Get connected with LinkedIn

Here’s how you can get started and make the most out of LinkedIn quickly.

What is LinkedIn?

It’s a networking site for business people across the world. It is also much more complex than Twitter or other forms of social media, and when you use it well, it will work for you. There are well over 30 million uses, from all sorts of business backgrounds, including people like Bill Gates and Barack Obama.

 What to do first

Get your own profile page up and running, by following the prompts. It will tell you when your profile is 100 percent complete. Make sure you add a picture, either of yourself or your company logo. A picture of your self does personalize it more, but brand recognition is also important.

 When it comes to adding your website url, choose “other” instead of “my website” then you can put the url which will show your company site rather than “my website” on your profile page. You can then use this to add another “other”, that being your twitter address or your blog. If you later on decide to chair a group, you can put the url of your group in here too.

Connect with everyone you know in your address book. You can easily export them in from Outlook etc by following the prompts. It even tells you who is currently on LinkedIn that you know already.

 Getting recommendations is also key, and the best way to do this is to recommend someone you know well, and hope they return the favour. It never seems right to me to ask for recommendations from people, so this is an easy way round it. When writing a recommendation for someone else, be honest, describe the capacity in which you know the person and comment on that. If you only know them socially, describe their personality rather than their work ethic.

A great time to write a recommendation for someone is when you have just completed a business transaction with them, it helps to create that nice warm and fuzzy feeling. You may find you get some referral work because of it.

 It does take a bit of time to get your page set up right and it is important, so bear with it.

What to do next

 When you are happy with your own profile, join some groups. They could be groups in your line of work, or groups such as “Small Business” or “Made from New Zealand”. This is the place to take part in conversations and get your profile out there, adding comments to other people’s posts, and then writing and adding your own in.

It is really rewarding when you are the writer, and people interact with you leaving comments, both good and bad. You will also pick up contacts to do business with either now or in the future.

Answering and asking questions in the Questions section are another great way to interact, so try that area too. Which ever way you do it, always check your spelling with your ABC on your browser before you send it.

Add your website link to any thing you comment on.

Other great uses for LinkedIn 

• Use it to check people out who you are meeting with. I find it better than Google (Unless they have a prison record!)
• A recruitment tool
• A tool to check out your prospective new boss
• Send an introduction to join to people you are hoping to do business with a couple of days after you have followed up with them. By using the introduction as a “filler”, they will also get a reminder via linkedIn if they don’t respond by a certain time. This keeps your name in their head for a while longer.

This really is only the tip of the ice berg, but at least it will give you some ideas how to get moving quickly. It’s like any thing, the more you put in……

 By Linda Coles of Blue Banana  (helping you get the results you want from your website)

Visit Linda on flokka, on twitter and LinkedIn