You have signed up to Linkedin.com and it BUGS you that you don’t know what to do next. LinkedIn.com is a powerful executive networking tool that is free (well almost). I recommend it strongly to those executives that seek to extend their company’s influence online (and indeed their own). I have posted a few tips on how to use Linkedin.com below. These are my tips and not necessarily those of Linkedin.com – although they probably overlap.
Here goes:-
- Use it actively and regularly – don’t forget – it takes a long time to build your profile online so start early and do it often.
- Complete your profile 100% on Linkedin
- Put a decent photo of you online. If you are ugly, where a suit and a tie it softens the blow for the reader.
- Import all of your email contacts into Linkedin – see who is also on Linkedin.com too (there’s a little flag) and invite them to join. Do this once every three months – the additional contacts you have met will be added to your Linkedin account
- Go through each contact you have imported and invite each one individually OR send them all an invite at once : not recommended as you will annoy people that you have not spoken to for some time
- Put your Linkedin personal icon image on your website, blog etc and invite people to get in touch
- See what Linkedin.com groups are profiled to your business e.g. African hospitality or hotels or accommodation. Go to the group profile and see the number of members – if there’s 30 members probably not worthwhile joining (unless its specific to you ie that group may be influential in what it does), if there’s 4,000 members its a good source of coverage.
- For every material release of information from your company website, link that, and publish it into the groups you have joined, with your commentary thereon. In Africa many executives join the same groups and this is why its important to join a few big groups and not lots of them.
- Use wording above that is direct and gives the reader a reason why he should read your post – saying “Press release No 43″ is not good. Saying that 40,0oo carats of diamonds are for sale at firesale prices will attract attention…… from the cops. So make it appropriate to your business and what you do. Keep it short. Use things like “Top 10 tips for hoteliers” or “Give us your favourite hotelier quote” or whatever. Linkedin can be a bit like Facebook, in that every now and then there’s interesting discussions online, tick the box to follow them, actively participate in them and contribute meaningfully – dont waste time.
- Think about whether you want visitors to your Linkedin.com to see all of your contacts and link to them. If your relationships are proprietary then set the setting not to show your contacts to anyone
- Think about whether you could set up your own group online to discuss things relevant to your business and sphere of influence
- Link your website disclosures automatically to appear in your Linkedin.com account and your Twitter and Facebook
- Put your corporate online presentation online under your profile
- Put what books you are reading online. If its the Khama Sutra then thats probably inappropriate (but may attract lots of readers). Put intellectual books online, like War and Peace, Wuthering Heights, The Ascent of Man, Romeo and Juliet. This accentuates your intellectualism. No don’t. Just put online what you are reading.
- Link your blog post to automatically appear in your Linkedin account.
- Regularly update your status – what are you doing on a strategic level.
- Ensure that every press release that is released by your company is published on your profile.
- Do not accept all LinkedIn.com requests – read the profile of the person that you might link with, are they likely to find what you have to say every now and then interesting. And vice versa. Do you really want to like with the person on the other side? For people looking for work bombard them with due diligence info and get them to courier their FULL details to you before you consider them. If they do that they are serious.
- Put your company profile on Linkedin too
- Be aware that having all of your staff online is effectively a HR shopping menu for your competitors – and vice versa.
- Put your Linkedin.com address on your business card
One last thing to bear in mind is to keep your contacts updated with what you are doing – you can only send messages to 50 contacts at a time so its a hassle and it takes time.
sorry i must have misread my copy