LinkedIn for beginners: Introduction

Are you on LinkedIn yet? Several of my friends who have recently joined and invited me to connect have yet to take the next step in creating and optimizing their profiles. For those of you (and you know who you are), this series of posts is for you.

Online networking

LinkedIn is a way to network with your peers online. It’s one giant daily networking event where people are sharing, communicating, collaborating, learning, and finding jobs. If you’re a student, business professional, or job-seeker, LinkedIn is a great resource to network, stay in touch with people, build your business, and advance your career.

Chances are you joined LinkedIn because of an invitation someone sent you. You created an obligatory profile just to get that person off your back and avoid future emails from him/her. Now that you’re in this social network, why not make the most of it?

Currently there are 44,000,000 LinkedIn members in the U.S. That’s way too huge of an audience to ignore.

Reasons you should be on LinkedIn

• A way to showcase your career, strengths, and skills online
• Opportunity to network with other professionals for business development
• Personal branding
• A chance to position yourself as a thought-leader, or expert in your field
• Job-seeking – most professionals are finding jobs through networking, not from a help-wanted ad

Learn LinkedIn in 3 steps

I recently conducted a series of 3 webinars for a client on how to use LinkedIn. Broken down into (3) 1-hour sessions, I covered:

1. Optimizing your profile
2. Growing your network
3. Lead generation

My upcoming posts will be summaries of each topic from the webinars. If you are interested in taking the next steps to expand your profile and network with other professionals, check back for my subsequent posts.

Next post: Creating & optimizing your profile.

What specifically do you want to learn about LinkedIn? Add your comments here, and I’ll address each one of them in related posts.

(If you are new to LinkedIn, or are a business interested in establishing a presence in this social network, I am available for training you and your employees on a consulting basis)

 

Tags: LinkedIn, social networks