Breathe, Mouse Over and Refresh (BMR) for Sanity on LinkedIn

LinkedIn

It’s a fact of life: LinkedIn is frequently buggy. It gets stuck, won’t let you save changes, and/or won’t show some information. Not to mention the frequent changes in features and format. Those are only the beginning of the de-facto B2B network platform’s many frustrating challenges.

I’d like to share my CPR (or BMR) for LinkedIn sanity. These are ways to deal with your frustration and the frequent high blood pressure-inducing bugginess of LinkedIn. This may be needed a lot as LinkedIn continues to make major changes to the LinkedIn user interface.

Breathe…

I work a lot with professionals who are excellent at their jobs but not always so comfortable with social media or the ins and outs of LinkedIn. If something goes wrong when they’re working on LinkedIn, they tend to assume it’s their error.

They need my reassurance that’s it’s most likely not their fault.

You should know that LinkedIn is often “buggy” and that chances are it’s not your fault at all. I recommend you relax, breathe deeply and take a fresh look at it in a few minutes or even the next day.

Mouse Over…

It all started with the mini-tutorial at the beginning of my online coaching sessions. I started saying “If you can’t find something or it seems like something isn’t working, try mousing around and you may find that options to edit, add, save, move, etc. will appear.”  Menu bars may disappear when you scroll down.  It will likely reappear if you mouse over where it should be rather than scrolling back up to the top.

I tell them it’s preferable to making me dizzy as they scroll up and down but the lesson is that they need to slow down and try mousing over.

Refresh…

LinkedIn (the Website, not the company) gets cranky—sounds more like a two-year-old but that’s how I feel it behaves at times. For example, when you have one section open; e.g. adding a new job description and then you open another section; perhaps a previous job description that includes some wording you want to copy.

All of sudden you’ll find an error message and you can’t save the new description that you painstakingly worked on. No amount of hitting the save button or doing the aforementioned breathing or mousing will resolve your problem. Canceling and trying again also generally won’t work.

What you can do is copy what you’ve just written, hit cancel and then and (this is the important part) only then refresh the browser page.  I reference this as clearing LinkedIn’s brain or blowing its nose. You can then open the section again, paste in the wording you copied, and hit save – bingo – no error message.

Well… I  confess it sometimes sticks again and you might have to go through the whole process of canceling, refreshing and pasting again. At this point, reference the “breathing” section above.  It’s worth it to work in a Word document, save it, and then copy it back into LinkedIn.  There will be fewer tears.  *Update note: this is less of a problem now but still happens.

Common Problems

There have been some sections in LI that have been particularly prone to getting stuck/showing error messages. And some sections that I used a lot in the past that have gone away. The tags and notes section was a section that I loved. I used it to keep notes on when and where I met people and perhaps something about what we discussed. I  could also label them as a prospect, association member, etc. It used to get stuck on a regular basis. This section is gone now though it’s available in the expensive LinkedIn Sales Navigator where I believe it works just fine so I will have one less reason to have to practice my breathing exercises. I would rather have kept that feature and dealt with the frustration.

I’m sure there will be new bugs to frustrate me (and you!), but that’s to deal with another day. I guess there will always be new reasons to practice my Breathe, Mouse-over and Refresh (BMR) techniques. There continue to be changes/new features/new designs regularly on LinkedIn, some of which work well and some which don’t.  I get lots of practice using my BMR technique! I’ve had to develop a daily meditation practice as well.

And, if you need a little help with figuring out all the changes on Linkedin, I would love to talk with you about the ways to make keeping up with LinkedIn easier. Please schedule a free 20-minute strategy consultation to see how I can assist you.