LinkedIn is currently 135 million members strong. Today I listened to a LinkedIn presentation given by their Public Relations Assistant, Erin O’Harra, and hosted by Career Directors International. O’Harra gave a lot of great advice for LinkedIn newbies and veterans. Here are her top tips.
- Add a picture. A profile is nine times more likely to be viewed if the profile contains your photo.
- Fill out the experience section completely. Profiles that contain at least one past position in addition to a current position are seven times more likely to be viewed.
- Connect to at least 50 trusted colleagues. Fifty seems to be the “magic number” necessary to reach the critical mass that makes it easier to source second and third degree contacts.
- Try to get at least 3 endorsements. Every time you receive an endorsement, a message goes out to both your network and the network of the person who offered the endorsement. This is a great way to become top of mind with people quickly.
- Be strategic about your vanity url. LinkedIn allows you to customize your url with your name. This makes it easier for people to find your profile and it helps with optimization efforts overall. When selecting a vanity url, the best strategy is to use your first name and last name with lower case letters and no spaces or dashes. If your name is already taken, the second best choice is to use your last name and first name with lower case letters and no spaces or dashes.
- Add volunteer experience to your profile. A recent LinkedIn study showed that 20% of hiring managers considered relevant volunteer experience when making hiring decisions.
- Add skills. This helps with optimization even more than the specialties section. If you click on the skills section under to “More” tab on the toolbar, you can key in a specific skill and get a list of related skills to help you build out your skills section. You can also view other profiles of people who have listed the same skill and see groups that are related to that particular skill set.
- Review company pages. If you have your own company and add a company page on LinkedIn, it will be easier for people to find you in searches. If you are a job seeker, viewing company pages helps you find out who in your network works for that company. It also shows which people from your school alumni work at that company.
- Save job leads. The jobs page allows you to save postings that you are interested in to make it easier to review them.
- Use LinkedIn Signals. This feature located in the “News” tab, lets you filter the information that is most important to you. You can click on the search all status updates button on the homepage and search on a particular topic such as “marketing jobs” or “JPMorgan Chase jobs” and source specific user status updates that relate to your search criteria.
- Be a stealth job seeker. if you want to leverage LinkedIn for job leads but are currently employed and don’t want your employer to become suspicious of your LinkedIn activity, customize your settings and turn off your activity broadcasts so you can connect discreetly. You can also hide your connections while you are looking so your boss can’t see if you’ve connected to a competitor or you can hide information on your group activity for the same reason.
- Use LinkedIn Today to view trending topics. On the LinkedIn homepage you can view the articles that are most shared across LinkedIn, your professional community, and your connections and save relevant articles to be reviewed at a later time.
- Get on LinkedIn Mobile. LinkedIn recently revamped their mobile apps making it easier for colleagues to connect on the go.