2013-05-16-LINKEDIN
Seminars@Hadley
LinkedIn – New Look, New Features
Presented by
Amy Salmon
Moderated by
Doug Anzlovar
May 15, 2013
Doug Anzlovar
Welcome to Seminars at Hadley. My name is Doug Anzlovar and I’m the Dean of Education Programs and Instructions here at the Hadley School. I will be your moderator for today’s seminar. Today’s seminar topic is LinkedIn Revisited.
Now let me introduce today’s presenter, Amy Salmon. Amy is an instructor here at Hadley and teaches courses in the area of entrepreneurship, employment and technology. Amy, welcome, and the microphone is yours.
Amy Salmon
Thank you Doug and thanks for the introduction and welcome everyone to today’s seminar. I see several of my current and past students in the room and I want to thank you for coming to today’s seminar and for those of you that I haven’t had as a student, hopefully I’ll have the opportunity in the near future.
Today our seminar is talking about LinkedIn Revisited. Really, the purpose is what are the new features that have been introduced in LinkedIn. Before I get into a lot of details, I’m going to go over some basics of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social networking site. It is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year and it currently has over 200 million members.
The purpose of LinkedIn is to allow businesses and business professionals to promote their business, research business contacts, search for employment opportunities, post resumes and look for potential employees. It also is a primarily business-oriented social networking site unlike Facebook and Twitter which can be geared more toward personal needs. Your LinkedIn is really for people who are working, want to work, who own businesses, entrepreneurs, and who want to make connections in their business or industry.
Today’s seminar, as I said, is focusing on new features of LinkedIn. We’re going to focus on LinkedIn on the main PC-based website. I’m using Internet Explorer for today’s seminar, but what I will go through works just as well on Mozilla Firefox. I will be using the Jaws screen reader for demonstration purposes; however, NVDA and Windowwise work equally well. The keystrokes may just be a little different for the screen reader you’re using if you are using one.
The website for today’s LinkedIn seminar is going to be Now, LinkedIn does have other ways to access their site. There is a LinkedIn mobile that you can open on your PC and that is www. LinkedIn.com/mobile and there’s also apps for your iDevices and you Android. I have looked at the PC-based one that we’re going to use today, the LinkedIn mobile, and the IOS app, and outside of a few minor differences, basically they all work the same. So, if you can do it on the PC and you have an iDevice, then adjusting to the iDevice app will not be a major transition for you.
You need to pick which one you like best and which one works best for you and I recommend that unless you’re out and about with your iDevice, if you prefer the PC-based website, then use that as your main LinkedIn.
Today we’re going to focus on the following new features that were introduced in LinkedIn since our last LinkedIn seminar which was over a year ago. Specifically, LinkedIn announced and rolled out at the beginning of this year, new accessibility features for accessing and navigating the LinkedIn page and content. So the first thing we’re going to focus on is navigation of LinkedIn. Then, we’re going to talk about customizing your news so you can actually select the news you want to read or receive updates on news of interest to you, as well as follow what they call Influential Leaders and their conversations on LinkedIn.
We will then focus on a new feature that was introduced. You can actually add notes, phone numbers, email addresses, etc., to your first level contacts. I’m going to show you how to do that. LinkedIn has some new, improved search features that actually allow you to do a more broad based search of LinkedIn and then you can also save your search results, so we’re going to go through that. And then last we’re going to touch on joining groups on LinkedIn.
Before I get into all of these areas, though, I really wanted to let you know if you’re new to LinkedIn, and you’ve never had a LinkedIn account or you’ve never even been on LinkedIn, then I strongly recommend that you take a look at Hadley’s Networking with LinkedIn course. Hadley’s Networking with LinkedIn course will focus on and teaches you how to sign up for your LinkedIn account, how to create your LinkedIn profile, how to start building your LinkedIn network, how to add connections on LinkedIn and those are your people that your adding. You’ll also learn in the Hadley course, Networking with LinkedIn, how to leverage your LinkedIn connections, how to reject at connection request, how to remove a connection, how to perform a background search on a company, for example, if you’re looking for employment. How to find people at companies or organizations that you’ve targeted. How to ask questions on LinkedIn and how to use groups. How to search, post and browse jobs, and how to use letters of recommendation. So, that’s everything you’ll learn if you go through the Networking with LinkedIn course at Hadley.
Today, as I said, we’re going to focus on some new features that LinkedIn offers. So, the first thing we’re going to touch on is navigating LinkedIn with its new accessibility features. I’m going to go ahead and go over to my LinkedIn.
