LinkedIn: 10 Steps to Creating Buzz and Forging “Relationships That Matter”

BY RACHEL RACOOSIN

I’m willing to bet that you have your resume up on LinkedIn and believe that LinkedIn is the business version of Facebook. It’s time to break the mold on this thinking!

LinkedIn is much more than a virtual career center; it is critical to building both your own personal brand and your company’s brand.As of last week, LinkedIn is home to 150 million+ professionals around the world.

Additionally, more than 2 million companies have LinkedIn Company pages, and LinkedIn counts executives from all 2011 Fortune 500 companies as members.

With an affluent and influential membership, LinkedIn represents a valuable demographic for marketers. Members also share insights and knowledge in more than 1 million LinkedIn groups.

Here are the top 10 things to know about LinkedIn:

1.  Build your personal brand on LinkedIn

Ask yourself, when is the last time you updated your LinkedIn profile?

Your profile constitutes your personal brand, and therefore must be complete and up-to-date with as much information as possible.

Quick Tip: Optimize your profile by using relevant keywords regarding your skills and specialties.  These keywords will help your profile to show up in search results when companies, recruiters, or others are searching.  A profile that stands out will help you gain visibility and credibility within your field.

2. Use your profile to share information from other social networks 

There are several site features you can use to enhance your LinkedIn profile.

Add a blog post feed

One easy way to do this is to connect your blog with your LinkedIn profile.  Use apps like the WordPress LinkedIn app or the Blog Link app, to sync your posts with your LinkedIn profile. These features will automatically post the title and first paragraph of your most recent blog post to your LinkedIn profile, which is shared within your network.  In addition to adding some extra flavor to your profile, this feature is sure to drive traffic to your blog. It’s important to note that you may not want to connect your blog if it’s too far outside the scope of relevance to your work or profession.

Add your slides from SlideShare

Another way to boost your LinkedIn profile is to add the SlideShare app.  This app allows users to share professional content with each other.  Users can share everything from slides and documents to presentations and videos within their network.

SlideShare allows you to view the presentations of people you share connections with, search for documents from industry experts and topics, and share your own presentations and documents with your network and the larger LinkedIn membership.

Add a Tweet feed

Another powerful way to generate buzz around your LinkedIn profile is to connect it with your Twitter account.  This allows you to tweet your LinkedIn statuses to your Twitter followers and/or automatically post your tweets as LinkedIn statuses. Joining these two accounts will bring more visibility to each social media platform and drive traffic between the two platforms.

Quick Tip: When you want to share your Twitter updates on LinkedIn, just add the hashtag #in or #li.

3.     Create a  company page to increase your company’s visibility - see the rest of step 3 and steps 4 - 10