Have LinkedIn just gone and lost the plot?
For some years now a very useful feature of LinkedIn were the groups you could create and manage (manage being the important key word here). You could invite members to your said group, build membership, share yourself and allow members to share great content. Also you could keep in contact with members by a group messages each 7 days.
Now LinkedIn have taken away the positive key features of groups and especially for those who admin / manage the groups, ie the ones who took the time to build the groups and manage them to what they are – Some groups are small with limited amount of members, some are 100,000’s in membership. LinkedIn have now retired the following:
- Sending Announcements to Group Members – No Longer Available: You can no longer message all your members weekly, so this really takes away value of owning and maintaining groups.
- How many members can be in each group? 20,000: You are now limited to the amount of members a group can have, this is pure madness and the key decision maker in this new feature needs to read up on what exactly social media is.
- All group members, including those currently set on pre-moderation, can post and comment without prior approval: Prior to this new dumb announcement, you had a great and very useful system in place in that you could pre-moderate content, ie if a member was sharing what you did not particularly want shared in your group, ie spam or references to external channels you were not in agreement with, you could simply make their content pre-moderated for you to either allow or refuse – This saves you deleting members or blocking them. Now LinkedIn have opened the flood gates for spamming (already happening in the groups we manage) and puts on a tremendous amount of extra work for group admins / managers. I want to question why LinkedIn have done this, but with the current changes to groups and all those involved in passing these new changes will mean there are too many people who’ve lost their marbles to find within their team.
- Group Identity / Branding: What is going on here, a feature that was down for sometime still is and some of our groups have branding whereas others do not and there is no way to simply add a group image / profile??
With recent news that Twitter is cracking and trust in the social media platform and value in the company continues to fall thanks to their policing and refusing of freedom of speech, especially with those users who have central / right political views, is LinkedIn going to be on the slide very soon also??