Leveraging LinkedIn: 12 tips for success
Michelle Carvill of marketing and design agency Carvill Creative offers a dozen tips on how to use the social networking website in a business environment.
When talking to a new client about social media or indeed when training to a group of businesses on the subject, the one social network that I find most business people feel most comfortable with – and have therefore started to engage with (ie: created a profile) – is LinkedIn.
Often branded as ‘The Professionals’ Facebook’ – over the years LinkedIn has certainly had the reputation of being the business to business resource. And until recently, most research in the four main channels, Facebook, Twitter,YouTube and LinkedIn, identified this to be the case.
And of course, that makes perfect sense.
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Personalising Invites
Can I just add to this highly valid point that using the "Groups" function when sending an invitation to connect has been shown to increase the likelihood and speed of acceptance.
Presumably you've joined the largest groups frequented by the largest numbers of members of your target market. If you have liked (or even loathed?) a comment on a discussion in one of these groups, an invitation based on both being members of that group and personalised with your reaction to their comment (don't forget to remind them which discussion!) is a powerful way of building your contacts with the sorts of people you need to be connected to.
Add your comments directly to the discussion too as this will build your profile and reputation within the group.
David Winch
Answer to Anne re personalised URL
Hi Anne - Go to: Profile - Edit Profile. Then look towards the end of the first block of text for "Public Profile" and click "Edit". This brings up "Customize Your Public Profile" on the right of the screen. Look down at "Your public profile URL -Your current URL" and click "Customize your public profile URL" which brings up a pop-up box in which the URL of "uk.linkedin.com/in/...." appears and type whatever name you wish in the box. If you type "fredbloggs" (all one word, no spaces) in the box, then your LinkedIn public profile can be found on the web at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/fredbloggs.
Excellent piece
Thanks very much for this article. As an independent contractor who gets work mainly through agencies, this brought home to me how I should be using such sites, LinkedIn in particular. I am too embarrassed to say how long I have been on LinkedIn with my profile 5% complete! I'll get onto it.
Peter Willoughby