with the attitude that, whenever you help people, it will return to you, increasing your bank account of karma. If you do not believe this and start heavily contacting people without offering to help them out, you may not be as successful on your LinkedIn journey. If you are helpful to others even when you don't need to be, believe me, more people will respond to you. You will then be able to ask them for advice when you really need it, and, chances are, they will respond favorably.
I hope I have opened your eyes if you are not currently a LinkedIn user. If you are a LinkedIn user, I hope this information helps you become a more effective user of the platform to meet your own objectives.
What is Your LinkedIn Objective?
You now have some key background information about social networking and what LinkedIn can potentially do for you. It is time to ask yourself what you want to achieve using LinkedIn.
This is by far the most common question that I reply with when someone reaches out to me with any sort of LinkedIn question. If you are still asking yourself why you should be on LinkedIn, I hope the previous chapter answered that question for you. If you are currently a LinkedIn member but don’t know where to go from here, I also hope the previous chapter gave you a taste of what is possible. If you are already a LinkedIn user who knows your objective, you are ahead of the game and will be able to quickly implement the strategies I outline in this book.
Many LinkedIn users fall into the following categories. I hope seeing these categories will give you some new ideas for creating your own objective:
Am I on LinkedIn? What is My Password Again?
Many people joined LinkedIn after receiving an invitation, and that’s it. They signed up, accepted the one invitation (or maybe a few invitations from friends) and put it aside. If this is you, I hope the preceding chapter has given you more ideas as to what your objective should be and how you can utilize this book.
Clueless!
These are people that have been on LinkedIn, connected with their friends when requested, but haven’t done anything else with it. They want to do something on LinkedIn after hearing a lot about it, but really don’t know how to utilize it. If you are one of the clueless, no need to despair! There are a lot of people in this category; you will find great value in this book once you decide on your objective and pursue it!
Just Checking It Out
There are a number of social networking sites out there, and it seems that every time one of your connections joins them, you get an invitation to join their network. Every social network wants to naturally extend their reach, so there is often a default “send an invitation to everyone in your address book” option that seems harmless and is often utilized. A lot of people from other social networking sites (Facebook and Twitter come to mind) may sign up for LinkedIn just to check it out. Especially if you are in college or have recently graduated, everyone is saying you need to be on LinkedIn. So, you are checking it out! I believe that people in this category are either early adopters of technology or are already familiar with the concepts of social networking sites. That being said, LinkedIn is unique in its demographic and functionalities (as well as in its limitations), so I hope after you create your LinkedIn Objective (as opposed to an objective which may be different for other social networking sites) that you will be able to fully understand and maximize your presence on the site.
Classmates.com Extension
Many executives I have met see LinkedIn as merely an extension of Classmates.com. To some extent, this is a very valid objective for using LinkedIn—to get back in touch with old colleagues. After all, that first invitation to join LinkedIn should have come from an old friend or colleague, right? As the name “classmates” entails, you can only find old friends with whom you went to school. What if you want to get in touch with ex-colleagues? LinkedIn is definitely the place to make this happen; reconnecting with past co-workers should, without a doubt, be part of your LinkedIn Objective. LinkedIn can offer this in that your basic profile is composed of your work and education history. For each company or college that you enter, you also have the option of to enter which years you worked or studied there. Combining this with the rich database and search functionality that LinkedIn provides allows you to quickly and easily find ex-colleagues. The more information you enter on your profile, the higher the likelihood you will find people. Two words of caution here: 1) you can only find people if they have properly filled out their entire profile (a lot of people don’t do this) and 2) although there is a standard drop-down for colleges and universities, this doesn’t exist for high school names, so it may be more difficult to find someone pre-college (which is where Classmates.com’s strength lies).
Recruiter
With millions of people putting their company names, years worked, past titles, and detailed descriptions at companies they have or are presently working for, you can imagine that, as more people join LinkedIn, it becomes a huge database of talent! Combined with the rich functionality that allows you to pinpoint searches by each of the fields that are entered, you can imagine the goldmine of information that LinkedIn provides to the world’s recruiters and headhunters. Rather than cold calling the competitor asking for “the VP of anything,” that person more than likely already has a profile on LinkedIn! Through sending an invitation, sending an InMail, requesting an introduction from a common connection, or joining the same Group, that recruiter can now contact anyone they wish without cold calling. You can now see why LinkedIn is the only tool that a recruiter may ever need, and also why there are so many recruiters on LinkedIn. For recruiters their LinkedIn Objective is very clear—to log on and start searching for qualified job candidates!
Job Seeker
It’s no wonder how LinkedIn grew with more and more professionals reaching out to ex-colleagues and recruiters, amassing a database of contacts. Just as you can google someone and find information about them, LinkedIn was already being used for finding people without you knowing it. So why use LinkedIn if you are looking for a job? To expose yourself to the incredible number of recruiters who are currently active users! Be found!
Sales & Marketing / Small Business Owner
If you are in sales & marketing, the ability to reach 40 million potential customers is an exciting prospect. But there is more to LinkedIn than just an audience to sell to; this is a professional audience that doesn’t necessarily want to be sold to. LinkedIn respects the privacy concerns of its professional members and has publicly stated spamming will not be tolerated; in fact, LinkedIn set up a special email address ([email protected]) to report those who are abusing the site. So while you can freely tweet away on Twitter or have a great deal of freedom on Facebook, you need to be aware that LinkedIn is a different beast. That is not to say that LinkedIn cannot be used for sales and marketing; it simply has to be done carefully, following the proper protocol.
Professional Networking
With all of the professionals who are already on LinkedIn, it makes sense that LinkedIn is the perfect platform to find and network with other professionals. If you are looking to build up your Trusted Network of Advisors, look no further than LinkedIn’s searchable databases, specialized Groups, and a comprehensive Q&A forum!
Windmill Networking
After becoming more familiar with LinkedIn, many will find that the larger the network they have, the easier it will be to reach their objective. Without knowing how LinkedIn really works, it is difficult to see how this can be done. Even when I received my first invitation from someone I did not know, I felt a little violated; however, as you start
