Gemma and Chris Long with Chris Carollo of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has over four hundred million users. These are not my words, but those of LinkedIn global accounts manager Chris Carollo, who gave a presentation to Sangamon CEO students today, hosted by O'Shea Builders in Springfield.
Chris was there to help spur on the young minds in the room, encourage them to build a great profile, to connect with business owners, recruiters and professionals in their field of study, but we learnt some great tips too.
Get on LinkedIn now! 123 million of the 400 million members make up 82% of the US workforce.
- Develop your network and when requesting to connect with someone remind them where you met and explain why you want them to be part of your network.
- Make sure you’re not one-dimensional
- Make an investment in a professional profile picture.
- Remember, whatever you post online will stay online forever.
- 70% of jobs come from networking.
- 25% of recruiters look down on selfies.
- Make sure you’re a resource and asset to the people you connect with.
- Build a diverse range of recommendations.
- Interested in learning? Looking for content? Check out Slideshare.
- Always have your finger on the pulse of the community. Check out Pulse for relevant professional content, which you can also share with your network.
- Connections – the lowdown. 1st is anyone you’re currently connected with, 2nd means any connection of his or hers that’s not a connection of yours and 3rd means someone your 2nd connection is connected with.
- Who gets requests from people they don’t know? The advice from Chris is … if you don’t know who they are then there’s really no value in connecting unless you or they are recruiting.
- We tell clients this all the time, but here’s a good reminder; use your business profile as a hub to share content, branding, marketing and encourage sales.
- Check out Lynda.com … it’s the future.
Last, but not least; you can’t break LinkedIn so use every little piece of it to help you excel.