Top 10 11 LinkedIn Tips
1) A picture paints a thousand words – Always
include a picture of you smiling in your profile. It humanizes
you and makes you seem more approachable. Not to
mention, some times it helps to jog their memory (and
yours!)
2) URL – Always customize the URL to be your name or
something folks can remember. Mine is
http://www.linkedin.com/in/lorrainemdavis
3) URL – If you don‟t have your own blog or website,
buy whateveryournameis.com and forward it to your
LinkedIn profile. Don‟t forget to include the www in your
profile or it won‟t work.
4) Name – Always include the way folks would know you
so when they look for your name, they find you. Include your
maiden name and/or nickname if applicable.
5) Requesting Connections – Always customize your
invitation when you ask people to join your network. Include
how they know you, how you can benefit them by being a
part of their network, and even how you hope to work with
them in the future. Leaving this as the default says “You‟re
not important enough for me to customize this to you” or
worse “You sent this to 200 people and are probably going to
spam my network.” The default message of “„I‟d like to add
you to my professional network on LinkedIn” is NOT very
compelling.
6) Email address – If you‟re going to use your work e-
mail address, always put your personal e-mail address on
there as backup just in case you leave a company and forget
your password.
7) Export EVERYTHING – Monthly, export your entire
profile and all your contacts so you have a hard copy backup.
Email them to your Gmail account for double backup.
Recommendations – Give folks you work with/for
recommendations when they do great work. Be willing to
revise them if folks find typos in your recommendation or if
they want you to use different words to say the same thing.
9) Recommendations – Ask for recommendations after
you do great work. Don‟t be afraid to offer a suggestion of
what a good recommendation to you might look like. Make
sure you ask the right people for the right thing. The last
thing you want to do is put someone in a place to give you a
recommendation on something they can‟t honestly say you
did.
10) Answers – Answer questions in your area of expertise,
or recommend the questions you find to experts you know
can answer them.
11) Answers – Ask questions of your network when you
need help (and for bonus points, publish the answer on your
blog for all to read). Never ask folks to respond privately so
everyone can learn from your questions.
10 Linkedin Tips for Professionals
, here are my top 10 Linkedin tips for professionals:
How to Become a Linkedin Expert
1. Make your profile client focused
Resist the temptation to make your profile look like your
resume.
Resist that temptation.
When you first meet potential clients you don’t rattle off a
huge list of companies you’ve worked for and the
responsibilities you’ve had – that would bore the pants off
them. Most effective introductions focus on who you help,
and what problems you help them solve or results you help
them achieve. Then if asked more, you say a bit more about
what you do – and give a little “backstory” as to why you are
uniquely qualified to help.
Linkedin is for making connections – and for the majority of
professionals that means clients and business partners, not
recruiters.
You need to design your profile to have the impact you want
on those connections. Treat it like your introduction at a
networking meeting.
Don’t take Linkedin’s category names too seriously either –
use whatever space you have to give the impression you
want to give. I use the “Specialities” section, for example, to
include a list of my services (in client focused terms, of
course).
2. Get connecting – but…
Linkedin works on connections. The most powerful use of
Linkedin is to find new clients and business partners through
the search function or directly via your contacts connections.
The more direct connections you have, the more
opportunities you have to connect. I still see people who’ve
made all the effort to set up their Linkedin profile – but who
have so few connections that they don’t get any benefit.
The Linkedin toolbar for Outlook provides an easy way of
inviting the your Outlook contacts and people you email
regularly to connect with you.
However, there’s a catch…
3…Choose your connection strategy carefully
There are two very different strategies to connecting on
Linkedin: “Open Networking” and “Trusted Partner
Networking”.
In business networking generally, the value you get from
your network is a product of the size of your network, and
your ability to “convert” connections into productive
business (work, a referral, etc.). You can grow the value of
your network by getting more connections, or deepening the
strength of each connection (getting to know people better,
helping them out, etc.)
On Linkedin, one strategy for getting value is to be an “Open
Networker” or LION (LinkedIn Open Networker). Open
Networkers focus on growing the size of their network by
initiating and accepting connection requests from as many
people as possible. Open Networkers typically have many
thousands of connections. This means that when they search
for useful relationships (potential clients or business
partners), for example looking for contacts in specific
companies, or geographies or with specific interests or job
titles – they are much more likely to find them
(exponentially more likely because of the way Linkedin
connections work).
The downside of this strategy is that with thousands of
connections you don’t know each one very well, if at all.
You’re essentially using Linkedin as a giant Rolodex or
telephone directory rather than as a way of making deeper
connections. That’s neither good nor bad – it just means
that if you find someone you want to connect with through
one of these “shallow” connections, you’re unlikely to get a
strong referral to them.
