How Businesses Can Leverage LinkedIn
If you are involved with social media and you are involved with business, you are probably a little disappointed with some of the more “unprofessional” aspects of these networks. Facebook and Twitter can be powerful business tools, but there is a lot of un-businesslike “noise” in them.
Fortunately, there is a network that is more oriented toward business. It is called LinkedIn.
What is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a social networking site that is fully focused on creating and nurturing business relationships. Like Facebook, users create profiles and make relationships with other users. On LinkedIn, these relationships are called “connections.” However, unlike Facebook, the information that people provide on a LinkedIn profile is similar to what they would provide on a resume: education, work history, training and recommendations.
After users have made their profile, they connect to the profiles of colleagues and business associates. Former colleagues can also write recommendations for one another. The point of all of this is to create an accurate snapshot of your professional credentials, and to provide context for outsiders to know who you’ve worked with.
LinkedIn is big and growing: it has approximately 60 million users and they are getting a new user every second. It also has plenty of important people on it. Executives from every Fortune 500 company are on LinkedIn. If you aren’t already, you might want to consider the opportunities you might be missing.
What Are the Benefits?
The primary benefit is obvious: employers can use LinkedIn to find new employees, and people looking for work can use it to find job. For employers, the fact that they can see how people are connected to one another means that they don’t have to hire someone who is completely unknown to them, or at least unknown to their trusted business connections. For job seekers, the network means that they can apply for jobs where the employers will look more positively on them.
Beyond looking for a job or an employee, LinkedIn can help users with all of the soft aspects of their business that require business connections. For instance, users can try to scout out funding for a new venture capital project, sell products, discuss projects with like-minded people, get PR or channel traffic to their blogs. All of this and more can be done through LinkedIn.
Starting a Profile
One of the biggest mistakes that users make when they start using LinkedIn is by only going halfway. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn doesn’t work very well with a bare profile. And this makes sense: in business, you need to provide all of your relevant details, and any gaps that appear in your professional background make you appear less professional and somewhat untrustworthy. With that in mind, remember these tips when building your profile:
1. Ask yourself: what exactly do I want to get out of LinkedIn? Unless you have a clear idea of how or what you want to leverage LinkedIn, your profile will look very haphazard. Present yourself as a coherent whole, and make it easy for your connections to know what you stand for and what you want.
2. Add connections. The more connections you have, the more you are going to get out of LinkedIn. It’s as simple as that. Communicate with your friends connections to see if they want to connect with you. They’ll probably appreciate the chance to expand their networks as well.
3. Get recommendations and give them to the people in your network you feel deserve them. If you aren’t getting any recommendations, request some trustworthy connections to provide some. Although employers won’t necessarily trust the recommendations, the people who don’t have any on their profile are at a definite disadvantage.
4. Join Groups. This will help you make more connections, particularly with people you have lost contact with or met in a very limited context. They will also help you branch out to find new people to make contact with through the group’s discussion boards.
5. Update your status regularly. This is particularly important if you have left your previous job and you are looking for new work. But don’t make your status updates personal. Only update it with relevant information that a potential employer might find interesting, such as when you attend seminars, or when you receive new training.
6. Communicate! When you join groups, post replies and start discussions. Answer people’s questions, and ask your own. If you are active on LinkedIn, people will start adding you as a connection, and your network will grow.
7. Go beyond the ordinary. Have selected Twitter status updates added to your linked-in profile. Add applications, such as a WordPress application that publishes your latest blog entries to your LinkedIn profile. Use the polling application to perform market research. Find out what the buzz is about your company on Twitter. You can see a full list of the available applications here.
LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for your business. Make sure you are using it to its full capacity.