LinkedIn Tips from Someone Who Works for LinkedIn

At a recent LinkedIn session at Social Media Week in Toronto, what was going on in the lobby area was more interesting to me than what was being said inside.

LinkedIn had someone present to take professional photographs, which is tops in my mind because so many people either do not have a photo on their profile, or have one that is not appropriate. The second interesting thing was that they also had a staff member to critique your profile and make recommendations for improvements.

A big thing is to always be curious, and explore the dropdown menu in your profile to see what the options are. Initially, it will take a chunk of time to update your profile, but after that, there is no need to spend more than 20 minutes a day on LinkedIn. Here are some tips I got from LinkedIn:

1. It’s all about the story, make sure that your profile tells the story that you want it to.
2. Have an engaging headline.
3. Join 50 groups and have a voice, you do not have to visit all the groups every day – rotate them – and get known.
4. If you own a company make sure that you have a company page, and update your status with company news about four times a week to make sure that your company followers see at least one status update.
5. Update your status once a day. Share an article that you find helpful.
6. Under the More tab you have many options such as uploading presentations to share with others (SlideShare or Google), connecting your blog to your profile, uploading other documents such as your resume or an article you wrote using Box.net Files (recommended to save as a pdf). If you enjoy reading, you can use the Reading List application from Amazon.
7. Under the News tab, LinkedIn Today allows you to customize relevant news to scan and read, and Signal allows you to quickly scan the updates of your contacts.

Your profile isn’t your resume, and shouldn’t be presented that way. Take the time to craft the story that you’d like to share with others. Please join the conversation by writing your comments in the box below.