Are you selling yourself short on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is the biggest business to business networking online site in the world, with around 70 million business people looking to connect, and by my calculations, around 250,000 of them are here in New Zealand. Now that might not sound like many when you compare that with say Facebook who currently have about 500 million users and around 1.7million in New Zealand, but when you add together the fact there will be no one asking you to join their “Mafia game” or take into account the youngsters (from age 13), then LinkedIn is the place to network in a business environment.

My guess is that a lot of you reading this article will be thinking “I am on LinkedIn but I don’t do anything with it” or “I don’t have time for all that social media stuff”, but let me take you through a few reasons why you should be taking more notice, realize what you may be missing out on.

If you are not already making use of LinkedIn, you certainly should be and here is why.

• Your prospects will be using LinkedIn for due diligence when deciding on whether to use your company or your competitor
• A half filled out profile may be giving the wrong message and be detrimental to your personal or company brand
• There is an expectation that all business people will be on LinkedIn and your absence will be noticed
• How are other business people supposed to network with you if you don’t take part? You do want to network with other business people don’t you?

Before you dive straight in and start sending out invitations to join to all of your current business contacts, get your housekeeping in order first. Take a good hard look at your profile and ask yourself if you are proud of it and could it possibly be any better?

Here are 3 quick wins to get you going:

1. Does your professional headline describe fully what it is you do? You have 120 characters so use them creatively

2. Make use of the 3 free links back to your website. You can link back to 3 different pages on your website or even your Facebook business page

3. Get some client recommendations. These will showcase you better than anything you could ever say about yourself. 78% of people trust word of mouth marketing and only 14% trust advertising.

So how can you use LinkedIn effectively?

Networking is a great way to meet others you would not ordinarily come into contact with. Start a conversation in any of the New Zealand (or worldwide) networking groups and see who responds to your post. It pays to ask a question rather than post a statement, and my rule of thumb here is ask yourself if that subject line came into my inbox, would it grab my attention enough to want to open it and answer?

When someone does respond to your post, do carry on the conversation, don’t just leave it, or else there is no point starting it in the first place.

Join your industry groups both here and abroad, you just never know what valuable information you might glean from someone who has had an issue like yours and how they handled it.

Sometime ago, I asked a question in a group as I needed some help with a problem. A lady in Canada picked up the conversation and said she could help me, but she knew someone a little closer to home here in New Zealand, could she pass my details on to her? The following day, I received a phone call from a lady called Sarah, who said that the lady in Canada had passed my details on, but she recognized my name already. Was I going to the business networking event that lunch time in Auckland as she had seen my name on the guest list?

 As it happens, I was, so you can imagine when we both arrived, we felt as though we knew each other already because we had been acquainted via a lady in Canada. What a great story. Now Sarah became a client, and also a good friend, and is a prime example of how small our business world really is. In fact, Sarah actually lives only 40 minutes down the road from me, and there are plenty more stories like that.

Don’t just use it for networking, use it also for research. You can actively follow a company on LinkedIn that you are interested in, such as Telecom, and each time there is a personnel change or a company profile change, you will be notified. How valuable would this be if you were a recruitment agent, or just watching to keep abreast of what is happening in your industry? How many people are following your company, you might be surprised.

You can also use it as a recruitment tool; after all, LinkedIn is simply a huge database of business people. Try using the advanced search function to narrow down exactly who or what you are looking for. Now that may be a new BDM or Sales Manager, so get a short list together by viewing the relevant profiles and take it from there. You would probably be surprised how many people are not actively looking for a new position, but would welcome a conversation with you if they know you were hiring.

Why not use it to make that final hiring decision, who has the best recommendations out of the applicants before you? It is almost a reference check.

I have just given you a taste of how valuable LinkedIn can be to your business, so take some time out to get your profile looking 100% and dive in, it will be a great investment of your time.

You never know who may be watching……