LinkedIn to the Max

By Trevor Cahoon

There aren’t a lot of places where it’s socially acceptable to show off. If you try to flaunt your skills in front of your friends, you might as well be ready to see eyes roll. Maybe family is the place for it, nope; someone will inevitably point out that all this is coming from the person who wet the bed until they were eight.

 Well there is one place where you can highlight all of your skills. LinkedIn. This social media site really helps emphasize your talents and experience in one place. Setting up a profile with your cute little professional picture in the corner is the easy part. LinkedIn practically takes you through the steps without breaking a sweat. Maximizing your LinkedIn is all about getting noticed.

Secrets

When it is the norm to tweet what you eat for breakfast or when you are urinating, LinkedIn isn’t the place to share everything about yourself. When updating your profile you can turn off activity updates. This will keep you out of people’s feeds until you want to share the good stuff.

 Do you want people to see that you’ve added your current job to LinkedIn? Probably not, these always get shared as a “new job”. Did you actually get promoted in your career path? Share that! Elected to a board? Definitely share that! Anything to make you look better than the next person is always a plus. Just steer clear of spamming people’s feeds, then you might end up unconnected (that’s bad).

 Redundancy

 When branding you want to think about the message you want to convey. It is always specific to your goals. Branding yourself is no different. Use the strengths you want to convey multiple times when setting up your profile.

 Using the same skill multiple times will help you boost your ranking in searches. To better your chances try and find the different variations of the skill used on LinkedIn. This will help you show up more prominently in the search results regardless of what is entered.

 Connections

 After all, this site isn’t only to put your name up and connect with everyone that you can. Begin connecting with everyone on your email contact list, and then move to twitter. You will need to spend some time adding everyone you know. This is a great way to begin networking.

 LinkedIn only allows free users to connect to first or second-degree users (second-degree users are removed from you by one person). Simple logic we have learned from “Seven Degrees to Kevin Bacon” is that you are connected far closer to people than you think. The more connections you have the more second-degree potential connections you can have. So have at it and add everyone you have said “Hi” to walking down the street.

 Just remember that LinkedIn is the Facebook for the business world. You can join groups and link up with people, and you should. If you just create a profile and never unlock the potential within you can bet someone else might get the job.