Improving LinkedIn for Midsize Businesses

[Tweet “Share your ideas on how to improve #LinkedIn for midsize businesses!”]For the record, I love LinkedIn! I love the changes that they are making (well, I love most of them) and I love the direction that they are heading (well, for the most part). I love the new contacts interface, LinkedIn publishing, premium account updates, the recent showcase additions to company pages, and thanks for bringing back individual updates. Overall, I feel that LinkedIn is by far the best platform for all B2B businesses including midsize businesses.

All of these improvements clearly point toward what LinkedIn wants and I’m pretty confident that these goals include …

Becoming an even more professional and connected network
Defining, and being recognized as, a new kind of a CRM
Establishing themselves as a leading content management system

And … for their members to spend more time on the site while increasing premium membership and ad revenue. This is the proverbial bottom-line that drives any decision-making process.

Have the changes to the platform supported these goals or, do they need to make additional moves in order to reach their objectives? Both. I don’t love everything.

LinkedIn must look to midsize businesses

And, vice versa. The absolute best way to achieve these goals is to make LinkedIn an indispensable tool for business and this starts with the basic individual functions and then graduates to team usability. What I see is a lot of separate people on LinkedIn, all working for the same company, but without any sort of connectivity and coordination save for what they may have established themselves. For that matter, half of their people are active on LinkedIn whereas the other half, who should be active, are not. The efforts (and the effectiveness) of each employee will vary greatly.

It’s simple math. You can sign us up one at a time or … you can knock us off in bunches (teams). If bunches are what you want, then businesses must come to rely on LinkedIn in order to:

Build their book of business
Expand their circles of influence
Share their brand story
Leverage the power of their network (internal and external) in order to increase their revenues and to build their company with quality team members

Here is how LinkedIn can do that …

Make LinkedIn more relevant and valuable for business teams. Yes, you have TeamLink but I have to wonder how many people have ever even heard of this service let alone what it does for their business. Then what does it do for teams that include more than salespeople (you must have a premium sales account)? Open these benefits up to all account types and then educate business on how to maximize the effectiveness of their investment!

We would like the old Rapportive back, please but, better. Add our team connections to this person’s profile. While we’re at it, who builds an extension that manually requires you to update your browser’s cookie settings!? Oh, that would be you and, in my experience at least, only you.

Please reinstate CRM API access to other CRM platforms (and sales-related applications) besides Salesforce and Microsoft. While I can’t say that I like or agree with this decision, I do understand it. You want to increase premium membership and this appears to be a requirement for full integration even with these two products. If that is the goal, why limit it to only two and where is the sales-related line being drawn? CRM users (many of whom are business teams) who have long enjoyed LinkedIn integration, and who have engaged more with your platform as a result of that, perhaps are feeling a bit betrayed. Make it only available to premium members, if you must, but please open it up again to all qualified applications. We both win!

Please bring back Signals! Having the ability to search updates was a critical piece in being able to find and identify those professional connections who were potentially appealing to my business and on many more levels than simply people who might buy something from us.

Always give us the option to personalize invitations to connect – I probably ignore 90% of the invitations that I receive to connect on LinkedIn because most are a result of you aggressively suggesting that they connect with me (please stop doing that). To make things worse, you are often removing their ability to tell me why they want to connect with me in the first place because … you have taken away their option to personalize that request. It’s one click and the template has been sent. Since the majority of people on LinkedIn are too lazy to personalize an invitation anyway, even if they were given the chance, I’d be even happier if you made everyone personalize their message. This would create a more effective, and more professional, experience for all of us!

Requesting introductions would be a great feature if anybody actually used it. It is either too complex, has too many moving parts, is too reliant on the intermediary even seeing the message let alone forwarding it or, all three. What can you do to improve this feature because it isn’t working now? Certainly, being able to identify and leverage existing team relationships would go a long way toward achieving this goal.

Either kill off endorsements or at least give us the ability to regulate what we are being endorsed for. Before I figured out how to turn off the feature that aggressively prompts folks to endorse me, I was regularly being endorsed by people who I barely knew, for skills that they do not know that I have, for skills that I know that I don’t have, and even for skills that I have to research because I don’t even know what they are. I’m sorry, it’s a great idea but, in practice it’s lame and it’s annoying. It’s even worse than a like on Facebook because, as much as I hate Facebook, at least Facebook does not beg me to like people.

Let us view our news feeds with a tag filter. Being able to organize my contacts via tagging is awesome! What would be even more awesome would be having the ability to filter my news feed to show updates from one (or more) tagged groups only. If building business relationships is the ultimate goal of any member/business on LinkedIn, this would allow us to focus on those connections who are the most important to us.

Allow us to export tags and phone #s. We created these connections and we’ve tagged them. Why can’t we export that information? Yes, we do want to move this export to our CRM.

Your search is very powerful but it is also less than user friendly. Sometimes it seems as if you need an engineering degree to get through some of the simplest things let alone access the advanced functions so … please make it easy and please make it consistent. Adding an interface that would accommodate “AND”, “OR”, etc. (without having to manually type these operators in) would be a huge plus.

Make your premium and upgrade membership options far less convoluted. It’s a mess and it is counter-productive to what you want. Place a new emphasis on business team options and position yourself as a solution in this arena.

I believe that all of these changes would move LinkedIn closer to what was originally its core vision (and an increase in premium memberships). The beauty of LinkedIn was that you and your business were encouraged to discover and to develop close professional relationships. Begging people to one-click like you and connect to you seem to me to be in direct conflict with this goal.

If there are already avenues to do some of the things that I am asking LinkedIn to improve, then you had better add #12 – make user options easier to find and to activate. What are your thoughts? Please chime in regarding any of my top 11 or please feel free to add your suggestions to this list!

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit IBM’s Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Craig M. Jamieson

Managing Member at Adaptive Business Services

Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. Adaptive Business Services provides solutions related to the sales professional. We are a Nimble CRM Solution Partner. Craig also conducts training and workshops primarily in social selling and communication skills. Craig is also the author of "The Small Business' Guide to Social CRM", now available on Amazon!