One too many pictures of cats and inspirational quips later and you have to question whether the ability to recruit is being undermined by a mutual love of sharing motivational memes from Branson and Jobs.

The six things we need to avoid to save LinkedIn.

Mimicking Facebook

Fishing for likes by compromising the quality of the content you’re writing and sharing is more suited to the walls of Facebook.

Perhaps a carpet ban on kittens, maths puzzles, and wordsearches on the news feed should be introduced to avoid completely obscuring the content with substance still out there.

Forcing personal opinions

This is not a platform for oversharing your personal opinions. In the same way you could be barred for speaking about religion or politics in pubs, LinkedIn is a professional social space where business commentary should remain the primary topic.

Save the political theatre and your love of cats for Facebook, or better yet, visit YouTube and add your two-pence to the comments there.

Adverts on Pulse

If you’re publishing adverts as Pulse articles, you’ve maybe misunderstood its intention, the value that it can bring to your agency, and how to engage with your network entirely.

Pulse is a brilliant tool for expanding your network and can equally be used as a marketing tool, but you have to remember that it’s primary purpose is a content publishing platform that’s supposed to influence, entertain, educate, inspire or stimulate.

Spamming 

Try to avoid shamelessly cluttering LinkedIn’s walls with job listings that are unlikely to get the same results than if you actually invested in some data driven direction.

Remember that by spamming all your openings you could also be giving away privileged information to the competition because you’re more than likely connected to a lot of recruiters.

No trolling

If you have the time to respond to status updates, shared content, or pulse articles then that’s great.

Disagreeing, furthering discussion, or commending work are all important to LinkedIn… that said, if you’re purposely writing out a War and Peace criticism, then you’re on the wrong platform and most likely wasting time. You could be better spending your time actually picking up the phone and winning some clients.

Don’t be anonymous

You keep looking at me from behind that hidden identity, or your profile is so incomplete that you might as well be anonymous.

Photos are important if you want proper engagement, and so is a complete profile free from spelling mistakes. This is a representation of you and your business, so keep it professional, or at least on brand.

About:

Calum is the Content & Marketing Executive for Sonovate, a disruptor to the banks, transforming the way recruitment agencies fund and manage contractors. Find similar recruitment content at www.sonovate.com/blog or follow @Calum551