What Should I Be Doing With LinkedIn?

This is the latest edition in our quick-and-practical Q&A style videos. Questions come from social channels, keyword analysis, and readers of this blog. A transcript accompanies each video.

What Should I Be Doing With LinkedIn?
“What should I be doing with LinkedIn?”
If you haven’t already, you need to fill out your LinkedIn profile. This means uploading a good picture of yourself that’s professionally done. If you go on LinkedIn, you’ll see some people with blurry pictures or pictures from the beach. This is a professional network. This is not where you have fun. This is where you go to network with people like you would at a professional cocktail party or something like that. So you need to have a good professional headshot done and that should cost you less than $100.00 to have a professional do it and upload it to the site.
The next thing you should do is make sure that your profile information is filled out with as much information as you can. The richer your profile, the more stuff there is for people to connect with you and find connections and make stuff work.
The next thing you should do is start connecting with people. There’s amazing ways for you to be able to find people within your alumni network. The alumni tool in LinkedIn will blow your mind with how powerful it is. You will quickly be able to find people that went to your school in the years that you went there and the year that you graduated and so on and so forth, and when you connect with other people, you have access to their connections as well.
There are LinkedIn groups, so make sure you go and join some LinkedIn groups. See who is in those groups. Any time you get anybody’s business card, get that person into LinkedIn.
LinkedIn should become the place that you’re spending a lot of time now. You should definitely be checking it every morning at work. You should take a look at what your connections are doing. You can post in LinkedIn now. If you haven’t been there for a while, you can post status updates like you can in Facebook so make sure that you like what other people are talking about, comment what other people are talking about, and let them know that you’re there and paying attention to them and that’s a really good way to start building trust with people.
LinkedIn is just a fantastic tool, and you should definitely be on it if you’re not.