Lost In LinkedIn?

LinkedIn, also known as Facebook for grownups, is growing rapidly itself with 100,000,000 registered users taking advantage of its facility for networking, a valuable feature in these times of job insecurity.

You may not get poked on LinkedIn, or even invited to raise a farm but you will be able to connect with people who you have in the past, and currently work with, get recommendations form them, reconnect with friends from Uni and college and look up key figures in your industry. If you’re shy about connecting with them you can still join their networks and see what their opinions are on events and issues. Getting an insight into the minds of the people who drive your industry forward... opportunities like that don’t come up every day. Except on LinkedIn.

I was an early adopter and in conversation with my MD last night, also an early adopter, we discussed our different findings. He stated that he hadn’t used it for ages, had no contacts and wasn’t really interested as anyone who wanted to find him could easily through the company website or already had his email. That’s the thing if you’re first on a bandwagon, I was one of the first people I know to go on twitter too, (nice to have my own name!) but it took a very long time for me to actually start to use it as there wasn’t really any-one to connect with in the early stages.

But getting back to LinkedIn, the continued growth and respectability it receives from members of the business world reflects its mature and professional attitude toward its operations. Sure, you do get the odd person who’s annoying on boards and discussion fora but that’s more down to poor netiquette than any deliberate trolling.

It appears that Adam and I weren’t the only people who struggled, and still struggle to find out what the FABs of membership include. So you’ve signed up, filled in your profile, linked up with everyone you know but now what? How do you make it work for you?

You’ve got to remember, it’s NOT Facebook! It’s a tool which you need to learn how to use, if you’re social media savvy you’ll pick it up more quickly than if you’re a novice. It’s up to you to go and seek people you’re interested in, ask people who you know to write testimonials for you, write testimonials for others you’ve worked with in the past. It’s your chance to catch the eye of your next employer by looking professional and adept, you don’t need to throw a sheep at them to catch their attention!

As with so many things the more you put in the more you’re going to get out. Even now signing up will not necessarily present you with the range of features that you’d expect coming from environments such as Facebook or Bebo, what you might do is check out the FAQs, join some groups, enable tweets so that you can keep up with what’s going on all in one place rather than switch from platform to platform, indeed tie all of your social media in, just remember that what you say in one place will appear in another. Always remember that!

Being updated on the activity of people in your groups means that you’re part of professional discussions, you’re in the loop as soon as some-one’s thinking about advertising for a position that’s coming up, you might not want the job, but you might know some-one who does, that’s the whole social aspect of social networking.

LinkedIn also allows freelancers and entrepreneurs to position themselves, and give themselves traction before their peers. If you’re an expert on a particular subject then your opinion will become trusted and valued. Achieving that sort of position is worth a huge advertising budget yet all it has cost you is time networking. 

Guest post by: Dan Cash is a feature writer who concentrates primarily on social media including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Technologies that are appearing on the horizon that should be interesting are Cloud storage and virtualization. Jump aboard now you ealrly adopters! 

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