to the profile photo edit. What this does is, and this is different from before. So on mobile and on desktop, you can use whatever camera you have attached to that. So on your mobile, most, vast majority of people have a forward-facing camera on their phone. But you could also do this with your desktop camera as well. You can take your profile photo now directly from your device and just go ahead and upload it directly from there. 

There is no longer any real reason to not have a profile photo up anymore. Obviously, you should make it look professional. Hopefully you’ve got like a neutral background and all of the stuff that we always talk about. But if you’ve got that ten year old photo of you where you look totally different and you’ve cropped your significant number out of significant others out of there.

But you still see their shoulders, like that type of thing. No excuse to have that type of photo up there anymore when you could just plop your butt down in front of your desktop or in front of your mobile and just take a shot and upload it, it’s a small thing, but I think it’s actually really important.

Brynne Tillman

 I love it. I have nothing to add except if you don’t have a photo, there’s no excuse anymore.

Bob Woods

Yeah. Especially because it’s funny, when I do profile makeovers, sometimes people don’t have photos up there. And up until now, every once in a while, I was actually able to take a screen grab of the Zoom and then send it to them. And then they could use that type of thing for their photo. I only did that like a handful of times just because most times you.

Brynne Tillman

Got to do what you got to do.

Bob Woods

You gotta do what you got to do. Exactly. So now you have another way to do what you got to do, essentially.

Brynne Tillman

 I love it. And what’s number five?

Bob Woods

Number five is something that I think, and I hope and I pray is going to get better and better as we go along, because right now it’s not great. But hopefully with Microsoft and OpenAI, because Microsoft is invested in OpenAI, hopefully all of the partners can come together and create something really good out of this. 

But right now, with any premium account, you can write certain elements of LinkedIn. With AI. It kind of stinks right now, but it is there. It is there. So just kind of be aware of it. The three areas that I know about are for your LinkedIn profile headline, for your LinkedIn profile about section. 

Those are the two that I have visibility into. And like I said, it’s not great. and then you can also do this, evidently, with messaging, with certain types of messages. This I haven’t seen yet. This is something that Kevin surfaced. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m not really sure exactly how it works. but those are the three that I know of. Is there something that I’m missing?

Brynne Tillman

Yeah, when you type a post, you can rewrite it as AI. like you could put in ideas in a post and then there’s a little AI button at the bottom that will reword it.

Bob Woods

Oh yeah, that’s right. And I think I tried that once and again.

Brynne Tillman

It wasn’t awful. Just use Chat GPT. And if you want some of our prompts, go to. Right now I think it’s socialsaleslink.com/chatgpt, but they’ll be updated soon. We’ve got some prompts there. they’re preliminary. We’re really working on some good ones. but you can download it, load them in magical getmagical.com, which is, ah, a short code-saver chrome extension. 

But right now we’re recommending Chat GPT over any LinkedIn AI, not sales navigator. Sales navigator has different AI, including some social listening and account iq stuff, which is phenomenal. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about content writing AI, which just isn’t there yet.

Bob Woods

And again, that’s just with premium accounts to start with. So if you have a free account, you won’t even see that. So you should use Chat GPT no matter what in those cases. But if you do have a premium account, it’s not there yet. 

I’m assuming, like I said before, because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, Microsoft owns OpenAI, all of those people will eventually come together at some point and do something really nice. It’s not there yet. Obviously. If you want to play around with it, feel free, do whatever you want to. Just know that, it’s not even 25% baked yet.

Brynne Tillman

Yeah, I haven’t done it one time where I’ve said, “Oh, that’s great.” And I do almost every time with Chat GPT, we get somewhere great. That’s the five newest, updated things. If you guys are finding any new features in the while, let us know. And tag, Kevin D. Turner.

Bob Woods

Kevin D. Turner. And then, and then use hashtag, even though they’re being appreciated, they’re still there. Hashtag new LinkedIn feature all, One word. He will pick up on that. so that we all know, because we are a community, we are social, and we do like to keep up with this stuff. So we would most definitely appreciate. And Kevin gives full credit too. I should have said that earlier. Kevin gives full credit to whomever comes in with these things as well. Kevin’s absolutely.

Brynne Tillman

He’s Amazing.

Bob Woods

Yup. Terrific guy, a true friend of the company. And we would have him as a guest on our podcast. Ah, as often as we.

Brynne Tillman

Let’s do it again.

Bob Woods

Yeah, we should. Absolutely. So thanks again for joining us on making sales social live. If you’re with us here live on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or Slash, Twitter right now, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for our live sessions. If you’re listening to us on our podcast, you should go ahead and subscribe if you haven’t done so already, if you want more info, it’s at socialsaleslink.com/podcast. 

Again, that’s socialsaleslink.com/podcast. We do two shows weekly. We do this one live. And we also have our making sales social interview series where we talk with leaders and experts in sales marketing business and many, many more areas. So when you are out and about this week, any week, and at any time, be sure to make your sales.

Brynne Tillman

Social. Bye, guys.

Bob Woods

Everybody have a great week. Bye bye.

Outro

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