LinkedIn is becoming more and more complex.

In the early days of LinkedIn it was all about connecting with my peers that I knew offline, from the real world. LinkedIn was just a neater way to stay in contact than Facebook because it was more professional, and with less cat videos. I carefully selected with whom I connect, I had a few hundred connections.

This changed back in the year of 2015 when I started to write articles for my blog ip-lawyer-tools.com. I have since then joined several big LinkedIn groups where I could multiply my articles as posts, thereby increasing my audience. That way I have collected over 14k connections, mostly from the area of Intellectual Property.

I recommend to use LinkedIn and to keep your profile updated. I have written about that before and about what you can do in order to improve your appearance on LinkedIn by investing one single hour of worktime (click here).

LinkedIn Events

LinkedIn has developed tremendously over the past two years. There was an “Events” feature added, which I use every week to organize an online event on Clubhouse. You can find my events here on my LinkedIn profile linkedin.com/in/martin-schweiger/

A comprehensive write-up about how to set up a LinkedIn event is found here: theb2bhouse.com/linkedin-events/

I do not find creating a LinkedIn Event very intuitive, and the features for LinkedIn events keep changing. But LinkedIn Events work and I multiply my weekly “4×4 Innovation Meet. Turn Ideas Into Money” on Clubhouse to my audience on LinkedIn. That provides about 20 people in my Clubhouse events, sometimes less and sometimes more. We are a small club of highly creative people from the field of Innovation and we discuss topics in this field.

LinkedIn Live

Linkedin Live is a very new broadcasting tool that lets you stream a live video within a LinkedIn Event. That live video stream can also be multiplied by other online platforms, such as Facebook or Youtube.

It is not a fixed requirement to use Linkedin Live to create a Linkedin Event page. You may stream Linkedin Live within a Linkedin event, but you may also still use third-party streaming tools such as Clubhouse instead. And I will continue that because Clubhouse is such a neat format that even works when you are traveling in a plane over the Indian ocean. Yes, I have successfully tried that out before.

Not everyone can create a LinkedIn Live stream. These are the current criteria for qualifying as a “broadcasting member” (from here):

The criteria for Live Video access are:

• Audience base
  Members and Pages with more than 150 followers and/or connections are eligible to be evaluated for LinkedIn Live access.
• Recent shares of original content (any type)
  We look for members and Pages who have experience creating original content on LinkedIn (For example, creating posts with text, images, or videos, publishing articles, etc.) to evaluate if they will be able to make the most of LinkedIn Live.
• A history of abiding by our Professional Community Policies
  We want to ensure our members have a safe, trusted, and professional experience on LinkedIn, as defined by our Professional Community Policies. Only members, Pages, and their admins that have a good standing record will be considered for Live Video access.
• Geography
  LinkedIn Live is not available at this time for members and Pages based in mainland China.

This leads me to the “LinkedIn Creator” mode because as a LinkedIn Creator you can – among others – stream on LinkedIn Live.

LinkedIn Creator Mode

The LinkedIn Creator can be activated on your LinkedIn profile

1. Click the “Me” icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
2. Click View Profile.
3. Scroll down to Resources and click on Creator mode: On

4. Click Next on the Creator mode preview pop-up window

5. Add topics (hashtags) to indicate the topics you post about the most. These are my hashtags: BetterIT, LegalMarketing, InnovationStrategy, PersonalityBuilding, and (my favorite) MustSeeIfYouAreAnEngineer:

Then click “Done” and you are good to go. Almost.

Here comes an important change that I recommend for members of the legal profession. Change the “Visibility” status from “Follow” back to “Connect”, as it was before you switched on the LinkedIn Creator mode.

Connect Vs. Follow Option

A connection is defined as a two-way relationship that requires one user to send an invitation and another user to accept. Following, on the other hand, allows one user to see and interact with another user’s content and activity without being connected.

The LinkedIn Creator mode changes the “Connect” option to “Follow” so rather than building Connections, you develop Followers. It is much faster for people to do one click to follow you, so this speeds up building your audience. You can still Connect with people who are on Creator mode, it is just one extra step to get to that button. However, when this is done the following can happen: someone who tries to connect with you may get this message:

This is exactly contrary to what a lawyer or patent attorney wants to achieve. We want to make it easy for our audience to connect with us. I do not “prefer to be followed”. I want to connect with my audience. I want to build up my network, and not just to create a large audience.

In earlier versions of the LinkedIn Creator modern, one could reset the “Follow” being the primary action when other members view your profile. But if you have creator mode turned on for your profile, turning this off will also turn creator mode off (and vice-versa). Check this setting out: go to your Privacy Settings and select the tab entitled ‘Visibility’ and choose the second sub-menu ‘Visibility of your LinkedIn activity. Then choose the last option on the right of the menu entitled ‘Followers’ and click to expand this.

Having done all this, you are good to go for your first own LinkedIn Live event.

But what I would recommend is to first take part in someone else’s LinkedIn Live event, and to publish the recording on your blog and share it on LinkedIn.

My Own First LinkedIn Live Event

This was a great honor for me, I have been invited to Bastian Best’s and Felicita Banzhaf’s weekly podcast (click here).

I have used the free CocoCut plugin in the Google Chrome browser to download the video file that is displayed when the LinkedIn Event is opened. Cococut could not detect the LinkedIn Life file so you have to use the “Force download” option in order to acquire that video:

The downloaded recording was 400MB big, so I have used the Cloudconvert online video converter to convert it to 720p resolution, thereby reducing its size to only 211MB.

I could after that edit the video file in Camtasia for adding a start and stop sequence and for displaying the link of my website throughout the entire video. Without reducing the size of the video, the Camtasia kept stalling when loading the LinkedIn Live video.

And here is the result:

Conclusion

Brush up your LinkedIn profile today (click here), this is important.

Find out whether you want to become a LinkedIn Creator. Calculate the costs: can you set aside your time for regularly producing content?

Then start a LinkedIn Event series. I recommend Clubhouse, but LinkedIn Live is a true alternative.

Whatever content you produce on LinkedIn, re-publish it on your own website so that you remain in control. LinkedIn is only a rented platform, and you may be kicked out any time, even without there being a reason.

Martin “LinkedIn” Schweiger