How to use LinkedIn.

This guide will advise you on how to use LinkedIn as a personal professional profile. LinkedIn offers the ideal opportunity to market yourself in the employment market and in achieving strong professional connections to enhance your career. It can further to this prove a successful tool in marketing products and services to the growing community of 200 million users as of January 2013. (Silicon Republic, 2013) http://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/item/30959-linkedin-reaches-200m-membe

LinkedIn serves as a fantastic tool in recruitment, with Number of companies recruiting on LinkedIn. It serves as the ideal platform to represent your public professional profile.

 

Having a LinkedIn profile is step 1. Well done if you’ve achieved this but what now? How do you use LinkedIn to connect with professional contacts?

How to fill in your LinkedIn profile:

Ensuring your profile is thoroughly filled and has a good layout is imperative. The more information relevant to your professional profile that is there, the more likely it is that you will be firstly found and secondly offered new opportunities as a result of your LinkedIn profile.

 So here’s a guide on creating an expert LinkedIn profile.

 Include your basic information- your name, email address, phone number and your current or most recent position.

After this your profile is generally split into education and employment history. Enter each job relevant to the industry that you’re currently in or wish to seek employment in.

Add your qualifications, detailing information about your course of study. LinkedIn provide a useful tool for each entry, asking for the information usually sought in relation to qualifications. Sometimes, your qualification may not fill all the boxes but just fill the relevant spaces and leave the others.

 How to over come negatives on LinkedIn:

You’ve had a period of unemployment and are a bit worried about how potential employers may see this? Outside of LinkedIn, you should try to partake in some voluntary work to fill the gap. A good tip in this case is to include ‘seeking new opportunities’ as your current position. Not only does this immediately identify you as employable to potential employers but it also gives you an opportunity to describe your ideal position in the description section.

 

LinkedIn allows you to add skills and expertise to your profile. Once added, they can be endorsed by your connections, having more endorsements here boost your chances of someone choosing you because of a certain listed skill.

 

Lastly on LinkedIn, you can be recommended by a connection, this is essentially a reference from someone who you’ve worked with. Avoid having references from friends and adopting a ‘one for one’ policy- it can be seen very easily and uncredible.

How to connect on LinkedIn. 

Now you have a profile and it includes the relevant information to catch other user’s attention. So, how do you get your profile out there? Let’s look at several ways below;

The first way to find connections is to invite your email contacts to connect. LinkedIn offers an option to automatically import your contacts. You can also import a .csv file of your contacts.

 It’s important to share your profile elsewhere, if you have professional connections on Twitter or Facebook, you should share a link to your professional LinkedIn profile.

 Further to this, there are many ways to find industry professionals who you may not know but may want to connect with. There are two main ways to network on LinkedIn. By searching for relevant industries or keywords, you can view potential contacts related to your query. This can enable you to connect with future prospects.

The second most convenient way to connect with new professionals on LinkedIn is to join groups related to your field. By joining, posting and interacting, it places your profile as the centre of attention among other members of the group. Of course, you can set up your own group and send invitations to your contacts, so that you can build a network of people within a certain field.

Get started here.