Social Networking

How to be a star on LinkedIn

Published July 20, 2011 | By Kate Rose

boy with medal This is the second part of our “basics” article for LinkedIn – designed to get you thinking about making the most of LinkedIn for your business. If you missed it, part one is here: LinkedIn – the basics for business.

Onwards and upwards

So, you’ve seen how LinkedIn can support and accelerate your professional networking efforts. Your business has a credible and effective company page, and your personal profile is complete and ready to go.

Here are our top tips for using LinkedIn effectively and strategically.

1. Rock your recommendations

The Recommendations feature is a great way of substantiating your own statements about your abilities, but only if you use it well. Be scrupulous in only requesting recommendations from people who can truly comment on your work, as it puts people in an awkward position if you ask for a recommendation and they barely know you, or have worked with you very briefly.
On the flip side, be discriminating about who you recommend, and particularly try to avoid an “I’ll do yours if you do mine” approach – readers can easily see whether all of your recommendations are reciprocal, and this may undermine the credibility of both the recommendation and your personal integrity.

2. Connect consistently.

Do you want your network to consist of colleagues and regular contacts, or are you happy to connect with people you’ve met briefly at a networking event – or perhaps someone you have never spoken to, but share a common interest group with? There’s no right or wrong answer to this; in some industries, a small, “close contacts only” network might work best, but remember that the larger your connection list, the more likely it is that someone you want to approach on a professional level will be within your wider network.
You may see people using the acronym “LION” in their profile heading – this stands for “LinkedIn Open Networker” and indicates that they are happy to connect with all comers.
You might want to include a short statement about your connection policy within your own profile, especially if you’re restricting to a small group for some reason.

3. Perfect your profile.

On the top menu, click “More..” and then “Get more applications”. This will show you a number of apps which can be added to your profile, ranging from being able to upload presentation to connecting up your blog so that new posts show on your profile. Certain professions, such as the Legal sector, have a number of sector-specific applications. Have a look around and add anything that will give additional depth to your profile and help to show off your strengths.

4. Be clever with your Groups.

Join a manageable number of relevant groups, but think out of the box a little – rather than hanging out where all of your sector colleagues are, give some thought to the kinds of groups your prospective customers might join, and get involved in those too.

5. Be a brilliant contributor.

Respond to discussion threads in your groups – but make sure you stick to your areas of knowledge and experience if you’re going to give advice or make bold statements, because you can be sure someone out there will call you on it if you don’t!
Avoid posting “naked” links – those with no commentary about what the link is to and why it might interest your fellow Group members – especially if those links are at all self promotional, ie to your company website / press releases. That section of the group is called “discussions” for a reason! Posting a lot of links to what is basically advertorial just looks low rent, and doesn’t do anything to enrich the value that your fellow members get from the group.

If you’ve got a point to make about something you know well though, absolutely do start a discussion thread. If you hit on something interesting and / or controversial, these threads can take on a real life of their own! Here’s a thread we started about the commercial value of Twitter followers which drew over 141 comments, and drove a significant amount of traffic to our website over almost a month. “Follow my Facebook page / Twitter account” threads – are we all kidding ourselves?

So, those are our tips for starting to become a LinkedIn superstar. What have we missed, that’s worked really well for you?

Posted in How To, LinkedIn, Social Media | Tagged social networking, strategy | Leave a comment

What is LinkedIn?: The basics for businesses

Published July 6, 2011 | By Kate Rose

Last week, Claire presented to members of the Cambridgeshire chamber of commerce on the subject of social media and its implications for HR professionals.

Of all the social media platforms, it was LinkedIn that dominated the discussions, but in our informal chats afterwards it became clear that many of the attending professionals weren’t sure what exactly LinkedIn is, or is for.

They’re not alone

According to Google’s keyword search tool, there were 1.8 million searches in the UK, last month alone, for “what is linkedin”. So, here’s our absolute basics guide to LinkedIn – we’ll follow it up with a second part in the next few weeks, looking at strategies for the more advanced user.

What is linkedin?

So, to start with that question! LinkedIn is a platform to help you connect with people you know in a professional capacity – old or current work colleagues, suppliers, or networking contacts.

If you’re familiar with using Facebook, the easiest analogy is that it’s a “business” version of Facebook.

Beyond the basic functions of keeping in touch with, seeking help or assisting those in your wider professional network, you are also able to see your contacts’ contacts (linkedin calls those your “2nd level network”) or even their contacts (your “3rd level network”). If you’re comfortable doing so, you may ask your immediate contacts to introduce you to particular people who are relevant to your business.

In addition, the site hosts tens of thousands of special interest, sector and geographic forums (“groups”) worldwide, has a Q&A function if you’re looking for answers to a specific question, and even allows you to create highly targeted advertising campaigns.

Should we be there?

In May 2011, LinkedIn recieved just under 3.6 million unique visitors from the UK. So yes – LinkedIn is fast becoming a “hygiene factor” for professionals and businesses; potential contacts or customers are highly likely to look you up on the site.

If your business isn’t there, the details are poor, or the key messages are contradictory to the impression you give offline, that can be detrimental to your business.

Getting started

We advise all our business customers that they should have a complete, professional looking Company page on LinkedIN, supported by good personal profiles for at least their senior managers. LinkedIn is another shop window for your business, and one which goes beyond the standard corporatespeak that many fall into on their websites. That way, even if you don’t (yet) plan to use LinkedIn for specific business objectives, it will be working positively for you.

