LinkedIn Essentials

For your professional life, some social media can be a little too much OMG instead of MBA, but LinkedIn is all about your career. Let’s see how we can put it to work for you! If you’re looking to network with people in your industry, generate business leads, and get noticed by potential employers then you need to have a LinkedIn account. It’s kind of like an online resume, but it’s far more dynamic. To get started you’re going to fill in your professional profile. LinkedIn will show you your level of completeness, because the more compete your profile is the more effective it is. Add everything relevant about your background including your industry, your education, where you’ve worked, what your responsibilities are and most importantly your skills. Even if you have a small business this is a place where skills, not size, really matter. In this section you’re going to add a summary of your experience. So here’s where you can let your personality and business philosophy really shine through. Of course you’ve heard the old saying it’s not what you know it’s who you know. Establishing connections in a major part of having strong profile on LinkedIn. Start by searching people you already know and send a connection request. Once you’ve done that LinkedIn is pretty amazing about suggesting other professionals you could, or should know. See these numbers? This indicates how close a connection someone is. So your colleague will be first connections, and people your colleges know may be second, contacts of contacts are third. Make sense? By clicking on the “import content” section you can even use your email lists to hunt for people to link to. Just be careful, my printer has an email address and got sent a LinkedIn request. Worst of all it didn’t even accept! You can also get people you’ve worked with to write recommendations for you. This is really helpful since things like that, and the number of connections you have, will rank you higher when other professionals do searches. If there’s a pharmaceutical company, and you’re a consultant who specializes in pharmaceutical marketing, you want to show up. Way up. And, remember LinkedIn is a social network, so it’s not enough just to have an account. It’s important to engage. You’ll notice there’s an update status box just like in Facebook and Twitter, but remember, this is also a business network, so stick with professional updates. You can also have them automatically go out on your Twitter account by activating the Twitter button here. A lot of times you may come across an article and you’ll see the LinkedIn share icon, this is an easy way to create an update without having to go into your account. And I recommend you check in frequently and join in on the conversations. That way you can form real relationships with people who might otherwise be little more than a profile. So time to get down to business and set up your LinkedIn account. To learn more about this and other social media networks watch our other videos at eHow Tech. See you soon. Bye.