Using LinkedIn EffectivelyClaire Robinson-AyresPam Gandee

LINKEDIN PROFILE – PORTFOLIOS

Portfolios

It’s easy to look at LinkedIn as nothing more than an online CV, whilst it displays your work history in a very CV like manner, it also gives you the opportunity to demonstrate to potential Clients why you and your business are the experts and the best choice for their business. Recently LinkedIn added the ability for you to add examples of past work to your profile, this not only brightens it up, but enables you to add practical examples of work you have carried out for your potential Clients to take a look at.

Portfolios

You can add portfolios such as blog posts and articles you’ve written, videos, photo’s from events or seminars, presentations you’ve carried out and so on.

Portfolios really brighten up the LinkedIn profile, as well as helping your contacts get a great feel for who you are and what you are good at.

LINKEDIN CONTACTS

LinkedIn Contacts

LinkedIn Contacts was introduced earlier this year. It enables you to sync your LinkedIn Contacts with Outlook, your smartphone contacts, your emails, and your calendars so that you get a real taste of exactly who you are keeping in touch with on a regular basis and who you need to keep in touch with more often.

LinkedIn Contacts

There are standalone smartphone apps, which will sync your address books for you and once everything is synced you start to get reminders to keep in touch with people such as birthday reminders, notices if one of your contacts is mentioned in the news, and when contacts get a new job or are promoted. All of these notices encourage you to get in touch with your contact and congratulate them, share their good fortune in your network or keep in touch in some way. This is a great way to stay on top of what is happening in your network, being a friendly face in what can become a busy crowd whilst saving you time as you don’t need to sift through lots of updates to get this information, just visit your contacts page once a day!

The perks of this are that when one of your clients moves to a new position with a new company you get to contact them straight away and establish a connection with them at their new place of business. One of the other things this does is encourage you to contact people you may not have been in touch with for some time who you used to contact on a regular basis (based on your emails, linkedin use, phone calls etc – assuming you have the app and all your accounts linked) so that you are encouraged to re-establish contact with people.

GROUPS & NETWORKING

Groups & Networking

Groups offer you the opportunity to:- Meet new contacts both in your own industry and outside of your industry as

potential Clients- To demonstrate your expertise and develop your thought leadership- To engage in discussion/debate- To find out about seminars/exhibitions and who is attending that is key.

Groups & Networking

Use the email digests you receive on a daily basis to see which updates are the most active rather than sifting through every update in every group as this will waste your time. Even if there is a discussion not directly linked with your career, if you feel you have something of value to add to it then go in and add your point of view. It’s important for the other members of the group to get to know you and become familiar with who you are so that when you add something relative to your industry they sit up and take notice.

Groups & Networking

In the same way you would want to create valid and interesting conversation at a networking event so you want to on LinkedIn. In this example, the question asked 14 days ago has created a stream of 16 comments the most recent 2 days ago, most of them 5-6 lines long. You want to get people thinking, enable them to add a point of view. In the same vein, as someone contributing, you want to be able to add your point of view to such a question and get involved in such a debate.

Groups & Networking

DO

DON’T

When posting a link to a blog or an article be it one you have written or one you think will be of interest to the network there are some unwritten rules you should follow:- Put a catchy title in to make sure that it catches people attention- Have a brief summary to explain why you think this is interesting, try and get a question in to encourage

people to read the article and comment with their opinion.- Make sure that you link to an interesting article and that you do know what it’s about. Don’t just link to

something because somebody else has! If you didn’t write it make sure you read it, you will be surprised how many people post to blogs/articles without actually knowing anything about them.

- Finally, once people start commenting, respond to them, engage in conversation. This is where the networking truly comes into it’s own. You ultimately want to draw out the people you can add as contacts and build relationships with.