Linked Intelligence » Using LinkedIn

Tips from the LinkedIn Rockstars: Top Ten Annoying Behaviors by People on LinkedIn- Number 9

Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:30:57 +0000

I recently received an email from a stranger asking me to send them a LinkedIn invitation. This is a complete breach of online etiquette, and creates a problem where there is none.

When you join LinkedIn, you get 3,000 initial invites. (If you send them often to people you don’t actually know, and they indicate in their response they don’t know you, you may find yourself having to enter email addresses to send out your invites. You can get this restriction removed by contacting customer_service@cs.linkedin.com.)

If you manage to burn through your initial 3,000 invites, you can contact LinkedIn and ask for more every thirty days! There is no reason that requires asking someone else to send you an invite. In the real world, this could be seen as the equivalent of asking someone you don’t know to buy you a cup of coffee.

Also, as an aside, the person who sent me this email sent it to a large number of people. How do I know? They included everyone’s email address in the ‘to’ box! Please, please, please use the ‘blind carbon copy’ (bcc) feature when sending out mass emails to protect the privacy of those involved. It will be appreciated.

The Magic is in the Mix!

Jan Wallen — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:40:07 +0000

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the MeetUp group, NSA-NYC (National Speakers Association, New York City chapter), about LinkedIn and how to get more speaking engagements using LinkedIn. A number of questions arose about where do you start, and where does LinkedIn fit in with the rest of your marketing? And how do you have enough time in your day for social media?

Since I started using LinkedIn more and more after writing my book, I find I spend less time and get more real results when I cluster my time and do similar networking and marketing activities at the same times each week. In doing so, I’ve streamlined the way I work, and really focus.

The Magic is in the Mix. Whether you want speaking engagements, new clients, more face-to-face meetings, or referrals and introductions from LinkedIn, always ask yourself this question every week, “What is the one thing that will make the most difference for my business this week?” Then focus on that all week – in your online networking, in person meetings, phone calls, writing and everything else you do. There is no one ‘Silver Bullet”. The Magic is in the Mix. Continue to use every marketing avenue that you currently use, and stay focused.

Cluster your time. Before LinkedIn, I woke up and read the newspaper with my morning cup of coffee. Now I wake up, scan the newspaper, scan LinkedIn – the updates and news, and spend 15 minutes catching up with people in my network, setting meetings with them, and updating them on things that will advance their networking, sales and businesses. I check e-mail twice a day – in the morning and the afternoon. I asked people to call me if they want to reach me in between times.

For more information about the MeetUp and more tips, check out my post on LinkedIn for Sales, and as always – Success to you!

When You'd Like To Leave LinkedIn

Steven Tylock — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:00:31 +0000

Yes, it’s almost sacrilegious – but there are people who’ve tried LinkedIn and decided it wasn’t for them.

I give them kudos over the people that haven’t tried LinkedIn. (or worse – who are waiting to lose their job before they “bother”…)

But this group can be vocal – they want out, and they want out now.

So I’ve written about the subject – several times.

Can we just say goodby?

Apparently not very easily…

It seems LinkedIn may have not followed through on its side of things – by continuing to send emails of different sorts.

And think about it – friends still know the hopefully ex-member, and when they send invitations to connect, what’s LinkedIn to do?

So start here when you’d like LinkedIn to stop bothering you;-)

Understand the system first

If you take the time to read my articles, you might find out that I’m actually trying to make sure users don’t want to leave for reasons that shouldn’t exist.

The most common is the “all those annoying emails” – and the response is that each LinkedIn user can effectively control how different types of messages come through. (If they only knew how to) So let’s start with education about how that all works so users can make informed choices.

But you probably get that already…

To your continued success,

steve

Tip from the LinkedIn Rockstars: Using YouTube with LinkedIn

Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:30:43 +0000

Embedding videos on your LinkedIn profile is something you should definitely play around with. Videos allow you to build up personal relationships with potential clients and customers early on. When you connect with someone through video, they are used to seeing you on the screen, which helps increase your click through rate!

When you put a YouTube video in your status, it automatically pulls in the assigned picture from the video, as well as the text describing the video. You can edit the text by clicking the little blue ‘edit’ button. Mike and I edit ours so it ties in well with the rest of the status. People can then play your video right there on LinkedIn. What an engaging way to bring people to your profile!

You can also post videos on your company pages. If you post a video in the section about your products and services, it will even push down the regular page advertising, allowing your company to have more premium space!

