Last night I hosted a small LinkedIn training session for some friends at Sunridge Church in Temecula. As LinkedIn (and the other social/ professional networking sites) grow and evolve, it’s challenging to keep up with how they work, which features are most important and how to best utilize these services to meet our career and business goals.
Our discussion included identifying intent and using LinkedIn with a purpose; planning to make periodic updates and investing reasonable time into your profile while avoiding getting bogged down and spending more time than it’s worth. After all, we’re all so busy already that we need to focus our efforts on marketing and networking tools that deliver. And LinkedIn is definitely worth investing some time.
We also reviewed some of the profile basics, like how your profile components work, including education, projects, work experience, publications and more. And we discussed techniques for finding and connecting with new people.
Lastly, we discussed in detail how LinkedIn handles endorsements and recommendations. For endorsements, it’s important to understand how you can manually add and remove skills and expertise so your connections can endorse you for them. Likewise, we reviewed how LinkedIn automatically selects skills and encourages your contacts to endorse you for those as well. For recommendations, we reviewed where they’re located within your profile (a recent change on LinkedIn) and how to both give and receive recommendations with your contacts.
Could you use some help with LinkedIn or other social/ professional networking sites to promote your business or organization? Let’s talk.
