5 Astonishingly Clever LinkedIn Hacks.

This blog has always been focused on ‘Advanced LinkedIn Strategies’. Before I decided to write about LinkedIn, I realized that there were far too many blogs which merely focused on the ‘what’ and too few that focused on the ‘why’ of LinkedIn. I couldn’t find an online resource which went deeper, revealed more and was written for people who were looking for genuine insights on how to leverage the LinkedIn platform. So I decided to build it myself and linkedinsights.com was born. It’s been a wonderful learning experience for me over the past 2 years and I get a lot of satisfaction from creating content which many people take the time to comment on, acknowledge and share. To all of you:     THANK YOU!

With that said, on with the latest installment of some more of the advanced stuff…..

In this post I’ll show you how to:

(1) Find (kinda) Your Semi Anonymous Browser.
(2) Re-order Your First 12 Endorsements.
(3) Find out how many Connections somebody has.
(4) Find out how much a Long-Form Post has been shared.
(5) Find out who disconnected from you. 

(1) Find (kinda) Your Semi Anonymous Browser.

You’ll never know who your Anonymous Browsers are, you can’t click on an Anonymous Browser, there are no doors to open.

But your Semi Anonymous Browsers leave the door ajar.

You can click on the semi anonymous description or on ‘Search’ and you can click on all 10 of the potential browsers suggested by LinkedIn. Why would you do this? Because (a) one of those 10 Profiles is the person who browsed you and (b) they’ll never know that you clicked on all 10 Profiles to find them. It takes just a few seconds of your time and the person who browsed you semi anonymously could be impressed/intrigued/freaked out, it may even prompt them to change their visibility status. Clicking on all 10 will increase traffic back to your Profile as some of them return browse you. Win, win.

(2) Re-order Your First 12 Endorsements*.

If you’ve spent time building your Skills and weaving your Endorsement Tapestry, it can look ‘raggedy’ through no fault of your own, filled with blanks, spoilt by Endorsements from people with no photographs on their Profiles, or with logos and other strange choices where headshots should normally go. Or maybe you want your most impressive Endorsements to be the first 12 – those displayed most prominently on your Skills section? Well, there’s actually a way to re-order your entire Tapestry and you can choose your first 12 endorsers for each Skill. Here’s how:

(1) When editing your Profile, go to ‘Edit Skills’.
(2) Then go to ‘Manage Endorsements’.
(3) Choose the Skill you want to reorder and deselect the 12 endorsers you’d like to have featured most prominently.
(4) Click ‘Save’.
(5) Repeat the above, but this time add those 12 endorsers back and click ‘Save’.
(6) Voila! LinkedIn will now show the 12 endorsers you just re-selected as the most recent in your Endorsement Tapestry.

Here’s the before:

Here’s the after:

(3) Find out how many Connections somebody has.

As soon as people started going nuts about adding Connections, LinkedIn decided to slap on a 500+ label in an attempt to stop the my-network-is-bigger-than-your-network games. LinkedIn network size braggers resorted to boasting about how many Connections they had in other ways (Headlines, Summary, Groups). The 500+ label indicates to me that someone is making the most of LinkedIn and it’s often a sign that he/she may be interested in connecting. I’d like to know how big somebody’s 500+ network is, I think other people are curious about that too. Well now you can figure it out. To find out how many Connections someone (with the 500+ label) has:

(1) Click on someone’s Profile (someone with 500+ connections).

(2) Click on the small dropdown arrow next to ‘Send a Free Message’ or ‘Send x inMail’

(3) Click on ‘View recent activity’

(4) Voila! LinkedIn now shows you that the person has x ‘followers’.

If the person has not published any long-form posts on LinkedIn, all of those Followers are actually Connections. If the person has published long-form posts on LinkedIn, a proportion of his/her Followers (5-20 %) will be people who are following that person because they liked what he/she wrote on LinkedIn Publisher. The vast majority of those Followers (80-95%), will be Connections. Why has LinkedIn done this? Because they’re going to do everything necessary to ensure that LinkedIn Publisher is a success, this includes automatically converting your Connections to Followers, even if you don’t actually write anything on LinkedIn.

(4) Find out how much a Long-Form Post has been shared**.

For a brief period, in the heyday of LinkedIn Publishing, it was possible to see exactly how many views and social shares (LinkedIn, Facebook Google+, twitter) a Long-Form post got and all was well. Then LinkedIn suddenly decided to take away social share stats, they didn’t say why and they didn’t have to (their game, their ball, their rules). So authors and readers had no idea how content was being received and how it was performing. Until now. There’s a clever tool which will tell you exactly how many times a Long-Form post has been shared on a bunch of popular social platforms (Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Pintrest). Now you can see how well/widely content is shared. To use the tool, you’ll need to (a) use the Chrome web browser and (b) install the free sharemetric Chrome extension.

It’s easy and convenient to use the sharemetric tool, just remember to always delete the stuff in the url after ‘?’, hit reload and click on the tiny sharemetric extension in your toolbar to get the results.

(5) Find out who disconnected from you. 

LinkedIn doesn’t tell you when someone has left your network, perhaps they think that parting on a social network is more sorrow than sweet? But it’s really easy to find this out – I use an ios app called ‘Friend Check’ which tells me when a LinkedIn connection disconnects (it also works with twitter & Facebook). Knowing who has left you doesn’t give you any actionable data…but it does give you the satisfaction of knowing.

What LinkedIn hacks do you know, love and use? Please share them in the comments section or send them to me directly (linkedinsights@gmail.com).

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By Andy Foote

* My thanks to Raphael Weishaupt for sharing this hack with me.
** My thanks to Irina Shamaeva for making me aware of this clever tool.