LinkedIN Publishing Platform – Bugs and Issues to Know

It’s brilliant that LinkedIN created an integrated publishing platform. It’s been a huge success and has allowed many talented writers and experts across many industries to publish and share their knowledge with the communities who would most likely be interested in it.

Unfortunately, having published 20+ articles on LinkedIn, I’ve noticed several issues with the publishing platform which I’m outlining here to help others. I should also make clear, the below details are from my experience and troubleshooting, and info should be taken as-is. It’s also possible issues I outline below may be addressed or resolved at a later date.

1. You publish an article and your connections and followers may never know because they don’t receive a notification

I’ve run across this a few times, at least 4+ occurrences. I initially found out about the problem when a connection of mine notified me that he didn’t receive a notification. A notification shouldn’t be confused with an update. A notification shows up under the flag symbol on the right-side of the LinkedIN top menu bar providing more visibility, and an update is something that is sent out on the activity feed that connections/followers may or may not notice.

LinkedIN Top Menu Bar: Flag icon is where notifications are received

LinkedIN Top Menu Bar: Flag icon is where notifications are received

I’ve also seen some other users complain about this, and, when I first ran into the issue, I reported it to LinkedIN support. The response I received stated the article was caught by one of their content filters for some reason, therefore causing notifications not to be sent, and that a change had been made so the problem wouldn’t reoccur. However, I’ve seen the issue occur several times after.

Unfortunately, even after four support tickets filed over 10+ months, no one has been able to resolve the issue or even provide details on exactly why this occurs.

2. When you publish an article you may get a false confirmation stating all your connections/followers have been notified

If your article is filtered, you’ll not be notified of the filtering, and your connections/followers will not get a notification, but you will still receive a confirmation message stating your connections/followers have been notified of your new publication. I was surprised to learn this through experience, and, it seems to be an obvious bug that can mislead the user in terms of response activity. Also, this seems to defeat the purpose of giving users the ability to follow others, because, if posts are filtered, followers don’t get a notification. A filtered article also doesn’t show up on the activity feed unless a manual update is done.

When I first reported the notification issue, the article wouldn’t even show in the users Recent Activity Feed if the notification/filtering issue was encountered. It seems some change or fix was made as now even if notifications aren’t sent, it at least shows in the user’s Recent Activity Feed.

LinkedIN Publishing Platform Notification Failure

LinkedIN Publishing Platform Notification Failure

3. If your article is filtered, it will not be published on any Pulse Channels

I’ve also noticed the articles that are filtered are never published on any Pulse Channels like Technology or Information Security. I have many other posts that if not filtered are usually published on LinkedIN Pulse Channels which allows for more visibility within LinkedIN.

4. Support – what should one expect from a free service?

Sure, LinkedIN trades on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and has a market cap of ~25 Billion, but what should users expect in terms of support when things just don’t work for a free service? In this case, premium support or phone support is not offered even for premium/paying users. All issues are handled through a Help Center/support ticket system.

This issue is something to consider for any such service. In my case, I’m just writing articles in my spare time and using LinkedIN as the respective publishing platform, so not an extremely urgent situation to fix but annoying regardless.

I remember a few months ago doing some research on phone/VOIP services for business. Reading some reviews of a well known company providing free phone/VOIP services, which offered no support except a public support forum, it seemed many small businesses use the service because it’s free. However, there seemed to be quite a bit of complaints on support due to literately no assurance of estimated time to fix or a fix at all.

With the issues I’ve seen on LinkedIN: week-long delayed support responses, and supports inability to provide meaningful feedback or resolutions, I can definitely see why people get frustrated as is obvious by many message boards and forums; just google “linkedin support” or “linkedin support phone”.

In closing, some not so great workarounds, but workarounds regardless, I found for the LinkedIN notification issue are:

1.) When you realize an article is filtered and notifications have not been sent out, create another article and simply put a link in it to the initial article. This will at least send out notifications that a new article from you was posted. However, I found with this method it’s still unlikely the article will get posted on a LinkedIN Pulse channel.

2.) Simply delete the article and re-post after modifying certain things you think may be causing the issue either with the title or content. The problem with this approach is you are guessing and may not be able to determine the issue easily.

If you use the LinkedIn Publishing Platform and are having similar issues, or perhaps didn’t realize there were issues, hopefully this post helps. Hopefully these issue will be resolved sometime soon.

Follow me on Twitter: @Humair_Ahmed

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