LinkedIn offers some great ways to get creative with YouTube. Videos are attractive and enticing, and definitely help you stand out from the crowd.

The $5,000 Profile Update

Scott Allen — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:52:55 +0000

My friend Jefre Outlaw shared with me a great LinkedIn anecdote about the importance of keeping your profile up-to-date.

Jefre is a many of many talents, with a diverse array of business interests and experience. Among other things, after more than 20 years as a real estate investor and developer, he decided to actually go get his own real estate license and join his cousin Blake’s agency.

“At first I completely forgot about updating my LinkedIn profile,” he said. “But I got a request to forward an introduction and it reminded me that I should probably go update my profile to include my new gig as a realtor.”

Good thing he did!

Just a couple of weeks later, one of his extended network found him in a search on LinkedIn for realtors and contacted him about listing his home for sale. Well, they did end up listing with Jefre’s agency, who got the home sold pretty quickly. $170,000 home x 3% commission = about $5,000 to the brokerage.

Now, Jefre was careful to say, “Let’s not overstate what happened. Being on LinkedIn didn’t get me the business. We were one of several realtors the client talked to, and I brought in my cousin, who’s a great closer and more experienced than I, to meet with the client. But the fact that I was in there, that my profile was up-to-date, that I have over 20 really good recommendations on my profile — all that put us on the short list.”

Is your profile up to date on everything you’re doing? If not, plan to update it right away — no telling how much it’s costing you in missed opportunity if you don’t.

Nothing But Your Name, Please

Scott Allen — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:46:53 +0000

I originally wrote about this issue back in 2007, and while LinkedIn has occasionally (and inconsistently) manually cracked down on this practice, 5 years later they still haven’t really done much to curb it. It’s a fairly common practice, primarily among “open networkers”, it seems, to put all kinds of stuff in the name field of their LinkedIn profiles, including:

E-mail addresses (originally intended to bypass LinkedIn’s requirement of knowing it in order to connect, which they no longer do — now it’s just a shortcut to allow people to contact you more quickly)
“LION” (intended to indicate the person is a Linked In Open Networker and generally receptive to invitations from people they don’t know)
Connection counts (intended to impress people, I suppose — the implication being that having more connections somehow makes one more worthwhile to connect to)
Various punctuation marks (intended, presumably, to affect sort order, or perhaps make the name stand out more in search results — the sort order is a non-issue, since LinkedIn doesn’t display search results alphabetically)

You can see plenty of examples by typing “@” or “[” into the LinkedIn search box and looking at the instant search results (don’t hit search — it’s just in the instant results). I’ve seen some pretty bad ones, but here’s by far the most egregious case of this I’ve yet seen:

This practice is turning what’s supposed to be a professional networking site into a virtual Las Vegas strip. It’s kind of like walking into a networking meeting wearing a sandwich board:

This practice also breaks LinkedIn Advanced Search. People may find you in the quick search, but if you do something like make your full name your first name and your company name your last name, people won’t be able to find you by name using Advanced Search. This also wreaks havoc on contact management / CRM systems. LinkedIn interfaces with tools like Salesforce, and people can download your vCard into Outlook. Again, it breaks the search function if there’s extra data in there.

Moreover, LinkedIn’s User Agreement (see 10.B.2) specifically prohibits it: Don’t…”Publish inaccurate information in the designated fields on the profile form (e.g., do not include a link or an email address in the name field).” I’ve long wondered why LinkedIn doesn’t just implement some very simple code to catch some of that. It’s very easy to pick out e-mail addresses with regular expressions, and there are only a few valid punctuation symbols that people can use in their name. If it’s in the user agreement, it should be enforced, consistently.

So if you’re one of those with extra stuff in your name, please remove it. Put whatever you want in your Headline, but leave the name field for your name…only. I promise you, it will actually enhance your image, not hurt it.

Making the Most of Website Links on Your LinkedIn Profile

Scott Allen — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:42:34 +0000

When LinkedIn first launched, there was nowhere to put links to any of your web sites in your profile. Then they added the ability for a single link, and later three. Now, they not only allow you to have three links, you can also make the text for those links whatever you want, rather than just the generic “My Website”, “My Blog” and “My Company”.

This is important for a couple of reasons:

Branding – Reinforce your business and personal brand(s).
Clarity – One of my contacts, who shall remain nameless, has two links, both currently labeled “My Blog”. Better labels help the person reading your profile.

