LinkedIn and Twitter added a feature that allows you to cross-post, but it just embeds functionality that other software already had. Here are some limitations of LinkedIn status updates, and some features they should implement.

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You can hide your LinkedIn connections, even from your other connections, with a simple switch. Here is how you do it, but it does have a set of implications.

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You can export some information about all of your LinkedIn connections to a file. LinkedIn doesn’t give you very much of the information that it has, but it will give you all of their email addresses. Therefore, there is a way to send your connections a mass email. However, please don’t be a spammer.

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The Professional Headline in your LinkedIn profile should not just be your current title. It should be a marketing slogan.

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In the upper right hand corner of your LinkedIn page, it says Search People, but LinkedIn allows you to do so much more, and it really should say “Search Profiles”. See some of what you can do in the following post.

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LinkedIn knows that Jim is a nickname for James, but it doesn’t know that Vin is a nickname for Vincent. Therefore, when you search for someone, make sure you try both nicknames and formal full names.

LinkedIn tells you not to invite people you don’t know, but they don’t make the punishment clear, and it’s harsh. If 5 people say they don’t know you, you get blacklisted, and you can no longer invite people by name.

Others have written about that part, and I will write about it in the future, but in this post, I’m going to address something no one has written about – how do you find out WHO said “I don’t know this user” to your invitation.

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Why would you misspell your last name in your LinkedIn profile? Because other people might misspell it when they look for you.

I knew that people would search for me in LinkedIn using the misspelling O’Mally (without the “e”) even though my last name is spelled O’Malley, and I still wanted them to find me. I discovered a trick that will do it, and I’ll show you in this post.