Welcome back.  I hope you are all beginning to see some positive signs of this economy starting to get some traction.  Speaking of traction, LinkedIn is really picking up traction, with more and more business professionals not only joining but finally figuring out how to use it with a higher level of effectiveness.  I hope this week’s tips and helps will assist you in realizing increased effectiveness as a result of the time you spend on LinkedIn.

Profile Tips

Have you updated your Experience section lately to reflect any significant volunteer work you have done recently?  Most people think this section is just for jobs.  That is not true.  If it were, it would be called Jobs and not Experience.  Remember that one of the things you are trying to accomplish in your profile is to differentiate yourself from your competitors and tell your credibility and expertise story in a way that sets you apart.  Significant volunteer work tells the world that you care about others and you work hard even when you are not at your regular job.  It may also help people find you if they happen to be searching by the organization’s name. 

If you do this, you may have to adjust the start date for this entry in order to control where this volunteer entry shows up on your profile.  You probably don’t want this appearing above your current full-time job.  You do this by giving the new entry an earlier start date than your current job. 

Connection Tips

Are you connected to some of the most connected people in your market?  You might be wondering why you should care about this and, even if you do care, how you would go about finding out which people in your market are actually connected to the most people.  Let me start by telling you why you might want to care about this. 

When you do a search on LinkedIn, the number of results you get (unless you are on a paid account) is a direct result of the number of first-level connections you have, how well connected they are, and how many people are members of groups that you also belong to.  So, based on this, you should want to be connected to well-connected people.  I am not suggesting that we all become LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers), those people who declare they will connect with anyone on LinkedIn.  As you know, I am a staunch believer in quality over quantity.  Your network should consist of people you consider to be trusted professionals.  What I am suggesting is that you make sure you are connected to all of the well-connected people in your market who meet your definition of “trusted professional.”  Here is how you can identify which people in your market are extremely well connected:

1.      Go to Advanced Search and select the location you define as your market.  Near the bottom of the page, under the heading Sort By, you will need to select “Connections.”  This will give you all the people on LinkedIn in your defined market, and they will be listed in the order of the most first-level connections.  You cannot tell specifically how many connections these people have because once a person exceeds 500 first-level connections, LinkedIn simply lists “500+.”  However, some people (usually LIONs) will identify their approximate number of connections either next to their name or in their headline.  They typically do this in order to encourage other LIONs to connect with them.
From this information, you will be able to surmise how many connections other people on the list may have.

2.      Go through this list page by page and identify people you are not connected with who meet your definition of “trusted professionals.”  I would suggest you look through at least the first ten pages, which will identify the top 100 most-connected people in your market. It is your call to decide whether to dive deeper.  Remember – there could be “gold in them thar hills.”

3.      Of course, the last step is once you have found people you are not connected to but should be connected to, invite those people to join your network.  I wouldn’t worry too much about the chance that they would decline your invitation, since they are following a strategy of adding lots and lots of connections to their networks.

Wildcard Tip or Question

Did you know you can download a vCard (a download of name, title, company name, and email address) for any of your first-level connections?  It will save into your Outlook or other address database.  You do this by clicking the icon that looks like a small index card with a green down arrow.  You will find this icon near the top right-hand side of a first-level connection’s profile page.  This is a great way to quickly populate your address book.