Not only is LinkedIn a great tool for job seeking, but for positioning yourself, your business in the best of light if maintained regularly. However, LinkedIn is also notorious for updating and changing up its site on a regular basis. So, we’ve compiled 4 LinkedIn updates you should know (but likely do not).  Here we go with the top 4 updates:

1. Send Personalized Invites In The LinkedIn App

When connecting with new people, you simply must customize your messages instead of sending the generic “I’d like to add you on LinkedIn” script.  For a very long period of time, LinkedIn did not support personalized messaging, but this is back into play now. You can now again add people as you meet them, while the exchange is fresh and top of mind, and here is how:

• Go to the profile of the person you’d like to connect with.
• Tap the icon to the right of the search box that looks like a box with an arrow (or the “More” icon, which looks like three vertical dots if you use Android).
• Tap “Customize Invite.”
• Write your personalized message and tap “Send.” Voilà!

2. About The “Field Of Study Explorer”

What to do with your life still a question? This nifty LinkedIn feature might not necessarily solve that conundrum for you, but it’s a starting point. The “Field of Study Explorer” shows you data based on your degree. Now, you can get a sense of which companies are hiring people with your educational background and for what types of roles.

3. Explore Insights Graph on Your Profile

One of the best parts of LinkedIn is the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” page. And now, that page has even more information. LinkedIn has added an additional component to the existing insights graph so that, in addition to seeing who is looking at your profile, you can also see which actions you took that led to that specific increase in engagement, including making various updates to your profile, endorsing a connection, joining a group or expanding your network.

For those of you that are trying to figure out what increases profile engagement, this is good stuff.  Now, when you tweak your LinkedIn strategy, you can gauge how well it’s working by seeing who you’re attracting to your profile with each change.

4. Viewing Recent Activity

You used to be able to go to people’s LinkedIn profiles and see their recent activity before scrolling down to their summary, their experience, and so on. Then that feature seemingly disappeared. But it turns out, it was just tucked away. You can now see a person’s LinkedIn activity by clicking on the little triangle that opens a drop down menu next to the “Send a message” button and then clicking on “View recent activity.” And just like that, depending on how active people are, you can see what they’ve shared professionally, their comments or “likes,” their LinkedIn posts, and their profile updates for promotions and new jobs. Hint: This is super handy if you’re about to do an informational interview or catch up with an old acquaintance over coffee.

Portions of the content for this post were originally published on The Daily Muse. With gratitude  to Lily Zhang who serves as Career Development Specialist at MIT for contributing to these 4 LinkedIn updates you should know about, but likely do not.

To find out more about what goes into a successful LinkedIn campaign, reach out to us at 619.962.5504.