14 Ways to Get LinkedIn to a Better Career

LinkedIn is a great tool for networking, promoting your services, finding a job and managing remote projects. Here are 14 ways you can use it to advance your career:

1. Position yourself as an expert. Tie your blog posts and Twitter feeds into your profile.
2. Display your industry awareness. Frequently change your status update to include information about industry trends, issues and tactics. Now that LinkedIn allows you to include links in your updates, your posts will show your comment, a photo and an article excerpt.
3. Expand your network. Participate in LinkedIn’s professional and alumni groups that attract your prospects and clients. Post questions to members, respond to group posts, find and post job listings, and see who has been promoted to a new position.
4. Create visibility for your services. Post a company profile that includes an operating description, job openings, and service offerings. For the latter, you can include images of your projects, list of project features, link to your website, e-mail links to company contacts, even a special promotion to LinkedIn members.
5. Engage members in discussion. An easy way to get recognized on LinkedIn is to participate in Q&A forums. You can either post a question to gather some much needed ideas for an article or paper, or you can respond to questions posed by other members.
6. Showcase your capabilities. Create an interactive display of your products. Use LinkedIn’s free add-on applications Slideshare and Portfolio Display to showcase the visual elements of your offerings.
7. Make it easy for people to contact you. Change your settings to allow other LinkedIn members to send consulting offers, expertise requests, and career opportunities.
8. Follow target companies. Get informed of personnel changes, job opportunities and company updates.
9. Find your next job. Use LinkedIn’s advanced search feature to search for jobs by keyword, industry, office location, job function,experience level, posting date and salary level.
10. Gather invaluable data. Create and post a poll to gain insight into what people think about an issue or trend, proposed or existing offering, or even a challenge you are facing.
11. Get seen. Use LinkedIn’s event feature to find interesting events or announce your own speech, meeting or celebration.
12. Share and track projects. Use the free add-on application Manymoon’s Projects and Teamspaces to share and track projects, docs and Google apps.
13. Stay relevant. Frequently update your profile to reflect your latest achievements, honors, publications and job assignments.
14. Connect with your contacts’ contacts. Search for a company and find out which of your contacts has ties to the organization. Then, ask your connection to introduce you to their contacts.

For more articles by Rick Alcantara, check out the Jerseycoach Blogism blog.