LinkedIn has become the world’s largest business network with 300 million members in over 200 countries around the world. Officially launched in 2003, LinkedIn has successfully connected the world’s professionals to each other and grown to include sections like your personal profile, company profiles, connections with other people from around the world, jobs, groups, education, and LinkedIn’s own publication called Pulse.
Just as much as consumers local shopping habits have changed over the years, the same holds true in being a successful marketer of your business. This is less about being technology savvy as much as being savvy using social communities. Expecting change, adapting to the change, and adopting the changes to your business marketing activities is the way to being competitive and meeting your marketing objectives in today’s world.
If you’re thinking LinkedIn is only for business to business and that you won’t get customers, you may want to consider the value of your LinkedIn personal and company profiles as they relate to validating you through Google search results to your customers. The value of maintaining your business presence through LinkedIn goes beyond the LinkedIn community.
Using the sections of LinkedIn is probably more about understanding what they are and applying them to your daily activities. Once you get in the habit of spending some time performing these daily activities, you may find 15 minutes a day could easily benefit you over the long run. The discussion will focus primarily on managing and maintaining your activities on LinkedIn. We will pickup advertising and sponsored updates in LinkedIn with our next article.
LinkedIn Marketing for your Personal Profile
A potentially daunting task might be the amount of information you are able to submit to your LinkedIn profile. Gathering all this information to update your profile may seem time-consuming and you would be right if you feel you need to do this all in one sitting. Perhaps breaking this up over a few sittings would be helpful? After all, there is no end to this process and you might as well get into the habit of daily or weekly tasks in which you include additional profile segments.
Once you have signed up for your free LinkedIn account, LinkedIn generally takes you through the process of helping you answer and update your profile questions. If you feel you do not have time to do all of it in one sitting, then you can opt-out of the questions and return to them another time. To edit your profile again in the future you can click on PROFILE, then EDIT PROFILE from the LinkedIn navigation menu.
Here is a summary of all the profile segments available to you:
- Profile Web Address
- Name
- Headline
- Location
- Industry
- Photo
- Contact Info
- Summary
- Experience
- Certifications
- Courses
- Honors & Awards
- Languages
- Organizations
- Patents
- Publications
- Projects
- Skills & Endorsements
- Test Scores
- Volunteer Experience & Causes
- Additional Information to include Interests, personal details like your birthday or marital status, and advice for people who want to contact you.
- Groups you have joined
- Companies you are following
Your personal profile is available to the public and will be picked up by Google. Anyone searching by your name or your company name is likely to find your LinkedIn profile in the search results of Google.
The information you submit to your personal profile is used by LinkedIn to display your profile in the search results of anyone searching within LinkedIn. Additionally, LinkedIn uses your profile information to make connection recommendations to you and the LinkedIn community.
You are allowed to select your public profile URL in your LinkedIn personal profile. The format for the URL’s is www.linkedin.com/in/(profile name)
Read more from this article at Web Marketing Today’s, “Using LinkedIn to Attract Consumers, Prospects“.
You can read more about our LinkedIn Marketing program and our other LinkedIn marketing articles.
Featured image and in-article images courtesty of LinkedIn.com
