482. User interface glitches

John Espirian: 00:00:00

What exactly is going on with LinkedIn's user interface? We are going to take a look. This is episode 482 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone, I'm John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, all about LinkedIn best practice. And this week we are going to take a look at a couple of odd user interface glitches. But before we get into that, let's take a look at this week's Postbag.

So, the Postbag is where we answer listeners questions, and I'm delighted to say that we've had 3 voice notes coming into me this week with questions. So, let's get started with Kaye King.

Kaye King: 00:00:56

Hi John, I have a question for you for the Informed podcast, and it's been inspired by conversations I've had with clients recently about how their feed on LinkedIn feels quite negative. Clients in different industries, in education, in web development, in coaching, whenever they come onto the platform, their feed is full of people in their industry making negative comments or it feels like it. That's what's happening.

And I've been talking to them about curating their network consciously so connecting with, commenting on, following, messaging people that they want to see more of, want to be connected with. And I'd love to know what your thoughts are on that and whether you've got any specific tips that you could share with myself and my clients about this question.

John Espirian: 00:01:49

Well, good question, Kaye. I think you are probably saying all of the right things to your clients, to be honest.

As I said to you before, I think it takes a lot of perseverance and curation to build the right sort of feed and a good set of connections to talk with. Frankly, most people just don't have the patience for that, and that's where the problem really lies.

You can't be a passive consumer, so you do need to seek out the people who are saying the things that you resonate with.

It's a good idea not to comment on content that you perceive to be negative, because LinkedIn's algorithms will probably serve you some more of that content in the future. So, it's best to just avoid that content if you can. And if needs be, you can unfollow or disconnect with the people who are putting that kind of content out into the world.

It's a good idea to send more direct messages to the people whose content you enjoy, because you're more likely to see their content in future and they're more likely to see yours.

I suppose you could also click the bell of the people's profiles to get notifications when they post, if they're people with a track record of posting content that you like.

I suppose the last thing I'd say is, this is tough to keep in mind, but try to remember that it might take only one positive interaction somewhere along the line to land a new client or open a door to some new business and that will have made it feel worthwhile. So, you need a bit of a thick skin to get through some of the haters that might be out there.

And I've found certainly for almost a decade, that LinkedIn is where I transact my business. And you do get negativity from time to time, but in the end, if you look at the results you get from it, it is worth it.

So, stick at it, Kaye and your clients, and thanks for chiming in.

OK, on to the next one. And this is another voice note, and this time it's about LinkedIn groups.

Christian Harris: 00:03:35

Hi, John, Christian Harris here. I run a couple of LinkedIn groups in the health and safety space. One has about 270,000 members and another around 20,000, and I've been thinking a lot recently about how groups are actually used well on LinkedIn today or not.

So, I guess my question is in two parts.

First, what are the best practices for people who run LinkedIn groups? Things like how often to post, how to encourage meaningful discussion rather than spam, and how to turn a large membership into a genuinely valuable community.

And second, what are the best practices for people who are just members of groups that they don't own? So, how can we actually get value from them, contribute meaningfully, and maybe build visibility without coming across as promotional?

Feels like there's little out there about this, so I thought I'd ask. Cheers.

John Espirian: 00:04:26

Well, thank you for that, Christian. It's a topic that's close to my heart since I've run a LinkedIn group of my own for some years now.

I think you need a clear purpose and some leadership structure to the group. You need some rules on what's OK and what isn't. So, for example, is it OK to sell into the group? Is it OK to share third-party links? Are group members encouraged to message each other? Are you willing to kick people out of the group if they don't follow the rules?

I mean, that could feel awkward, but at the same time it's a positive signal to the people who remain in the group if they feel that you really stand for something. And I think you foster a sense of community by having some kind of shared thing that brings you together. But also, the things that set you apart from everything and everyone else.

How often to post. I post about 4 times a week on average into my group, and it's really not about broadcasting from my point of view, but rather stimulating discussion and trying to get others to do the same. And I always think about it as, instead of running a lighthouse, I'm trying to build a campfire in my group.

Your group settings will allow you to set up rules. No doubt you've done that already, and you can reinforce those with a pinned post at the top of the group that only admins would be able to set up.

You can encourage your members to see more content from the group by asking them to click the bell that's at the top of the group page. A lot of people don't know that feature is there.

