7 Ways to Use LinkedIn Effectively

By Shailendra Sial

LinkedIn is a business oriented social networking site providing professional network service free of cost. It is an online hub of professionals and companies which is helpful in many ways such as:

• To find people
• To find jobs
• To find businesses

Most of us use LinkedIn for the above stated purposes only which makes this tool under-utilized. You will be surprised to know that as per the statistics of May 2009, LinkedIn had more than 40 million registered users spanning across 170 distinct yet related industries. Owing to this fact, there are many things that we can achieve (both at the personal and professional level) with this free service.

1. Develop Connections – This is a must for every account holder, whether an individual or a company who wants to get seen across the websites and especially the search engines. Developing as many connections as possible increases the chance of profile being viewed by other people. This strategy encourages the people to enter into professional relationship with you as they contemplate your massive connections to good trust.

2. Make Proper Connections – In order to achieve what is stated in step 1, don’t go about adding irrelevant or vague connections. Start by adding your friends, colleagues, clients and family members. Along with this try adding connections which are directly related to your direct connections i.e. friend of a friend.

3. Use it as a Social Media Optimization tool – The best part of LinkedIn is that the profile pages achieve good search engine results page ranking as well as good PageRank too. Utilize this opportunity properly and make the best use of the links that LinkedIn allows you to create. E.g. you can place links of your company and blog. Try to incorporate the name or your keyword in the anchor text by selecting the “Other” option when entering the information. Moreover, as you develop your connections over the time period the more important your profile gets.

4. Utilize the power of Answers section – The “Answers” section of LinkedIn is often not utilized properly. Since LinkedIn is not just another social networking platform and is a hub of professionals, quality is expected. You can use it to ask question related to your profession or business and get a rational view from experts free of cost. Moreover, if you are an expert in your domain, you can use it to build the authority by answering the questions of other members. Remember, building authority among professionals at global level is a chance you rarely get and it has long term benefits attached to it.

5. Search smartly – The real beauty of LinkedIn lies in its power of search. Anyone who is a member can search for people, jobs and companies. The best part is that these three domains are perfectly segregated and separate searched can be performed as per the requirement. It also allows the user to save the searched for future references.

6. Know about the company – If you are entering into business relationship with a company or are about to join it then LinkedIn is a tool to reckon with. It gives the detailed information not only about the company but also of the employees. Just make a search about the company by entering the company name and you will definitely be impressed with what you see.

7. Know about an individual – If you want to have some information about an individual prior to making any kind of deal with him/her just use the people search option of LinkedIn and you will get all the professional information about the individual. In case if you don’t know the full name of the person there are loads of other options which can help you to zero upon him/her.

There are hundreds of social networking sites where people interact but LinkedIn is one such service which presents the true picture of a company or an individual. It is easy to fabricate the information or other details on causal social networking sites but LinkedIn has its own way of functioning. It’s a serious professional networking place with genuine members and verifiable information.

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