How To Remove People From a LinkedIn Company’s Page?

Once in a while someone from our audiences ask: “There are some people connected to our Company Profile, but they don’t work for our organization. How can we remove them?”

The first step to take is of course to contact those people and ask them to change it on their Profiles themselves.

If that doesn’t work, use these steps (from the Help Center of LinkedIn, at the bottom left of every page on LinkedIn):

You can ask us to remove someone from your Company Page if they don’t work at your company or have never worked at your company.

To file this request, you must have a confirmed company email address registered to your LinkedIn account.

Provide the following information when you contact us:

– The full name of the person.
– A screenshot of your Company Page where that person appears.
– An explanation of why they should be removed.

We’ll review your request and let you know when the person has been removed, or if we need more information.

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)

LinkedIn Labs – Year in Review

LinkedIn encourages its employees to be creative and think of tools that might enhance LinkedIn or that might benefit its users.

One of the ways they do this is by organizing Hackdays. Some of the projects that are shown on those Hackdays make it to LinkedIn Labs. And some make it even to the actual website.

This is the explanation of what LinkedIn Labs are (from their website):

“LinkedIn Labs hosts a small set of projects and experimental features built by the employees of LinkedIn. We share them here as demonstrations and to solicit feedback, but please remember that they are intended to be low-maintenance experiments, and may be added and removed over time based on popularity and support.”

By now there are already a few interesting “products” available on the LinkedIn Labs website, but not on the main website. As a consequence many people won’t have heard of them or will ever hear of them.

So I thought it was a good idea to put some of these “products” in the picture in the next couple months.

The first one is “Year in Review”.

You might recognize this one since you would normally have gotten an email in the beginning of the year with an overview of (some of the) people in your network who changed careers.

The “Year in Review” tool works the same way. In a (visual) overview of pictures from people from your network you see who has changed positions, organisations or started their own company.

You can access it any time: http://yir.linkedinlabs.com

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)

Where To Find The People Whose LinkedIn Updates You Have Hidden?

In last week’s post about “How To Remove LinkedIn Home Page Spammers?” I explained how to “hide” people’s updates on your LinkedIn Home Page.

Sometimes you want to give people a second chance in life, so also on LinkedIn 🙂

But where to find the people you have hidden from your Home Page?

These are the steps to take:
1) On the top right hand side of any page on LinkedIn, click on the arrow next to your name and click on “Settings”
2) Sign in to your account (this is a security check by LinkedIn)
3) On the left hand side, click on “Account”
4) Click on “Customize the updates you see on your home page”
5) On top of the pop up window click on “Hidden”
6) Click on “Show Updates” of the person whose posts, updates and other messages you want to show again on your LinkedIn Home Page

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)

How To Remove LinkedIn Home Page Spammers?

A question we get more and more in our presentations and training courses is: “How do I get rid of the people who are littering my LinkedIn Home Page with their spam messages or silly tweets? I don’t want them to mess up my professional network place!”

Actually it is quite simple: when you move your mouse pointer over a status update or other post on your LinkedIn Home Page, on the right hand side the word “hide” appears.

When you click on the word “hide”, the post disappears and instead this message appears: “You will no longer receive updates from this user” (you also have the option to “undo” this action).

(By the way, they are not notified of this action.)

It is important to know that you won’t see ANY updates anymore from this user.
So if you are interested in knowing when someone changes their profile, but not in their (automatically forwarded) tweets, it might be a hard choice.

However, it might be a good idea to contact them first before “hiding” them. Maybe they have set up their Twitter accounts (using other tools) to automatically forward their tweets, without knowing what the effect on LinkedIn is. When you make them aware of it, they might apologize and thank you for educating them! In other words, not every “spammer” is a bad guy/woman 🙂

To prevent other people “hiding” YOU, it makes sense to think about what you want to share with your LinkedIn contacts.

A major tip: don’t automatically forward your Twitter messages to LinkedIn.

Use a tool like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck instead. These tools allow you to post updates to several social networks at once. In this way they help you to save time and be aware of to which websites you send what message.

