5 Tips to Help You Make the Most of Your Efforts on LinkedIn

If you saw last week's post, you'll have a pretty good idea of how to make the most of your LinkedIn endorsements [link]. This week, I've put together some general tips for you, which will help you to get your LinkedIn profile in full swing.

1. Join lots of groups

This is something lots of people don't think of. When you join a group, you can reach out to those who are not connections. You can start to build mutually beneficial relationships with these people. Join groups that are peripherally related to your industry, or groups where your potential clients may be hanging out. It's a great resource for new and relevant connections.

2. Repurpose any content you create

This post has been generated using a few points from my training course materials. I just expanded on it, eh voila!, brand new content for Pulse, which can also be chopped up for tweets, Facebook posts and perhaps even posted on my blog with a slightly different twist. It has also yet to be turned into LinkedIn posts which link back to this article. Nuff said! ?B^)

3. Accept connection requests from everyone

This is a controversial point. Lots of people will tell you that you should only accept invitations to connect from people you have actually met. I advocate accepting requests to connect from everyone. My reason for this is that when people search for services on LinkedIn, their 1st level connections come up first. If you're their first level connection...well, you do the maths.

A second reason to accept invitations from everyone (if you need one) is to aim for the magic 500+ connections. Once you reach over 500, visitors to your profile can't see exactly how many connections you have - just that it's over 500 and this is considered an achievement and helps to make your profile look substantial and popular. So, on the question of whether to accept connection requests from everyone? You be the judge.

4. Change your viewing setting to ‘anonymous'

This allows you to secretly view the profiles of other people:

Employees - perhaps so you can keep an eye on them and make sure they don't need any pointers on the content they send out on behalf of your business. I'm not suggesting you spy on your employees, just that if they know you're checking everything they do, they could be less creative and more nervous. Perhaps better to do it under the radar.
Clients - so you can see what they're interested in and ensure your content continues to answer their questions and solve their pain points.
Prospects - similarly to above, so you can see what kind of things they're interested in, or the kinds of questions they're asking and then create your own content to try to help them with their pain points.
Competition - so you can see the content they're generating and how successful it is and in a non-copycat, non-stalky kind of way, you may get some ideas for your own profile.

I've given instructions to do this under point 5 below.

5. Turn off activity broadcasts

Receiving continuous notifications from your community members every time they update the smallest part of their LinkedIn profile can be irritating. So, I advocate turning off your activity broadcasts, so that your connections stop receiving these notifications and just get your well thought out, targeted posts :-)

To turn off activity broadcasts, just do the following:

1. Sign into LinkedIn
2. Hover over your profile photo at the top right hand side and click to choose ‘Privacy and Settings’ from the drop down menu.
3. At the bottom of this page you’ll see the privacy and controls for your Profile.
4. To turn off your activity broadcasts, click ‘turn on/off activity broadcasts’. Make sure the box to ‘let people know…’ is unticked and then click to ‘save changes’
5. To change your viewing setting to anonymous, from the same place, click ‘select what others see when you’ve viewed their profile’ and choose to be ‘totally anonymous’ and save changes.

That's it for this week, rather a long one. If you liked this post, don't forget to let me know by liking it, or even sharing it if you think your own network might get something out of it. Of course, if you have any questions, pop them in the comments below, or email me if you prefer on lorraine@socialmatrixhub.co.uk Happy to answer any questions you have.

Follow me on Pulse, but also on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and sign up for my weekly blog posts too if you like. All the links are below.

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Also, I have a new membership website which will be out later this year. For a very small monthly fee, you'll have access to all my videos, tips, how tos and other tidbits so you can learn everything you need to know to get your online presence nailed. Keep your eye out for news.

Until next time...

Lorraine :-)