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All the professionals by now should realize just how much of a revolution LinkedIn has brought among the top companies. This is why jobseekers and employers fully utilize LinkedIn’s services to develop both themselves and their respective networks professionally. Since LinkedIn is a free service and upgrading your account is optional, LinkedIn gets a lot of the revenue through advertising sales. There is no way to remove these ads whether you upgrade your account or not so you can be sure that all 30+ million members will see advertisements in LinkedIn.
This is a fantastic opportunity for you to take advantage of because these 30+ million members aren’t ordinary people, but they are professional members that usually have an average household income of $100,000. If a serious brand needs to be promoted by a specific crowd, LinkedIn may be the perfect network for maximizing your ROI since it is in-line with LinkedIn’s objectives.
Paid Advertising
Whether you are on a tight budget or wish to pump up something big, LinkedIn provides the right advertising solution for you. Text ads are proven to work for small to medium advertisers and should work even better since just about all the profiles and sections of LinkedIn have professional content in them. A lot of the banner advertisements can be very annoying in other sites, but LinkedIn only seeks professional quality to best attract the right people towards the brand or opportunity that you are promoting. This limits you to your creative skills in dishing out the best and professional looking banner and LinkedIn does the rest by displaying that to the target that you selected. The new Expanded Reach feature can also be used to reach specific audiences by using its highly-accurate targeting technology based on the profile fields.
Free Advertising
LinkedIn also grants you the opportunity to advertise your profile as well. By simply updating your profile whenever necessary, your profile gets indexed quickly. LinkedIn has a high Google page rank and by beefing up your profile with tons of relevant information, you have better chances of topping the results with more keyword phrases. Make sure you set your profile to public so both registered and non-registered users can see your page. This is a great way for people to discover additional information about you and your company.
To gain even more exposure, you can utilize the various widgets and 3rd party widgets available to promote your LinkedIn page in blogs, forums, and other social networking sites. These are all free advertising mediums that can give you some extra traffic.
LinkedIn claims to have at least one new member signup every second with existing members coming from all the Fortune 500 companies. If you have a huge brand to promote, you can target these individuals directly and be rewarded quality traffic and leads. All the success depends on how well you design and present your ad, but LinkedIn takes a lot of the hassle out of finding the audience because that’s what LinkedIn is all about giving you high chances for your ads to fly.
The internet is a great source for finding some general information regarding the profile of a given company. Knowing these things is important especially when joining the ranks of top corporations because grabbing the wrong opportunity at the wrong time may lose your chances of getting that back. It is also important to stick to whatever job you are doing for the duration of the contract so you can move on to bigger roles smoothly.
The problem of researching online for these businesses by traditional means is that the details are pretty scarce and often times, there is no line that allows you to communicate with the author of the information given. There was also no center point for professionals to gather and share ideas about companies until LinkedIn came along.
LinkedIn doesn’t show its face as a directory of companies or some corporate encyclopedia. Instead it takes the face of a social networking site where you can build your network of professionals. It is these professionals that give you the necessary information regarding the company in question and since you are dealing with people who are directly involved with the company, you are sure to get accurate and relevant information that cannot be found anywhere else. LinkedIn also allows professionals to fill up their past companies allowing those people to be consulted regarding their experiences with the company during that period.
If you filled your background to the best you can, you should also be able to find new people who could be your partners or colleagues one day that are involved with businesses that you never heard of before. The best thing about LinkedIn is that it remains a free service so you can spend as much time needed gathering as many companies as possible for comparison.
Perhaps the most powerful feature in LinkedIn is the LinkedIn Answers. If you start to struggle in finding the information you need, you can use this service to ask questions about any business related topic. This question can be directed towards your network alone for trusting answers or can be given to a wider audience for varied opinions. With over 35 million LinkedIn members and counting, your question is sure to have some feedback after the first 24 hours. And again, LinkedIn is all about business so you know that you won’t be bumping into any internet trolls that steer the discussion off-topic.
Once you have gained enough experience thanks to the information brought to you by the LinkedIn community, you can start building your reputation as well and help others get their questions answered. LinkedIn is all about helping one and another professionally and building careers together.
