LinkedIn Features 2023: The Activity Tab has got a makeover

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I'm back. Did you miss me? I took a little bit of hiatus after Christmas, and I haven't been live for about two months. Hi, everyone. I'm Mary Fain Brandt.

I'm your host. 15 minutes of FAIN. That's me. I took a little break because I was working with a business coach and redefining some new services. And I'm happy to say or announce that I've created a couple of special packages for recruiters so they can add value to their clients.

So if you're a recruiter and we're not connected and haven't had a conversation, I'd love to talk with you about this program. It's invite-only, and it's only open for ten recruiters, and we have eight already. And don't worry, it doesn't cost you a penny. It's actually something I'm giving to you guys. So I'm very excited about this.

I just got off a call and it's launching next month. So if you're a recruiter, let's have a conversation and see if this is a great value add for your clients. I actually missed going live, so I'm super excited to be here. Who's here today? What platform are you watching on?

Because we stream on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. And if you like the look and feel of this show with the intro video, I can bring comments on screen and the titles and everything and just wait till I start sharing the screen. Then you might want to sign up for Streamyard. Streamyard is the official sponsor of this show, 15 Minutes of Fain, and I just love how easy it is. So if you're thinking of launching a show or elevating your show, but you're not real tech in, you don't want to dive into all the tech stuff and you're worried about getting stuck.

I'm telling you, Stream Yard is easy breezy. Easy as apple pie. Brenda Miller, that one's for you. And I'll be dropping all my affiliate links after the show so you can sign up and give it a test ride. Now, let's see who's joining us.

It's Brittany. My girl Brittany, she is the instagram queen in my book. I love all of her tips. And my buddy Matteo. We're partnering up at Social Media Marketing World.

We're hosting a brunch if you're going to be in San Diego. I'm going to talk a little bit about that later. And Shiggy, this is your first show with me. Welcome to 15 Minutes of Fain. I deliver your tip on LinkedIn new features, trends, and career tips and trends.

So let's get back to the agenda. Are you guys ready? Can I get some thumbs up over there in the comments? So today let me start. LinkedIn is on a roll.

They are rolling out new features faster than chocolate chip cookies disappear in my house. Yes. Not for me, but my husband Joseph eats chocolate chip cookies like it's his last one he'll ever have. And it's hard to stay on top of all the new LinkedIn features. Rolling out, even for LinkedIn trainers and strategists like myself.

But thankfully, we all band together and we share what we find out in the wild. As Kevin Turner says, Beth Granger shares, John Asparian Brenda Miller. We all share what we find because we want to help elevate each other. And that's one of the things I love about being in this community of LinkedIn trainers and strategists. So we have five new features and I'm not going to list them all out.

We're just going to dive into them and we're going to start with my favorite new feature. Matteo, I don't know if you got this yet. Brittany, this is a game changer for you because you do video. So the activity tab has changed. It has got a makeover and it's one that we've been dying for.

We have been pleading and praying for a video tab to magically appear on our personal profiles. Guess what? It happened. It happened last week, as a matter of fact. And I'm going to show you where is that what it looks like, and why.

You might want to check this out. So let me pull up. There we go. You can see all my crazy faces. Okay, so right here, I'm just going to go back.

This is my profile. So this is on your personal profile that we're going over the activity feed right here. It now has posts, videos, comments, articles, newsletters, ding, ding, ding, events, ding, ding, ding. And then your more tab. And under the More tab, for me, it's just documents, right?

That's not something I really need to feature. But what is great about this is now you guys can grab your wine or your coffee and you can just binge watch all my videos like a Netflix Friday night, because I know that's what you've been dying to do, right? No, I swear. Someone told me they just wanted to sit and watch Mary Fain on a Friday night. Anyways, it just makes it easier for us to find videos from our favorite content creators.

In the past, you had to search through their posts and it was just very clunky. So thank you, LinkedIn, for creating a video tab. Now, that's part one of this wonderful feature for someone like Brittany who does amazing videos. If you don't know my girl Brittany, you got to follow her on TikTok or on Instagram. Sorry.

