LinkedIn Tips

Social Media Speaker and LinkedIn Expert reveals 20 Tips and Tricks to Becoming Successful on LinkedIn

Treat your LinkedIn profile like a website. Make sure it is formatted, clean, and most importantly, filled with search engine friendly keywords.
Create a LI Profile Word template to create and edit your profile. This will guard against spelling and grammatical errors, and can be easily copied into other social media platforms to keep your branding unified.
Keep you name clean – LinkedIn can’t find you if your name looks like this: Smith, PhD. John A. (johnsmith@gmail.com) LION 941-555-1555
Keep your photo professional. Headshot only. LinkedIn doesn’t like logos.
Keep the “What are you doing now” function updated.
Personalize your “public profile” to reflect your name, your business, or your area of expertise: http://www.linkedin.com/in/linkedinexpert
Personalize your websites by using “other” to reflect your business name and not just “My Website”
“Experience” is not your resume. Make sure the jobs you choose to list support each other.
“Experience” is a great place to list “wins”, different companies you have helped, seminars or workshops you have presented, a mini-shot of your personal website.
Make sure you list your certifications and licenses as well as traditional education.
Get Recommendations!
Join strategic groups – then invite strategic members to build your network.
Create a group - fill with interesting and relevant information.
You only get 3000 invitations in a lifetime – use them wisely.
Don’t IDK!
Use “Answers” sections to position yourself as an expert, get exposure.
Use Answers section to get free, valuable advice.
Always be courteous.
“Give to” more than you try and “get from” other LinkedIn members.
Be relevant!

More of an audio person – here’s my latest radio interview!
Blog Talk Radio with Melody Campbell and Viveka von Rosen

{ 9 comments }

Mike O'Neil January 16, 2009 at 2:33 am: Great analysis. Tips for people at all levels, even advanced users! Thanks.
Chris January 18, 2009 at 10:30 pm: Thanks for Linked In tips
Andrew Ballenthin February 3, 2009 at 10:09 am: With the 3,000 invites, do you know if you send invites and then withdraw them because they were not responded to do they still count as part of your 3,000? I would like to assume 3,000 invites means 3,000 invites accepted.

Thanks
Andrew Ballenthin
linkedinexpert February 3, 2009 at 3:41 pm: I know traditionally that even if you withdrew an invite, you never really got it back (not to mention it was a 4 click – one minute process and a pain in the butt). Now that LI has limited first connections to 30, 000 – they are going to have to change that function. I don’t know what the super-users are going to do? How do you choose which 20,000 of your 50,000 connections to delete???
ian February 21, 2009 at 6:16 pm: nice info.

thank you
Ben D. Manevitz March 2, 2009 at 9:04 pm: Have you heard of mylinkinvitation.com?

You send a link and then the putative invitEE actually invites you. I’m not explaining it well but I’ve been using it off and on for a while now and I really like it. (Note, I use it, but am otherwise not connected to it.)
Ben D. Manevitz March 2, 2009 at 9:04 pm: I’m just saying it might be a way around the 3000 invite issue.
Joe Knaack March 5, 2009 at 10:03 am: Excellent info for LinkedIn users and…thanks

I have a bit of work to do on my profile.
gloria willis March 5, 2009 at 3:30 pm: Thanks Viveka. I appreciate this as a first time user.