There have been a number of changes to the LinkedIn Personal profile which appear to have been rolled out across the site over the past week or so. Major? Well, to be honest not really although there have been a bit of a mixture hence the reason for looking at them within a single post rather than breaking them out individually.
I may not have spotted all that has been going on, but here goes. For those of you only interested in high level functionality, you might like to turn off for a few minutes … 😉
1. The redesign / re-colour of the profile
This does not give you the ability to turn your profile ‘pink’, as I was asked by one contact last week, after my earlier tweets on the matter. What it does do instead is replace the previous blue based format (that you can still currently see on your Public profile), and replace it with the rather serious business grey that has started to permeate the site. I guess that it has a little more design element in it though that really comes down to taste.
2. Twitter ‘follow’ button
Now, having established a link between your LinkedIn and your Twitter accounts, LinkedIn has taken the decision to automatically create a “Follow” button directly on your profile so that people – when they like what they see on your profile – can automatically follow you on Twitter as well.
3. Public Profile
The display elements of some aspects of the LinkedIn personal public profile have changed. You previously had the chance to hide all aspects of your work details so that the summary area at the top displayed your job details, but they didn’t appear elsewhere. Now, these also appear further down the profile as well which does change the emphasis on the page slightly. No way to change this back to the way it was unfortunately which does detract slight from your ability to focus on the two key ‘calls to action’ on your Public Profile which is the “View Full Profile” button and the links through to your website(s).
4. Auto-updating updates
Taking a leaf out of Twitter’s play-book, LinkedIn has also made it so that we get told about new updates that we get on our homepage from our 1st level connections automatically rather than having to refresh the page. You should now get a blue bar appear at the top of your updates (and in LinkedIn Signal as well) which tells you how many new updates there are.
As it happens, you also get notification of this up in the ‘tab’ of your browser in a similar format to what you can see below.
I’ll be honest with you here – none of these are particularly earth shattering, however, all are important in the terms of the way that the various elements in LinkedIn are developing and so what we need to be keeping abreast of.
Keep them in mind as we see the LinkedIn platform develop and let’s try to feed back ideas as to how best to use the elements that they are bringing into play in the site.
