The lovely Jo Saunders invited Sue Ellson to contribute to a more comprehensive video of LinkedIn Predictions for 2021 (Part 1 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn5tc2OC6jA&lc – well worth viewing).
Here is Part 2 of Sue’s list of LinkedIn Predictions for 2021.
TRANSCRIPT
Sue Ellson in Melbourne Australia
LinkedIn predictions 2021 Part Two
More sections at the top of the LinkedIn profile for pre-nominals, post nominals, personal pronouns and personal identifiers. So pre-nominals things like Mr, Ms, Mx, Dr, Prof I’d love to see more academics and artists on LinkedIn. Post nominals – I have a Bachelor of Business so for formal qualifications BBus but I’m also a member of a lot of professional associations one of them being the Institute of Managers and Leaders MIML so it’d be great to feature that up there and make sure that people only put their first name and last name in the field instead of all those other descriptors in there. Personal pronoun section for he, she or they as in how you would like to be communicated with in any correspondence as well as the personal identifier so you might identify as a First Nations person. I identify as a Victorian from South Australia and thanks to my education and technology, a Citizen of the World. That’s obviously too long it’s something that really indicates something about you more personally whereas the headline is more for your skills and your capabilities and the values that you bring.
Topics for posts. Now on Facebook at the moment you can type up a post and then give it a topic after publication but i would like to see for personal posts and for company page posts a TOPIC to appear in capital letters similar to a hashtag at the beginning of every post. Now what this will mean is that as people scroll through the news feed they will be able to focus on Posts that are most relevant to their needs and perhaps even follow topics, just the same as you follow hashtags. It’s not to replace hashtags, but it’s to try and focus the content to one thing per post and just make it easier for people to scan for things that they’re really interested in.| Out and about on my mobile phone I’ll sometimes try and type a message and accidentally hit send or the autocorrect will change the spelling so I would love the ability to be able to delete messages if I needed to.
Articles. I would love to see them become more of a feature so at the moment they’re hidden in the All Activity link and so the problem with that is that there’s a lot of evergreen content that needs to be seen more than once not just in the news feed once but it’s evergreen and it could be referenced multiple times so rather than just having it as in the Featured you know particularly for thought leaders who let’s say write more than 10 articles for them to be able to showcase that on their LinkedIn Profile.
And I would love to see Tags come back. So I know that Tags are now part of Sales Navigator but they were originally part of the free LinkedIn product and the benefit of a tag is that LinkedIn gives us access to millions of people worldwide which is fantastic and I love appearing in those search results but Dunbar’s numbers suggest that we can really only maintain 150 social stable relationships with people so for me connecting with all of my Connections is is just impossible. But, if I could give some people that Tag of VIP Very Important Person as part of my closer network of 150 people then I could perhaps invite them to events and engage with them more frequently you know try and do three times a year that should increase engagement and really get us back to the nuts and bolts of LinkedIn which is about having that network you know so we get out more publishing happening and we get more engagement with posts because we’re you know more in tune with our VIPs two other categories could be prospects so if you’re looking for work or business they’re people you’re engaging with right now and then clients or employers for people who either have work or employment and would like to maintain those relationships as well.
2020 was an amazing year for LinkedIn, I saw so many improvements. I really hope that you can continue on in 2021 with the same speed. Thank you Jo Saunders for requesting a second edition of LinkedIn predictions. I didn’t really know I had so many so thanks for that and bye for now.
Learn more about Sue Ellson at
