LinkedIn May Be the Most Useful Network You Join

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Let me be the first to say, I’m social networked out! In fact, I’ve claimed to be social networked out for over a year. There are tens of thousands of social networks I can join, and that I get invited to, but I find no compelling reason to jump on board. There are a handful of exceptions, including LinkedIn.

For those of you not familiar with LinkedIn, it is a place to find and be found (this applies to people that are looking for their next great job, client, vendor, partner or investor). Instead of going to LinkedIn to develop relationships, communicate with others in a social environment, or share pictures and stories, LinkedIn is simply a place to find contacts that you can pursue relationships with as well as be found by people interested in your or your services.

If you are a job seeker, or realize you will be a job seeker in the next three years, or interested in networking, or in sales or business development, you need to have a presence in LinkedIn. Realize, however, that LinkedIn is not a comprehensive networking system (although recent announcements about OpenSocial, which is Google’s open interface to tie social networks together, might drastically change that), nor is it the silver bullet solution to all your professional relationship problems. Let me share a few ideas to help you get the most out of LinkedIn:

1. Beef up your profile to be found. When people search, without knowing your name, they’ll put in keywords like location (city, state), associations (IEEE or AMA), schools (University of Utah or Brigham Young University), titles (CEO, VP Sales), etc. Make sure that your profile has a healthy mix of abbreviations as well as complete titles (for example, PMP as well as Project Management Professional) as you never know what people will search for.

2. Write your profile to be understood. Once someone finds your profile you want them to be able to learn about you. This is your opportunity to sell your value proposition – so make sure that your profile reads professionally. While the first tip says to optimize for LinkedIn’s search engine, this one says to optimize for the human being. Make sure you don’t clutter your profile too much with buzzwords and jargon! Additionally, put enough details about your jobs, education and the other sections of your profile so that the reader isn’t left wondering where else they have to go to learn more about you.

3. Market your profile. Some sales professionals and recruiters might spend hours a day searching LinkedIn for that perfect contact, but most people don’t. You can easily point people to your profile. Include the “Public Profile” link in your e-mail signature, use it as your URL when you comment on blogs, or if you have a website or blog, put it on the front page, easily accessible.

4. Use the search tools to know how they work. With the simple and advanced search tools you can look for friends, alumni, colleagues, potential customers, partners, etc. Going through the process will help you see what others see when they look for you. You’ll see the screens when they find who they are looking for (you!), including the degree of separation measurement, what a profile looks like, etc. There’s nothing like understanding the process that others go through so that you can optimize your own profile.

5. Look for new contacts. Really use LinkedIn. Recently I had lunch with someone who was new to Salt Lake City. We met after he searched for local CEOs on LinkedIn. Because of this lunch I was able to sell copies of my book, speak at a university, and find a restaurant for a social event. You may be just a few clicks away from expanding and strengthening your professional network, but you need to start looking!

Of course, there’s more to LinkedIn than just finding and being found. You can look through job postings (and see how your connections might help you network into those jobs), use the “Answers” feature to ask questions (browse through the answers to see some amazing knowledge sharing) and keep in touch with your contacts, and even communicate to others through the system. These five steps are perhaps the most important steps to get started.

A few words of warning. Don’t rely on LinkedIn to be your relationship manager. Aside from the fact that it isn’t a relationship manager, there are two major issues with relying on LinkedIn to manage your contacts. First, you don’t have complete control over who connects with you, and who stays connected with you! In other words, there may be people in your network that won’t be on LinkedIn. Worse, some people in your network may opt out of your network… can you imagine having a relationship manager where each contact can delete themselves without you knowing about it?

Additionally, be careful how you invite people. There has been a lot of discussion about using the LinkedIn canned invitation template. Some people think that sending an invitation without customizing the invitation text amounts to spam (I don’t completely agree with that). Right now LinkedIn has an internal control to prevent spammers from inviting people they don’t “know and trust,” and it can have a real impact on how you use LinkedIn. Unfortunately, the control will lock you out of using certain parts of LinkedIn if you have five people say they don’t know who you are, when you invite them.

For business, LinkedIn is probably the most powerful network you can join. As I mentioned, there are others. Depending on your target demographics you might want to have a presence on Facebook and/or Xing. But definitely spend an hour or two just getting your LinkedIn profile set up – and prepare to find and be found!