125. Hashtags are back…..sort of!

Welcome to episode 125, I’m back from an amazing holiday in Italy and the English Cotswolds so plenty to catch up on this week……

Whilst away my Linkedin messages built up and it occurred to me that LinkedIn could really do with an ‘out of office’ auto reply feature similar to that which you get with emails. LinkedIn is unique in that being work related, people are less likely to login whilst they are on holiday.

LinkedIn are renown for copying features from other social media sites but on this one I would like to see them innovate.

What do you think?

Autopilot

Due to a string of problems I have stopped using Autopilot for LinkedIn and can no longer recommend it. I still believe in the idea of auto viewing though and I am looking into a couple of alternatives.

I will keep you informed.

The data scraping bots issue

LinkedIn sues 100 individuals for scraping user data from the site

LinkedIn suffers huge bot attack that steals members’ personal data

LinkedIn are saying very little about this but the lawsuit they have filed suggests they are trying to discover the names of people who have created false accounts and used sophisticated bots to circumnavigate LinkedIn’s security to obtain information that is being sold on. I suspect this might be email addresses or possibly full profiles for out of network members.

It could be that some extensions or 3rd party products are involved (although none have been mentioned anywhere), I noticed that the email finder extension Prophet have revamped their terms of use - coincidence?

LinkedIn Quietly Publish 2nd Qtr results

These results were released with little fuss and no earnings call, I assume because of the proposed Microsoft takeover. After all investors really don’t care how well they are doing now that a price has been agreed!

I still care though as the quarterly results are one of the best ways of finding out what is going on at Linkedin.

Highlights

• Members grow to 450m
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• Unique visitors plateau at 106m
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• Revenue $933 (31% yoy growth)
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• Revenue split was 64% Talent solutions, 19% marketing, 16% premium (Mostly Sales Navigator)
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• No word on member growth in China but given the slow down of overall member growth I assume it’s not that impressive.
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• 59% of LinkedIn traffic is via mobile

Links;

The financials spreadsheet

2nd quarter announcement

The Welcome Return of the Hashtag

A few years ago LinkedIn had a wonderful feature called LinkedIn Signal. It was a very popular tool that allowed you to search for status updates via keywords and is still greatly missed.

The good news is that we can now search status updates again via hashtag searches.

This is important for two reasons;

2. You can use hashtag searches for research purposes to find people that are posting content about subjects that are important to you. This is a great way to find information and new contacts to expand your network.
3. 
   
5. Your updates have a greater chance of being found if you remember to use a hashtag.

It’s not as good as Signal was but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

The only downside is that the hashtag only becomes active (a tappable link that creates a search) on the mobile app.

This may just be a feature they are testing so it might disappear or it might be rolled out to desktop soon as well….let’s hope so!

In the meantime I would advise adding hashtags (just a couple) to every status update you post.

LinkedIn Influencer Videos

A big fuss was made about this while I was away…personally I think it’s rubbish!

So someone from LinkedIn sends out a question to a select list of Influencers who (via a specific new app) post a short 30 second reply….whoopdeedoo!

Don’t get me wrong, this could be a positive move if LinkedIn A) roll it out to all members and B) allow people to post what they want (rather than answer a stupid questions such as the shown one below)

What’s the first thing you do every morning to prepare for the day?

Mentioned in this episode:

This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.