The other strategy is to have fewer but deeper connections –
a “Trusted Partner” strategy. Here you only connect to
people you already know and trust. Most likely from face-to-
face interaction, but possibly from online interaction too.
With this strategy you have less chance of finding someone
via a search because you have less connections. But if you
do find someone, it will be through someone who knows and
trusts you – and they will be able to give a strong referral to
you and put you in touch with the person you’re interested
in connecting with.
In my experience, this Trusted Partner strategy works best
for most professionals. It mirrors the way we develop
trusted relationships in the real world. And it reduces the
risk that your trusted connections will be spammed from
other connections you barely know.
Both strategies can work, but you must be consistent. If
you’re following a Trusted Partner strategy, you must only
connect to people you really know & trust and turn down
connections from people you don’t (Open Networkers for
example).
4. Use Search to find potential clients and business
partners
Many people get going on Linkedin but fail to use it to help
their business. One of the most effective ways to gain
business value from Linkedin is to find potential clients and
business partners.One of the things I do in my consulting
practice is to help clients get more referrals for their
business. And one of the key things I teach them is to be
very specific in who they ask to be referred to.
Linkedin allows the ultimate in specificity. You can search for
exactly who you want to be referred to – by company, by
geography, by name, by job title, etc. And you can search
across your entire network at once. Or you can look at the
contact list of an individual to see if there’s anyone you’d like
to be connected to.
Once you’ve identified people you’d like to be introduced or
referred to, rather than try to connect them directly, give
your mutual connection a call and ask them if they can
connect you. That’s much more polite than going directly,
and it’s much more likely to be successful.
5. Give testimonials to get them
Testimonials are very helpful to have on your profile. They’re
a clear indication of the quality of your work and the
relationships you form.
But begging for a testimonial isn’t a great strategy.
If you want to get testimonials, use Linkedin to give them to
people you’ve worked with and who have done a great job
for you. Linkedin will show them the testimonial to approve,
then ask them if they want to reciprocate. Most do.
6. Have a helpful headline
When people find you in searches on Linkedin, or when you
contribute to Group discussions or in the Linkedin Answers
Q&A section; the initial thing they see is a little box with
your name, photo, and your “headline”.What most people
have in their headline is their job title. “Owner at XYZ
Company” or “Principal consultant at ABC Ltd”. By default,
unless you change it manually, Linkedin takes the headline
from your last job title.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t give people a clue as to whether
you might be able to help them, or might be interesting to
connect to.
You should treat your headline like your introduction when
networking. Focus on what you can do to help people.
My headline, for example is “Helping Professional Services
Firms Attract More Clients and Win More New Business”. It’s
much more useful in telling people what I actually do than
using an “offical” job title like Managing Director. That will
get more people to click through to my profile and maybe
begin to interact with me.
You can edit your Headline via the Edit My Profile option.
7. Join Linkedin Groups to connect and interact
Linkedin groups are essentially discussion forums for specific
interest groups. They allow you to find out the lates news,
and to join in debates on topics of interest. You should be
joining groups both of interest to you professionally, and the
groups where your potential clients “hang out”.
I’m a fairly active poster on the Law Marketing group for
example. I try to answer questions and be helpful. It’s all
part of building my personal brand as someone who’s
knowledgeable and experienced in the field of professional
services marketing & business development.
The same is also true of the Linkedin Q&A section. Post
sensible answers or pose sensible questions and over time
you’ll develop a reputation for knowing what you’re talking
about.
8. Use Status Updates to subtly remind your contacts
of what you do
Linkedin status updates are a nice way of helping to stay top
of mind with contacts. If you were to call or email all your
contacts any time you did something small but interesting, it
would quickly become seen as pushy or spammy. But
updating your status is an non-intrusive way of getting a
gentle reminder out.
Depending on their settings, your contacts will get a regular
email with a summary of the status updates of their
contacts. And they will see the updates on their Linkedin
homepage. Mostly it will just be “so and so updated their
profile” type messages. So if your status update has
something interesting in it (“Ian has just run a seminar on
consultative selling skills”) it will remind them of the sort of
thing you do and may even trigger them into action.
Using the ping.fm service allows you to update the status of
other social networks like Facebook and Twitter
simultaneously.
9. Watch others’ status updates to initiate contact
Keep an eye on status updates from others – it can be a
good opportunity to get back in touch – especially if they’ve
changed jobs or have set out on a new venture. Even small
status changes can help give you something to start a
conversation – the sort of smalltalk needed to keep
dialogues and relationships going in between more meaty
topics.
