5 Hidden LinkedIn Tricks You Didn’t Know About

As an avid LinkedIn user, I have discovered some wonderful tips and tricks that don’t seem to be universally known to the LinkedIn community. Most people know what LinkedIn is, but many don’t know how to use it to its full potential. It’s taken some time to learn these tricks. LinkedIn can be a little hard to initially navigate, but don’t let this scare you away. It is one of the absolute best tools you can use to build your personal brand! Here are 5 LinkedIn tricks I wanted to share to make your LinkedIn experience just a little bit easier.

1.      How to rescind a LinkedIn connection request

Did you accidentally send out an invitation to connect? Has an invitation to connect gone unanswered and you’d like to withdraw that invitation? As long as the recipient has not taken any action, you have the ability to withdraw the request. These simple steps explain how it can be done.

1. Click on the envelope icon on the top of your homepage.
2. Click “sent” on the left and then find the “sent invitations” tab under the top navigational bar.
3. Find the invitation you’d like to rescind and click the subject line of that invitation.
4. Click “withdraw”.

2.      How to turn on/off your activity broadcasts

When you make changes to your LinkedIn profile, an update is sent out to your network alerting them that a change was made to your page. This can be a great way to notify your connections of a new position or a change in your career, but there are times when you’d rather not have these updates made public (perhaps you are searching for new employment). Fortunately, LinkedIn gives you the ability to turn off activity broadcasts. Here’s how to set your account so your updates don’t show in your feed:

1. Click settings (under your name on the top right of the page).
2. Under privacy controls within the account section, click “Turn on/off your activity broadcasts”.
3. Remove the check mark from “Let people know when you change your profile, make recommendations, or follow companies”.

When you are finished making changes, you can easily follow these same steps and put the               check mark back in place to turn the Activity Broadcast Updates back on!

3.      How to be anonymous to others when viewing their profile

If you are job hunting, recruiting of just trolling LinkedIn, be aware that when you look at a user’s profile they can see this through the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile?” feature. This can be a handy tool to see who is checking you out but in certain instances, you might not want people to know you are reading up on them. Here’s how to become invisible on LinkedIn:

1. Click settings.
2. Under privacy controls within the account section, click “What others see when you’ve viewed their profile”.
3. You can choose from 3 options. If you want to be totally anonymous, choose the last options and click “save changes”.

4.      How to personalize your public profile URL

Many people do not realize that you can create a custom URL that points directly to your LinkedIn profile. For example, instead of having a URL for your LinkedIn profile of:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnshaw/5/635/89a/2546dk&6/%467d3

You could create a custom URL such as:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnshaw

The primary reason to create a custom URL is for simplicity purposes. You want to create a URL that is easy to share and include on a business card, email signature, etc. Here is how you create a custom URL for a LinkedIn profile:

1. Log in to LinkedIn and go to your profile page
2. Select “edit profile” and you will see a blue “edit” button appear next to your existing URL
3.  The public profile page opens. On the right side of the page you will see a link marked “Customize your public profile URL”, click this link and a new box will appear where you have the ability to edit your URL.

5.      How to create a one-click invitation link

I recently went to a lunch and learn where Stacy Zapar, CEO and Founder of Tenfold Social Training, gave a wonderful presentation on Social Recruiting. She is a lover of LinkedIn and I encourage you to check out her blog.

Her blog post on, How to Create a One-Click Invitation Link, allows you to create a one click invitation link and give people (in an email signature, on your Twitter, ect.) an easy way to connect with you on LinkedIn.

Hopefully these tools prove to be as useful to you as they have been to me. Knowing your way around LinkedIn, particularly these hidden tips and tricks, is the first step in being able to use it to its fullest.

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