What you should know about LinkedIn
This week we took a look at LinkedIn and I began to understand how important and beneficial LinkedIn can be for an individual. LinkedIn has more than 90 million members in over 200 countries around the globe. LinkedIn is a tool you use, like Facebook, where you post your work experience, education, awards, tools, skills and attributes. You can use this tool to really highlight YOU.
Looking for connections may be difficult and the site may have a hard time picking up on the “keywords” you enter; but once you start collecting connections it becomes much easier to make other connections.
There’s also something called “endorsements”. You ask someone (who is also on LinkedIn) to give you a recommendation and provide a good reference for you.
What else I like about LinkedIn is once you put the year you attended college or university you get an entire list of people from your class or from your alumni year. Lists of people including teachers or other important resources you wouldn’t have been able to connect with prior to LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is about promoting yourself. You’re telling someone to come find you and convince them why you’re the person they’ve been looking for. A lot more companies (over a million) are using LinkedIn searches to find possible future employees. If there is someone with specific qualities needed then they can key in the keywords and your profile would come up under those keywords. That’s why building your profile to be specific and accurate is most important. If you are going to be on LinkedIn, use it for the sole propose of what it was designed for. Use your full name so you are easily located, nothing is worse then looking for someone and can’t find them because they don’t have their full or real name posted. Get the most out of the site you never know who you’re going to find or who is going to find you.
Caitlin Wilkins was hired as a coordinator of online communities by County Media under the Career Focus programme managed by the OACFDC. Tune in for Caitlin’s weekly blog posts to follow her journey toward becoming a social media expert.
Good points, Caitlin – so true!
Awesome article .. learning such much every week .. keep them coming!