The Postbag includes voice notes from Mark Lee, Ashley Leeds, and Lynnaire Johnston.

Suggested LinkedIn fixes:

• Exact date and time on posts & comments
• Batch delete notifications
• Pinned comments
• Combine split DM threads from the same person
• Rich text support in posts
• Reorderable sections in LinkedIn profiles
• Update image option when editing posts and comments
• Folders and tags in direct messages
• Block option for company pages
• Muted words & phrases option
• Away message option for non-connections
• Export option for newsletter subscribers
• Block voice notes option in direct messages
• Videos and audio in comments
• Voice note transcriptions in DMs
• Send DM voice notes on desktop
• Reintroduce audio events
• Folders and tags for saved posts

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What could be done to make LinkedIn better? We're going to take a look in episode 503 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone, I'm John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, a show all about LinkedIn best practice.

I'm going to start quickly by saying thank you to everyone who turned up for our UpLift Live Nano event in Bristol this week. Really good session, I thought. Answered loads of questions, reviewed loads of profiles in the room and the feedback has been really good.

OK, we are going to move on and start the show with the Postbag section. It's the part of the show where we take listener feedback and questions very often in voice note format and we got a few of those this week.

Let's start off with Mark Lee.

So, I include my professional qualifications to make it easier for people to find me as distinct from all of the other Mark Lees out there.

But otherwise, like you, I very much doubt that it has an impact on people looking at my profile.

However, I suspect that the verification option is particularly useful and relevant to those seeking a new job looking to be recruited, because I could imagine, I don't know if this is true, that their Prof.

Verified profiles are more attractive to recruiters than the unverified ones, particularly for people with less experience, less detailed profiles than everybody else, and that it's only those profiles people looking to be recruited who really secure additional views reach as a result of being verified.

But that's just a guess, I admit.

Thanks for that contribution, Mark. Yes, I can imagine that it would be an annoyance because LinkedIn has a habit of continually reminding you about such things. So yes, fair enough, that's a decent point.

During the Uplift Live Nano session that we had that I mentioned earlier, one of the people there mentioned that she'd seen a couple of people who were trying to set up brand new profiles who weren't able to do so without verifying right at the start, so it wasn't just an optional thing, but that they couldn't actually proceed unless they did.

But then she also said that some other new profiles hadn't been given that prompt. I thought that was very strange because as far as I know, it is just an optional thing, but maybe that is changing.

That's an interesting point about the recruiters potentially looking only for verified accounts. I don't work in the recruiting space at all, but if anyone who does work as a recruiter on LinkedIn, is it the case that you can even filter by verified profiles? And is that something specifically you're looking out for? I'd love to hear from you.

OK, let's move on to the next voice note. This one comes from Ashley Leeds.

Hi John, It's Ashley, the 15-minute guy. I've got another question for you for your amazing podcast.

This week I was chatting to somebody that said that when they schedule a post on LinkedIn, it doesn't seem to do well, as if they do it on the day that they do it. Is this right? Is this just another one of those myths? Have you done any testing on it?

So, let us know, should we be creating the content on the day or is it OK to schedule it? Does it make any difference? Thanks very much indeed. Keep up the good work.

Good question there, Ashley. I believe, algorithmically speaking, I don't think it makes any difference whether you post it kind of live and in the moment on LinkedIn or whether you bring it in through a third-party scheduling tool or use LinkedIn's native scheduling tool. That's just the way the platform is set up.

But the downsides are that you might schedule something and then just forget about it, and therefore you're not there to foster that early engagement and that can reduce the visibility of the post.

And I suppose another point to keep in mind is that sometimes when you think about a post a bit too much, it might not feel quite as raw and as human as the stuff that does tend to be in the moment, rattled off in 5 minutes, that can sometimes blow up.

So, you know, if you take a step back and it becomes a little bit more formal, a bit more structured, takes fewer risks, maybe that kind of content is not likely to do as well as stuff that you're just posting as you think of it.

So, that's a bit fuzzier, harder to quantify, but whenever I've tested this in the past, scheduled stuff, so long as you're there to foster engagement, there's no penalty associated with that content. So, it's not something really to worry about.

OK, and last voice note for this week for the Postbag comes from New Zealand via Lynnaire Johnston.

Hi, John. I thought I'd share a quick update on collaborative posts from my side of the world following the one that you and I did a few weeks ago when the analytics weren't visible to you.

Fortunately, I've not seen that glitch again, but I have noticed 3 other things.

First, the visibility seems strongest through the network of whoever initiates the post.

Second, if a collaborator also reposts it at the same time, that can work against the original post rather than extending its reach.

