I used to strongly advocate tech company directors putting effort into their profile, building up their network and using LinkedIn for communicating. It seemed on the verge of turning into a really handy mini-CRM for social selling.
But no more, all the useful functionality has disappeared without notice or warning.
Some of the important disappearances include:
- Ability to categorise your contacts into groups - gone!
- Ability to send messages to these groups - gone!
- Ability to search your contacts by anything other than their name - hidden away.
- The ability to do a search that shows a list of who your contacts' contacts are so you could go through systematically and ask for introductions - I thought it had gone, but now I have found it!
- Ability to download the contact details of your contacts - gone!
- Ability to give recommendations for businesses - long gone!
Maybe they will come back? Some were on its premium SalesNavigator, but don't fancy paying only to find things there start changing and disappearing too.
So in the meantime I will accept invitations and use it for connecting with new contacts and looking up the details of people I am going to meet. I'll even do the odd post and keep my company page up to date and a few ads.
Is it now worth much more effort than this? What do you think?