I like visiting the Jury’s Inn at Heathrow for our LinkedIn seminars with UK4Business especially as not only is parking so easy but I do get to watch planes flying over my head. The reception was packed with tourists but as always the conference management was quick and efficient.
Today’s training focussed on LinkedIn and how to use it to gain business and to raise the profile of individuals as well as of companies.
The initial concerns raised by the attendees included:
How best to connect to my professional contacts?
Why do people who I don’t really know keep endorsing me?
How do I set up a company page?
How do I use LinkedIn for advertising?
Infrequent visitors to LinkedIn may have missed where to access their Privacy and Settings options. Simply click on your picture top right and this menu appears, select Privacy and Settings and finally you may have to enter your password. Despite all the recent changes these options have hardly changed except that Email Notifications has now been re-labelled as Communications – but with the same functionality.
An often missed part of settings is to make sure that you have chosen a personalised URL for your public profile. This is easy to do simply select “Edit your public profile”, then look to the right of Public Profile screen where your current public profile URL will be shown, click on “Customize your public profile URL” and then you will be able to enter your name.
Note, you may have to try a variant if someone has picked that version of your name for themselves.
Opinions about how useful Endorsements really are varied other than they are a very quick and easy way of flagging a skill that a contact may have rather than spending time to make a full blown Recommendation for one of your contacts.
My suggestions are as follows:
- Only endorse someone for a skill that you personally have had experience of
- Edit your own entries for endorsements to remove spurious entries
- And finally only rarely accept skills that are recommended by others as if it was important surely you’d have included it in your list yourself?
(As an aside please do have a smile when you see Lego as a skill on someone else’s profile . . .)
In our training we emphasise the importance of always personalising messages when trying to contact someone through LinkedIn – this will set you apart when trying to contact senior people who maybe much in demand for connections.
“A very useful & practical introduction to LinkedIn which gives me greater confidence in using it”
~ Martin from Miller Health“A good introduction to how LinkedIn can be used to readily expand business opportunities and connections”
~ Myles from Cove Industries