See also previous blog posts HootSuite Makes Your Professional and Social Networking Life Easier and Track The Response To Your Tweets and Status Updates in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo and other Social Media

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)

LinkedIn Tip: How to Add Your Blog in Your LinkedIn Profile

The last weeks I have been writing about the leverage factor of blogs when combining them with LinkedIn.

As a consequence the question we have received the most recently is: how do I add a blog to my LinkedIn Profile?

There are two Applications you can use: the WordPress application and the Bloglink application.

WordPress Application (use this one if you have a WordPress blog):
1) Add the WordPress Application to your personal LinkedIn Profile
2) In the WordPress Application: add the URL of your blog.

Bloglink Application (use this one for all blogs but WordPress):
1) Add your blog to “Websites” in your personal LinkedIn Profile
2) Add the Bloglink Application to your personal LinkedIn Profile (it will automatically look for your blog in “websites” in your Profile)

How does it work?

Every time a blog post appears on the original blog, your LinkedIn Profile is automatically updated.

Remark: if you have a personal blog and also want to show the company blog, you might want to use the WordPress application for one blog and the Bloglink application for the other one. In this way both are shown on your personal Profile.

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)

Why Blogging is so Interesting for Organisations in the LinkedIn Era

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the pros and contras of blogging.

Blogging might benefit companies and organizations even more when they empower their employees to use LinkedIn (and other social media).

Like I wrote last week it starts for companies with rethinking the relationships with their employees first.

But let’s assume that there is enough trust, then LinkedIn might be a gigantic lever for a company when they blog.

Let’s look at some numbers:

1. The larger the organization, the more people can contribute once in a while. If you have only 50 people writing 1 blog post a year, you already have enough content for a whole year.
1. Remark: in reality you will see that there is a small group of people who are already writing and would love to contribute on a very regular basis. Just ask around who is interested.
2. When you link your blog to your personal LinkedIn profile and your Company Profile it is automatically updated.
1. If you are the only person working in your organization, the “leverage factor” is not so big: 1 blog post is shown on 1 LinkedIn Profile and on 1 Company Profile (if you don’t have one read the benefits of setting up a Company Profile). Let’s assume a person has on average 50 connections on LinkedIn and a small business has 30 followers via their Company Profile. Then the potential readership via LinkedIn is 80.
2. But if you are working for an organization with 1.000 colleagues then the “leverage factor” increases to 52.000.
1. 1.000 colleagues times 50 connections = 50.000
2. 2.000 people following the Company Profile = 2.000

Of course, this is just the potential. Not everybody reads the blog posts on their connections’ profiles.

But you can increase the chances:

• Ask everybody to mention the blog post in a Status Update.
• Ask people who have a Twitter account to mention it there as well.
• Ask (a select group of) people to post it as a Discussion in the Groups.

Big remark: people will only take these proactive steps if the blog posts are interesting and helping other people. So they need to contain free tips and they can’t be sales pitches.

In this way the potential readership can be increased even more.

Let’s assume that:

1. 200 people share it via a LinkedIn Status Update times 50 connections: 10.000 extra potential views.
2. 100 people share it via their Twitter account times 50 followers: 5.000 extra potential views.
3. 50 people share it via a post in a LinkedIn Discussion with a membership of 1.000 people per Group: 50.000 extra potential views.

Result: in total we have 112.000 potential views.

Even if only 1% of the potential readers actually reads it, then your blog post still has 1.120 readers.

An extra benefit is that this blog post will end up higher in Google. Why? Google takes traffic to a webpage into account. As a result many more people will discover this blog post when searching for information on the web.

Not bad for 30 minutes work per year (assuming that you have a pool of contributors who write one blog post per year).

To your success !

Jan

The Person I Want to Connect With on LinkedIn Only Has A Few Connections. Now What?

One of the (many) misunderstandings about a professional networking website like LinkedIn (or Xing, Ecademy, Viadeo and others) is that it doesn’t work when the people you are looking for are not active on them.

