GigaThoughts

6 part series – How to effectively use social media applications.

I am planning to write a series of articles on how people can effectively use different social media application to market themselves, their companies, their services and products. I am going to share my personal experience with each application and suggest ways and means by which these applications can be used to your advantage. For people who are new to social media I recommend you read this post first.

The applications that I am planning to cover are:

• LinkedIn – Business Networking
• Facebook – Social Networking
• Twitter – Micro Blogging
• StumbleUpon – browsing based on recommendations
• Del.icio.us – Social bookmarking
• Digg – Sharing content from anywhere

LinkedIn – Topic 1 – How to effectively use social media applications.

My Experience

I have made an attempt to cover various ways in which one can use LinkedIn to gain unfair advantage ;-) All that I have written stems from my experience of using LinkedIn for personal and professional objectives. 

LinkedIn is all about business networking. The more connection you have the better networked you are. Having said that, I suggest please be very selective in choosing people you connect. Don’t just keep adding people just because you want to increase your connections. The golden rule of quality versus quantity also applies here. Choose people who share similar interest or work in similar line of business. Only add people if they have something in common with you. LinkedIn allows Google to crawl your profile; this will enhance your personal and your company’s SEO effort.

I have divided my analysis into following categories:

• Personal Branding
• Quality Contacts
• Recruitment
• Business prospecting
• Use of Applications
• SEO

Personal Branding

• Complete your profile – it should be 100% complete. As people searching for contacts will first look at profile and then make a decision to connect or not to connect. Complete profile will increase your visibility if you are searching for a job or want to be searched by a prospect.
• Under “Edit profile >> Additional Information” you can a) promote your company, b) your blog, c) your RSS feed and d) others. You can use “other” option to write whatever you want to promote. This will help you immediately promote yourself, your company, your brand whatever is your objective.
• Please…Please …Please…Upload your photo on the profile. People like to see faces instead of a cartoon or some wacky lines
• Recommendations. Get more and more recommendations period from friends, relative, colleagues, partners & where ever possible. This will tremendously add to your creditability factor

Quality Contacts

• As a starting point search for friends, colleagues, relatives and business contacts as this will help you build first level of quality contact base.
• LinkedIn Answers is a great place to get expert advice on any topic. Identify the topic of your interest and indulge in asking question and answering questions. This way you will be able to build rapport with thought leaders in the industry and make qualitative connections.
• Use your current status effectively to announce to the world what you are upto, it can be a business requirement, a specific project or simply looking for information. People tend to first look at that and you never know what it can lead to. I once had my status as “working on a project in stealth mode” I had my whole lot of people asking details about the project. Curiosity fosters interactions and interaction lead to conversation, Finally leading to quality contacts.

Recruitment

• Starting point is via “Jobs” tab, under that option you can straight away start searching for jobs that are advertised and in the same section hiring managers can post requirements.
• Search for people who are currently in the recruitment space & are specializing in your area of expertise. Once you find them immediately request to get connected
• Directly get in touch with HR in the companies that you wish to work and request for connections
• JobInsider toolbar from LinkedIn is an excellent tool. It acts as a job assistant while you are on your job search. JobInsider works well with most job boards. It automatically suggest your connection on LinkedIn and other possible connection on LinkedIn related to your job search
• Always keep an eye on LinkedIn network updates. Updates will give you an opportunity to track who’s connecting to whom and what your friends, colleagues and former bosses are doing
• Use LinkedIn groups – you can join professional, alumni, industry and corporate alumni groups listed on LinkedIn. This is a great way to market your profile and increase your connections. You can also create groups – Do remember managing groups is really a time consuming activity so please think before you start one.

Business prospecting

• Search for CXO level people within your target market and try and establish a connection with them.
• LinkedIn can also serve as a good starting point to research companies before you decide to get in touch with them. Research and analysis can also be done on your competitors, their teams, their offerings and much more.
• Before any important meeting always make it a point to search for LinkedIn profile of the person that you are planning to meet. You can learn a lot about them even before your meet them.
• If you are a services provider make sure you choose the option “yes” in the service provider directory. This option can be found under the “accounts and settings” option
• Request your client for recommendations, Nothing works better than happy clients recommending your work

Use of Applications

• LinkedIn offers integration of some really interesting applications. Effective use of application can really generate awareness about your company. You can use these application to promote yourself, your products and services and your company
• Reading list by Amazon – use this to let people know the kind of books are you reading
• Wordpress – Excellent way to promote your personal / Corporate blogs
• Box.net File – offers online collaborations between work groups
• Polls – Want a quick survey ? Use this. Imagine millions of users as your target for surveys
• Slide Share – This is one of my favourites, It allows you to share presentations with LinkedIn users. Again an excellent way to promote your brand.
• Trip it – You can share destination where you are planning to travel and find out people on LinkedIn who are travelling to the same destination and get connected.

SEO

• For better SEO, always use your profile link as part of your signature at various avenues like, email, blogs, articles where ever you publish.

• Under Account & Settings >> Profile settings >> Public Profile, customize your LinkedIn URL to your actual name rather than default. This is good for SEO as Google indexes LinkedIn profile and gives high importance in its ranking eg: http://www.linkedin.com/in/amitdesai

• Optimize Keywords in your summary section. This is a full text section which is indexed by Google.

AVOID

• Never use avenues like LION, toplinked.com, and open invites to improve your connections. Remember quality does matter. As there is very little outcome from extended networks, it is your direct network that matters

• Write a personal message and a reason before sending an Inmail or introducing someone or adding someone to your network. Differentiate yourself from standard invites that LinkedIn provides by default.

• Don’t lie or make up information to project an image that you are not as people might check your profile for various reasons:

o Reference checks for jobs, companies, candidates checking out your company.

o Background check before signing a deal

o Finding service provider.

One another way to promote yourself is to write such articles and request reader to visit your profile. Please visit http://www.linkedin.com/in/amitdesai

I request you to share your experience using LinkedIn and ways in which it has helped you achieve your objective. You are also welcome to share your LinkedIn success story.

Related posts:

1. Do you have a social media policy for your organization
2. Now money can buy friends, followers, connections, fans on social media sites
3. Thought sharing over social media
4. 6 part series – Topic 2 – Twitter
5. Hubspot – Measure effectiveness of your online initiatives
6. Online marketing at its best – The movie 2012 End of the world

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Powered by Wordpress | WP Premium theme by WP Remix
Copyright 2007. GigaThoughts. All rights reserved

• Home
• Why GT
• Team GT
• Write for GT
• Feedback