Did I say TikTok? I think she's on TikTok too. So let's look at what else you can do here. So you have these different tabs in your activity now, but you can reorder them. So what you can do is you can pick what do you want to be featured.

So you all saw that my videos were the first thing that you saw. Now you could click images if you're not a video person, and then all your images will appear. And maybe you want to change it. Maybe like once a month, you want to go in and change this.

And we've got Matteo and Shiggy a shout out to you too. So again, you can switch this. Now. Obviously, as a creator, I want to have video show up, even if it means showing these funky, funky faces in the car wash post. But I just love this new feature and I want to know if you guys will use it.

Can you drop a heck yeah in the comments now? It's rolling out slowly, right? So Matteo, the other day, he didn't have it. Maybe he has it now. You know what, Matteo?

Should we go look? Matteo, my buddy. Let's see you're on the spot, Matteo. Right? Look at that, Matteo, you have it.

It's right there. So now I can go to videos because Matteo is a creator. He does a lot of videos, images, articles, newsletter. Okay, so pretty darn cool, right? So that is my favorite new feature.

The activity tab has had a makeover. You can now find you can look up activity by content, style or format. So I think that's a game changer. Thank you so much, LinkedIn. Feature number two.

Admins can now automate welcome messages for groups. Now, I was able to do that last year, but someone said that that was a new feature, and if you are an admin of a group, this is very helpful. So I've created a standard welcome message to anyone who joins a group that I help manage. Now, let's find I want to show you guys another new feature. And I have to find it's a different tab.

So this one has to do with LinkedIn Lives. Was anybody here early? Waiting, waiting for me to go live? Let me show you what the new feature is. And Matteo, you've joined several of my audio events, so this is going to look quite familiar.

Let's find that. Here we go, folks. The new feature for LinkedIn Live, it kind of looks like an audio, right, Matteo? So now you have the join button. And so if you're early, right, you'll see that join button and you can go ahead and join and wait for the show to go live.

That's why I was asking if anyone was sitting there joining it. So I think that's kind of cool. It looks a lot like LinkedIn Audio events. If any of you attended the B show, which was my LinkedIn Audio event with Laura Bayshore for I think we did that for nine months. We ended it on January 30th.

But don't fret, we're starting a podcast and we're launching that next month. Lots of good things coming down. Okay, so three new features already. Activity feed, welcome message in groups, the join button for your LinkedIn Lives. And now I'm going to show you just over, like, I don't have anyone else's.

So I'm going to go to my personal profile and show you another favorite feature that just got launched. Let's see. And this one is something that we've all been waiting for. It's not exactly what we wanted, but you know what, I'll take it. Okay.

The Star feature in messages, I don't know about any of you, but my inbox let me go over here. I mean, look at it. It just goes and things can get lost. So Kendall and I are setting up a meeting so I can now star this. So I can now star important messages.

So then I believe you can search them. Starred. So now I can go through and go back through these. Are there any that I need to go back and reply to? Any meetings that I've missed that I need to go back and reschedule or just touch base?

So I really love the Star feature in the message box. Is anybody using that as of yet? Because it is a game changer. And then okay, so we've already gone over four new features and you guys, there's new ones rolling out. So I'm going to be doing like new feature alert shows probably at least every month throughout this year as they keep rolling out the next one, I can't show you the screen, right?

So Shiggy said the Star feature is great. It helps get it organized. I mean, it is not exactly what we asked for. We want to be able to tag and kind of create folders in there, but that would be a lot of work probably for LinkedIn. But the Star feature helps.

And the other box. So your LinkedIn mailbox, right? You have focused and other so all the spam goes and other and you can train LinkedIn to move the spammy stuff over there. By moving it yourself, you will train it. So the other great news feature, and I haven't looked into this yet, but you can schedule articles and newsletter on LinkedIn, right?

So what I understand is you have to write the newsletter first and then you go in and the scheduling option will display. So I haven't tried it yet, but I'm going to try it next week and maybe I'll record how it works so I can share that with you guys on LinkedIn. You guys also have you run my bell on LinkedIn. You're like, what, Mary? What's that?

