Archive for September, 2009

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Like any other social networking site, newly registered members will have a steep hill to climb if they want their profile to become popular and more recognizable by people within and out of their network. While your profile exposure can eventually expand as you add more people, you might find yourself limited if you do not have many contacts to add. Even if you do have contacts to add, you can still add a little bit of your own effort to promote your profile and show off all of your professional details to the people that matter. Here are some decent ways in promoting your profile quickly.

 

Inviting other Professionals that you Know

 

Before you expose your profile to the public, expose it to the people that you know first so others will see that you are well connected with other individuals. It may increase the chances of you meeting new people if they find someone that they know in your list of connections. Although it is fine to add people that you personally know, emphasize on the other professionals to establish a better image.

 

Use the different network building tools in LinkedIn to get started. If you haven’t found many people from your personal contact list, spend some time inviting these people to use LinkedIn for their business endeavors.

 

Getting noticed in LinkedIn

 

You can do a lot to promote your profile all from within LinkedIn itself if you spend some time exploring the different areas. The easiest way to add some extra visibility is by joining any LinkedIn groups that catch your interest. Then just be an active participant in the group by responding to discussions and eventually people will start making their formal introductions to you where you can add them as a connection. The answers section is also a great place to get noticed in LinkedIn. Just share your knowledge and expertise by answering the questions that you are most familiar with. Your profile will get more views that way as you continue to help others.

 

Using your Blog

 

Now that you made a presence within LinkedIn, you can start making your profile known to the people who are not yet LinkedIn members. This is a great way to spread the awareness of LinkedIn to grow your network and let others see the professional side of you all at the same time. People that track your blog can still track your blog from LinkedIn because you can link them together. LinkedIn widgets allow you to put all the important information in a small, but attractive graphic that is clickable and can lead directly to your profile if it is set to public.

 

Leveraging on other Social Networks

 

LinkedIn isn’t designed as a replacement of other social networking sites, but as a complement service to your other networks that you are in. You might have professionals that are in your other networks, but never heard of LinkedIn before. You can send those people to your LinkedIn profile and have them join. The same widgets that you can use in your blog can also be used in your other social networking profiles as well.

 

For best results, spend considerable time promoting your LinkedIn profile using each method. This should help you gain traffic to your profile and any links that you have posted in your profile.

Many people have praised LinkedIn for its capability of obtaining lots of different information that cannot be found elsewhere. These very people join LinkedIn to see what all the fuss is about and may end up being disappointed because many of the features of LinkedIn can be found in the more popular networking sites.

 

What really separates LinkedIn from the rest is their community and that is where the unique information starts to come into the picture. Thanks to their large community of professionals and seamless integration with other components, you can get all types of information exclusively at LinkedIn the most common types being the following.

 

Company Profiles

 

LinkedIn has an extensive database of different companies that grow whenever new members register because it is they who place their company profiles there so that they are on the network map for others to look for. You can probably find company profiles in their respective corporate websites, but LinkedIn makes searching extremely easy with lots of ways to do it.

 

Searching for company profiles is a great way for jobseekers to find their ideal company to get into or for professionals that are already representing a company to check on how their competitors or doing as well as discover new ones.

 

Professional Ideas

 

LinkedIn is an excellent repository of topics that are related to the business world. If you explore the different groups formed by registered members of LinkedIn, you will learn a lot from the different discussions that are made by the group members.

 

There is another major area that LinkedIn users head to often too called “Answers”. This section lets people ask any business-related question they can think of and then categorize it in such a way that it is easy for others that likely know the answer to find. Since there are professionals coming from all parts of the world, you are sure to get some world-class information from these professionals that you simply cannot find in standard knowledge websites. Looking at some of the professional profiles and company profiles also include special business-specific fields that aren’t present in conventional social networking sites.

 

Current Business-related Events

 

Social networking sites let you better keep track of what your direct contacts are doing. But the majority of users that are active in the social site often display public events that are not business-related for confidential reasons. However, in LinkedIn, business is emphasized and people will almost always use the standard features like status updates, blogs, and other common tools found in social networks to let others know what business-related events they are currently into. People that add trusted contacts won’t hesitate at all in making their business activities public. The information that you can gain from this depends on the number of active users that are connected to you.

 

All you need to do to get all this information is to register a new account in LinkedIn or login to your existing account and explore the different features that are offered. You will be surprised on how much new things you can learn after using it for a few days.

The biggest feature that is present in all social networking sites is the ability to add any person you like which while widen your network allowing you to communicate with more people as it opens up more 2^nd and 3^rd degree contacts. The common practice for some social networkers involves them adding as many people as they can even if they do not know the individual. This is totally acceptable as people join these networks in hopes of searching for new friends.

 

However, LinkedIn is different and doesn’t recommend that you add people that you don’t know although it is technically possible. In order to maximize the professional benefits that LinkedIn has to offer, it is better to connect with others the right way through proper sequencing. Follow these steps to connect with others in LinkedIn properly.

 

Adding your Personal Contacts

 

Adding your personal contacts is easy because LinkedIn’s home page right after login gives you access to a variety of tools that let you link to your e-mail account and have LinkedIn analyze your contact list and generate  a list of people that are registered in LinkedIn. Any found profiles can be added from there, but if the e-mail isn’t in the database, you can invite that person to LinkedIn instead.

 

If you take the time to build your profile, you can add former classmates as well. Other names of familiar people may show up on your profile based on your company history and other common data that you may share. The “People” search is also available for people that prefer searching their friends by searching the name one by one. It is important to add people that are extremely close to you or related to you to get a better impression from people that may check out your profile.

