This article attempts to help intermediate and advanced LinkedIn users understand how their LinkedIn activity is broadcast and shared with other users, and provides recommendations for the best approaches to managing that activity within LinkedIn’s constraints. It provides a comparable assessment and recommendations for filtering and managing other people’s LinkedIn activity as well.
Want more control over how your LinkedIn activity is broadcast and shared with other users? Good luck with that. And good luck filtering and managing other people’s LinkedIn activity too. I first wrote about the quantity and quality challenges inherent in managing LinkedIn activity a little over three years ago, and when I revisited subject recently I found that not much has changed. In fact, the situation may actually be worse. Although there have been some positive changes (e.g., people’s tweets are no longer automatically posted to LinkedIn), it appears that many activities that were previously controllable, at least to some extent, are no longer. And LinkedIn has added more things to the home page activity feed that can’t be controlled, like Pulse news and sponsored updates. *sigh*
This situation is both disappointing and unfortunate. Encouraging and maximizing engagement is obviously in LinkedIn’s best interests. As a metrics-driven company, they need users to leverage its features so they can determine how to enhance and extend their offerings. But they seem to be missing the point that giving people the ability to control and customize their experience on the platform – and to do so with relative ease – is crucial to promoting engagement.
LinkedIn Activity: Trying to Manage the Virtually Unmanageable