The trick to maximizing your research is to fill in your profile completely and ask your questions professionally. Observe proper netiquette the same way the other members do and you should be fine. Don’t forget to stay in touch with your first and second degree contacts as they may provide you with valuable information regarding your next company lead.
Once you have finished learning the ropes of LinkedIn, you can give yourself a pat in the back because now all you need to do is find people that you trust and connect with the ones that you know personally. Some people have a hard time in doing this even after they have filled up their profile completely and tweaked all of their settings. The reason may be because the people in your area may not be very familiar of LinkedIn. A good number of small businesses use other social network sites as a means of communication simply because they are popular and do not know of the existence of LinkedIn. As an existing member of LinkedIn, you can make the difference by following these steps.
Introduce them to LinkedIn
If you are actively chatting with friend either online or offline, you can simply say that you know a nice website where you can connect with people professionally. The most important thing in this step is giving the site address. The homepage shows more than enough information to get anyone to sign up right away.
Import your Contacts
If you have a huge address book in your webmail, you can add all of them to your LinkedIn address book and optionally send them all invites. You can also find any existing members of LinkedIn that matches your imported address book. If you see their profiles bare, they may be experiencing the same problems as you. Show that you are around by messaging them so they can give LinkedIn a second look. When inviting new people on board via e-mail, make sure you personalize your invite message to convince others to join without hesitation.
Add your invited Contacts to your Network
This should be done automatically if you invited them through e-mail, but if you gave the address instead, you should ask the person’s e-mail address so you can add the person to your network. Make sure you do this right away or else the person may lose interest with the service.
Show your Profile to the others that you have invited
To demonstrate the full capabilities of LinkedIn, you can use your profile as an example. Providing that all the information and details is complete, new members can easily grasp the idea on how valuable LinkedIn is. If you are an upgraded member, you may end up convincing others to upgrade as well in the long run.
Teach them how to complete their Profiles
This is an easy step since LinkedIn offers a meter illustrating how complete your profile is. This meter can be missed by new users so all you need to tell them to do is click the small “Edit” button below the meter and complete their profile from there.
Encourage them to look for others
Once they are all finished, you can finally encourage them to find other colleagues that they may know by using the search bar on top. If the person manages to forge some connections of his own, that means more 2nd degree connections for you. By then, the person should be deeply involved with LinkedIn and willing to grow from there. Try to get more people on board for even better results.
Searching for a new job is tough in this economic situation. Although the internet serves as a valuable tool for finding jobs online, it doesn’t necessarily make it a walk in the park. The problem with the available resources online like job boards, trade publications, and other job services is that so many people rely on those that it ends up really difficult to find a job that suits your interests best. The less popular resources can be good too, but there is a risk that the job could be a scam. Looking to your close friends may help in some ways, but if you don’t have the same interests, it could lead you nowhere.
LinkedIn is a bit different because it combines the concept of social networking with a member base of over 35 million professionals that each have corporate backgrounds so you can always find a spot for yourself to fit in a relate with. By making the most out of the features offered in this free service, you may be able to net your next job. Here are some ways to do so.
Expand your Network
LinkedIn has recently added a feature that allows you to post status updates so that you can express your great interest to find a new job based on your profile description and listed interests. It wouldn’t do you any good if nobody sees it and the best way to get it noticed is to expand your network. The more people you have in your network, the better the chances of someone noticing your status update and responding accordingly.
Get LinkedIn Recommendations
If you lost your job due to an unfortunate cause, this may help get you out of the ditch. Just because you’ve been laid off doesn’t mean that you should sever communications with your former colleagues. If your former colleagues are LinkedIn members, you can simply have them recommend you to a few people in your network and find new opportunities.
Build a List of Companies that Matches your Background
This can easily be done by using the “Advanced Search”. The idea is to find people by using your background as a search query and then noting where the individuals that matches the query work at. From there, you can build a list of companies and check which ones are currently hiring. It doesn’t even have to be the company they are working with right now. Also check their history and see if there are any related companies that may be of interest to you.
Remember that LinkedIn is packed with professionals and hiring managers representing top companies including the Fortune 500 companies. So not only will you find a great job that fits your background, but you will also have the honors of working in a reputable business and climb your way up the corporate ladder even faster. LinkedIn is an excellent service to build your career and find the best jobs for you.
