For this weeks blog we are pleased to welcome, once again, Coach Glenn Smith as our guest blogger. Glenn Smith is a Growth Coach Franchise Owner from the Houston/Sugar Land Texas area and is a highly regarded business coach, prolific blogger, an accomplished marketer, and has recently been recognized as “The 2011 Coach of the Year” by The Growth Coach System.
You can learn more about Glenn, his credentials and his coaching services at www.TheGrowthCoachhHouston.com.
Top 20 Best Practices for Using LinkedIn
I had the privilege of training today on LinkedIn for both recruiters and sales professionals. LinkedIn is a powerful tool and I think it is even better with the new changes that have been rolled out over the past month or so. I think it has even better connectivity and is much more graphically appealing.
As I worked with each of these teams I focused on the top 20 practices that I consider “best practices” on LinkedIn. Look this list over and let me know what you think. I refer to this as my LinkedIn Checklist.
If you are a business owner, a sales professional, or a staff recruiter you can take each of these points and personalize them to your job and industry. Here they are:
- Profile is 100% complete with a professional picture
- Profile is optimized with keywords (e.g. headline, summary, skills, experience, urls)
- Profile is well organized; I am well branded
- Profile has meaningful apps
- I have a weekly goal for adding new connections – I am proactively building my strategic network
- I am an openlink networker (particularly useful for recruiters and sales professionals)
- I am engaging with groups strategically
- I am letting fellow group members discretely and appropriately know what kind of team members or prospects I’m looking for in my groups
- I am engaging with others through asking and answering questions (Answers Feature)
- I utilize status updates, consistently adding value to my connections
- I have a keyword list for every position and/or person I am searching for
- I utilize the Advanced Search Feature well
- My company has an effective company page – we are building a following
- I search and follow other companies
- I am utilizing “Introductions” and Inmail to build my strategic network
- My employees and team members coached on how to leverage LinkedIn
- I connect from LinkedIn to key people using twitter; I tweet my LinkedIn updates
- I study how people I search for describe themselves (keywords) on LinkedIn
- I study the groups that my prospects participate in; I join and leverage those groups
- I have a consistent, daily routine for utilizing LinkedIn
There you have it, the Top 20 Best Practices for Using LinkedIn. Let me know if you think I’m missing one or if you agree.
Absolutely fantastic, Glenn! Each point could be enlarged into a separate article. I’m sitting down with a social media expert next week, and I’ll use your blog to guide our work. The goal of the meeting is to set up a specific strategy to use LinkedIn effectively. Now that I’ve read your list I’m somewhat daunted, but we’ll just have to prioritize. Thanks!
Glenn,
Thanks for the great tips about LinkedIn!
Susan
These are very useful tips and a LinkedIn training sounds really interesting. I myself have a LinkedIn account and would like to improve my profile for more connections. Thank you for sharing!