Just looking at my LinkedIn profile this morning and noticed some minor developments that I wanted to share as well as some areas that it is worth revisiting.:

1. Optimize Profile.  This is a button that comes up on the right if you click Edit or View your profile.  Clicking the button will encourage you to add schools, education, skills to your profile – you can skip anything that you don’t want to add.  I was taken into Optimize Profile automatically when I viewed my profile this morning.

2. The look of individual profiles on LinkedIn has a slightly different look.  I’m not sure that this makes any material difference to the profiles, but it does make it easier to look at.

3. You can generate a pdf version of your profile.  This seems to part of the new section of LinkedIn which allows you to apply for jobs directly through the application.

4. There is now a share button which means you can forward Person A’s profile to Person B.  Could be an interesting way of making an introduction I guess.

5. Just above the Summary section of your profile, you can add additional sections to your profile.

You can use this to highlight parts of your profile that are important to you or your business.  For example, students might want to highlight particular projects they have been involved in or their Test Scores, a multi-linguist might want to highlight languages that they can offer.

6. Don’t forget that you have a number of applications that you can include in your profile.  You can access these from the Additional Sections button or from More > Get More Applications.  I have used TypePad to include my blog in my profile and Slideshare to share some slide shows that I created for presentations.

What do you think of the LinkedIn Changes – have you found anything to be particularly useful?

LinkedIn is a great professional networking tool that can be used for a variety of reasons:

1. Be Found.  Fill in the details of your profile so that when people search on LinkedIn for what you do, you appear.  Make sure your company also has a profile so it will be included in search results. 

2. Be Visible.  At least once a week, fill in your network update (found on your LinkedIn home page).  All your contacts can see your network updates – not only will you look busy, but it is a great way of telling people the range of services or products that you can offer.  Make sure that you use a good quality photo in your profile, this reminds people what you look like.  Some people are better at remembering and recognising faces than names – give these people the opportunity to remember you.

3. Connect with people.  Think about who you want to connect with on LinkedIn.  Yes, connect with the people you see regularly, but what about the people you used to work with, but have now lost contact with?  It is a great excuse to make contact with people you used to know well but haven’t seen for a while.

4. Extended Contacts.  You can see contacts who are three degrees away from you.  For Example,

                Mary is connected to Paul

                Paul is connected to Jack

                Jack is connected to Susan

Mary and Susan can see each other. 

I would probably only actually make use of two levels of contacts.  How valuable could it be if Jack is a manager in a company that I have targeted?  I could contact Paul and ask for an introduction / recommendation?

5. Groups – get involved in group discussions.  LinkedIn groups exist for many face to face networking events as well as your market sector and your target market sector.  By getting involved in the discussions, you are raising your profile amongst others in the group.

6. Answers – Anybody in LinkedIn can ask a question about anything.  Anybody else can answer any of the questions.  The person who originally asked the question, gets to nominate the best answer.  If you are nominated as best answer, then you become known as an expert.  Imagine being known as an expert in your area of knowledge by everybody who uses LinkedIn?

7. Jobs – About 10% of jobs are found on LinkedIn – a great tool to find and post jobs.

There are other uses of LinkedIn, including events, polls and other applications.  What do you use?  What would you recommend to others?

I’ve been doing a fair bit of LinkedIn training recently.  As you probably know, it is really important that you have a strong profile on LinkedIn.  This ensures that you can be found via the LinkedIn search and ensures that you give the correct impresssion if any of your extended contacts look at your profile.

The headline or title or ‘put directly under your name’ is your headline.  Not only is this included in the keyword search, but it is also the first thing that is seen after your name.  If you think carefully, you can really use this headline to your advantage.

As an example, which of the following headlines gives the viewer more information?

Mary Thomas, Owner at Concise Training

or

Mary Thomas, Social Media and Microsoft Office Specialist for Concise Training

It is worth spending a bit of time thinking about what keywords are relevant to your business and what your particular role is in the company and crafting your headline accordingly.

It never does any harm changing your headline every so often.  It adds to your status updates and shows a different size of your business.

What do you think?