And third, collaborative posts seem to perform better when all the collaborators actively engage with the original.

I think that particularly clearly when someone like Gillian Whitney gets involved in the conversation.

So, that's where my thinking on collaborative posts has got me so far. Hope that's useful. Really loving the show. Bye now.

OK, thank you for that feedback, Lynnaire, about collaborative posts.

I still don't have the facility to start a collaborative post of my own, so I can't really check this with my community, but it's good to know, so thank you for that feedback.

And as soon as I get this I'm going to try it with asking someone from Espresso+if they would like to have a go at putting out some joint content together to see how that works.

I'm still a bit hesitant about the real power of this because I think people in engagement pods are probably going to abuse it, but we will see what happens.

OK, that's the Postbag done and the main topic this week is to talk about some suggested fixes for LinkedIn.

So, I saw a post from someone who works for LinkedIn asking for some ideas and this is stuff that I've talked about in the past and I've done a blog, quite a long blog in the past, and I just decided to rattle off some stuff that was outstanding in my head and some people in the comments chipped in with some further ideas.

So, we're just going to quickly go through those and you can maybe see what you think whether that would make LinkedIn a better place.

So, the first item on my list is something that's just always top of mind. I'm not quite sure why, but it is.

I'm always frustrated when I don't see exact dates and times on posts and on comments. You just see relative dates and times.

You'll see something that was posted 3 hours ago or 6 days ago and I just would rather see what is the exact date, what was the exact time that went live.

I have actually made a little tool that will do a lookup for you, so if you paste a LinkedIn link into there, it will tell you.

But that third-party interaction shouldn't be necessary. It should just be baked straight into LinkedIn.

I think also you should be able to batch delete notifications.

I used to do this much more regularly where notifications would come in and once I kind of dealt with them, I would delete them so that I have a kind of inventory of stuff that I need to attend to.

Those notifications became too busy in the end, but it would have been much easier if I could have just selected multiple notifications at once and deleted them rather than doing them one at a time.

Another feature I'd like to see is pinned comments.

We used to have those for a short period of time, but they went away.

But I'd love to see them being brought back so that, you know, people who make posts and then they see one particularly insightful comment, could pin that comment to their post so that it appears at the top of the list.

I think it was taken away because probably people were abusing it a little bit by putting their own comment with a link in it and then pinning that so that it could be seen.

Although, I mean, I think that's actually a good thing. You know, if you want someone to be able to see a link, why not pin a comment? LinkedIn didn't seem to like that and they took the feature away. But I'd very much like to see that being brought back.

Another fix would be to be able to combine split direct message threads.

You might notice sometimes you're in a chat with someone and maybe the same person appears in a different direct message chat and you think, well, our conversation is fragmented here.

It'd be nice to be able to kind of select both of those threads and say combine into one, and it would just kind of automatically fix all the timestamps so that everything is in time order. There's no option for that.

And sometimes I've seen threads split more than two ways. You know, you can have 3 or 4 chats.

I'm not quite sure in what circumstances that happens, but it's quite frustrating when it does happen.

And it would make more sense to just keep all your conversations with the person in a single thread.

Shortform LinkedIn posts don't support proper rich-text formatting.

So, things like bold and italics and underline and so forth, there are ways of getting them in because you can use these special Unicode characters that look like bold and italics, but that's not the same as having a proper formatting bar inside your posts, and that would help content stand out a bit more.

So, I'd like to see that in shortform posts on LinkedIn.

I'd also like to see reorderable sections in your LinkedIn profiles.

So, instead of being forced to fit LinkedIn's templates, you should be able to say, well, look, you know, my Featured section is the most important thing that I want people to see. I'd like to drag it to the top of my profile.

Or, you know, I don't really care so much about the Experience section. I want to drag that to the bottom.

But there's no way of reordering what's there on LinkedIn. You're forced to stick to their template. And I think that should change.

When you post images, sometimes you might make a mistake. You might want to just change your mind and choose a different image.

But once the thing is posted, you can edit the text of the post, but you can't edit the image that goes with it.

So, I'd like an option that would let you edit to select a different image in your posts.

And the same is true also if you ever post images in comments, you should be able to just replace that with something else.

One very common request I've seen from other people as well is that direct messages should have a kind of system where you can have folders and tags, kind of the same way that things work in, for example, Google Mail.

And that would make things a lot easier to find. You could find conversations because you know that you've tagged them in a certain way.

So, folders and tags in direct messages would be really helpful.

There should be some kind of block option for company pages.

I believe that something is happening around this, but I don't yet have it myself.