So, I’m at my LinkedIn page and the new introduction with the navigation that LinkedIn offers now is to navigate by regions or landmarks. For Jaws users, the keystroke to jump from landmark or region is the semicolon. For MVDA users, it’s D as in David. I don’t remember off the top of my head the Windowise command to quickly jump between landmarks or regions. But, basically what LinkedIn’s done is its grouped the key parts of the top part of LinkedIn, or the content that’s going to appear on every LinkedIn page in these regions or landmarks.
So, I’m going to just jump through the regions or landmarks that we have. The first is the banner. And that’s really all it is. It’s the banner at the top of the page. The next is your navigation region. This is your first of two navigation regions. This navigation region basically bundles my LinkedIn profile. The search—so these are same page links so you can quickly jump down to them.
We’re going to actually teach you a quicker way to do it thought. And then the add connections link. The next region is the second navigation region. This is the critical navigation region for moving through things in you LinkedIn account and LinkedIn profile So, I’ll quickly go through these. Here you’ve got Home which is your main page in LinkedIn. It’s the page I’m on right now. Your Profile, so if you want to make changes to your profile, tweak it, update it, this is where you would go.
Contacts, this is where you can manage your connections in LinkedIn. Your Groups, this is where you can add or delete groups as well as look at what’s happening with your groups. Jobs, pretty self-explanatory. You can look for jobs in specific industries, or jobs of specific types.
Your Inbox is your mail box, but it’s also where invitations are put. So if somebody has sent you a request to connect with them, you’d find it in your Inbox, too. You can look at companies, and your News is here and there’s a lot more, but these are the key ones that you want to look at. So, that is what is in your second navigation region. So, I’m going to press the semicolon because I’m using jaws to move to my next landmark or region.
This is your Search region, so here if you want to quickly jump to this, you would just press your semicolon or your landmark keystroke to quickly jump to the Search region. Here’s where you enter your search criteria. So there’s your search edit field, you search button, and advanced.
The next region, and actually the last region landmark here, is the Main region. This is where the content in LinkedIn is going to change. Everything that we’ve just gone over stays the same no matter where you are in LinkedIn. So, I call that your top content, or your top navigation. That’s always going to be there. It’s a quick way for you to move through different aspects and features and functions of LinkedIn. But when you actually select where you want to be, then what you want to do is quickly jump down to the main content.
Now, within the main content, the quickest and easiest way to navigate is by heading. And, again, use your, if you’re using a screen reader, us your screen reader keyboard command H to jump through all of the headings, or you can use the numbers. So, if you want to just see the level 2 headings, which would be the main headings on this section, then you would press the number 2. For headings of number 3 under that heading 2, you would press the number 3, etc.
So, let’s take a look at what our key headings are here, our number 2s. So, I’m just going to press the number 2. There’s my main LinkedIn Today recommends this for you. This is news that LinkedIn has pulled and compiled for me based on who my connections are, who my groups are, what my interests are, what my employment experience is, what my education is. We’ll just look real quick down at some of the top headlines. So those are my top news stories that I could then click these links and go and read the actual articles.
Now, for some reason LinkedIn repeats these again just below it, which is kind of annoying, but let’s get to our next heading level 2 and see what’s there. I’m going to press the number 2. There’s no more heading 2s, so that means that anything under here is going to be all heading 3s.
So our next heading 3 is going to be People You May Know. These are people that LinkedIn has kind of, based on your profile and your connections, thinks you might want to connect with and then just down arrow to go down into them. So they think that I might want to connect with Sharon. Just below Sharon’s name here, I can choose to connect with her, I can remove her; here’s the next one. There’s no photo and you’re going to notice this, and this is something you’ll learn in the LinkedIn course from Hadley.
You really need to have a photo with your LinkedIn profile because it comes up as “no photo,” and it really is distracting for people doing searches on LinkedIn. Especially for the visual searchers or visual users. They’re looking at LinkedIn and they’re looking at pictures and the associated profile. So, it is critical in part of their searches because LinkedIn has become a more visually-based social networking site. Even though you may not be visual, the people that may be looking at hiring your or maybe looking at doing business with you are probably visual and so having a photo will benefit you.
Here’s the next one. We could go through all of the LinkedIn recommendations of people I should connect with, but we’re going to skip to the next heading 3. I can look at who’s viewed my profile. I’ve had seven people view my profile in the last thirty days, and I’ve shown up in search results twenty-three times. Which is interesting if you want to know about that.