Yesterday we shared the first part of a very exciting LinkedIn Success Story. Here is part 2…
You have some exciting business opportunities you are working on. Can you share those in the context of how you’ve been able to leverage the power of LinkedIn?
As one of my main business objectives is to provide medical marketing coaching, I started developing a training program to help junior medical marketers excel in their careers. As I am a strong believer in the power of being surrounded by brilliant and highly skilled professionals, I decided to assemble an advisory board comprised of pharmaceutical sales and marketing experts. The role of this advisory board is to provide me with input and guidance throughout the development process of the training program. I decided to send a request for volunteers to join my advisory board via several LinkedIn groups with a focus on pharmaceutical marketing. As my business is in the start-up phase, I was not able to offer a salary or an honorarium for this role. Instead, I offered a free copy of the final product to those who would be ‘active participants’ in the ad board. I also promised that whoever would be actively involved in the project, that they would be acknowledged as a member of the advisory board on the final product.
I was expecting a handful of people to respond to my request, and I was going to be happy if I had 5 to 10 members as part of the advisory board. To my utter disbelief, over 70 highly skilled pharmaceutical professionals from around the world asked to join my advisory board. Their profiles were all so impressive. It was so exciting to have so many talented people share the same passion as me and want to help me with this project. I would have liked to include everybody that applied as part of the group but I felt it would be very difficult to manage, so I selected 25 members to be part of the Pharmaceutical Marketing Coach Advisory Board. From my investigation, I am confident that this is the first international pharmaceutical marketing training group comprised of individuals from various companies, including the client and the agency side. As the ad board was officially launched in January 2009, we are just starting to work on our project. We have an exciting journey ahead of us and I am thrilled to have the support and guidance from all those who are members of the advisory board!
What are 3 actionable tips you would suggest to help someone increase their success on LinkedIn?
For those using LinkedIn for business purposes, I would recommend that they join groups that are related to their industry, participate in the discussions (start discussions, respond to questions and don’t forget to share resources and tips that might be of value to your network even if they don’t generate direct business for you), and send personalized notes to people that you would like to get to know better. I have found that the LinkedIn members are generous in sharing their ideas and are accepting of multiple perspectives and opinions. There is so much to learn from one another, and LinkedIn makes it easy to do so.
Recently we had the privilege of getting introduced to Natalie Bourre and discussing LinkedIn & social networking with her. She has only been on LinkedIn for a few months and clearly shows what being strategically focused & being active can achieve! We were so impressed by her success that we wanted to interview her and share it with you on this blog.
What was your introduction to LinkedIn?
I signed up for LinkedIn in June 2008. It was at this time that I decided to start my medical marketing consulting and coaching business, Marketing 4 Health Inc., and started to build my website http://www.pharmaceutical-marketing-coach.com. Some of my colleagues suggested that I join LinkedIn as a way to post my profile in order to network with other professionals within the industry. I must admit that I had no idea what to expect. In fact, I did not expect much at all. My experience with social media up to that point had been very limited and more of a personal nature. Upon signing up for LinkedIn, I sent a few invitations to people that I knew in the pharmaceutical industry, and did not see the professional benefits of the site until I noticed somebody within my network had joined a pharma group on LinkedIn. This caught my attention right away and that’s when I started using LinkedIn strategically to expand my network within the medical marketing arena.
What is your goal for using LinkedIn?
My goal for using LinkedIn is to find prospective clients for my medical marketing consulting and coaching services. In order to improve the probability of finding potential clients, I am focused on developing a large targeted network of professionals who are involved or interested in the pharmaceutical / biotech / medical industry. On the flip side, it is also helpful to have a large network in case I ever require to sub-contract some business to skilled experts within the industry. And yes, I definitely plan on growing my business to the point of requiring an extra hand or two in the next couple of years!
Since you have built such an impressive LinkedIn network so rapidly, can you share some of your activities?
In the beginning, I invited all the people that I found on LinkedIn whom I used to work with, either directly or indirectly (service providers such as marketing agencies). It helps to look at the connections of the people that you used to work with to see if they might have a contact that you might have missed, as it is quite likely that you have a lot of work colleagues in common.