Now, some people have mistakenly assumed that it is good for search engine optimization (SEO) because it puts keywords in the link to your site. Unfortunately, though, LinkedIn routes the link through a redirect function on the LinkedIn server which kills any search engine benefit, since the link is not actually to your site, but the LinkedIn URL, which looks something like this:

http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Elinkedintelligence%2Ecom

For the more technical among you, it’s now a 302 redirect, so no SEO benefit.

Anyway, the two other reasons cited above are more than sufficient reason to change those links. Here’s how to change them, step by step:

Click on My Profile in the top tabs.
Scroll down to the Websites section and click on Edit next to any of them:
On the next screen, for each website, choose “Other” from the left menu, then type the name of the site in the empty field to the right. The URL then goes in the field underneath, like so:
Save changes and you’re done!

Not everyone has three websites to link to. If you don’t, there are some other cool things you can do with those unused links:

Link to your profile on another site. That’s probably not what LinkedIn had in mind, but I don’t see anything in the user agreement prohibiting it. If you’re an “open networker”, you could invite people to also connect with you on your networking platform of choice. Better yet, link to a site that shows all your other social connections, like FullyFollow.me, Xeeme, or maybe something that does so indirectly, like your Klout or Empire Avenue profile.
Click to call. MySkype.info provides a great web interface for people to contact you via Skype. Jaxtr uses the web to enable free phone calls from people to you. Oddly, jaxtr’s own explanation of how it works isn’t nearly as clear and concise as Mashable’s: “Your visitor enters his phone number and receives a call. Once he picks up, your phone starts ringing, and the call is connected. If you don’t answer, Jaxtr will take a voicemail message, and there are tools to block unwanted callers or only allow certain friends to call. The caller’s phone numbers are never exposed to one another.” When you sign up with jaxtr, you get a simple URL you can use on your LinkedIn profile. I suggest labeling it something like “Call me for free via jaxtr”.
Promote your favorite charity. Why not? You’ve got the space – if there is a cause you’re really passionate about, why not offer a link to their site?
Promote a friend or family member. Really, isn’t that what networking is all about? Make a link that says something like “My best friend’s startup – WidgetCorp”.

Your LinkedIn Profile Photo Matters

Scott Allen — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:37:37 +0000

Besides the fact that it’s against LinkedIn’s User Agreement, this should just be plain common sense:

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How NOT to Use LinkedIn for SEO

Scott Allen — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:21:24 +0000

This is from the Linked Intelligence archives, originally published 3/20/2009. I’m republishing it because I saw a couple of profiles today that were darn near this bad. Some people never learn!

Some search engine optimization company got the brilliant idea that they could use LinkedIn for pure SEO purposes, and they set up a profile that looked like this:

That’s pretty “black hat”. But it’s also completely, utterly DUMB.

See, this profile might just actually get ranked well for “search engine optimization Jacksonville”, but even if it did, so what? Do you see a link to their site anywhere on the page?

Oh, wait, that’s on their “full profile”. Let’s click on the View Full Profile button:

“Expanded profile views are available only to Business account holders.”

That’s a teeny, tiny fraction of LinkedIn’s members. And “0 connections” means they’re not even going to show up in the search results for anyone except business account holders. Google will never see their full profile page that has the link back to their actual site.

In other words, whoever created this gets no value out of it whatsoever, because there’s no way for anyone other than a handful of LinkedIn business users to ever even see it, and they get no Google juice with a link back to their site.

How not to do SEO on LinkedIn.

Tip from the LinkedIn Rockstars – Helping LinkedIn Improve

Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:30:46 +0000

There is a new option on LinkedIn that lets you tell LinkedIn that the position you are adding to your profile is one for which you used LinkedIn to find, research or connect to someone that helped you get the position. As seen in the screen shot, your answer will be kept private, but checking the box will let LinkedIn know they had a hand in your career progression, giving them bragging rights when they can say so many numbers of people or a certain percentage of new positions being added to profiles were obtained through LinkedIn.

Disclosing this information can help LinkedIn in several ways, not just for bragging rights, but to also track success and eventually methods of job procurement, perhaps helping them help recruiters, hiring managers and job seekers with information that will help others in their search as well. It’s too early to tell, but it should be fine to disclose whether the position you are adding to your profile really did happen because of your activities on LinkedIn.