Are You LinkedIn Yet?
Posted By Industrial Web Solutions Marketing Team on February 18, 2010
LinkedIn is a professional networking service that has successfully attracted over 53 million members from more than 200 countries representing 170 industries. The governing philosophy behind the service, simply stated, is that “relationships matter” in the business world. Experienced professionals around the world have a way to find, be introduced to and collaborate with other qualified professionals that can help them satisfy or fulfill a particular business need. The world’s largest and most successful organizations, such as Dow, utilize the service to make important connections.
Access to the service requires you register with your email address and create a password. Once you have logged in you create your professional profile. Or, if you’re like me and many other business professionals, you have more than one area of expertise and service offering so you create a separate profile for each. You form connections by inviting contacts you have already made to join LinkedIn and connect to you. You begin to build your network in a number of different ways:
- Accept invitations to connect with the connections of your LinkedIn connections
- Accept invitations from professionals who found you through LinkedIn
- Request connections with professionals you discovered through the service
- Invite new contacts you have made to join and connect with you
The network allows you to:
- Manage your public professional profile
- Find and be introduced to potential clients, service providers, and subject experts who come recommended
- Create and collaborate on projects, gather data, share files and solve problems
- Be found for business opportunities and find potential partners
- Gain new insights from discussions with like-minded professionals in private group settings
- Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
- Find or post a job listing
- Create or join a Group with shared interests or for research
- Integrate with your Twitter.com account
LinkedIn and Twitter recently joined forces to allow members of both services to integrate their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to display real-time updates. Once logged in to LinkedIn, you can make Tweets (posts) directly from within LinkedIn that will post in real-time to the Twitter service, providing all your Twitter Followers with notification of your latest post.
How you choose to use the service is up to you:
- Publicity
- Professional Updates
- Company/Department/Personal announcements
- Make connections with other professionals in your industry
- Find clients
The service is free and requires your time and creativity to leverage the career and business building opportunities it potentially affords. To join LinkedIn follow this link.
I love LinkedIn for professional networking.
My top three tips:
1. PLEASE fill out your profile. Seriously. Unless you don’t want anyone to know anything about you. This is how you can be found via search. This is how some people will decide if they want to talk to you further. Don’t just include this job, include previous ones. Include things you did, like on a resume, but you have more room.
2. Select a custom profile address. Get rid of http://www.linkedin.com/in/ajkfaklswhatever and put your name in there.
3. Join a couple groups related to your areas of expertise. Even if you never interact with them on the discussion boards doing so gives you the ability to Inmail and see the profiles of the other group members, dramatically increasing your network with just a few clicks.
I’m a little surprised at the advice to have multiple profiles for different activities. I’m curious as to the rationale. You can have multiple current positions and can explain your focus in the introduction area. I would think in an environment like LinkedIn it would be confusing to not be transparent.