We’ll go to the next heading 3. My LinkedIn network. I have 181 connections that links me to four million two hundred and some thousand professionals and that’s through these level 1, level 2 and level 3 connections which we do go into more detail in the course. So there’s been twelve thousand plus new people in my network just since May 14th. So, in two days.
Let’s see what my next heading is under there, so I’m going to press the number 3. Groups I may like, so here LinkedIn’s recommending some groups that I may consider. I can join the group right from here. Here’s another group, accessible .pdf. So, I can look at all my groups here; we’re going to press the number 3 to go to the next heading. Companies I may want to follow. All right, there’s quite a few more down there, but we’ll go on to the next heading 3. We’re at the end. There’s no more. So if I were to press heading 3, there is People I May Know.
There’s some repetition on the LinkedIn page which is why navigating by your headings and your landmarks is going to really simplify your ability to get through the LinkedIn content. Here you’ve got People You May Know. Again, these are more recommendations from LinkedIn of people I may want to connect with. And that’s it—there’s no more headings here. The rest of the content at the end of this is just going to be your standard LinkedIn what I call footer navigation which is your copyright help, FAQs, all that stuff.
These are all my potential connections. But you notice how I didn’t have to go through any advertising. There is ads on LinkedIn and I have a free LinkedIn or basic account, so I get bombarded with advertisements. But because I’m to navigate using the built-in navigation, I don’t have to go through all those ads, which is really nice.
We’re going to go back to the top of the page and we’re going to go through our region landmarks again. I’m at the top of the page. My regions or landmarks are going to be the navigation region that has most of the links you’re going to want, and your main region which is where you content starts. And then you go back to the beginning. If we go back to Main Content, and then if I were to just down arrow here after Main Region, that’s where some of the ads start. So by eliminating that and jumping to the first heading here, I go directly into Content. This heading 3, Quickly Grow Your Professional Network, is something that you can actually choose to have closed on your LinkedIn page. This is where you can actually use your current email contacts and send everybody in your current email contacts a request to join you as a LinkedIn connection. Again, we do cover that in the Hadley course.
We’re back to our heading 2, which is the main area with the LinkedIn news and then all of our H3s are under here. So, this is a quick and easy way for your to get through all of the visual and advertising stuff that’s on LinkedIn using your landmarks which for Jaws is semicolon, for MVDA is the letter D as in David, and then navigating by headings.
Now you can also pull up a list of headings in Jaws and MVDA and Windowise and then navigate down by just going through that list of headings if that’s easier for you. And in Jaws, that command is Insert+F6. Arrow down; you notice how I was able to skip past all that advertising. You can navigate just up and down through this list of headings and then when you get to the one you want to go through, press ENTER and it puts you right on that heading.
So, that is the new navigation features that LinkedIn is offering. If you’re not familiar or have never used regions or landmarks before, they’re a great way to quickly jump through some of that top content in order to get directly to the main content on the page. Going to come back and we’re going to actually move on from here.
How do you customize your news? You notice that on my main LinkedIn page, LinkedIn recommended news articles for me. They base those on my connections and my groups and my profile. But if I want to customize my news, what kind of news I actually want to see, you actually can do that with LinkedIn now. So, in order to do the News for You, we’re going to go back to our LinkedIn; we’re going to go to the top of the page.
We’re going to navigate down to that second navigation region. And then down arrow to News. Because this is a link, you could also use your links list here, with Jaws INSERT+F7 and I know that’s also the same command for MVDA and for Windowise it’s INSERT+TAB. We go to News and we press ENTER. Where it places you on the page is in this list which is a little confusing, so I’m going to recommend that you always try to go back to the top of the page with CONTROL+HOME. Then navigate either using your region landmarks to the main content and then by heading.
Here you’ve got four links. Your News, which is once you’ve added news sources you would go here to read your news. Influence or Posts, all Influencers, and All Channels. And channels are just that. They’re channels of news that LinkedIn is feeding, so there’s like a channel for entrepreneurs and that’s really going to be all your news media that are geared toward entrepreneurs. Now, if you have no one in Your News, or in News, then you will get a prompt down below that list and I actually have some in my Your News, but what you would get here is a little message that says you don’t have any influencers or channels currently in Your News, so select the Get Started and that will actually prompt you into the next couple of screens that you can then add channels or influencers. So, let’s go up and take a look at Channels.