Well, you need to ring my bell on LinkedIn because then you get notifications of when I go live, when I post amazing content, things like that. That way you're always in the know and you can ask people to ring your bell too. And it just kind of gets everyone in that conversation because you're going to see posts and you'll comment and vice versa. With all of you guys. The last thing on a bonus one is that LinkedIn now lets you add an SEO title and description when publishing articles on LinkedIn.

Now, I haven't tested this yet, so I will test it and I'll report back. But I wanted to share that with you so if anyone here is writing articles, SEO is super important on LinkedIn. A lot of people don't realize that SEO is built into LinkedIn. So you want to use keywords on your profile, but you also want to use those keywords in your articles. And if you can embed the SEO in the article, why not do that, right?

So when people are searching career change, career Pivot, right, LinkedIn profile, you want to have those built in embedded into your LinkedIn articles. Let's see, what else do we have? Well, that was six LinkedIn features, and I promised to keep these live shows short and sweet because we all are busy, but I want to keep you informed. I'm going to be doing these shows twice a month, and I'm going to be bringing back the interview. So I'll be interviewing someone once a month that can help you grow your business or your career.

So people that do branding, podcasts, book writing, maybe graphic designers, email marketing, and then other career coaches that can help you elevate your brand. I really believe in collaboration, so if you know someone that fits one of those descriptions and you're like, Mary, you really need to interview them and have that conversation live so we can all learn from the both of you, please let me know. Drop me a DM. So what's coming up? Well, this week is the Glendale Chamber events.

Shiggy, when am I going to see you? There's an event tomorrow morning. It's Bob. I'll be at all the Glendale events. Friday, we have a ribbon cutting at Ocj Kids, who we supported with LinkedIn Local Phoenix in 2022.

And Saturday there's another ribbon cutting at the Car Museum, which I'll be going to next month. I'm going to be interviewed live on the Arizona Daily Mix by Brad Perry. I'm nervous and excited. I mean, what am I going to wear? What am I going to say?

Am I talking careers or am I talking LinkedIn? And in March, I'm going to be with my buddy Matteo, where I'll be in San Diego for a week at Social Media Marketing World '23. And if you're in San Diego and watching and want to meet up for coffee or lunch, please reach out to me. March 9. I'm speaking on Russ Hedges show, and we're going to be talking about vulnerability and authenticity.

So I'm a big fan of being yourself online and in person. Be the same person, right, Brittany? If you guys go check her out on Instagram, you'll see what I'm talking about. She's the same person online as she is offline. And I'm also in the talks about offering LinkedIn labs.

I did this in San Diego. We're talking about bringing it back. It's a two hour intensive. You bring your laptop. You know what, I meet you where you're at on LinkedIn.

We're setting it up or you're ready to elevate it and we just get busy and we limit these to about ten people in a room, so you can just get stuff done. And the price point is affordable for everyone. So if that's something you're interested in, I'd love if you could drop me a message or tell me if you have a space where we could host that. And finally, LinkedIn local Phoenix was a big success. We raised $400 for Benavia and collected socks, slippers, and sweaters for the seniors.

And that just makes this girl's heart smile. I am so happy about that. If you know me at all, you know that giving back to the community is super important to me. I'm looking for a very cool venue to host our next LinkedIn local Phoenix. We were sold out 60 people in the capacity, and we're looking at late May, early June on a Tuesday.

So if you know of a cool venue or you'd like to sponsor us, please hit me up and let's have a conversation of what that looks like. So, you guys, everything that I mentioned, I'm going to drop the links over in the comments. So remember, go to your activity tab. Do you have that new feature, and do you need to reorder that? Are you creating videos?

Maybe you want that tab to be the first one that people see. And don't forget about the SEO in your articles and that you can now schedule your LinkedIn articles and newsletters. Well, you guys, that's it for now. Here's to good coffee and great connections. I'm Mary Fain Brandt, and this is 15 Minutes of Fain.

And I'll see you in two weeks. Ciao.

Wondering how your LinkedIn Profile stacks up in 2023? 

You can find out through my LinkedIn Profile Audit service!

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