Want to Become Successful on LinkedIn? Some Tips!

Want to Become Successful on LinkedIn? Some Tips!:

As part of my daily job I give internal Social Media workshops. I thought I’d might share some of my tips with you. This week I’ll try to cover LinkedIn.

Create Your Profile
I you haven’t created a profile yet, start with creating a profile. Most of you probably already created one, but forget to keep it up to date. You need to complete the following sections at the very least:

• Photo:  Let people see who you are. Keep it professional and keep it up to date!
• Summary:  Briefly tell what makes you different and extinguishes you from te rest
• Experience & Education: You may want to copy/paste your C.V. in these sections
• Skills: Fill in as much skills as you see fit, this will help to find you better on Google search
• Public Profile:  By default LinkedIn will give you numbers and letters. Click ‘Edit’ to personalise it
• Applications:  If you have a personal blog make sure you integrate it using ‘More’ – ‘Get More Applications’
• Websites: Make sure you fill in either your Blog name or your website name to drive more traffic
• Twitter: Update your status automatically but use #in so you don’t spam your network
• Recommendations:  Ask your network for recommendations! This will help you to get 100% profile completeness

If you have a complete and up-to-date profile, you are much more likely to receive new professional connections and messages, which can ultimately lead to a new business deal or perhaps your dream job. I would also advice you to use the “Improve Your Profile” button which is an easy way to optimize your LinkedIn presence.

Build And Grow Your Network
Take time to build and nurture your network. Invite your colleagues, ex-colleagues, customers, partners and ofcourse your friends. You might want to consider these tools to help you grow your network.

• Mobile Invitations:  Download LinkedIn for mobiles/iPhones, this way you can invite people directly after your meeting
• Social Connector:  Use LinkedIn for Outlook to invite people from your inbox
• Groups:  Grow your network outside of your ‘immediate circle’ by joining groups
• Companies: Be in the loop on new developments, potential business opportunities or even job opportunities by following companies of interest to you
• Status Updates: Engage with your Network. Share for instance your blog posts or other news that might be of interest to your network. Make sure you don’t ‘spam’ your network by oversharing!
• Upgrade Account Type: I would recommend if you are in sales or have your own company to upgrade your account to Business Plus, which give you a lot more insights on members
• Get introduced:  Also consider a 2nd degree connection. Which means you know someone who knows this individual you would like to be connected to. Click on ‘get introduced’ and send a note to both the person you’d like to be introduced to, and your mutual connection.

LinkedIn Today
As a last tip I briefly want to touch on the latest Social news platform of LinkedIn, ‘LinkedIn Today’, which I absolutely adore! It delivers top stories you need to know from your network and industry. You can also pull in news by industry, company, location and more. It will show you what professionals by industry are reading. LinkedIn will send you a weekly email of the top industry headlines across all of the industries you follow.

You can also share stories with your network, specific professionals, on Twitter and even on StumbleUpon. LinkedIn will show how many shares, comments a story has received and exactly who has shared a story. You can narrow your results with filters like industry, location and company. LinkedIn Today is also available as an iPhone app. Any articles saved on the iPhone will show up under Saved on linkedin.com/today, and visa versa.