Chapter 13

Creating Effective LinkedIn Strategies

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social network, used mainly for professional networking. It's supported by nearly 260 million users in over 200 countries. LinkedIn enables users (workers and employers both) to create profiles and connections with each other. It can save you a lot of time with interacting, following, and learning from others in your organization or even experts in your field.

More efficient than your old Rolodex, LinkedIn keeps you in touch with those who support your career or who can help you advance it. If you find yourself out of work, it can be a huge timesaver. You can use this organized network to help you leverage your connections, relationships, and business friends to land on your feet. This chapter takes a look at effective LinkedIn profiles as well as how you can best use your time on LinkedIn.

Creating a Link-able Profile

Your profile on LinkedIn is the key to being seen, found, and connected to. And with LinkedIn, the larger the group of contacts you have, the more associations you can generate. Your connections and network strategy should be focused on quality and quantity. To attract a lot (quantity) of pertinent and reputable people (quality), you have to have a compelling profile.

When people search for you in LinkedIn, your well-constructed profile increases the chance they will find you and want to contact you. Your profile communicates key information about you, although it's not a resume or an autobiography. A well-constructed profile conveys your value. It clearly articulates the brand of “You Inc.” Your profile should contain your education, experience, key skills, past positions, and interests.

Creating a personal profile

Your profile highlights your experiences and accomplishments. As part of this, you can attach files, videos, presentations, and anything that presents you in a favorable light. Be creative in this section. You want someone to gain a clear perspective of you and the benefits in hiring or associating with you.

Start building your profile by entering your name, profession, and other pertinent information. You can add your city, state, education, even a picture (I talk about that a little later on in this chapter). After you click Create My Profile, you can start getting to the meat of your story.

Sharing your experience

The Experience section of LinkedIn gives you several ways to showcase your work involvement. Too many people view this area as a resume format, but the truth is that you can go into more depth on LinkedIn as opposed to your resume. The conciseness and bullet points of a resume need not apply; however, there must be alignment with your resume so your job titles, work history, dates, companies, and so on are all consistent. Frequently an employer will compare your resume and your LinkedIn profile. This more thorough approach also has search engine optimization (SEO) benefits as well, meaning that an employer uses key words to search out people with your types of experiences. The search engine benefits won't exist if you have not inputted the information for it to find. Use all possible variations of search terms. How many ways can you describe being a manager?

Note that an employer may also use LinkedIn to review your connections as well as do background checks and reconnaissance on you.

When listing company names or school names, use every possible option from full name to abbreviation. I went to Willamette University, so I like the full name along with WU. List both the full names as well as commonly referred names of any company you've worked for or with. If United Airlines was a previous employer, like it was for my wife, Joan, it would be advantageous to use UAL, the common abbreviation. You might even include the stock market lettering as an abbreviation as well.

Your skills need to be clearly and concisely presented. As already mentioned, many potential employers use LinkedIn to search for people with specific skills. Again, this is the case where clarity and specificity create an advantage.

Along with information about you, LinkedIn provides a way for business contacts and friends to “endorse” your work and skills. (Note that you can do the same for your friends and colleagues.) Your connections can validate your professional skills and accomplishments, which always looks good to an employer. If you state on LinkedIn that you can tame wild tigers, and 15 people give you endorsements, you just may be the tiger tamer that Tigers Unlimited is looking for! So encourage co-workers and colleagues to endorse your skills, and always do the same for them.

Picturing yourself on LinkedIn

Your picture is one of the first things your colleagues and potential employers see in your profile, so select a shot that reflects your professionalism. Leave the family photos, your pets, and exotic locations on Facebook; LinkedIn is for business. The type of head shot and smile you feature can lead to a higher level of credibility and trust. Choose a picture that shows a well-groomed and happy individual with tons of experience and potential … someone who would be an asset to any company or for any assignment.

Defining LinkedIn Goals, Objectives, and Connections

To be efficient with your time in any area, you must have clearly defined goals and objectives. The same is true for a LinkedIn account. Are you trying to increase your stature and credibility in your chosen field? Is your objective to protect from long-term unemployment? (More than 80 percent of companies use LinkedIn as one of the resources for recruiting.) Do you want to use LinkedIn to gain involvement in a specific community? Start by defining you goals, objectives, and what you want from LinkedIn.

Are you looking for a fun way to connect with others professionally? LinkedIn is primarily a business network, so it might fall short of that objective. Another business service organization like Rotary might be better suited for that need.

With the connections you build, more is better. You never know when making a new connection will pay off in new business, new ideas, or a better job opportunity. The goal should be a high-quality connection with diversity. You want connections, not only in your field but in complementary fields as well. If you're in pharmaceutical sales, any doctor in your local community or territory would be a worthwhile LinkedIn connection, as well as anyone in parallel industries — for example, medical devices, imaging equipment, even medical software. Certainly anyone that is in pharmaceutical sales management would also be a valid connection. Don't limit your connections just to the medical field. There are literally hundreds of sales job similar to pharmaceutical sales in the broader sales market.

Use the tools on LinkedIn to expand your connections. The first and easiest is to use your contacts in your email accounts, whether in Outlook, Gmail, or most others. By using people who are already in your database, you can increase your number of connections rapidly. Using your school affiliation is another excellent resource to create connections.

Establishing Your LinkedIn Schedule

When using any social or business network, having a system that you use to track your time is essential. Even with all the positive opportunities LinkedIn provides, it's like other social media platforms — it's one tool in your business strategy tool belt. Creating a schedule can mean the difference between spending hours a day surfing LinkedIn — which could lead to you needing a new job — and not checking your profile for months.

New articles, studies, and information are posted frequently on LinkedIn. This can be a deep resource in your field, the field you would like to enter, or just general knowledge of business and success. Establish a schedule of reading at least one quality article or information piece on LinkedIn each day, which creates an opportunity to visit the site on a daily basis and check your connections. Even 10 minutes a day repeated consistently over time can add thousands of connections to your network in a short period of time.

And don't be shy about posting articles yourself! If you're respected in your field, or simply have new and creative ideas you'd like to share, write an article and post it for all on LinkedIn to read. This is another way of finding new connections.

Being prompt in accepting invites to be added to someone's network shows courtesy as well as an indication you take your profile seriously.

The two-check system

Institute a two-check system for checking your social media, LinkedIn included. If you institute the two-check system, you stay on top of your LinkedIn network without losing productivity in other areas. The two-check is as it sounds; check twice a day. Not at random times, but at the same time each day. I suggest you do the two checks in your time schedule that has lower value. For example, I'm at my best in the morning, so I usually delay time of my social media checks until later in the day when my brain is not as sharp. This gives me the maximum use of the direct income-producing activity time.

Meeting weekly to check for success

Investing 30 minutes a week to review and check your strategy and results on LinkedIn is important. By having a success meeting each week you can plan what to share with some of your groups, what to write, what to report, and what to do to increase your reach in building connections. Learning how to join groups and post articles in beyond this chapter, but you can learn more about LinkedIn from LinkedIn For Dummies by Joel Elad (Wiley).

You can also see who has viewed your profile in the last week. Are these people who are potential additions to your network? Send them a request to join your LinkedIn network. Are they possibly representatives from companies or recruiters looking for a quality employee? A large number of corporate recruiters and executive headhunters use LinkedIn to find qualified people.