But if you're being annoyed by a company page, you should be able to block that page.

And certainly if that company page is leaving comments on your posts, you should be able to block those too.

Like I say, I believe something around this is coming, but I haven't seen official confirmation that it's going to be rolling out to everyone.

And I certainly don't have that just yet, but I'd like to see it sometime soon.

One way to clean up the LinkedIn feed would be to have a muted words and phrases option. So, you'll see that on some of the platforms like Threads and Twitter as well.

And something like that on LinkedIn I think would be really good if there's a particular topic that is popular, but you just don't want to see any content around that, you should be able to set a list of words and phrases that mean that those topics just don't appear in your feed.

I like the away message feature for Premium members. I've got that and I sometimes turn it on. But what's annoying is that away message, that kind of out of office message, will go back only to your 1st-level connections.

So, if someone who's out of your network tries to send you an InMail, for example, and you've got an away message turned on, it won't send a notification back to that other person saying, you know, I'm away or I'm doing so and so at the moment.

So, I'd like to have kind of a two tier system where maybe your first connections get one message and your non connections get a different message. But that's not available at the moment. But that should be an option for Premium members.

A common complaint about LinkedIn newsletters is that you can't really get any data out about your subscribers, so there should be some kind of export option which doesn't necessarily give away email addresses, because I think that could definitely be abused. But some other data downloads about your newsletter subscribers would be useful.

I'm a big fan of voice notes, but I do think for those who don't like them, there should be an option in LinkedIn to say I don't want to receive voice notes.

And if they turn that on, then that would mean that anyone trying to send them a voice note wouldn't be able to do so.

So, for example, the microphone symbol in the direct messages would just be greyed out, indicating that you can't voice note a particular person.

That way people who don't like them can opt out and everyone else who is quite happy with them can stay as usual and send voice notes to each other.

Those were all of my original things that I came up with off the top of my head in 5 minutes.

And there were a few other contributions in the comments on my post.

One of them was about adding videos and audio support in comments.

I think that would probably take up a lot of bandwidth, but it would make for an interesting multimedia experience.

One of my colleagues, Gillian Whitney, suggested that we should have voice note transcriptions in direct messages.

I'd very much like that because at the moment if you see a voice note in a DM, you've just got a blue bar and you've got to click and listen to it, and if it's not convenient to listen, you might forget about it altogether. So, there should for cccessibility reasons, there should be a transcript on that.

There should also ideally be a way of sending a voice note from LinkedIn desktop. At the moment, if you want to send a voice note, you've got to use the LinkedIn mobile app, which isn't always convenient for people.

So, if you spend most of your time on LinkedIn on desktop, why not hit a microphone button and be able to record while you're sitting in the comfort of your own home and record from there? I'd like to see that, too.

There's also a suggestion to reintroduce audio events. So, LinkedIn Live events really are video focused. Potentially, you could do one of those and turn your cameras off and that.

That's kind of the same as an audio event.

But LinkedIn did for a while have a specific audio event option where people would just join a room with their microphone turned on and they could speak to each other. I thought that was quite good. The technology didn't always work brilliantly, but the idea was good and I'd like to see that being brought back.

And the final thing suggested, we've already mentioned folders and tags for direct messages and someone suggested why not do the same for your saved posts? I use saved posts a lot for just things that pique my interest for this show.

It'd be nice to be able to categorise those things and go back to them and easily find them, rather than having a flat list of potentially loads and loads of saved posts.

So, lots of ideas there, and I know that LinkedIn have seen my post with the original suggestions and they will have seen all of the comments as well.

Whether anything gets done about all of this is another point altogether. We can only try and remind them about things that would make the platform better.

It's always a case of is this going to benefit LinkedIn though? Because if there's no financial incentive for them to make any of these changes, they will always seem to focus on other stuff rather than doing things that would truly benefit the user experience.

But you know, we travel in hope and every now and again I will kind of bang the drum for things that I think would make the platform better.

OK, last thing to say for this episode is that next Friday, so that's 25 September, I'll be hitting the train heading up to Birmingham for LinkedIn local with Gus Bhandal and Marianne Avery. Always a lovely networking meeting. People stay around for lunch, good chance to chat and catch up with lovely people.

The tickets there are only £20 as well, and it's only £15 if you're an Espresso+ member.

So, I'll leave a link in the show notes if you want to come along and join us.

Always one of my favourite little networking events, so I will be there because I'm going to be busy there next week.

That means that there won't be a show next week, but do please keep your questions and feedback coming, especially if you want to send me a voice note.

I always like hearing your voice on the show and until then I'll speak to you next time.