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.

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New Twitter Open Function

It also appears that they are using the same visual display to show who retweeted your posts – which again was even more of a pain to monitor (you had to look to the right and scroll down to see the avatars of the people who had retweeted your story).

New layout for retweeted tweets

In my opinion, this is a really good addition to the twitter website that now allows you to grab conversations and see them in a less “clunky” manner. I particularly like the retweeted tweets layout as this makes it much easier to thank people for sharing your message.

What do you think? Good? Bad? Indifferent? What else does Twitter need to do on the website itself to improve functionality?

Please leave your comments below.

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