Chris Brogan is a successful blogger and entrepreneur. He advises businesses on how to use social media and social networking to build relationships. And in use linkedin effectively he tells us how he uses the web’s most popular professional social site to get more business.
His tips are simple yet effective and are worth repeating. If you didn’t already know, linkedin is a space for your professional profile and connecting with business colleagues. It’s more of a closed social network compared to twitter, for example, but it does have some unique features you can use quite effectively.
The status update is similar to facebook and twitter but should be used to tell people what you’re doing in your business. Chris advises not to link it to twitter and reckons he’s got two new leads recently from this feature. He also recommends importing your blog into your profile. People search and read profiles on linkedin. It’s a key activity. If you have a wordpress blog it’s easy to import and will publish your posts automatically. You can also add slide shows with slideshare.
With over 25 million visitors a month slideshare is a very popular business media site for sharing presentations, and you can create a slideshow, a slidecast (slideshow with audio) and now business videos to import into your linkedin profile. Chris has gained 6 leads already from the slide show on his profile.
You can join groups to learn, participate and connect with group members, even if you don’t know them. There are many excellent professional and business groups on linkedin that are very active too. You can answer questions from your area of expertise. Linkedin questions are a unique feature and very popular for solving all sorts of problems. And linkedin also suggests people you may know so you can send them a connection request.
It’s best to schedule time to work linkedin, maybe, once a week. But the results and benefits to you and your business will be worth the effort.
