Sharing a LinkedIn Event

The following question came in via my Formspring account, “I’ve been using LinkedIn for a long time so this may be a dumb question but when I set up an event, it tells me that “An update has been sent to your network letting them know about your event”. Do I still need to “Share with Contacts” one by one?”

For those of you who are not familiar with LinkedIn’s practices, you can create Events to share with your connections.  These events can be virtual or in-person events but adding them to LinkedIn increases the exposure for a specific event.

Setting Up an Event on LinkedIn

To setup an event, you want to login to LinkedIn, click “More” at the top of your screen and scroll down to Events.

Once you’ve setup your event and added the details, you can then publish your event.

Once your event is published, you will see a confirmation screen that looks like this:

Notifying Your Network & Sharing the Event

As you can see, the first box states that “an update has just been sent to your network letting them know about your event on LinkedIn.”  So, what does this mean?  This means that as soon as you publish your event, your status update (now known as a network update) is updated with the event.

Here’s the latest activity on my account after posting my event:

You can see that my top update is about the event I just added.  (Side note: LinkedIn’s update of my event has the incorrect date yet the event has the correct date… This will be something I will be sharing with LinkedIn.)

This network update can be seen from anyone else’s home page on LinkedIn.  Here is an example of the activity that I am currently viewing on LinkedIn:

Now, you can take it a step further by following option #2 in the confirmation box that appeared after you published your event:

Using the “Share with Contacts” option will allow you to select people from your list to receive an Inbox notification of your event.  This means that your event will be pushed out to people’s LinkedIn inboxes and their e-mail account (if they have that option setup).  To do this, you want to click on “Share this event” and then add people manually to the screen that follows.

To summarize the choices: the #1 option “Tell Your Network” is something that people have to be looking for to see whereas the #2 option pushes the information out to them specifically so there is little chance of them missing it.

Making Sure Your Activity Can Be Seen By Others

Even though the network update will get pushed out automatically for every event you setup, you want to be sure that your settings are configured so that people will actually see it.  Click on “Settings” at the top of the screen and choose “Member Feed Visibility” under Profile Settings.  Here, you want to make sure that your member feed is visible to “Everyone.”

Next, click on “Profile & Status Updates” under privacy settings and ensure that you have the following settings checked:

Once you do those two things, your network updates will be seen by everyone — not just your connections or your immediate network.

Questions? Post them as a comment below!

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