10 Tips To Navigate Your Way Through LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the top networking sites for professionals. It can be used for recruitment, job searching and networking and is great for sharing company information. Just like other networking and social media tools, LinkedIn is important for your business.

It’s professional and gives you the opportunity to connect with people who have an interest in your products or services. You can set up a company page which will help you build your business brand on LinkedIn, individual profiles can then be created to introduce skills, experience and act as ambassadors for the company.

If you’re new to LinkedIn you might find it hard to know how to get the best out of this online tool, so we’ve put together some handy tips to make sure you can get the most out of LinkedIn.

• Keep your profile up to date Ensure to update skills, expertise, products and services.
• Customise public profile URL It makes it much easier to share your personal profile and looks much better than a load of numbers at the end. Details on how to do this here.
• Set a profile picture It makes it much easier for people to recognise you when searching for you and your posts.
• Connect with new contacts When given a business card from a new contact be sure to ask permission to connect with them on LinkedIn - this helps build your network of contacts.
• Reciprocate Endorsements When a contact visits your profile they can endorse one of your areas of expertise or suggest a new skill to add to your profile. This is important as people with at least 5 skills listed on their profile receive more views.
• Use the search function The search box allows you to look for posts, people to connect with, jobs etc and with the filter option you can find exactly what you’re looking for.
• Connect with others Like their posts and share news that might be of interest to others in your network.
• File Business cards digitally If you have Evernote Premium it will automatically find the contact’s LinkedIn profile and add it to the contact details.
• Give recommendations to others This might lead to them giving you recommendations in return. Be sure to ask previous employers and business partners for recommendations for previous work.
• Join groups and communities related to your industry You can connect and participate in trending topics. It also gives you the opportunity to make new contacts.

If you’ve still not set up a LinkedIn profile or company page, now is the time to do it. It’s simple to get started and you could be missing out on many business opportunities and contacts. Make it part of your daily networking tasks.