Social media sites are always making tweaks and changes, based on customer feedback and constant monitoring of activity.

Apart from spending all day working out what the changes are, how do you keep an eye on what those changes are, and how they affect the way you use LinkedIn?

As we use LinkedIn for so many of our clients marketing activity, it’s our job to watch what changes they are making, and determine how our clients profiles should be changed accordingly.

Here’s a quick summary of the latest changes and how you can use them to your benefit.

LinkedIn Groups
The groups you belong to are now much more visible, so you need to make sure they are relevant (to your business, not personal use), and targeted.

Updates
The companies and news updates you follow are also now more prominently displayed.  Make sure you are following your own company – ensuring your company profile is up-to-date and updated regularly.  You should also follow your customer?s company pages, previous customers, and the companies you want to be working with.

Your status updates are displayed at the top of your profile now.  Make sure you update your status regularly with useful, relevant information and links – useful to your audience (your contacts).

You can add documents, videos and slideshare presentations to each of your jobs.  This is a really useful way of keeping in touch with customers and prospects, and directing traffic to your website.

Contacts
When you look at somebody’s profile, you can see what groups you have in common with them, and also how their network is categorised – by company, location, education or industry.  This is all useful information when you’re building your prospects list or relationships.  Remember your contacts can see your contact network too, so think strategically about which groups you join and are active in.

Just like the search engines, social media sites will always be making changes and updates.  Some have a bigger effect than others in terms of how you can use them to market your business.  It?s our job to keep up with these changes and decide how best for our clients to work with them.

If you want to find out how we manage our clients social media accounts for them, just get in touch, we’d be happy to connect – even in person!