Tag | LinkedIn

Social Media Image Sizes And Layouts

Thanks to the fantastic people at Lunametrics (and a hat tip to Mark at Status Social for bringing this to our attention), here is everything you need to know about image sizes across all the main social media platforms – this is a handy guide so that you can plan prior to putting your profiles together.

Please feel free to share the love of this infographic!

Introduction To The New LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn suddenly appear to have found their thinking caps with new updates seemingly arriving on a weekly basis! Which is GREAT news for those people who are active on LinkedIn. The latest addition to their development is the New LinkedIn Profile design.

LinkedIn have three core strategies in mind when they are redeveloping their platform:

• Simplify
• Grow
• Everyday

For anyone who has been using LinkedIn for the last few years, that word “simplify” will mean an awful lot.

LinkedIn has been full of some fantastic features, ways to showcase how good you and your business are, ways to meet new connections, and ways to share your own industry knowledge. The problem has always been that it has been so bloomin’ confusing to do so!!

With the launch of the new profile design, things could be about to become MUCH easier to edit, build and discover your profile and LinkedIn relationships.

LinkedIn have built the editing of your profile from scratch – in the past there were just so many different editing routes into your profile that it just became confusing.

Their redesign is aimed to fulfil three requirements:

• Enable Simplified Editing
• Build Relationships
• Offer Rich Insights

Enable Simplified Editing

There will now be an option to enable you to add industry or profession specific sections to your profile such as:

• Projects
• Test Scores
• Courses
• Languages

Things that until now would be tucked away in a profile summary (and simply lost in a mountain of text).

You will also be able to see how “complete” your profile is, with the 100% bar replaced with a sexier completion score that doesn’t give you a percentage,  but does give you a visual – “the complete circle” and a handy completion compliment “All-Star!”

Build Relationships

One rather Google Circles-esque addition to your profile is the section showing you how you are connected to your LinkedIn network. This helps you to understand your network “reach”, as well as answering the question – What is it that you share “most” with your connections?

This could be:

• A company you are working / have worked for.
• A school, college or university you have both attended.
• Simply your location (awesome for building local relationships)
• The industries you are in

Having these additional insights will allow you to understand better the relationship you have with people, and hopefully, how you can improve on that relationship.

Offer Rich Insights

The everyday element of LinkedIn’s strategy has seen “recent activity” becoming much more prominent in the LinkedIn profile pages. All recent activity will be posted at the top of people’s profile pages.

For many, LinkedIn isn’t a “daily” visit in the same way as people use Twitter & Facebook. However by adding more rich snippets of information, and making them more prominent, it is LinkedIn’s intention to try to get more eyes on their platform more often.

What we have found with LinkedIn is that it is very much “business” information that tends to get “shared” and this can be a very powerful way of getting on to the radar of people within a particular industry.

Conclusion

We are LOVING the updated direction that LinkedIn are taking, with recent(ish) updates such as LinkedIn today, Company Page redesigns and Endorsements, we can see this becoming an ever more active social network that business owners will want to get their teeth into. Nobody on LinkedIn is here to play games, or share their family photos. It is very much about business, and is probably the best online representation of an actual business networking meeting.

The people who put the most effort into LinkedIn are the people who tend to get the most out of LinkedIn.

What are your thoughts? Please feel free to comment below.

Still Not Convinced About Pinterest?

I have looking into Pinterest more and more this month and have been extremely surprised at the level of engagement I am finding from this new(ish) Social Media Platform.

Let me share a few (basic) statistics I have found so far (especially when I am comparing this to Twitter) – first up is my Google Analytics Data for visits to my website:

I was surprised to see as much traffic to my website from Pinterest (yes I know it is low traffic numbers, thanks for pointing it out!). As you can see it is the 3rd highest source of traffic to my website – way ahead of Twitter & LinkedIn.

What is even more surprising (and what caused me to write a brief blog post about it) is that when you line my profile stats up on Pinterest vs. Twitter – there is NO comparison:

Imagine if I had the same number of followers on Pinterest as I had on Twitter? I have read many blog posts about how Pinterest is driving much more traffic to people’s websites than Twitter, LinkedIn & Google+ and the data I am seeing in the “early days” certainly backs up this theory.

But as we know, traffic could be seen as vanity and conversions should be seen as sanity – and when I finally look at my own “conversions” over the same period then we see an old favourite making an appearance:

So there you have it (and I am slightly tongue in cheek with this as the data wouldn’t warrant proof) but Pinterest HAS driven more traffic to my website than the other Social Media Platforms, AND LinkedIN HAS provided me with more “referral” traffic (something that many blogs have also been written about).

I will be certain to keep an eye on this traffic, especially if I can grow my Pinterest network.

What experiences and results have you found? Please leave you comments below.

Google Circles Or Google Me?

I have been watching the recent rumours then denials by Google about its own social networking platform. Some have dubbed it the facebook killer (despite not knowing what it was – probably the same people who dubbed wolfram alpha as the Google killer! Lazy Journalism?) – however I came across this inconspicuous search result yesterday:

www.google.com/s2/search/social

On clicking this link (and signing in with my Google account) I was then presented with a list of people I knew via my Google Account, and more intriguingly, a list of all the social network sites that they were part of, as well as a list of posts they had published to these sites. The sites included:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Their own websites
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Picasa Web Albums
• Blogger
• De.li.cious
• Google Reader
• Flickr
• Quora
• TinyUrl

I can click on the name of the people in my “profile” and then go through to their “buzz” tag and see all the tweets (and other stuff) they had posted – which in itself isn’t the bit that got me thinking.

What did get me thinking was how Google could use all this information it is very obviously collecting to create a social media platform to rule them all!!

Instead of trying to compete with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the rest – why not create a ”super” platform that actually feeds in all the social media information, from all your subscribed social media channels all into one place?

This would actually be a better experience for most people as they would be able to keep even more up to date with their social networks (without having to look at multiple feeds in management tools such as hootsuite).

How good would it be to have a Google platform that brought information through (similar to how twitter works) but filled with the posts from ALL the social media platforms in one place – so you would get a steady stream of updates but it would be 5 in a row from twitter, 2 from facebook, another 3 from twitter, one from flickr etc.

If you could then respond directly from one platform BACK to these it would make the management of multiple social media platforms much much easier for everyone.

Google could also then corner the “social search” market (which possibly has them concerned at the moment) – allowing you to search for (or ask for) help across multiple social media platforms at once, without the need to navigate away from Google.

So could the answer be that Google don’t end up offering a “social media” platform – but actual become THE social media platform by integrating everyone else?