10. Proactively link others together who you think
may benefit
Don’t wait for others to initiate a request to be linked up to
your other contacts. Review your contact list regularly
looking for ways to add value to them. One good way is to
offer to link them up with potential clients or partners for
them.It’s not super easy to do this using Linkedin
functionality – I find it’s easier just to email both and
suggest they make the connection themselves.
The tips I’ve outlined are for professionals who want to use
Linkedin to help them grow their businesses and their
careers through what is essentially the online equivalent of
normal business networking.
It’s not the only way to use Linkedin. For years I used it
mainly to reconnect with old colleagues I’d lost touch with.
But it’s certainly a good way to use Linkedin that can deliver
real business results.
Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn
• The average number of LinkedIn connections for people who work
at Google is forty-seven.
• The average number for Harvard Business School grads is fifty-
eight, so you could skip the MBA, work at Google, and
probably get most of the connections you need. Later, you can
hire Harvard MBAs to prepare your income taxes.
• People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times
more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than
people with less than five.
• All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact,
499 of them are represented by director-level and above
employees.
Most people use LinkedIn to “get to someone” in order to make a
sale, form a partnership, or get a job. It works well for this because
it is an online network of more than 8.5 million experienced
professionals from around the world representing 130 industries.
However, it is a tool that is under-utilized, so I’ve compiled a top-
ten list of ways to increase the value of LinkedIn.
1. Increase your visibility.
By adding connections, you increase
the likelihood that people will see your profile first when
they’re searching for someone to hire or do business with. In
addition to appearing at the top of search results (which is a
major plus if you’re one of the 52,000 product managers on
LinkedIn), people would much rather work with people who
their friends know and trust.
2. Improve your connectability.
Most new users put only their
current company in their profile. By doing so, they severely
limit their ability to connect with people. You should fill out
your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past
companies, education, affiliations, and activities.
You can
also include a link to your profile as part of an email
signature. The added benefit is that the link enables people to
see all your credentials, which would be awkward if not
downright strange, as an attachment.
3. Improve your Google PageRank.
LinkedIn allows you to make
your profile information available for search engines to index.
Since LinkedIn profiles receive a fairly high PageRank in
Google, this is a good way to influence what people see when
they search for you.
To do this, create a public profile and
select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL,
customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. To
strengthen the visibility of this page in search engines, use
this link in various places on the web> For example, when you
comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your
signature.
4. Enhance your search engine results.
In addition to your
name, you can also promote your blog or website to search
engines like Google and Yahoo! Your LinkedIn profile allows
you to publicize websites. There are a few pre-selected
categories like “My Website,” “My Company,” etc.
If you
select “Other” you can modify the name of the link. If you’re
linking to your personal blog, include your name or descriptive
terms in the link, and voila! instant search-engine
optimization for your site. To make this work, be sure your
public profile setting is set to “Full View.”
5. Perform blind, “reverse,” and company reference
checks.
LinkedIn’s reference check tool to input a company
name and the years the person worked at the company to
search for references. Your search will find the people who
worked at the company during the same time period. Since
references provided by a candidate will generally be glowing,
this is a good way to get more balanced data.
Companies will
typically check your references before hiring you, but have
you ever thought of checking your prospective manager’s
references? Most interviewees don’t have the audacity to ask
a potential boss for references, but with LinkedIn you have a
way to scope her out.
You can also check up on the company
itself by finding the person who used to have the job that
you’re interviewing for. Do this by searching for job title and
company, but be sure to uncheck “Current titles only.” By
contacting people who used to hold the position, you can get
the inside scoop on the job, manager and growth
potential.
By the way, if using LinkedIn in these ways becomes
a common practice, we’re apt to see more truthful resumes.
There’s nothing more amusing than to find out that the
candidate who claims to have caused some huge success was a
total bozo who was just along for the ride.
6. Increase the relevancy of your job search.
Use LinkedIn’s
advanced search to find people with educational and work
experience like yours to see where they work. For example, a
programmer would use search keywords such as “Ruby on
Rails,” “C++,” “Python,” “Java,” and “evangelist” to find out
where other programmers with these skills work.
7. Make your interview go smoother.
You can use LinkedIn to
find the people that you’re meeting. Knowing that you went
to the same school, plays hockey, or shares acquaintances is a
lot better than an awkward silence after, “I’m doing fine,
thank you.”
8. Gauge the health of a company.
Perform an advanced search
for company name and uncheck the “Current Companies Only”
box. This will enable you to scrutinize the rate of turnover
and whether key people are abandoning ship. Former
employees usually give more candid opinions about a
company’s prospects than someone who’s still on board.