A quality company profile

The Company page should be properly linked to the employee profiles, and copy provided for the appropriate sections on each of your key products and services – if someone has made it as far as your company page, why waste the opportunity to show them what you can offer?

Fine tuning personal profiles

Employee profiles should include a clear, professional head shot, and be reasonably fully completed – not necessarily including every detail of their past working life, but giving a full picture of their skills and experience.

Most importantly, their background information – skills and past employment history – should ideally be phrased in a way which shows the value they add to your existing customers. A personal profile isn’t just the same as a CV!

For both personal and company pages, there are applications within LinkedIn which allow you to significantly enrich the profile, using everything from slide packs to blog posts.

Join the dots

Next, you should try to connect with as many relevant people as possible. One way to do this is to export your personal email database and load it into LinkedIn, which will then show you who you already know on the site. You’ll start to receive invitations to connect, so you might want to give some thought to your personal policy around this, too.

Once you’ve got a credible presence on LinkedIn, you’ve taken the basic opportunity to give yourself and your business a positive representation on the web, away from your corporate website. The next stage is to start using the site strategically – take a look at How to be a star on LinkedIn.

Posted in How To, LinkedIn, Social Media, Social Media Basics | Tagged "how to", B2B, basics, business, social networking | Leave a comment

Are you missing out on business referrals through Twitter?

Published June 1, 2011 | By Kate Rose

Twitter networking - are you at the party?

Today we’re looking in detail at one aspect of using Twitter to grow your business: gaining referrals through networking.

There is a LOT of business networking done on Twitter.

Face to face networking, whilst it can work very well for some types of business, can also be time consuming and / or expensive; and there’s a school of thought which suggests that some of the busiest and most successful businesses are more likely to be hard at work on projects than taking a couple of hours out to make new connections. Keeping up with contacts or sending out help requests via social media, on the other hand, only takes a few moments during a coffee break.

People increasingly look to social networking for help

Networks of all kinds have always been used to find partners and suppliers, of goods or of services; a word of mouth recommendation is usually preferable to the “sticking a pin in the Yellow Pages” type alternatives. Online networks are a natural place to start, for the huge community of businesses now using them.

For whatever reason (speed and reach no doubt come into it) we see far more requests for recommendations on Twitter than on Facebook or even on LinkedIn. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve recommended, or have been recommended to others, for probably four or five requirements.

If you’re not there, you don’t exist

But, businesses who haven’t got involved with Twitter are going to miss out. Here’s why:

We see a tweet from someone we follow, or via a search set up to spot referral requests:

Now, let’s say we know a handful of companies in that line of work. We want to help the person concerned and also those companies who are looking for clients, but realistically we’re in the middle of several projects so can’t spend a lot of time on this.

So, of those companies, one of them is on Twitter and the others aren’t. To send the referral to the one who is, we just reply

To do this only takes a few seconds, and the Twitter bio will give all additional information needed – their business name, plus a link to their website which should include all their contact details.

To involve the company who isn’t on Twitter, we’re going to need to supply all those contact details ourselves, so first we have to find them; then we may well need to send either multiple Direct Messages or even an email, because a name, email address and website details won’t fit in a Tweet. Now, there are times when that might happen but let’s face it, if you’re making it hard for people to refer to you, you’re substantially decreasing the odds.

So, here are our top tips for getting referrals on Twitter.

1. Obviously, BE THERE! If you’re not using Twitter at all, you’re missing out on a whole conversation that’s taking part amongst businesses - both local to you and further afield.

2. Be timely. If you have an account but don’t really “get” Twitter, and consequently only log in once a week, that’s not great. Your contacts will know that it usually takes you days to respond to a message, and that will impact on their willingness to refer work to you - after all, recommending someone who might only get back once the project’s completed, doesn’t actually help very much! If you’re finding it hard to keep on top of Twitter, there are lots of tools around to help you do this more efficiently.

3. Have impeccable manners. Not just in the area of recommending, but all the time when you’re using Twitter. If someone responds to a question or comments on something you’ve said, acknowledge or thank them. If someone retweets your stuff, thank them. And it goes without saying, if you get a recommendation…yeah. You know what to do.

4. Be competent. We’ve also seen situations where we’ve made a link between someone offering work on Twitter and a suitable business, and that business has then totally screwed things up by making basic mistakes when responding – for example, mis-spelling the Twitter handle or even forgetting to put it in at all. Result: they don’t get the work, the business offering it wonders what the hell is wrong with them for not following up on a clear lead, and we decide not to get that business involved again. If you’re on Twitter but not using it confidently, get some training.

So, if lesson one is that your business has to be visible on Twitter, a big lesson two is that you also need to know what you’re doing, otherwise you could be inadvertently making your business look bad to potential customers.

5. If you get involved in “offline” networking, try to find out whether the businesses you meet use Twitter, and if so, connect with them soon after you meet. Face to face plus online conversations mutually strengthen the relationship, so keeping in touch on Twitter can accelerate the impact of your offline networking and vice versa. If you’re not on Twitter now, you might be surprised by the extent to which those local networks you attend have an online “sub group” of Twitterers, who are exchanging information you’re currently not even aware of!

Have you won business after a Twitter referral? Do you make recommendations online? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Posted in Social Media, Twitter | Tagged social networking | 2 Comments

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