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.  

Support me by sharing this post:

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)?

Support me by sharing this post:

You’ve defined your personal brand and created your career marketing materials, designed to resonate with your target audience.

And you know that, in job search, you’re in a sales and marketing campaign for your corporation of one – Brand You.

How are you going to market your unique promise of value to potential employers?

You’ll need a well-rounded brand communications plan that incorporates real-life and online personal marketing to capture the attention of recruiters and hiring decision makers.

If you think your online presence doesn’t factor much into hiring decision-making, see my post Does Your Online Identity Scream “Hire Me”? All other things being equal, a strong online footprint can tip the scales in your favor.

I safeguard the integrity and vitality of my own plan and keep it humming with personal brand health insurance – the 3 Cs – clarity, consistency, constancy.

Here’s a good part of what’s in my brand plan:

Online Profiles/Presence:

• 2 blog-based websites, Executive Career Brand and Executive Resume Branding, and one static website.

-Both blogs are included on several other blogrolls

• LinkedIn – 100% complete, branded, searchable profile
• Job-Hunt.org Personal Branding Expert bio
• Brand-Yourself blog weekly columnist bio
• Google Profile
• ZoomInfo
• Business Week’s Business Exchange
• Business VisualCV
• Personal VisualCV
• Amazon – I need to update this.
• Facebook
• Careers industry professional associations

Social Media:

• LinkedIn. Network updates 2-3 times a week. Active with 20+ Groups. Manage Job-Hunt.org’s new LinkedIn Personal Branding Help sub-group. Come join us!
• Active Twitter user, post several times a day. RT my tweeps regularly. Drive traffic to blogs through Twitter network
• Post at least twice a week to my 2 blogs
• Guest blog regularly at various other relevant blogs
• Comment regularly on relevant blogs (I try to be the first responder so my comments sit at the top of the list.)
• Weekly columns (Mondays) here on the Brand-Yourself.com blog
• Personal Branding Expert at Job-Hunt.org, contributing articles once a month
• E-list/online forum sharing and discussion through personal branding and careers industry professional associations
• Contribute articles and content to executive networking/job agent/job boards
• Contribute content and document samples to numerous job search/personal branding e-books and print books each year
• Press releases to various publications several times a year
• Branded email signature, with links to blog, LinkedIn profile and VisualCV
• Self-Google several times a week to monitor how I’m doing

Networking / Continuing Education

• Keep up with my professional network, virtually and in real-life. That means actually speaking by phone frequently. Emailing alone just doesn’t cut it
• Attend numerous professional webinars/teleseminars each year
• Put faces to names by attending at least one professional conference each year

WHEW!!! I think that pretty well covers it. That’s what keeps me busy marketing-wise. It can be a challenge fitting all this in with working my job, which is helping senior executives build their personal brand communications plans.

So, what’s in your communications plan? What are you doing that I should be doing?

Related posts:

10 Steps to an Authentic, Magnetic Personal Brand

How NOT to Build Your Executive Personal Brand

Digital Distinction: Does Your Executive Brand Pack a Punch Online?

An Executive Personal Branding, Online Identity and Job Search Strategist, Meg is a 20-year careers industry professional and one of only a handful of people worldwide to hold the Reach Certified Personal Branding Strategist and Master Resume Writer credentials, both gold standards.

“I love my work collaborating with savvy senior executives and entrepreneurs who know where they’re going, but need help differentiating their unique promise of value in the new world of work and executive job search, and positioning themselves to work their passion. My clients are typically c-suite, senior-level executives and rising stars.”

Find out more about Meg at Executive Career Brand, and by viewing her LinkedIn profile and following her on Twitter.

Support me by sharing this post:

Social media is becoming more intertwined every day.  There are countless tools to utilize and social networks to join and connect with others and there are even big name integrations that occur such as Facebook with Twitter and, maybe more importantly, LinkedIn with Twitter.  This integration allows you to connect your Twitter account and feed updates into your LinkedIn profile, and vice versa.  Also, as both LinkedIn and Twitter only allow for 140 characters in their status box, it is a natural fit.

Initially, this was a great move for LinkedIn to capture another audience and put what was largely an under-utilized status box into more of a prominent position for its users.  However, if you look at this from another perspective, it may not be an ideal solution for everyone.

Twitter is an outlet for you to share a wide variety of information, from personal to professional and from insignificant to breaking news.  LinkedIn is very much a professional networking site where business-related topics are shared and discussed.  With the integration between Twitter and LinkedIn, the LinkedIn professional updates are becoming gray at best for some of the members.

Some individuals on LinkedIn may choose not to use Twitter or are not active on Twitter.  These individuals are now getting your “noise” on any topic, including the non-business variety of message.  This could be viewed as a negative within your network and could result in the loss of connections.

What is also important to consider is that you may not be connected to or following individuals on purpose on Twitter.  Maybe you are not following your boss or coworkers for fear over what you may post.  Now, because of this integration, you maybe exposing your messages and putting them in front of the individuals you were trying to hide them from.  You are also exposing when you are “tweeting” during the workday.  It is important to recognize that there is more to your tweets than just their content; the time at which they are posted can tip off a boss to an unproductive worker.  Think about it.

Personally, I have linked my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts because I felt this was a fantastic merger from a business perspective.  I am now able to communicate with two potentially different  networks.

My strong recommendation is to not allow every “tweet” into your LinkedIn profile.  LinkedIn was smart in how they allow you two choices as to what “tweets” are connected.  When you link your accounts, you are provided the options to select either the “all tweets” option or the “only tweets with #in within the message” option.

The first option, the “all tweets” option, carries a high probability of producing messages which are perceived as spam to your connections on LinkedIn and potentially damaging professional relationships if you tweet often or tweet on mostly non-business topics.  The second option, the “only tweets with #in within the message” is much better in my opinion and appears to be a more sensible option for the LinkedIn and Twitter integration.  Simply keying “#in” within your message on Twitter will post to both Twitter and LinkedIn.  This provides you a greater ability to stay on the course you have chosen on Twitter while increasing your ability to post business information on multiple sites.  Or you may post a message on LinkedIn and push it out to Twitter.  Either way, you are in control as to what messages you share on LinkedIn.

Easy steps on how to adjust your Twitter settings within LinkedIn:

1. Log into LinkedIn
2. At the top right corner of the page, select the “Settings” option
3. Under “Profile Settings”, selection the last option for “Twitter Settings”

This integration may not a perfect solution for reaching both audiences in an ideal manner, but it definitely can work well depending on how you choose to use it.  What this integration continues to reinforce is that you must be very smart with what information you choose to publish online and to what audience.  There is definitely a big upside to this feature. Just remember, this is your personal brand you are looking out for.  You spent a lot of time and effort building it up, so make sure you’re taking the proper precautions to maintain it.

Support me by sharing this post: