For many, LinkedIn causes confusion – what is it, exactly?  Is it a virtual Rolodex, a place to showcase one’s resume, or is it a social network?  My answer – yes, yes, and yes.  Here are 7 tips and tricks to greatly improve your LinkedIn experience and make it a site you want to visit every single day.

1.  Expand Your Network

With a limited number of connections, LinkedIn is going to be pretty darn boring for you.  There will be few updates for you to see, and virtually nobody will read your status changes.  So, how do you expand your network to include relevant connections?  Send the invitations yourself!  Don’t be shy about it, either.  I say go for the gusto, invite the CEO of your company to connect, invite the awesome presenter that enthralled you at the latest conference, invite anyone that you either know well or want to know better.

But, when you do send the invite, follow these tips for how to properly construct the invitation.

2. Be Creative With Your Headline

Most tend to assume that a LinkedIn headline should include only your precise job title.  Why?  The LinkedIn police aren’t going to hunt you down for adding a bit of creative flair to your profile.

After all, it is highly unlikely that your job title alone does you justice. You might officially be an “Account Executive”, but that title tells us next to nothing about what you actually do. Look to these examples for inspiration on how to amp up your LinkedIn headline.

Marci Reynolds – Operations Leader | Expertise in Call Centers – Sales Ops – eBusiness | Blogger & Social Media Enthusiast

Dan Schawbel – Personal Branding Expert, Bestselling Author, Speaker, Consultant, Columnist, Publisher and Blogger

Liz Isaacs – Connector ♦ Passionate Writing & Marketing Communications Strategist ♦ Writing Coach ♦ Author & Screenwriter

To make the change, navigate to LinkedIn > Edit My Profile > Edit Headline.

3.  Incorporate Twitter

LinkedIn and Twitter integrated with one another in November of 2009.  The unlikely pairing instantly changed the way many use and think of LinkedIn.  By incorporating a select* number of tweets into your LinkedIn status updates, you can form a much closer bond with many of your business contacts.

*But a word of caution – many LinkedIn users won’t be used to a Twitter-like bombardment of updates, so be thoughtful with your frequency.  And remember to keep everything business-appropriate.

4.  Access LinkedIn Via Mobile

Only staying connected to your network when you are chained to your desktop is so 2009.  Several months ago LinkedIn released a completely new interface for their iPhone app.  The result?  Functionality shot through the roof, and the mobile experience instantly improved.  The LinkedIn iPhone app is the reason I now visit LinkedIn every single day.

5.  Ask Questions

Most often my advice is for folks to answer questions on LinkedIn, showing their specific expertise via the official “Answers” section.  But this is about making your experience better, so go ahead, start off by asking a few questions of your own.  Here you will see the power of the LinkedIn community – try and stump them by asking a doozy of a question.

6.  Join Groups (Even Cool Ones)

I know what you are thinking.  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard of LinkedIn groups, but why would I want to join? They seem boring.”  Maybe you are a skateboarding champ who happens to love The Simpsons, and you think there is no LinkedIn Group worth your while.  Think again!  You can join the “Action Sports Connect” and “Simpsons Fan” groups, and find a few like-minded individuals in your industry.

7.  Create Your Own Group

What is better than joining a group that suits an interest of yours?  Creating your own, of course.  You can create a group around any niche you want – be it topical, age-based, geographic, anything.  Sure, your group might start out small, and maybe it will stay small.  Who cares?  The connections you make via a small, tight-knit group in your industry are likely to be stronger than any formed in a group of thousands.

These are just seven ways of many to improve your LinkedIn experience.  If you haven’t logged in to LinkedIn for a long while, give it a shot again – I think you will like what you see.

Now seems like the perfect time to connect on LinkedIn, right?  Connect with Ryan Rancatore on LinkedIn here, or on Twitter here  @RyanRancatore.  Swing by Personal Branding 101 too if you are cruising for more personal branding tips and tricks.  

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The social media world has tools,  tools, and more tools at your disposal to connect you with any number of networks.  You are most likely on Facebook and LinkedIn.  Maybe you are on Twitter and YouTube.  And maybe you’re even on a few additional sites like MySpace, Ning, Plaxo, Yammer, any number of blogs, and too many other sites to list.

The ability for you to expand your online network has never been greater.  And while all of these avenues are available for you, this is not what is important.  What is important is how you use any of these networking tools to your advantage.

If you want to converse with anyone on any topic, you are most certainly able to do this.  What you need to consider is how to best assert yourself, and your brand, in the best light.

Yes, it is important to be on a network with a lot of people.  But it is even more important to be on a network where the “right” people are located.  If you are working for the government or government agencies, you will want to check out GovLoop to network more effectively with those in your core business area.  If you are a doctor then you might be interested in Physician Connect.  If you are in Human Resources or Recruiting then you will be interested in SHRM or ERE.

