You may be LinkedIn, but are you connecting?

2012-02-14 11:05:17 by Jenny

I came across the following whilst browsing LinkedIn. It’s an infographic entitled LinkedIn Boot Camp, which provides some really useful advice on how to whip your personal profile into shape. It is essentially a basic how-to guide, but there are some really helpful tips that I felt were worth sharing.

The author states that LinkedIn is the ‘proverbial dark horse of social media’. We all know it’s there, but few of us use it to it’s full potential, he observes.

Besides stating the more obvious suggestions such as a completed profile and displaying the company that you work for, the author mentions some other tips to help optimise the potential of a LinkedIn profile.

He recommends connecting to ‘everyone’, and not just people you know, as this can lead to new business opportunities and helps to expand your network, which can only be a good thing.

Secondly, he talks about the benefits of recommending people that you have worked with, following the old adage ‘what goes around comes around’. Prospective employers may regard these as credible references, so it’s better to have some than not to have any. But take note, this is not a case of the more the merrier – just several well-written recommendations will do.

The final most useful point in my opinion is to optimise your search ranking, similar to SEO but specifically for LinkedIn. You can do this simply by adding keywords to your profile that may then be used by others as search terms.