Category Archives: LinkedIn Advice

Dissecting your LinkedIn Groups page

February 9, 2012 by ,

LinkedIn Groups pageWhile I’d be the first to admit that this might not be the most exciting page on LinkedIn, nevertheless the Groups page – the one that lists all of the groups that you are a member of – does in fact contain a lot of good information and provides a great summary or overview of the latest activity going on in the Groups you have joined. And after all, the Groups are places which are likely to be a key element of your LinkedIn activity.

It’s true that you can never really hope to keep on top of all the discussions that go on in the groups but this summary or ‘homepage’ for the Groups will give us a great overview of where the latest activity is happening and so where we should perhaps be focusing our attention. After all, we might be able to join up to 50 groups but, with the best will in the world, you’re only going to be able to participate in 4 to 5 of them at best.

Why might this me of use

It may be particularly helpful if (more…)

Article Categories: Groups on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Advice
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Get Tagging on LinkedIn

January 31, 2012 by ,

LinkedIn Tagging OptionsTagging is something that I wish I’d done right from the start on LinkedIn but, to be totally honest, I simply didn’t know that I could. It was only much later that I realised just how useful it could be and so decided to go back through all of the people I’d connected with and add relevant tags, which certainly took a while!
So, I thought that I’d help you avoid my own mistake and save you some time in the process!

Just to be clear, tags on LinkedIn are simply keywords you can “attach” to your 1st level connections (ie. the people you are directly connected with) which essentially allow you to put them into categories, a bit like creating different folders to keep their records in. LinkedIn actually starts the process for you – when you invite people to connect as ‘colleague’, ‘friend’ or as ‘groups’ then, when they accept, they automatically get tagged as such.

However, the real benefit is that you can (more…)

Article Categories: B2B Advice for LinkedIn, LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn for Recruitment Agencies, LinkedIn Tips
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Connect blogs to your LinkedIn profile

December 12, 2011 by ,

Blogs and LinkedIn StrategyI don’t know about you, but I like to get as much benefit as possible from the work that I put into something.

My blogs are a great example of that. I’ve been running a blog for over 5 years now and also have set blogs up for, I guess, over 100 companies and individuals. Done right, they’re a fabulous business tool – a combination of push marketing, with relationship building and search engine marketing all in one nice little bundle. A key component in the social media as well as the internet marketing mix.

One place where all the information from your blog is going to be particularly valuable is over on your LinkedIn profile. It’s the perfect place to display things you’ve (more…)

Article Categories: LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn Applications, Q & A on LinkedIn
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LinkedIn Tip: Get your Current Roles in Order

November 21, 2011 by ,

LinkedIn current roles - how to reorder themMost of us wear more than one hat in business and on LinkedIn, we reflect this by having a number of “Current” roles on our profile. This might also include membership of business organisations, networking groups, non exec positions etc. or we may simply be using it as part of our LinkedIn Profile optimisation and hence splitting out the roles we have to help push us towards the top of the search results in LinkedIn.

Whatever our reasons, we almost certainly have one which we particularly want to be known for and which should appear at the top and then a preferred order for the others to appear. Previously on LinkedIn, we could only change that order by ‘playing’ with the start dates, as the roles were ordered purely on the basis of the start date for each role.

That is no longer the case.
(more…)

Article Categories: LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn Site Changes, LinkedIn Strategy, LinkedIn Tips
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Getting your network on LinkedIn

October 5, 2011 by ,

LinkedIn - Connecting People on LinkedInWe all have networks of contacts. Thankfully, we don’t usually refer to them as “our network” – we talk about business colleagues, friends, clients, family, people we met at networking events, prospects etc. Nevertheless, they are all part of our personal and/or business network.

Therefore, for me, an important first step in developing our online network on LinkedIn is to link up with these people, the ideal people that you want to connect with – the people who are in your network already! While it does many things, one key element is that it immediately makes their network more visible to us – not to then dive in and ‘pillage’ but to identify where personal introductions might be possible through people we know well. There’s no stronger approach to a company than through a personal introduction and this opens up that opportunity.

So how to bring our networks online

In most cases, we keep in touch with them by phone or, more often than not, by email. And there’s lies an opportunity and one that LinkedIn offers us some tools to help (more…)

Article Categories: LinkedIn Advice, Networking supercharged
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Quality versus quantity in your LinkedIn network

August 30, 2011 by ,

Quantity versus QualityThere’s long been an (often) animated debate as to the “right” way to approach networking and particularly to building your network.

In the red corner: there are advocates of a quality based approach where you only connect with people you either know well or who are directly relevant to you and what you do;

In the blue corner: over here, the watchword is ‘quantity’ and so the aim is to connect with all and sundry and rely on the idea of serendipity, that’s to say that these people are bound to know someone (who knows someone) who will be interested in what you do or offer.

LinkedIn of course supports both approaches and seemingly takes no sides in this.

However, there is a caveat to this because of the way that LinkedIn structures and displays its search results, which may influence your thoughts on this. This is particularly relevant if you are looking at this as a (new) business development tool (more…)

Article Categories: B2B Advice for LinkedIn, LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn Strategy, Using LinkedIn
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