LinkedIn now has a new feature in the groups area. If you haven’t been on LinkedIn for awhile or in the groups area, go check it out. Click on “Statistics for this group.”

As you know I love stats. I am not sure how we can use this information, but I think it’s great that they provide this type of information. Will more be coming from LinkedIn?

Here are some of the screenshots for my Digital Marketing group.

The LinkedIn Group Statistics Summary:

Find out how many members that are in your group, Seniority of group, Location, as well as how many comments have been posted in the group.

LinkedIN Group Statistic Summary

The LinkedIn Group Statistics Demographics:

Find out what type of job function of people are in the group, and breakdowns of Seniority, Function, Location and Industry.

LinkedIN Group Statistic Demographics

The LinkedIn Group Statistics Growth:

See a chart of the growth in the group and how many new members there was last week and the week over week growth rate.

LinkedIN Group Statistic Growth

The LinkedIn Group Statistics Activity:

See how many comments, discussions, jobs and promotions there was in the last week.

LinkedIN Group Statistic Activity

Have you noticed the new feature? What do you think?

Have you noticed some of the new changes on LinkedIn lately? One of the new features that is currently in beta is the “Skills and Expertise Area“.

I just found this late last week and I have to say I’m really impressed thus far. Here is a screenshot below, if you haven’t seen the new feature yet. In the screenshot, I have “Video Editing” as a skill. This is something that I currently do for our lacrosse team and want to learn more about. It is a great way to find groups related to a particular skill, as well finding people and companies that do this skill set. On the right side, there is a section titled “Video Editing Jobs”. Can you imagine the benefit to not only job seekers, but people that are looking for a new career and of course, college students looking for their first job? The possibilities are endless!

LinkedIn New Skill And Expertise area

On the top right of the page, it also has the “Relative Growth” of that skill and expertise. This way you can see if your skills are hot or not. As Dickie V. says “Awesome baby!”

If you have checked out this new feature, what do you think about it? As you can tell, I love it. Think about the possibilities for people looking for a job, searching out a new career, college graduates and the list goes on.

Have you noticed the new changes to the LinkedIn Group area? If so, what’s your thoughts? Honestly, I don’t like the new icons. I’d rather have the messages below the name of the group.

Here’s a screenshot of the changes, if you haven’t seen the new updates recently.

LinkedIn Group Changes

I’d love to hear your feedback.

Over the past few weeks, I have noticed a few changes to the LinkedIn site. Some of these changes weren’t that different, so I didn’t write much about them. However, there is one major change coming through that I did want to write about. You may have seen this change already. I guess I’m one of the chosen lucky ones to see the change before it goes from Beta to Live.

Here is a screenshot of what you would normally see of a user’s profile in your group:

LinkedIn - Current View

Now, here is the change we are seeing in Beta (not sure when this will go live).

LinkedIn - New View in Beta

Notice the major change, where you can No Longer message somebody within your group. I find this very disappointing that they have removed this functionality. I’m not sure exactly why it was removed, I’m hoping it was changed by accident.

What are your thoughts on the new changes? Do you like these changes or do you feel that LinkedIn is losing some of it’s communication power that it once had? Let me know what you think, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Over the past few weeks, LinkedIn slowly released a new look to the “Who’s Viewed My Profile”. Many of my friends started seeing the changes a few weeks ago, but my view was changed late last week. It is much more powerful then what we saw before, but I’m not sure if everybody will be able to see these changes or just people with business accounts, like me.

Here are a few highlights of the changes:

1. Trends – How many times did you appear in LinkedIN search. This has great potential. See a screenshot of “Appearances in Search” below.

LinkedIN Top Trends

2. Top Search Keywords – Interesting, my name Doug, brought in 4% of my searches. I’m sure this will be more beneficial down the road. I like the idea though.

LinkedIN Profile Keywords

3. Viewers by Geography – Most of my audience came from the US (781 visits). I think this is another really powerful feature.

LinkedIN Top Countries

4. I like the breakdown of viewers from this week vs last week as well.

I think these changes are a great start which can be very beneficial to LinkedIN users. Do you see more possibilities with what they added? Or did they miss the mark completely?

Let’s hear your comments.

LinkedIn has updated some of the companies area over the past week (it’s currently in BETA right now). I think the new layout is a huge improvement over the old version. Here is a screenshot for comScore, Inc.

New Company LinkedIn feature - ComScore, Inc

Now, if you go to a larger company, you will see a link on the right side “Insightful statistics about company XYZ employees”.
I really like this feature. You can learn a lot about a company with this information.

LinkedIN New Company Job Function Feature - Home Depot

I also love the new layout that you can see where employees worked before. I am a visual guy, so I really like this look.

LinkedIn Company Before & After Feature - Home Depot

What are your thoughts about the new area? Will this be useful to job seekers, researchers and others? Let’s hear your feedback.

I was having a conversation with a new connection the other day and he told me that he doesn’t use LinkedIn as much as he should for his job search. However, the real surprise came to me when he mentioned he didn’t even know that there was a job listing feature on LinkedIN. That blew me away!

So, I thought I would ask the question, how many of you use LinkedIN for job searches, if you are looking for work? How many of you knew there was a job listing feature on LinkedIN? How valuable do you find this feature?

I’d love to hear your feedback!

Over the weekend I was talking to a family member that has their own company. We were talking about LinkedIN and the many changes that have taken place over the last two years.

Even in the past few weeks, it seems like there are many new changes. Some good and some bad. For me, most of the changes are good. One of the features that we were talking about was the companies area. She said she really likes this feature and I have to agree with her. This is probably one of my favorite features of LinkedIn. It’s so powerful.

I wrote an article about all the New features on LinkedIN a few weeks ago (New features on LinkedIN!) but I wanted to know what your favorite LinkedIn feature is and why? I’d love to hear your feedback.

As I pull data for clients this month (and my websites) I have noticed a trend. Over the last 3 months I’ve seen the quality of traffic increase to almost triple the amount.

Many of my clients are starting to use social media and they are beginning to see the payoff. More quality traffic to their websites & blogs.

Here are some numbers from one of my own websites:

LinkedIn traffic has increased by 320%, time spent on site up 224% and bounce rate has gone down 34% over the past three months. Those are amazing numbers!

Facebook traffic has gone up as well, but not as much as LinkedIN.

Many businesses I know have seen great numbers coming from both LinkedIn and Facebook. Is your business seeing the same thing?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed some strange emails coming via LinkedIn for people looking to connect. I wanted to pass along this information and see if anyone else is seeing the same thing.

Here is what I have seen over the last 2 weeks:

“Bob Jones” has indicated you are a Colleague at college:
I have seen about 5 of these over the past few weeks. Another one is people looking to connect because we worked together at Xerox, Kodak (for me) or somewhere else. When looking through their profile it’s obvious that we never worked together and they may have never worked for that company.

Have you noticed any of these messages over the past few months? I’d love to hear your feedback.

Vinny D’s stance, just say no to spam!

Say no to SPAM on LinkedIN