You have to make every effort you can to encourage people to post something valuable into the group that they wouldn't necessarily share publicly. And then you've got to look for the signals of engagement and foster those as much as possible.

So, at minimum, you'd want to try to encourage people to post an introduction into the group so that others can welcome them and know more about what they're interested. I suppose you could try little challenges within the group, although that can sometimes come across as cheesy, depending on how it's phrased.

We've had some success with that inside Espresso+, where every so often it might be a challenge to reintroduce yourself to your public network or create a little video or things like that.

Groups can be a space where people can get a little bit more vulnerable and share a bit more than they would in public. So, it is also good to remind people that if you run a private group, that activity won't be seen by anyone who's outside the group. So, I've had questions about this from people in my community because they can see their own activity, of course, and some of them mistakenly assume that everyone can see their activity as well, which they can't.

Groups will allow the group owner to recommend a post to people, so you can recommend up to 3 posts per week now, and a proportion of the people in the group will then receive notification of that via a digest that they'll receive via email.

And in terms of being a good member of the group, you need to align yourself with the purpose of the group, so long as you believe in what's being done there, and try to be as helpful as possible. You know, answer questions, look for opportunities to support the group's leadership.

So, for example, again in the Espresso+ community we have a small welcoming committee of group members who look out for and support other new members to the group to make sure that they settle in properly.

So, those are just some quick thoughts about how groups work. This is something I've been studying and implementing pretty much every day for the last several years. My group works pretty well. A lot of LinkedIn groups don't work well.

I must admit that I don't have experience of managing a group as large as the ones you're talking about. Those sound massive. So, you'd need a proper support structure and probably rotas for people to manage the group with admins and so forth like that. So, yeah, good luck with that. But thank you for your question.

OK, and the last question via voice note comes from Kate in New Zealand, and this kind of leans into the main topic of what I wanted to talk about this week. So, let's listen to Kate.

Kate Nankivell: 00:08:18

Hi John, it's Kate here. Hey, thanks very much for your kind reply to my last message.

The issue is regarding the editing and appearance of the About section, so it's not been something that's happened here before. I've seen some commentary about it from others, but what's happening when you make changes to your profile here with the number of clients, it's adding a whole bunch of extra line spaces and so far support have not been helping in resolving it for clients.

We've tried workarounds by putting the copy into a notepad and then copying it from a notepad. So, there's absolutely no formattinh when you're then pasting it into your About section, that seems to create the best result, but it still adds extra line spacing.

Then if you click Save, then if you go back in to enter and you make any change, like trying to delete a line space, suddenly you've got 3 or 4 line spaces between a whole lot the paragraphs or lines within the copy in the About section. So, it's quite frustrating. Haven't found the right solution yet. And again, just wondered if you've encountered it, if you've found a solution or if it's one that you'd like to delve into.

John Espirian: 00:09:23

Yes, well thanks for getting in touch about that, Kate. And a lot of people have been saying the same sort of thing in the past week. I haven't been able to replicate it myself, but I have seen a video that one of my colleagues shared with me via direct message that shows the problem in action. So, I did my usual thing of speaking to the other LinkedIn specialists within the Espresso+ community to see whether anyone else was seeing this. Sure enough, they were.

The best workaround we found so far is to go and edit the About statement via the mobile app. Just pretty much clear everything out, make sure that you put everything in initially in one block of text and then insert your line breaks on the mobile app and then save that. And with a bit of luck those line breaks will translate to the desktop version.

A lot of people I've spoken to have just been editing via the desktop and there seems to be a bit of a glitch with that, although as I said, I can't actually make it go wrong at my end. So, not everyone is affected by this.

And I have heard also that some people who've been trying to edit via mobile, even that hasn't worked for all of them, but for most of them it has. So, that's the workaround. Go and edit via mobile, insert your line breaks there, and hope for the best.

It's very clearly some kind of LinkedIn glitch. I know of several support tickets that has been raised to LinkedIn. I raised one myself and they haven't responded to it yet, which is disappointing. So, hopefully it'll be resolved soon. But that is our workaround for now.

So, really frustrating when a user interface doesn't work for what should be a really basic feature by now.

