how to make the most of linkedin
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HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF LinkedIn
Introduction The primary role of LinkedIn has shifted in the past few years from a recruitment site – that you would visit only very occasionally -‐ to a means of building and sustaining a contact network, sharing useful and relevant information and demonstrating expertise and thought leadership. This shift has made LinkedIn far more useful and relevant to the majority of business users and not surprisingly has resulted in a significant increase in the number of people using the site on a regular basis. The number of LinkedIn users active for at least two hours a week has increased from 48% to 58% in the past year, whilst those active for at least seven hours has increased from 11 to 18%. The number of people with at least 500 LinkedIn followers has also increased from 30% to 41% during this period1, suggesting that people are investing more time in building their personal networks. This growing utility of LinkedIn means that all of us need to start taking the site more seriously and invest a bit more time in ensuring that we make the most of what it can offer. The following short and hopefully practical guide has been put together by Martin Thomas, Dissident consultant and the Institute of Directors’ Course Leader on Digital and Social media, to help you use LinkedIn more effectively. How to manage your personal profile In a sense you are your own brand manager on LinkedIn. Even the most amateurish of designers will find the ‘edit profile’ settings on the site easy to navigate. It is amazing how many bad photos continue to populate LinkedIn: making it appear like the world’s dullest dating site. It is worth taking the time to choose an interesting photo that ideally says something about your style and personality, albeit in an appropriate business context: so you would be well advised not to use that drunken ‘selfie’ from the recent conference. I am not suggesting that my profile photo is perfect, but as you can see from the picture below, I have attempted to use an image that captures me in action … talking as per usual.
1 Forbes Entrepreneurs LinkedIn study (May 2014)
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It is also worth spending a bit of time creating an appropriate background for your profile page. As you can see from the above, I have used one of our Dissident company images. The format requires a somewhat elongated photograph, so you might find that some of your preferred images don’t look right, but it is worth persevering. Here is another example of a background produced by a contact of mine who is a keen music fan, hence the mixer image:
You will notice that Matt’s Professional Headline describes what he does – ‘Helping organisations where people, content and technology collide’ – rather than simply providing a job description. There is plenty of room in your profile to talk about your current role, so why don’t you use the Professional Headline to grab people’s attention and say something interesting about yourself?
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Tell your personal story LinkedIn has recently produced a list of the top 10 buzzwords or clichés used by people in their profile pages. You may be ‘motivated’, ‘passionate’ or ‘creative’ but unless you want to sound like everyone else, it would be worth finding some more interesting adjectives.
Manage your settings There are times when you may want to be anonymous, perhaps when researching potential connections, or you don’t want to inform all of your followers when making minor changes to your profile or simply want to hide your personal connections from other users. On these occasions, a simple adjustment to your LinkedIn settings can change what other people see. Apparently, 25% of LinkedIn users don’t know about the setting that allows them to hide their connections2: make sure you are not one of them, especially if you are in process of (discretely) looking for a new job.
2 Forbes Entrepreneurs LinkedIn study (May 2014)
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Be an active participant As is the case with all social media platforms, LinkedIn rewards active participation. The more you share, upload, publish, comment and like, the more people are likely to see your profile and the stronger your network will become.
LinkedIn’s acquisition of Pulse in 2013 has helped turn the site into a publishing and news platform. This has led to a significant growth in the number of people using LinkedIn as a source of business news and knowledge. It is worth spending a few minutes managing your news-‐feed to maximize your chances of receiving useful news and information – from people and companies whose opinions matter to you. In simple terms this means following companies and Influencers (for example, Jack Welch has over four million followers) – you’ll find recommendations on LinkedIn’s Pulse tab – and hiding updates from connections who tend to fill your news-‐feed with trivial or self-‐serving rubbish. You can find the hide function by scrolling on the icon showing when a specific news update was posted (see below):
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Groups remain a really useful part of the LinkedIn experience. You can find a Group for every conceivable interest. In addition to providing you with access to relevant topics and the ability to debate and share suggestions with your peers, you can send direct messages to fellow group members even if they are not personal connections. In recent months, LinkedIn has made it easier for people to post their own blogs on the site. Because your posts appear automatically in the news-‐feeds of your connections, you can often achieve far more views, likes and comments for your LinkedIn posts than you can typically gain by posting on a corporate website. By clicking on the ‘Your recent activity’ link, you will get a simple analysis of the effectiveness of your updates, posts and comments in terms of views and likes. This is particularly useful when measuring the relative performance of blog-‐posts, helping you identify the type of content that generates the best response from your audience.
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Photographs and images – graphics, cartoons, infographics – work particularly well on LinkedIn. Society as a whole is becoming more visually literate, with the ability to spot the perfect image becoming as important, if not more so, than the ability to write a great piece of copy. Be an active networker LinkedIn is clearly the world’s most potent business network, with over 350 million users worldwide. Just about anyone worth talking to can be found on the site if you take the time to look: I have come across businesses claiming to generate in excess of £200,000 month in sales leads, purely by identifying prospects on LinkedIn. Networking etiquette is a personal thing: some people will accept every invitation to connect, even from complete strangers, whilst others have an in-‐box full of invitation requests from people they don’t know. There is nothing wrong with reaching-‐out to people you don’t know, although my recommendation is to avoid generic or default requests and instead make a direct pitch to the recipient: ‘the reason why I would like to make a connection with you is (add a reason or describe how you have a mutual connection).’ The Advanced People Search function is very useful to help find new contacts, especially friends-‐of-‐friends. The ‘Six degrees of separation’ rule suggests that all of us are only six steps removed from anyone else on the planet. In the world of business the degrees of separation are far fewer: you typically find that someone you already know is connected to the person you want to reach.
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To pay or not to pay? LinkedIn operates a ‘freemium’ commercial model: the core platform is free to use, but there are a range of added-‐value services that you can pay for. The jury is out when it comes to deciding whether it is worth paying for LinkedIn’s Premium offer. Around 16% of LinkedIn users pay for an upgraded service. It does offer a free trial so the best way to decide whether it is worth paying around £20 per month for a Premium service is probably give it a go. Analyse and learn All professional users of social media channels should be willing to analyse the effectiveness of their activities and continuously improve their performance. In simple terms this self-‐appraisal will help them do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. We have already described the value of measuring views, likes and comments generated by posts or updates. The other key diagnostic favoured by LinkedIn is the measurement of Profile Views. This will give you an idea of how effective you have been in boosting your profile within the LinkedIn network.
For further advice: please contact me at [email protected] or find me on LinkedIn at https://uk.linkedin.com/in/martinthomasdissident www.dissident.biz
© Dissident Business Ltd, May 2015
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