Question – What’s the next LinkedIn change? Answers = gone
The global Questions and Answers forum on LinkedIn where you could get insights, help and advice from the 200 million users is being retired at the end of this month and I have to say I am sad to see it go.
The announcement on Help Centre says “As of January 31, 2013, the LinkedIn Answers feature will be retired from LinkedIn. We’ll be focusing our efforts on the development of new and more engaging ways to share and discuss professional topics across LinkedIn” so watch this space.
It was a great bit of functionality, divided by interest area and then it gave you the opportunity to reach, engage and canvass opinion from a wide professional audience, which is what a social network is all about, but as only 35,000 people used it in December it is such a small part of functionality they have decided it is time to retire it – bye bye Q&A you will be missed.
So what now if you want to get an answer, an insight, opinion or help others? Well you can simply:-
Ask the question of your own network using your network update / status message, or that of the company profile.
Look for an expert in the area using the search and engage them, bound to be one in the 200 million users.
Look out for a smoke trail in Signal and see if someone has talked about it.
If you want to ask a wide audience consider a poll, they can be shared on status, in groups and on other social platforms too. If you’re wondering where polls has gone from the menu you can find it here, temporarily at present.
Start a discussion in one of the groups, or if you’re looking to demonstrate your expert status then answer someone else’s query, join in the discussion and demonstrate your expertise. With 1,545,609 groups right now there is bound to be one for you to ask in.
So still plenty of options to get an opinion, find an expert and get the help you need to move forward.
As always if I can ever help you with making LinkedIn work just ask, just not in the Answers section …
Strange how, as other platforms are adding functionality, LinkedIn keeps removing functions. Another example is Events. It seems a danger to LinkedIn that people who like the Q&A types of functionality will end up going elsewhere, to places such as Quora. I know a few people who are now organising their events on G+. I hope LinkedIn are quick to bring out their new functionality – I see LinkedIn as a valuable resource, but they need to keep people there for it to deliver.
I’m surprised to see it go as I saw it as part of the gamification that Linkedin seem to be encouraging with the newer Endorsements ‘feature’.
Not surprised how (relatively) few people used it as it wasn’t exactly highlighted on the toolbars. More importantly, like twitter, it had no obvious geographical boundaries. When I share my expertise I am keen to do help my target audience. That’s not worldwide so why spend time checking and answering Qs from around the world?
An alternative approach would have been to add more filters. But the removal of the facility may drive more (actie) users into more groups which would be a good thing.
Can you cite your source for the usage stat of 35,000 in December 2012?