Whatever your profession, passion, or area of expertise, you should consider an alternative social network.  It’s one more way for you to expand your connections and your passions with those sharing similar interests.

Take the time to do the research to find what communities may impact you the most.  Two books I definitely recommend, written by Gary Vaynerchuk and Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, both speak about passion at great extent.

Follow your passion and go to where you will add to your personal brand, make the most impact and create trust with your network.

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Keith McIlvaine is a Social Media Strategist within HR and Recruiting for a Fortune 500 company.  When he is not focused on leveraging social media and networking, Keith is also a personal branding coach and social media mentor.  He is passionate about his family and is a major soccer fanatic.  Connect with Keith on Twitter and LinkedIn.  The statements I have posted on this site are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

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This weekend I engaged in a discussion at LinkedIn Answers about Personal Branding & Corporate Branding, discussing the different aspects of how personal brands and corporate brands can work together and against each other. Since this is a complex question which you may not have given much thought to, I thought that I’d share my ideas with you.

How corporate and personal brands empower or diminished each other

Competence

For the corporation, strong personal brands among the staff show the competences and strengths of the employees as well as the fact that they are interested and engaged in their line of work. For the personal brand it is great to have a network of strong brands around yourself and also to be connected to a strong corporate brand in your line of work.

On the other hand, if the company has weak competence, that brand will be hurt by the fact that the employees are not as sharp as expected. Also if some event (think Enron) happens, that will also have an impact on the personal brand of the staff, whether they have anything to do with what destroyed the corporate brand or not.

Inventory of resources in the company – working with your passion

If you are working in a place where the company cares about its brand and about the personal brands of the employees, it will be easier to find the right competence within the organization instead of using consultants for unnecessary tasks. (I believe in consultants, but they should be used in the proper manner.) This will give the employee a better chance of doing the things they are passionate about (as they have branded themselves) and will in the long run strengthen the corporate brand since it will be a better place to work at and hence attract better employees.

If there are weak personal brands in the organization, it will attract weak and unmotivated co-workers, which will have a negative impact on both brands.

Customer care / receptionist / salespeople

These are areas within the company where every client (hopefully) meets an actual human being. The way this person communicates will have a immense impact on whether or not the client feels happy. The brand of the person interacting with the client is carrying two brands, that of the company and that of himself. Both brands will be affected in either a positive or a negative direction depending on the associations that the client gets.

Conclusion

Both the company and the employees have everything to gain from working with their brands, and also thinking of how they can empower each other’s brands and the brands they are associated with in different networks or contexts. I believe that an increased brand awareness throughout the corporation will also benefit the corporate brand as well as make the employees more motivated to add to the corporate brand as well as start working on their own brands.

Have any of you faced situations in which the corporate brand and the personal brand have empowered or worked against each other?  How did you benefit from it (if positive), or deal with it (if negative)?

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Your personal brand is divided into two parts, your Personal Brand Image and your Personal Brand Identity, where the Personal Brand Image is how your peers perceive you and your identity, personality, values, skills, and abilities. Your Personal Brand Identity is who you really are (identity, personality, values, skills, and abilities) and what you want to communicate to others.

There are a lot of ways in which you can align the two, but today we will focus on networking and events.

When you see someone at a restaurant, in a meeting room, or at a networking event, you will automatically add definitions to your image of that person. If she is having lunch with a head hunter that you recognize, it will probably empower certain areas of her brand image such as skill level and professionalism, while having dinner with her daughter will add to her image of being a good mother, emotional skills etc. The bottom line is, your brand image is affected by the company you keep.

Using Facebook and LinkedIn to meet with the right people

Let’s say you want to meet with a certain type of person, to pick their brain, to hang out or to make inquiries about if their office is a good place to be looking for work. The first thing I normally do is to find out if there is anyone in my network that fits the profile, or if there is anyone that knows someone with the profile I am looking for. So how do I do this?

First I go to my LinkedIn account, looking around for certain skills, positions and interests of the people that I know personally. If somene fits the profile, then I just contact them. I do the same on Facebook, but the search possibilities are much more limited. OftenI find that I do not know the right person directly but that my connections know someone, which is almost as good. Let your connection help you get connected.  Ask for an introduction.

Finding the events where you want to be seen

You have now met with the connections in your network and also with some of their connections, but you still wants more. Maybe you are looking at the local chamber of commerce and other traditional networks for the right events to practice your networking skills. If you do that, it is a great start, but I have found that looking at which events my connections go to is much more efficient as far as find the best ones. The good thing is that Facebook and LinkedIn lets you do that easily.

LinkedIn lets you list the events that your connections are visiting by going to the events section. Here you can see them ordered by date or popularity. You can also recommend events to your connections.

On Facebook, you cannot actually list the events of others, but you can keep track of the one you are invited to and who else is attending. Go to the events page where you will see upcoming events and also the upcoming birthdays of your connections.

How do you use the social media networks to network offline?  Share your tips and success stories in the comments section.

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