9. Gauge the health of an industry.
If you’re thinking of
investing or working in a sector, use LinkedIn to find people
who worked for competitors—or even better, companies who
failed. For example, suppose you wanted to build a next
generation online pet store, you’d probably learn a lot from
speaking with former Pets.com or WebVan employees.
10. Track startups.
You can see people in your network who are
initiating new startups by doing an advanced search for a
range of keywords such as “stealth” or “new startup.” Apply
the “Sort By” filter to “Degrees away from you” in order to
see the people closest to you first.
11. Ask for advice.
LinkedIn’s newest product, LinkedIn Answers,
aims to enable this online. The product allows you to
broadcast your business-related questions to both your
network and the greater LinkedIn network. The premise is
that you will get more high-value responses from the people in
your network than more open forums.
For example, here are
some questions a Learning & Development leader might ask
◦
◦ What should we pay a vp of biz dev?
◦
1. Integrate into a new job.
When people start a new job,
ordinarily their roots aren’t that deep in the new company.
However, with Linkedin, new employees can study fellow
employees’ profiles and therefore help them get to know
more people faster in a new company
2. Scope out the competition, customers, partners, etc. This
seems like it’s a no-brainer, but you can use LinkedIn to scope
out the competition’s team as well as the team of customers
and partners. For example, your competitor’s vp of marketing
came from Oracle…she’ll probably believe that business is
war.
What recruiters look for in a LinkedIn
profile: 8 tips
If you are an active or passive job seeker, there is no better way to cut
through the clutter and get yourself noticed than LinkedIn. Nowadays, most
recruiters and companies are increasingly using sites like LinkedIn to
identify talent. Given my experience looking for candidates, here are some
key characteristics of a LinkedIn user that grab my attention when I make
my daily picks:
1. Make your LinkedIn profile 100% complete
• Include all companies, education, and awards. These are the key items
on which we recruiters search.
• References are very important. The
more we know about you the better.
• The more robust your profile, the
higher you will be in the Google search rankings.
• The more
information a recruiter has upfront, the more efficient the search
process.
• Update your LinkedIn profile here
2. Use a profile picture that you use on multiple sites
• A picture helps to create and reinforce your online brand
• It will help
a recruiter identify you on the interview day at “Starbucks”
• Add a
profile picture here
3. Use the “Specialties” box to fill in keywords
• List as many keywords as possible that are relevant to your roles,
capabilities, and interests that will help you turn up on LinkedIn Search
•
Update your profile summary and specialties here
4. Update your LinkedIn “Status” regularly
• Link to articles you have written or in which you are quoted
• Update
status with your latest blog posts
• Discuss business
accomplishments
• If you are actively looking for a job, tell people what
you are looking for!
• Update your status on other social networking
sites such as Twitter. Try services like ping.fm that allow you to update
your status across multiple sites.
5. Make changes to your profile after every job change or
promotion
• The recruiters you are linked to will notice these
changes
• It is harder to be found if people don’t know where you
are
• Update your LinkedIn profile as you would your change-of-address
at the post office
6. Include your web site and blog links
• Add suitable weblinks to the “Websites” section on your LinkedIn
profile
• This could range from your career blog to your Twitter profile.
Alternatively, you can also link to a guest blog post you wrote recently.
•
Update your “Websites” section here
7. Do not block incoming emails
• No matter how popular you think you are, you will not be overwhelmed.
I promise!
• The LinkedIn community is all about participation so feel
free to accept incoming communication from fellow LinkedIn users. Update
your contact settings here.
• If a recruiter reaches out to you and you
are not interested, let him or her know or better yet refer a friend
•
LinkedIn actually allows you to control how you receive emails and
notifications. Update your settings here.
8. Increase your number of trusted connections!
• Use webmail
importer to bring your real world professional relationships online and to
find your contacts who are already on LinkedIn.
• Depending on
whether you’re a browser person or an Outlook person, check out the
respective toolbars that will help organize your professional relationship
either while you browse or check out your Inbox.
1. Use LinkedIn Groups: Out of all the features on LinkedIn, I think the
groups feature reigns supreme. It positions you as an expert and, just like
people who start events; it makes you the center of information and the
“connector.” I started the Personal Branding Network on LinkedIn about a
month or so ago and have already built it up to 841 users! The value I’ve
received out of this group is tremendous and now I spend less time
updating the group because it’s generated a powerful community that
4. Applications: When applications first came out, I was praying that it
wouldn’t be like how Facebook did it and I was right. I find great value in
two of the applications LinkedIn currently supports: WordPress blog RSS
and Slideshare.net. Having your blog syndicate through your profile is
valuable to showing employers that you’re already writing about topics
you’re interested in and a Slideshare presentation also makes you look like
you’re contributing great value.