 

Adding your Former and/or Current Colleagues

 

The same tool that you used in connecting with your web e-mail contacts can be used in adding current and past colleagues too. Just click the “Find” button on the homepage and fill up the “Job Title”, “Company”, and years to get a list of people that you may be familiar with. This is the most important step of the process because it will affect how many 2^nd and 3^rd degree contacts you will have. The more people you have in that network, the more chances of you being introduced or recommended by some someone in your network to new people that may help you forge your career.

 

Adding 2^nd and 3^rd Degree Contacts and Others

 

Although LinkedIn discourages the idea of adding people that you don’t know, there are some features that allow these other people to be introduced properly either through a direct connection or by means of a special introductory message. To do this without major setbacks, find people that are described as “open networkers” as those people are the ones that are open to expanding their network regardless of how close the people are with others.

 

There is no need to rush when adding people to your network. Just in that sequence and you should eventually end up with a profile that has solid connections opening up more opportunities to keep in touch with all of them.

LinkedIn and its members have done a fantastic job in promoting their concept of a social network that is exclusive for professionals to settle in. So many people that thought they were stuck in their top social networking sites ended up being excited with the whole idea and quickly checked out the service if it is worth moving to for doing business related things. It turned out that LinkedIn really lived up to its name and now people are actively promoting their LinkedIn profiles to others while putting emphasis on the fact that it is a professional social networking site.

 

However, you might have a hard time inviting the ones that are already comfortable with their current social networking site to handle business endeavors. The fact that LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals may not be the deal breaker especially since there are lots of other social networking sites where you can connect with others. But if you share with them these facts, they will realize that LinkedIn is so much more than just an ordinary social networking site.

 

Knowledge Base

 

LinkedIn has a section called “Answers” that resembles Yahoo! Answers and other knowledge market websites, but LinkedIn keeps the categories strictly to business related topics ensuring that all members stay on topic. Lots of members are taking advantage of this feature by either asking questions to learn more information or helping others by asking their questions in order to boost their popularity and respect. All the information found there is highly useful and may even contain content found nowhere else.

 

Advertisement Center

 

Since LinkedIn keeps things strictly to business, advertising can safely come into play where different individuals representing different companies can advertise anything within the site’s policies. It can be your ticket to make some online through advertising your affiliates or any service you wish to bring your target audience to. Internet marketers are actively using LinkedIn to introduce new home-based opportunities and other products and services. While other social networking sites can be used to advertise these opportunities, LinkedIn has special tools that let people better target their professional audience.

 

Job and Company Directory

 

When the advertisements to starts to show their signs that they are not very impressive, the tendency is to research the competition and figure out what their competitors are doing in their advertising campaigns. Thanks to the special searching capabilities, LinkedIn doubles as a complete job and company directory where people can look for new opportunities in a similar fashion to lo looking in standard job directories. As more professionals join the network, more company profiles are made as well for people to check out for seeing how the competition is like or keep track of their former colleagues. Combined with the advertising features, it is also possible to look for people to hire easily.

 

Just by looking at their home interface, you can easily tell that LinkedIn does a lot more than just connecting professionals together. Check out the “Help” section for more unique things that you can do only in LinkedIn.

Many of the top developers behind the different services that drive the Web 2.0 movement are finding more ways for people to access their services. LinkedIn is amongst these services and they have been successful with over 40 million users registered in the site. As a response to the growing number of Internet users doing all kinds of things online through many devices, LinkedIn expanded on flexibility offering more options for people to access their services. Here are some of the different ways you can log in to LinkedIn

 

The Traditional Way

 

People that are just getting started with LinkedIn stick to the traditional ways in logging in and that’s by visiting their homepage at http://www.linkedin.com and then being greeted by their home user control panel where users can check their messages, build their network, and access the rest of the LinkedIn features. It is that simple and is the favored method for the average LinkedIn user. 

 

Through the LinkedIn Browser Toolbar 

 

Web applications are becoming more popular these days resulting to people loading up more websites on their trusty browser. From e-mail checking to regular surfing all the way to serious productivity, more people are resorting to their online connections to get everything done. Some frequent users might find themselves actively using LinkedIn more often than usual and often times it is being used simultaneously with other useful services. Switch back and forth through tabs or windows could be a bit cumbersome for some people. 

 

This is where the LinkedIn Browser Toolbar comes in and unlike other annoying toolbars, LinkedIn is rather useful allowing quick searches to be performed anywhere and connections to be seen when job postings are viewed. The most significant thing about the toolbar is the easy direct access button that makes LinkedIn just a click away. 

 

Using other 3^rd Party Applications 

 

There are a number of useful 3^rd party applications that are adding support for the top social networking sites and other related services. Digsby, which is a multi-messenger application, is one of those services and recently, LinkedIn support was introduced allowing people to log in using their LinkedIn details and then do simple tasks such as changing the status. More applications are expected to incorporate LinkedIn because of its huge success in gathering professionals around the world together. 

 

Connecting your Mobile to LinkedIn 

 

Currently, the iPhone and the Palm Pre have their own LinkedIn applications that are available for download that grant all the basic functionalities for people to work on their LinkedIn completely from their phone. Other phones that have a web browser can still access LinkedIn by heading to the mobile version of the website at http://m.linkedin.com. 

 

Each method of logging into LinkedIn doesn’t have any major advantages over each others. It depends entirely on your preference and current situation. Making LinkedIn part of the daily web habits just got easier thanks to these additions and even more ways should be made as more people start to get more deeply involved with LinkedIn.