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Why LinkedIn is driving me crazy

making the most of LinkedIn, maximizing LinkedIn, using LinkedIn to get a job, LinkedIn frustrations, LinkedIn challlenges,
I love LinkedIn. I do. But lately, my favorite business social medium is ticking me off.

Here are five reasons why. 


Do you agree? What's bugging you / impressing you lately about the world's largest professional network? Share your thoughts!


1) LinkedIn rolls out features to only some people at a time (sometimes for a very long time). For example, most people don't have the rich media feature that would let them post videos, documents, presentations, and portfolios to their profile in a viewable format. That's unfair. This image shows you the box with plus sign image that must appear on your profile for you to be able to post rich media.

If your Edit Profile page displays the box with plus sign image in your Summary, Experience and Education sections, you can add clickable rich media like presentations, documents, videos, and online portfolios like shown here ...


LinkedIn, work samples on your LinkedIn profile, adding work samples to your LinkedIn profile,
... but if the box with plus sign doesn't appear on your profile, too bad! You don't have that option. 
2) The new combined search box is frustrating. Search results aren't as robust as they used to be when you could search by separate categories.


LinkedIn search, using the LinkedIn search box, LinkedIn combined search,
The combined search feature is frustrating and the results are often not what I had hoped to see.


3) LinkedIn's "simpler" navigation bar (which went from 9 options to 5), makes it nearly impossible to find things like ...
a) The Groups Directory (I teach LinkedIn and I still haven't found it), 
b) Recommendations -- To find the Recommendations page, type 


LinkedIn, LinkedIn navigation bar, navigating on LinkedIn,
The new navigation bar may be better for LinkedIn's mobile app but it makes finding things like the Groups Directory, Recommendations and Signal (aka Updates) more difficult to find.

4) The Connections page is unnecessarily complex. Why the system is set by default to show you the people you had your most recent conversations with rather than an alphabetical listing is beyond me. Imagine if you phone book was organized that way!

5) LinkedIn keeps rolling out features so fast and so flawed ... and with so little guidance ... that even ardent fans like me are sick of trying to figure the changes out. I'm now hesitant to write or teach about new LinkedIn features because ...

a) others may not have the same options,
b) the features don't work properly,
c) the feature will change again ... and again (making my post or presentation obsolete), or
d) Sometimes even the LinkedIn's Help Center lacks up-to-date information about how the features work.


LinkedIn I still love you! But when you make changes, please 1) Make sure they 1) work 2) are worthy 3) are easy to find/use and 4) are rolled out to all users at the same time. Oh, and while you're at it, give us a way to tell you what we think of your new changes! -- Kathy

How are you feeling about LinkedIn lately? Share your thoughts! What do you like ... what do you loathe? Your comments might help drive positive change.

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2 comments :

  1. I like your comment about adding a suggestion/survey feature. Who better knows how to drive LinkedIn than a community of social-media-savvy, entrepreneurial spirits who actually use it?
    The disappearing drop-down box was frustrating. I wrote it off as a trick to keep us logged in and thus tracked. The drop-down menu seems to stay “hot” longer now, but last week it took the skill of a gamer to sign out.
    Everyone should get the new features simultaneously, as you mentioned, and bringing back the LinkedIn help files would be good also. I viewed a (non-LinkedIn) tutorial about using the “rich media” feature, but could not find the buttons it mentioned. With the many changes to LinkedIn, I guessed that the rich media feature was either now obsolete, or was part of the premium package, and moved on without it. Yesterday a pop-up offered to help me get started with adding rich media. Who’s next?
    One more thing I’d like to tag as annoying involves the “people you may know” feature. It only feeds about 8-10 profiles per scroll, giving it lots of chances to display new ads and taking forever to load them.
    In general, the entire internet would probably speed up if the ad servers were accelerated, but that’s another issue. One might think that even the much-vaunted speed of Google fiber will be compromised by the performance of creaky ad-servers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Kenneth, Someone commented to me that the Send Feedback link is good for passing along comments to LinkedIn. You can find it at the very bottom of each page on LinkedIn. I have started using that to share my concerns about the new system changes.

    I hadn't noticed that the ads were loading very slow, but there is enough going wrong on the system, that it must have been an oversight.

    ReplyDelete

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