5 BIG CHANGES to LinkedIn in 2024: What VOICE ACTORS NEED to Know

LinkedIn's got a ton of changes in store for 2024. And if you're not up to date, then you could be missing out on huge opportunities and getting left behind.

LinkedIn is bringing a massive change to creator mode, a dedicated services section, search filters, and a whole lot more.

In this post, I'll break down five big LinkedIn changes for 2024, what they mean for you as a freelancer, as a voice actor, and maybe most importantly, how to update your LinkedIn profile to take maximum advantage and have the best possible effect in light of all these changes.

LinkedIn is the world's largest database of working people.

And if you're responsible for creating and developing relationships that lead to business for you, then LinkedIn has got to be a top priority. That's true for sales reps, it's equally true, or maybe even more true, for freelancers, voice actors, audiobook narrators.

Let's talk about…

Big Change Number One: Creator Mode For Everyone

Now, if you're not familiar with LinkedIn Creator Mode, don't feel bad. LinkedIn Creator Mode is a special set of features for content creators that they can use to create and publish content and grow their audience on LinkedIn.

Now it's been around since 2021, believe it or not, but LinkedIn has only rolled out Creator Mode to a very select 11 million users out of a possible 1 billion users, which is what LinkedIn has overall. I've had Creator Mode for several years now and I absolutely love it.

Now here's the cool thing. Creator Mode is getting rolled out to all of us, all 1 billion worldwide LinkedIn users as of February, 2024.

So... what does this mean for you? Well, if you're like me and you've had creator mode, the option to toggle it on or toggle it off, that's going away. That's going to disappear.

Now, if you don't or didn't have creator mode already, be aware that the connect button on your personal profile will now change to a button called follow and LinkedIn will display the number of followers on your personal profile.

Now, the good news is you do get to choose between follow and the old connect call to action depending on your goals and you can switch back and forth at any time. You're not stuck with connect or follow forever. You can change it whenever you want.

Now here's the change you need to be aware of: once you have creator mode and somebody reaches out to connect with you, they will also follow you until you make the decision whether or not to accept their connection request. And even if you deny the connection request, they will still follow you until they manually unfollow you.

Pretty cool, right?

And once you're connected, just like before, you'll get to see each other's content in your news feeds. But the big difference between connect and follow is that only if you are connected can you direct message each other in LinkedIn. Your followers cannot DM you.

Also starting in 2024, the hashtags shown at the top of your profile, they're going bye-bye, too. No more hashtags at the top of your profile page, but you can still list topics that you're interested in, in your headline or in the About section.

But wait, there's more!

LinkedIn is moving the Featured section and the Activity section, both of those sections, up to the top of the personal profile. Also, the Activity section in your profile will no longer include your likes, your comments, other activity.

It will still be there. And you can still get to it when you click on see all activity and you can add a link to the introduction section of your profile to drive traffic to your website, to your demos, to wherever you want to drive it.

Now, once you have Creator Mode, if you qualify and we're not sure exactly what the qualification criteria are right now, but if you do qualify, you can get access to what they call creator tools like LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Newsletters.

Now if you have Creator Mode on and you want to find out whether you have these tools available to you or not, you can go to the Creator Tools section in the Creator Mode Flow and you'll see a list of those Creator Tools and next to each one it will tell you outright whether it's available to you or not.

Now once you have Creator Mode you also get access to Creator Analytics which is one central area to give you analytics on both your combined posts and your audience.

Okay. That's creator mode coming to everybody that's on LinkedIn this month, February, 2024.

Big Change Number Two: A Dedicated Services Section

LinkedIn is adding a dedicated section to each profile so that you can explain in depth what it is that you do. Now the section itself doesn't look all that much different from what we have now, but when you click on it, it takes you to a dedicated Services page, which is all yours, where you can expand on what it is that you provide.

First, you can set up your prices if you so choose, although I highly recommend for voice actors that you set this to Contact for Pricing. You can request reviews of your work. And the best part is you can upload work samples in up to eight file formats, eight media formats. And yes, that includes videos and yes, that includes links to YouTube videos. What a great way to showcase what it is that you do.

And if you happen to be a coach and or a Course Creator, (We don't know anybody like that, do we?) you can also showcase your coaching and course offers there as well.

One other cool thing is at the top there are dedicated buttons for Request Proposal and Message. And the best part is anybody can use those. It doesn't depend on their connection degree to you in LinkedIn. They don't have to be connected at all. They could be a seventh degree connection. They can still request a proposal or message you through your services page.

An awesome feature. How much play it's going to give to voice actors, I'm not real sure.

But the big problem with the Services section is that you can only choose services from a very limited drop down menu. And quite frankly, voiceover is not one of those options. Hopefully, maybe even the powers that be at LinkedIn will see this and they'll expand those offers.

Change Number Three: Filter Your Searches Now by Content Type

Now this might seem like a fairly small update, I'd probably agree with you, but it's also a very useful one. So, until now, if you put a search, a keyword into search in LinkedIn, you had to then look and sort through every possible content type that LinkedIn served up for you.

But now as you're doing the search before you get the results, you can filter your search by LinkedIn content type. In other words, you can sort the results by images, video, job posts, live videos, newsletters, and documents.

Big Change Number Four: Multiple Newsletters

Until now you could only publish one LinkedIn newsletter per personal or business page. But now you can create and post articles for up to five different newsletters on topics of your choice. LinkedIn calls these Editions. After you create a newsletter, you can publish your first edition. Then you can publish additional editions or delete those editions altogether over time.

And what this means, especially for voice actors, is let's say you've been doing a newsletter targeting a particular client segment, let's say e-learning producers. You can now add up to four other targeted newsletters for, let's say, explainer video producers, advertising creative directors, and so on and so on.

Or if you're a voice actor and coach, you could target one newsletter to voiceover clients and another newsletter to voice actors looking for good coaching.

Now when you publish the first edition of your newsletter, that's automatically going to create a newsletters page which will, you'll be able to edit information about you and your newsletter and all the different editions that you offer.

And the cool part is the newsletters page serves as a preview for all your newsletters and you can share that both on and off of LinkedIn.

Now people don't have to be logged in to view your newsletters page but they do have to be logged in to subscribe or to share it on LinkedIn.

And Big Change Number Five: Custom Buttons

Now this one applies to LinkedIn premium. So, if you have LinkedIn Premium, you can now choose a custom button, a call to action button to appear on the top of your profile right next to the follow or connect button.

And the options here are visit your store, visit your website, visit your portfolio (for voice actors, yes, website and portfolio are pretty interchangeable), visit your blog, or book an appointment.

That depends on your business and marketing goals, but you can choose any one of these calls to action. And again, it's right up at the top, right next to connect and follow. So, you can direct targeted traffic wherever you need it.

So, there you have it. Five big changes coming to LinkedIn in 2024, what they mean for you and how to handle them with your personal profile.

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