How To Use LinkedIn Effectively

LinkedIn - Onesheet

LinkedIn is a relatively “closed” social network – “closed” in that you have to be somewhat active to get the most out of the network. While it is possible to see someone’s online resume without being logged in, LinkedIn is most useful when you see his or her connections and references.

How LinkedIn works..

According to LinkedIn, you should only link to people you know and trust. That way, other clients and contacts will have more trust in that person and your other resources based on your opinion. However, you can utilize your connections to introduce you to knew connections, and by LinkedIn partnering with resources such as Businessweek, its now even easier for you to find out who’s doing what – and who their connections are.

…In the real world.

Most just try to connect with as many people as possible. For someone trying to reach an audience of potential employers, they want to make as many connections as they can to become that much closer to someone who may be looking for their services in the future.

Three more good reasons:

1. Health and many other industry professionals are still pretty novel on the site, so there is plenty of room to get noticed by people who matter.

2. It is really easy to stand out… Simply upload your address book and ask previous friends/co-workers/clients for recommendations and you are right in the game.

3. The site is highly educated and primarily made up of well-to-do, web savvy people. You’ll be surprised at how many teammates from your past and present companies are utilizing LinkedIn.

Seven Ways to Make LinkedIn Work for You:

• Step 1: Sign up for an account with your personal email address. Remember this is your account.

• Step 2: Create your profile. It is definitely encouraged to keep this clean and honest. Your bluffs will be called and your past will come back to haunt you.

• Step 3: Upload your address book and connect with everyone who is already a member of LinkedIn. [http://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonycerreta]

i. *NOTE: LinkedIn makes it extremely easy to upload your online address book (like one through Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and/or Hotmail) Always use extreme caution with giving up your password.

• Step 4: Selectively invite people from your address book. My experience has been that unless there is a personal invitation sent with a really good reason why they should join, there is a REALLY low response rate. [Really low response rate] Sending a personal message will usually explain your reasoning, or guilt-trip them into signing up just for you.

• Step 5: Start recommending anyone and everyone you can. If you give a good enough review of someone, they are quite likely to return the favor! Besides, it’s a lot easier than begging for recommendations and makes for a good start meeting new people.

• Step 6: Obviously, the more recommendations and the more connections the better. The best part is that once you get even one recommendation, you’ll start showing up in that person’s list of recommended service professionals.

• Step 7: Promote your LinkedIn profile on your other social networking platforms [such as MySpace, Facebook or Digg].

Five Most Helpful LinkedIn Uses:

1. Improve your Google Search Rank:

When your profile is set for public viewing [standard], your profile information becomes available for search engines to index. Since LinkedIn profiles receive a fairly high Page Rank in Google based on LinkedIn’s pre-established reportoire, this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you – your professional side and personal accomplishments.

To do this, create a profile and select “none” under the “public profile” tab. Also, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name instead of using the default URL provided. To strengthen the visibility of this page in search engines, use this link in various places on such as in your email and forum signatures.

2. Make your Meeting Go Smoother:

You can use LinkedIn to find the inside scoop on people that you’re meeting/about to do business with. Knowing your adversary is always beneficial [necessary].

3. Ask for Advice:

LinkedIn Answers [www.linkedin.com/answers] is the easiest way to ask for advice by allowing you to broadcast your business-related questions to both your network and LinkedIn’s whole network, in hopes to get a more sophisticated, accurate answer than with forums. Of course you have to have a well established and interactive LinkedIn account to produce effective answers (as with any social network). A couple examples…

-What is the best skin lightener?

-Which hospitals are the best in Detroit?

-What is the best price to pay for commercial real estate in Akron?

4. Research the Competition:

LinkedIn can be used to research your competition and their team before a business startup and during a campaign project. Find out their team of customers and partners, and use this knowledge to your advantage. For example, if your competitor’s vp of marketing came from McDonald’s...you’ll know he/she probably has a wide range of global marketing experience.

5. Perform Reference Checks:

Now that LinkedIn has started teaming up with different resources such as Businessweek, checking up on a company or persons references becomes even easier. By inputting a company name and the number of years a person worked there, You can utilize the reference check tool to search and find the people who worked at the company during the same time period.

This tool can even be used to double check your prospective manager’s reputation. Personally, I’ve never been able to ask a hiring manager for their references, but with LinkedIn I can not only scope them out, but connect with potential friends and like-minded individuals in the process. You can even use this tool to find the last person who had your potential job! In the reference check tool, search for job title and company, but this time make sure “Current titles only” Is unchecked.

Guy Kawasaki, a genius at social networking, points out that “…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.” So true.

You can find more useful hints for LinkedIn through Guy Kawasaki’s article, Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn. (including the following fun statistics below )

Fun Statistics:

-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.

-Most members tend to be between 30 and 55 years old.

-97 percent of LinkedIn users join based on invitations from existing members.

-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.

-Out of 840,000 members - 10,000 are venture capitalists. \

-LinkedIn users accept 83 percent of referrals

Have fun with this, as always I'd love to hear what you use Linkedin for