Joel Elad - LinkedIn For Dummies

You have your network today, but what about the future? Whether you want to move up in your industry, look for a new job, start your own company, or achieve some other goal, one way to do it is to expand your network. LinkedIn provides a fertile ground to reach like-minded and well-connected professionals who share a common interest, experience, or group membership. The site also provides several online mechanisms to reduce the friction of communication, so you can spend more time building your network instead of searching for the right person.

First and foremost, LinkedIn helps you identify and contact members of other people’s professional networks, and best of all, you can contact them not via a cold call but with your friend’s recommendation or introduction. (See Chapters 9and 6, respectively, for more information.) In addition, you can find out more about your new contact before you send the first message, so you don’t have to waste time figuring out whether this is someone who could be beneficial to have in your network.

You can also meet new people through various groups on LinkedIn, whether it’s an alumni group from your old school, a group of past employees from the same company, or a group of people interested in improving their public speaking skills and contacts. LinkedIn groups help you connect with other like-minded members, search for specific group members, and share information about the group with other members. (I cover LinkedIn groups in Chapter 16.)

When you’re ready to get started, you can sign up for an account by checking out Chapter 2. Before you do, however, take a look at the following sections, which walk you through the different parts of the LinkedIn website so you know how to find all the cool features I discuss in this book.

After you log in to your LinkedIn account, you see your personal LinkedIn home page, as shown in Figure 1-4. You’ll use two important areas on your LinkedIn home page a lot, and I cover those areas in the following sections.

FIGURE 1-4:Your LinkedIn home page.

Every page on LinkedIn contains links to the major parts of the site, and I call this top set of links the top navigation bar throughout this book. As of this writing, the major parts of the top navigation bar are as follows:

Home: Go to your personal LinkedIn home page.

My Network: View your connections on LinkedIn, add new connections, and import new connections.

Jobs: View the different job searches and postings you can do on LinkedIn.

Messaging: Go to your Messaging inbox to communicate with other LinkedIn members.

Notifications: Go to your Notifications page to see what your LinkedIn connections are doing, reading, and sharing, as well as daily rundowns on news items, the work anniversaries and birthdays of your connections, and suggestions for influencers or companies you can follow on LinkedIn.

Me: When you start your LinkedIn account, you’ll see a generic icon in this spot. After you add a profile picture to your LinkedIn account, the icon changes to a thumbnail of your profile photo. When you click the drop-down arrow, you can choose to access your Settings & Privacy page, access the LinkedIn Help Center page, or manage your LinkedIn posts, job postings, or company pages.

You have to click each element in the top navigation bar to go to that direct page. For the Me icon, you need to click the drop-down arrow to see the various options for selection, as shown in Figure 1-5.

FIGURE 1-5:Click the drop-down arrow to see options for this section.

Finally, other features typically appear along the top right of the screen:

Advertise: This icon takes you directly to the LinkedIn Advertising page. I discuss using LinkedIn Ads in more depth in Chapter 18. If you don’t see Advertise as its own option, you can find it as an option in the Work drop-down list.

Work: When you click the drop-down arrow, you can either access a number of LinkedIn services, such as LinkedIn groups, ads, ProFinder, and job postings, or go straight to one of LinkedIn’s business services, such as Talent Solutions, Sales Solutions, or Learning Solutions. At the very bottom of this drop-down list is the Create a Company Page option, where you can build a Company page. You’ll be using this link when you explore Company pages in Chapter 15.

If you need to update any aspect of your LinkedIn account, click the Me icon, and then select the Settings & Privacy option. The page shown in Figure 1-6 appears.

FIGURE 1-6:You can change the details of your LinkedIn account.

Following are the settings you can access from this page:

Account Preferences: Update your profile, language, and security settings; upgrade, downgrade, or cancel your LinkedIn account; connect your LinkedIn account to Microsoft or Twitter, and more.

Sign in & security: Update email addresses, phone numbers, and your password, and enable two-step verification to access your account.

Visibility: Set how much of your profile is accessible by your contacts and how much information you want to make available to your network in terms of profile or status updates. Control your data and advertising preferences.

Communications: Set the frequency of the emails you receive from LinkedIn and which LinkedIn partners can reach you. Select how other LinkedIn members can communicate with you and who can send you invitations.

Data privacy: Manage how LinkedIn uses your data, set your job-seeking preferences, and manage your connection to other functions in programs such as Microsoft Word.

You spend more time on how to properly use these settings for your benefit in Chapter 11. For now, it’s important to know where to find the Settings page in case you need to change something about your account.

Signing up for LinkedIn is free, and many functions are open to all account holders, so you can take advantage of most of the opportunities that LinkedIn offers. You don’t have to pay a setup or registration fee, but you can pay a monthly fee for a premium account to get additional functions or communication options. Finally, tailored solutions are available for corporations that want to use LinkedIn as a source for hiring quality candidates.

There’s not much difference between a free account and a paid account on LinkedIn. And the basic (free) account is anything but basic in usage.

Your free account with LinkedIn allows you to use most of LinkedIn’s most popular features, including the following:

Build a network of connections with no limits on size or numbers.

Reconnect with any member of the LinkedIn network, provided that he or she knows you and agrees to connect with you.

Create a professional and detailed LinkedIn profile.

Give and receive an unlimited number of recommendations.

Join up to 100 or create up to 30 different LinkedIn groups.