By the time this list was exhausted, I was starting to become familiar with LinkedIn. That is when I noticed a colleague joined a pharma group on LinkedIn. Always one to take as many opportunities to socialize as possible, in person and online, I joined as many pharmaceutical / biotech related groups as I could find. I immediately became an active participant in these forums; I started discussions, made comments, and contacted some people who I felt wrote very insightful comments. Once a contact has been made through the group discussions, if the other person is in agreement, I invite them to join my LinkedIn network. I regularly share resources and tips that I have found online with my LinkedIn groups by posting these as new discussions. Sometimes these resources come from my website, but oftentimes they are not linked to my business at all. I am just sharing something that might add value to my network. As a member of 48 groups, it takes a long time to post the same information on all groups, but I do it because I feel sharing information that might be perceived as valuable by my network is an important part of online social networking. If you want others to provide you with suggestions and insights to your discussion topics, you have to give them something as well, either through comments or sharing. Plus, this helps build a personal brand that others might start recognizing. For example, when I post a resource on the web, I usually get a couple of people who comment on the fact that this is something that I do on a regular basis.
I have also had success in generating invitations to join others’ networks by posting a request for others to send me invitations. I try not to do this too often because I feel it is not as personalized as other network expansion methods. I do not get to know my new contacts as well as I would via the other methods that I just described. Nonetheless, it is an effective way of getting a quick boost in your network volume. As long as you are part of a network that is targeted to your industry, chances are that those who will respond to your post will be involved in the same industry as you, either directly or indirectly.
Finally, I post my LinkedIn public profile address on my other social network profiles and on various pages throughout my website.
There are a lot of social networking websites on the internet that aim to bring people together. Many of these services offer messaging capabilities and the ability to add a user as a contact or a “friend” so profile updates and other alerts can be sent to other users that are linked to that particular contact. A lot of online social activity develops as more members start to join the service and connect with one another. Searching for people is as easy as typing in keywords based on name, location, interests, and other fields. Depending on the social network, the service may incorporate additional features such as blogging, profile widgets, games, entertainment, mobile access, and other social related features.
LinkedIn has a similar set of features to these social networking sites, but has a few interesting features of its own that separate it from the pack. Knowing these differences can be useful for convincing your colleagues. Even existing members can find this information helpful as many do not know the full set of features that LinkedIn has to offer. Here is why LinkedIn is a unique and different service that deserves attention.
A Network of Professionals
Social networking sites are usually geared towards younger audiences, but LinkedIn encourages employed people with professions to join the circle. Most of the profile fields that are to be filled up are mostly business related which is just enough to keep the non-professionals at bay. Currently, there are over 35 million members from all over the world that are seeking to link with other professionals. In addition, all the top executives representing companies found in the Fortune 500 list are registered in LinkedIn.
A Place to Seek Professional Help
While the common social networks offer a bulletin board that lets anyone in the network share ideas, LinkedIn takes it a step forward by allowing users to ask questions in a Yahoo! Answers style fashion. Since LinkedIn is a professional network, only business related questions are encouraged. These restrictions make LinkedIn a lot more stable in its field than other networks that offer a free for all in terms of topics and theme.
A Job Fair for the Masses
Linked in is not only a place to get to know other people for professional socialization purposes, but it also serves as a great way to find your next job. Thanks to the special profile fields, it is quite easy to find others with the same work background as you so you can partner up with them with ease. Because LinkedIn supports company profiles, you can also find out where people go from one company to the next. With the millions of people registered in the LinkedIn, the possibilities of finding a job are endless.
If you neglected your LinkedIn account because your other contacts are active in other social networks, perhaps it is time to introduce them to LinkedIn and tell them the professional potential of the network. It will help forge deeper connections in both a personal and business perspective.
One of the best applications now available for LinkedIn users is the “My Travel” application by Tripit.
The My Travel application allows on the go LinkedIn users and professionals to let their network and colleagues know their travel itinerary. This will allow connections to know when they will be in the same city or when they will be attending the same conference or event. It also allows for personal connections to occur with former colleagues and friends from school or an old organization.
We are not the only ones raving about the new app. Additional comments from other groups are:
“TripIt’s straightforward approach makes it addictive…” – Walt Mossberg Solution, Wall Street Journal
“Best for organizing travel details…” – CNN, Travel + Leisure
“Easy and damn useful…” – DailyCandy
“A terrific site that has changed my travel life…” – WNBC New York TV
