Tips for Using LinkedIn No One Else Will Tell You

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LinkedIn can be a powerful resource for business people. It is a great networking tool, and can also generate some pretty solid leads when it comes to marketing or even hiring. But there are some aspects to LinkedIn that are still pretty much unknown.

Learning these things and avoiding the pitfalls that come with them might just be the edge you need to be more successful with this social media platform. Here are some of the secrets to LinkedIn that often seem counter-intuitive or unimportant, but they are worth learning and doing, and no one else is likely to educate you about them.

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Know Your Strengths and Advertise Them

You should concentrate on just a few strengths and then advertise those everywhere you can across your LinkedIn profile. The problem that some people have is that they list every strength that they can think of throughout the various sections of their profile, or they don’t list strengths at all. You should list four to five strengths in your summary and then throughout your experience descriptions. This will help the right people find you.

Join Every Group You Think Fits Your Brand

Some people advise that you limit the number of groups you join so that you can actively participate in them, but you should really join every single group related to your brand so that people get a picture of your business from your groups. Join groups for causes you believe in, work-related interests that you have and groups where people you have gone to school with or worked with are present.

Accept Connect Requests from Everyone

LinkedIn says to only accept connection request from people that you actually know in life, in an effort to sell more premium memberships, but accepting connection requests from anyone and everyone will help you get found easier because the LinkedIn search looks at your network first, and the more people you connect with, the more second level connections your network has.

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Change Privacy Settings When Updating Your Profile

If you update your profile or are making a bunch of changes all at once adjust your privacy settings when you’re updating so that your connections don’t get notified every time you change something, which can get extremely annoying. Change it so that only you can see the changes in your feed until you are done.

Use as Much Room as You Want to List Experience

If you ask LinkedIn, they will tell you not to list the experience that you’ve had with each job that you’ve held, but instead, only make descriptions for job titles. Since people have usually only had 3-7 job titles in their professional lives, this would take up a lot less space than listing every job. But here’s the thing: the more words you have, the better chance people have of finding you. Take up as much space as you want.

Use Repurposed Blog Entries on LinkedIn

It is unlikely that all or even most of your connections on LinkedIn read your blog. In fact, if you are like most people, almost none of them do. You can use blog posts that you have put on your site to write activity updates on LinkedIn. Don’t use the same exact content or you will get flagged for duplicate content (and LinkedIn may not be happy about that) but rewrite your post and use it so that your contacts on LinkedIn can get to know you as well as your blog readers do.

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Use LinkedIn’s Anonymous Setting

You may not know that you can use LinkedIn anonymously if you want to look at your employee’s (or potential employee’s) LinkedIn profile. All you need to do is change your viewer setting to anonymous where it says “Select what others see.”

Use Every Character, Literally       

Use every single character that LinkedIn gives you for that particular space. You will be able to repeat the keywords that are important in helping people to find your profile of add new keywords that will serve the same purpose.

Reorder Content

You can reorder the content in your profile so that you can start with what is most important for others to see and decide what comes “above the fold.”

Have we missed out on something that LinkedIn users might find useful? Let us know by sharing your thoughts in the comments section below.

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