But unfortunately this sort of thing happens on LinkedIn all the time, and it doesn't always affect people equally. Sometimes I get some of these bugs and other times I don't, and it just smacks of a lack of joined up thinking or a lack of testing.

I appreciate LinkedIn is a massive platform used by at least hundreds of millions of people, and so you can't expect everything to be perfect. But compared to other social media I've used, the user interface really is quite "janky" at times.

And another thing that's just happened as I record this the day before this goes live, lots of people reporting that another weird thing has happened, which is that their user interface is showing their profile in different languages completely unexpectedly without any changes being made.

So, lots of reports coming in of people saying, why has my profile suddenly changed to French or German or Italian or Japanese even.

Again, this hasn't affected me, but I've seen enough screenshots to know that it's a real thing. It very much smacks of being a temporary glitch.

Sometimes, LinkedIn displays what I think of as tremors that lead to an earthquake, which just means that when you see glitches on LinkedIn, sometimes that's a sign that things are changing or a new feature is being tested, or something new is coming and things are leaking out into the wild.

That's kind of reinforced by Kevin Turner, who said in the comments when I posted about this issue:

I've heard that LinkedIn is working on an AI-powered auto-translate for profiles based on our chosen account language, much like it does for posts and comments. Perhaps this is an accidental glimpse that it's being pushed to localise for every member of a very global platform.

So, perhaps some kind of automatic translation thing is on the way, and we're in some kind of mid state where things are being tested and some people are seeing unexpected behaviour.

So, if you see anything like that in the next few days of your account just magically converting to another language, it probably is just a temporary glitch, and if you refresh the page, it'll probably go back to your standard language.

It did remind me actually of a video post I put together fully 5 years ago where I got together with people from my network and we all said in our own languages how to say hello and thank you. So, we've got lots of languages captured in that. It's a bit of a throwback. I'll share that video post in the show notes. You might like that one.

I've seen a few posts this week from people talking about typos in LinkedIn posts, and specifically the strategic use of them, because we're all in that position where we're trying to make sure that we're looking for human generated content, and we tend to dislike content that is produced by AI tools.

I did say during a session that I ran last year, don't be surprised if people who use AI tools will just realise that one of the signals of humanity is the mistakes that you see in text. And of course AI tends not to make things like spelling and grammar mistakes. They don't really make those type of mistakes. They make plenty of other mistakes, but not that category of mistake. And so it wouldn't surprise me at all if some people are cynical enough to instruct their AI tools to leave or insert deliberate errors.

People have been debating that recently. I would just counsel you never to do something like that. I think human writing has got enough natural errors in it already without us having to insert even more. If you are using AI to generate your content and then deliberately lacing it with errors to make it look human, you're probably not listening to this podcast, are you? You're probably doing something else. Please don't do that. It's just terrible practice.

I suspect the next topic is something that might well come back for further discussion in the future. A recent report by an organisation called Profound has labelled LinkedIn as being the most cited domain for professional queries. And there's a link to that research that I'm going to include in the show notes. And the upshot is really that longform articles on LinkedIn – articles and newsletters – things that look like blog posts are because they're indexed and because they're now cited more than any other domain.

I suspect that we'll probably see an uptick in the number of longform articles that people publish because they're scrambling for that kind of authority so that the Large Language Models, the chatbots, refer to them as sources of information. So, I fully expect to see more people diving back into articles and newsletters.

I think they'd fallen out of favour a little bit. That's the sense that I got. I've continued to post lots of them.

Every time I put out a blog on my website as well, I tend to turn that into a LinkedIn newsletter and publish it there because republishing your content from your blog to your newsletter on LinkedIn isn't associated with any kind of penalty. So, you might as well have your content in two places rather than having it in one. So, that is one to look out for. I'll leave it there for now.

I'm in the full throes of preparation for the UpLift Live conference. It's less than two weeks away now. If you listen to this in time and you still haven't bought your ticket prices are going to be going up in a week.

So, if you want to get onboard with our livestream so you can watch remotely, or if you can be in the room in Birmingham on the 26th, the place to go is uplift-live.com – we'd love to see you there. It's going to be another fabulous event. It's our third year of running the conference, so yes, I'm busy with that.

I will still try to make some time to record an episode next week and until then, if you have any questions for the show, please drop me a line again. I love those voice notes if you can and see you all again soon.