The major benefit of LinkedIn is that it shows us who is connected to whom.

Or in other words: who can introduce us to the customer, partner, employer, employee, investor, expert or other person who we want to meet.

So it doesn’t matter that much whether they are active or not.

To get in contact with the people you want to meet, always think of these three steps:
1) Use a professional networking website as a research database to see who is connected to whom.
2) Pick up the telephone and call the person you both know.
3) Ask to be introduced via a regular email (in the book “How to REALLY use LinkedIn” I call it the Magic Mail; if you want to know what that is, you are welcome to join a free LinkedIn Fundamentals webinar in English or Dutch, or if you can’t wait, just buy the book :-))

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)

How CEO’s can have a LinkedIn Profile without being stalked by Sales Reps and Other People

Last week I shared that it is important for CEO’s to have an attractive LinkedIn Profile for marketing, PR and recruiting purposes.

Some organisations recognize the value in these tips, but still many CEO’s don’t have a Profile on LinkedIn. The main reason (next to fear of the unknown and not understanding the value of LinkedIn since nobody ever explained it to them)?

They don’t want to be stalked by sales people (or at least the annoying ones :-)).

The good news is that LinkedIn has many ways to protect privacy and to limit the number of invitation requests, messages and emails.

You can find them in “settings” (click on the small arrow next to your name and it will pop up).

For CEO’s it might come in handy to use these settings (under Email Notifications):
– Contact Settings -> I’ll only accept Introductions.
– Invitation Filtering -> Only invitations from people who appear in my “Imported Contacts” list.

In this way no pesky sales person can stalk you while enjoying the marketing and PR benefits of having a LinkedIn Profile.

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)

Why having an Attractive LinkedIn Profile is important for people at C-level?

Let me give you the answer straight away: for marketing and PR reasons!

Nowadays when CEO’s, General Managers and other chief executives and board members are mentioned in the press, many times a link to their LinkedIn Profile is used.

If people click on that link and they see an incomplete, boring Profile they might assume that the organisation they represent is also boring and inattractive.

Next to that many recruiting and lead generation opportunities are missed that way.

A few weeks ago I already shared that it is important for managers to have an attractive LinkedIn Profile for recruiting matters and I also gave some advice about what to do.

What can CEO’s add to that from a marketing or PR point of view? A few quick tips:

1) A SlideShare presentation with tips showing their organisation’s expertise.
2) The books they are reading via the Amazon Reading List (this gives a personal flavour to the Profile).
3) A SlideShare presentation with their personal point of view or strategy (or at least that part that can be shared with the outside world).
4) Box.net files application: share their notes, articles or interviews.
5) A movie clip with tips, insights, an empowering message or interview.

What is important is to not focus too much on saying how great your own organisation is, but sharing stuff that can help other people. Remember that it is about building Know, Like and Trust.

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates (50 pages in the meanwhile!) of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)

Who Can Edit a LinkedIn Company Page?

Especially when we give training courses to multinationals or when we do strategic sessions with the top management of a company, this question pops up: who can edit our LinkedIn Company page?

This is how it works by default:

1) Someone creates the first version of a LinkedIn Company Page.
2) Everybody else with the same email address after the @ sign can edit the page. So if john.smith@company-abc.com has created the LinkedIn Company page then everybody with the @company-abc.com email address can change the page.

As a consequence my advice to you is: if you don’t have a LinkedIn Company page yet, make one right now before someone with another email address creates it without you being able to change it!

As you can imagine the fact that anybody with the same email address can change the Company page, makes some people very nervous. In my opinion you don’t have to be too dramatic about it since you can always see who changed the Company page and you can change it again.

But now LinkedIn also has the option to choose who is allowed to change the Company page.

How to do this?

1) Go to your Company Profile.
2) Click Edit.
3) Under “Company Page Admins” choose “Designated Users Only”.
4) Choose which colleagues are allowed to change the page (of course they must have a LinkedIn Profile and you must be connected to them)

To your success !

Jan

PS: get your free light version and free updates of the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (or in Dutch: het boek Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken)