How to grow your LinkedIn network without going to jail

By Neil Patrick

Building your network on social media and especially LinkedIn is a great way to increase your career opportunities as I described here. But if you send out invitations to connect without enough care, you’ll not see much return on the investment. In fact, if you are really careless, you could even end up in LinkedIn jail!

The ever insightful Stacy Donovan Zapar has provided some very helpful pointers here into the various types of LinkedIn jail and how to get out.

But I am sure you’d much rather never go to jail in the first place, so here are my tips on one key aspect.

How can you make new connections without risking the dreaded IDK (I don’t know this person) response?

The current assessment is that gaining just 5 IDK responses to your invitations to connect will result in your LinkedIn account being ‘restricted’, meaning that for all future invitations you send, you’ll have to include the person’s email address.

So here are my thoughts on how to send invitations to connect safely.

I get an increasing number of invitations to connect. That’s great, but there are a few that I pass over. I never hit the IDK button, but not everyone can be trusted to do that.

Like anyone would, when I receive an invitation to connect from someone I don’t already know, I make judgements about them based on what I can see on their LinkedIn profile.

Reading various other posts about how to set up a great LinkedIn profile, in practice I apply some different criteria to who I connect with.

Here’re the things I don’t worry about:

Some profiles are so packed with information that it would take me too long to read it all. But that’s not a reason to decline an invitation in my view. It just means I simply skim read it. And too much info is better than too little. Once we get more engaged, this stuff will all be dealt with as needed.

Some don’t have a personal photograph - just the bubble head or a company logo. Not best practice agreed but neither is it a reason to decline. I have quite a few great contacts who usually through shyness don’t include a personal photo.

Some people are at an early stage in their careers. So they don’t have a lot of accomplishments yet and I understand that. So that’s not a reason to decline them either. In fact, I interpret this as a great opportunity to be of help to that person and build our relationship.

So what are the reasons I do decline invitations to connect?

There’s never a single reason, but almost always, it’s a combination of some or all of the following:

No recommendations

I don’t care if you’ve got 20,000 Linkedin connections. I care what they think about you. And if only one or two people think enough of you to provide a recommendation, I only have what you say about yourself to go on when I make that judgement. And some people are let’s say extremely “creative” with the descriptions they apply to themselves.

More often than not, such connections immediately bombard me with spammy updates which just fill my homepage with junk. No thanks.

In my view, someone who boasts about thousands of connections, but has no recommendations, is just collecting connections at a frantic pace in the belief that this will give them status and kudos on LinkedIn. If they are not engaged with the community, neither are they likely to engage with me.

On the other hand, if a dozen or more people who are clearly professionals say some good things about you, I will take you much more seriously. 

You say you are a LION

In case you’re not yet familiar with this acronym, it stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. This is a tricky one. I consider myself an open networker. In other words, I am happy to connect with MOST people even if I’ve never met them before.

And this includes LIONS.

But even so, I still apply some filtering. If someone's headline shouts, “I’m a LION and I’ve got 50,000 connections”, I am likely to look much more closely at them before deciding whether to accept or move on. Especially if they have very little on their profile to suggest why they deserve and are engaged with so many connections.

 
They don’t include a personal message as to why they wish to connect with me

This doesn’t have to be much. Just including my name in the message and an explanation as to how you found me would suffice. But still at least half the invitations I receive show no such courtesy or interest. How can I be expected to think you are someone who is likely to engage with me or anyone else if you can’t even invest the effort to write a single sentence? 

We have no shared interests at all

I apply very generous criteria to this. I think one of the great things about LinkedIn is how it can broaden our network beyond our normal sphere of influence. So if someone has a different industry background, that’s great. If they are at a different career stage, no problem.

On the other hand, if we appear to have nothing in common and no shared interests, then I wonder why the invitation was sent? Especially if any of points 1,2 or 3 above also apply.


So these are the criteria I apply in accepting or declining invitations to connect on Linkedin with people I’ve never met or engaged with on other social media platforms.

And I am sure that I’m not alone in applying such criteria. If that is the case, then it is really very simple to build a great network with new connections on LinkedIn.

Just avoid the traps above.

So: 

Make sure you've got some recommendations on your profile

These don’t have to be amazing or long. Just someone else’s positive comments about you. And you’ll find most people you already know will be happy to provide you with a recommendation if you help them out by providing a draft of the sort of thing you’d like them to say. This makes it easy and quick for them to just do any editing they’d like and post it. So a big task is reduced to a couple of minutes. 

Don’ t assume that someone will choose to connect with you just because lots of others have

I think if the most interesting thing about you is how many connections you’ve got, then something’s adrift somewhere.

I also have a feeling that as the number of LIONS grows and we all get bit tired of the game, the folk who just build huge numbers of connections and do nothing else will become more and more sidelined. We'll see...

Show everyone you invite to connect the courtesy of telling them why you’d like to connect

It doesn’t have to be anything world changing. Just be open and honest about why you'd like to connect, show that you know a little about them and compliment them a bit. Flattery works wonders with most of us! 

Especially if the person has a different area of professional interests to yourself, then the reason for the invitation really does need some justification. So this point is especially important in such cases. 

Finally avoid overt self promotion on LinkedIn

Networking and marketing are not the same thing and in an understandable drive to control spamming, the Linkedin police are getting more and more sensitive to promotional posts. So save your marketing and promotional efforts for discussions one to one with your contacts not on LinkedIn.

Do you agree with my criteria? Or do you apply different ones? I’d love to hear what criteria you apply and will be happy to post them here. Please share your thoughts below!

What’s the worst thing you can do on Linkedin?

By Neil Patrick

Today I have been reading gripes about LinkedIn from people complaining that they get endless approaches from recruiters…nice problem.

Some even go so far as to say that this is so annoying it makes them want to take down their profile.

I do not know what these people do that makes them so attractive to recruiters but, I suspect they are not high flying professionals; much more likely they are workers in high turnover jobs like bar work, call centers and sales.

In other words they are getting a lot of recruiters contacting them not because they are so awesomely talented, but because there are always lots of vacancies to fill in their field, and their jobs have a high turnover.

If I am right, then it is ironic that the people who could do with some career progression more than most are also the ones who are hating LinkedIn.

Anyway, all this whinging got me thinking about the things people do on LinkedIn that I really do not like.

In no particular order here they are:

Posting Junk

You know, all those brain teaser tests, pictures of lions (promoting LinkedIn Open Networking) and ‘inspirational’ quotes. I’m happy with these on Twitter, but not LinkedIn please!

Invitations to join groups that are irrelevant to me

I like LinkedIn Groups – I’m a member of about 30. But when LinkedIn has such a rich data content of who every member is and what they do, and I get an invitation to join a Group which is completely irrelevant to me, it tells me that the group owners are just blasting out invitations to everyone. Not a Group I want to be a member of thank you. It‘s just sloppy work all round.

Invitations to share my email address

If you wish to email me, my address is on my contact details. Why would I want to add it to a giant spam list? No thanks.

Invitations to connect with no words of introduction

I am an in fact an open networker. Unless you are clearly a spammer or other undesirable, I accept all invitations to connect. But probably 80-90% of the invitations I receive just have the default ‘I’d like to add you to my network on Linkedin’ message. I don’t mind what you say by way of introduction, but it’s rude and disrespectful in my view when someone cannot be bothered to show a little courtesy and write just a sentence or two addressed to us personally.

The reciprocal of this is that I try and send a personal message back to everyone who invites me to connect. I reach my own conclusions if they choose to ignore this message.

Anyway, these are my pet hates. I’m sure you have your own too, so do please share them in the comments below and help make LinkedIn a better place for us all.

Words thou shalt not use on thy LinkedIn profile - but then again...

By Neil Patrick

LinkedIn tells us there are certain words we shouldn't include in our profiles, but I disagree and here's why.

Linkedin sent me an email a few days ago informing me that I had used the word ‘strategic’ in my Linkedin profile and because many hundreds of thousands of others had too, I might want to remove it - especially since it was in their top 10 most overused buzzwords list.

I didn’t.

The reason I didn’t was that during my career, I’ve held executive board responsibility for strategic planning in three businesses - two of which were plcs. Rightly or wrongly I think this means I can and must use the word. How else could I describe it? Author of non-tactical business plans? Hah!

In fact I replied to Linkedin to explain to them why I thought they were wrong in making this recommendation to me. So far I've had no response.

Anyway, the whole notion that some words should be blacklisted through overuse seems nonsensical to me.

For the record, the top 10 must overused words according to Linkedin were:

1. Responsible

2. Strategic

3. Creative

4. Effective

5. Patient

6. Expert

7. Organizational

8. Driven

9. Innovative

10. Analytical

This got me thinking that typically it’s not the words themselves which are wrong but their application. There shouldn’t be a ‘blacklist’ of banned words which we cannot use just because loads of other people have abused or misappropriated them.

In my opinion, every single one of these words is absolutely fine provided we use them with thought, justification and most importantly, evidence.

Here’s my list of words I think we must be careful with, but not automatically reject, just because others misuse them. I also provide my thoughts as to why they are risky and how you should use them to ensure you don’t risk a backlash.


Clichés

These are just tired and worn out buzzwords which make you look like you’ve given no thought to what you are really trying to communicate. Using them actually suggests you are lazy and unimaginative (unless you provide clear evidence that demonstrates why you are using them):

• Passionate 
• Driven 
• Strategic 

For example, I think it's fine to say something like, ‘Author of strategic plan to take business into 14 new markets between 2010 and 2012, resulting in increased global market share of 32%.’

Pretentious

These words should be used with extreme caution. If others chose to apply them to you  (for example in their recommendations) that’s wonderful, but if you attribute them to yourself, you just sound like a bit of a jerk: 

• Thought Leader 
• Inspirational 
• Innovative 

If you are lucky enough to have had anyone else actually write these words about you by all means include them, providing them in the form of a quote, such as ‘Described by XYZ magazine in September 2013 as one of the top 10 thought leaders on sustainable energies’. 

Hollow

These are words which carry no real weight – they mean nothing unless they are backed up by quantified outcomes or benchmarks: 

• Responsible 
• High Impact 
• Dynamic 

Saying you were responsible for this, responsible for that, tells the reader nothing about what you actually accomplished, merely the things that were on your job description. Much better to talk instead about what you achieved and to give quantified results.

If you say you are dynamic, what measure are you using to arrive at this conclusion? Compared to whom are you dynamic? If you've got a benchmark for dynamism, I'd love to know what it is!


Unsubstantiable

These are words which must in my opinion be supported by hard evidence if we are to use them: 

• Expert 
• Motivated 
• Successful 

For example, I think to say, ‘I was motivated by a desire to prove that small businesses could take significant market share from larger multinationals’ is just fine. Or to say, ‘I was successful at increasing revenues by an average 22% each year between 2007 and 2011’, is also great.

However, I think to describe oneself as a 'successful business expert, passionate and energetic'…well I think you know what I’m getting at…

These are my thoughts for what they are worth. I do hope you find them useful and if you have any other pet hates you’d like to share here, do please drop them into the comments below.

How to get headhunted on LinkedIn

By Neil Patrick

LinkedIn currently has over 250 million members and continues to grow rapidly.

If you're hoping to get head hunted, this growth of the network means it’s no longer enough just to have a basic profile, sit back and wait.

As LinkedIn’s membership grows, unless we adopt some active measures to increase our visibility, we’ll never be found. Our profile will just be buried under a pile of other people’s.

If you are a passive LinkedIn member, there’s almost no chance that a head hunter will find you and contact you about that perfect job.

So it’s not a good idea to simply approach LinkedIn as a static online resume. LinkedIn like every other social media network rewards it’s most active users with higher rankings and visibilty. But since we all have too much to do every day as it is, how do you know what are the best things to invest your precious time in doing?

Some people try to game the system to improve their search ranking, for example by keyword stuffing their job title, but LinkedIn's algorithm is smart to such tactics and will not reward this. In fact you just end up looking rather silly whenever someone views your profile.

What’s the real value of an endorsement vs. a recommendation? How can you make your profile capture the interest of headhunters? What things should you do on LinkedIn which will boost your chances of being found?

These and many other questions are answered here.

In this interview by Mark Neilan, Managing Director of Finlay James, asked LinkedIn Senior Relationship Manager Jonathan Gaskell how we can ensure we get found by recruiters on LinkedIn. Given that Jonathan is part of LinkedIn’s management team, he’s a pretty reliable source I think.

My thanks go to Finlay James and Jonathan Gaskell for sharing these insights.

6 Ways to Attract Recruiters to Your LinkedIn Profile

By Stacey Politi

You know the drill. You’re unhappy in your current job - or unhappy with no job - and are desperately updating your LinkedIn profile that hasn’t been touched since the last time you were in this situation.

Well, you’re not alone; this sums up the dysfunctional relationship many professionals have with their LinkedIn profiles. While some flock to LinkedIn only when in need and apply to already posted positions, the platform is at its best when maintained regularly and optimized to allow hiring managers to reach out to you.

LinkedIn's career expert Nicole Williams helps elaborate on six ways to optimize your profile and attract more recruiters to you now.

1. Develop a Keyword Strategy

If search engine optimization is not your expertise, here is a mini lesson. LinkedIn’s search functionality makes it easy to find people by their name, skills and any other words that appear in their profile — which is why these words should be chosen with thought.

First, make a list of terms associated with your skills and experience. Ask yourself, "What words would someone search for to find me?" If strapped for terms, seek inspiration from a job positing you are interested in.

Next, take those terms and rework them from the perspective of a searching recruiter. For example, you may have the term "digital strategy" in your LinkedIn profile; however, a recruiter would be more likely to search for the term "digital strategist." Synonyms are also important; you never know if recruiters will search for "digital," "online" or "Internet," so include them all. Lastly, you want to organically incorporate these key terms into your profile to attract both the search engine and human reader alike.

2. Say Cheese

Williams says that "hiring managers are seven times more likely to view your profile if you have a photo; it’s a must have."

Not only does a photo allow your profile to stand out in the search results, but also shows recruiters that you are active on the network and LinkedIn is a viable way to contact you. Williams suggests using a photo that places you in the context of your job. You want to help hiring managers envision you in that position.

"If you are a chef, feel free to show yourself in a kitchen, or in front of a whiteboard if you are a marketer," Williams says. "But don’t use a picture of yourself with your dog, unless you’re a veterinarian."

3. Be Vain

Williams also prompts all passive and active job seekers to claim their vanity URL. This is a customized URL that drives directly to your profile.

"Using your name in your vanity URL gives it a chance to appear in a Google when someone searches for you," says Williams.

This makes it easier for hiring managers to find you and share your information with other hiring managers. If your preferred vanity URL is already claimed, incorporate a relevant key term, for example www.linkedin.com/in/CarlySimonSinger.

4. Rack up Recommendations

Solicit recommendations from people you have worked for or with. "Make a strategic plan for your recommendations," says Williams. "Approach different people and suggest particular skills or experiences you would like them to highlight."

This strategy helps provide hiring managers with a more holistic view of you and your past work. However, the most important part of the recommendation is not necessarily the content, but that it exists at all. It shows that someone was willing to take the time to personally vouch for you.

(Extra Tip: People are always busy and if you ask for a recommendation, even if they agree, it’ll probably sit on their to do list for weeks. Worse, when they do it, they might not say what you want. So make it easy for them. Send a draft of the sort of things you’d like them to say, and allow them to edit as they see fit. You’ll make it quick and easy for them this way AND you’ll more likely get something close to what you desire – Ed.)

5. Strategic Connections

The more connections you have on LinkedIn the more likely you are to come up in a hiring manager’s search results. Strategically identify people you’d like to be linked to and approach them with a custom connection request.

"The biggest mistakes users make is asking for too much in the first request," says Williams. LinkedIn are no different than connections in real life.

"Find an affinity you have in common, ask a question, but don’t ask for a job in the first connection."

Groups work similarly and if you and a recruiter are in the same group, you can rise to the top of their search results. Join groups that are relevant to the industry you are in and a few recruiters in your field will most likely be members as well.

6. Now Share with your Connections

"Don’t just set up your profile; actively engage in LinkedIn," says Williams. Share useful content or comment on the shared content of others to make your profile more viewable. Interacting with others on the platform not only makes you visible to them, but also their connections.

If you don’t have time to scour the Internet for shareable content, Williams suggests leveraging LinkedIn Today, a feature that allows you to receive the most read news on your chosen topics. Choose one story per day from that feed and not only will it help you in your current job, but it might catch the eye of a hiring manager for a future position.


This post originally appeared here:
http://mashable.com/2013/11/17/linkedin-tips-2/

The Secret Benefit of LinkedIn Endorsements

By Mike Allton

A little while ago, LinkedIn began allowing members to endorse each other. Unlike recommendations, endorsements were simply a way for one member to confirm that another member has a particular skill. Because LinkedIn made it extremely easy to quickly endorse people for multiple skills, and because there is no verification required at all, many observers questioned the validity or use of the feature, myself among them.

Of course, it's nice to have a great list of skills on your profile, and having tons of endorsements for your skills is certainly more impressive than none at all. Furthermore, each time you endorse a potential partner or prospect, that person gets a nice email telling them that you thought they deserved to be endorsed for some skill.

If you thought that was all there was to LinkedIn Endorsements, then you might not have noticed the Skills & Expertise section.

Skills & Expertise

Like the old LinkedIn Answers, Skills & Expertise is hidden within the More drop down. If you can find it, you'll be rewarded with a great-looking landing page that announces that Skills & Expertise is there to help you "Discover the skills you need to succeed. Learn what you need to know from the thousands of hot, up-and-coming skills we're tracking." According to LinkedIn, this feature is still in beta.




The top of the page features a search bar where you can begin typing in a skill. It can be for someone you wish to hire, or something you want to learn about and are looking for someone whose blogs you might want to read. Or, more interesting, do a search on one of your own skills to see where you stack up.

Below is a summary of a couple of specific skills. For me, iPhone was the first "skill" listed, and the summary included cities, related skills, and featured professionals.

Skill Details

If you search on a skill and select it, you'll see the full Skill Details page. The left side lets you search for a different skill or take a look at related skills. We'll get back to the importance of related skills in a moment.

In the middle, you'll see your selected skill and a nice box that details the industry the skill is typically associated with, whether or not you current list that skill, and a button to see suggested skills. You'll also see a percentage followed by y/y, which stands for year over year. We'll talk about the importance of this metric as well in a moment.

Below the info box will be a list of professionals who list that skill. You might think that these professionals are ranked according to the number of times they've been endorsed for that skill, but that isn't the case. The top ranked professional for "Social MediaMarketing" only has 33 endorsements for that skill, while the #2 individual had 99+. So getting ranked isn't solely based on the sheer number of endorsements.

At the bottom is a list of LinkedIn Groups that are associated with that skill.

Along the right side you'll find buttons to share the skill, charts for relative growth, size and age, related companies, related jobs, and related locations.

Using Skills & Expertise

First of all, getting yourself listed as a Featured Professional within a specific skill could potentially result in a significant number of new leads. If LinkedIn members begin using this feature to contact and hire professionals, you're definitely going to want to be listed.

Or, on the other hand, if you're looking for an expert in a particular field or industry, this might be a great place to start looking!

One of the suggestions I've given people in the past is to seek out leaders and mentors in their field and learn from them. What better way to find an industry leader than to check on LinkedIn's Skills & Expertise? You can identify one or more individuals you might be interested in learning from and take a look at their profile, follow their updates, and subscribe to their blog.

Those are all fun, but there's one more use for Skills & Expertise that could be a game changer for you.

Social SEO

I'm sure you know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to making your website as attractive to search engines and their users as possible. You identify keywords that your potential customers are using in searches and find ways to increase the frequency and prominence of those keywords in your site code and text. But what about social media? How do we help social network users find our profiles? That is where Social SEO comes in.

All of the major social networks include internal search capability, and that's a feature that is continuing to be refined and improved (like with Facebook's Graph Search). And while targeting keywords like we do in traditional SEO plays a role, optimizing your social media profile for social search has some differences.

On LinkedIn, for instance, your profile lists your previous jobs and job titles, and includes a summary. Many people fail to take advantage of those fields. LinkedIn allows you to be as descriptive as you want, so power users take advantage of that and go into detail about where they've worked and what they've accomplished.

Now, thanks to Skills & Expertise (and Endorsements), we have a great way to monitor, adjust and improve our Social SEO for LinkedIn. Here's how it works.

Go back to Skills & Expertise and look up one of the skills you already have on your profile. Take note of its Relative Growth, Size and Age. Also make sure that the skill is growing compared to last year, and how much. Now, check out some of the related skills. What you're looking for are potential skills that will be even better for you to list on your profile.

You're limited to 50 total skills, so add any that apply to your profession until you reach your max. At that point, it's time to prioritize. You will want to look for skills that are growing, but aren't used by absolutely everyone. Like a long-tail keyword, a more specialized and less-common skill will make you more competitive.



Once you've refined your skill list and you're happy with them, it's time to fill up your endorsements! I am not a big fan of emailing LinkedIn users and asking for endorsements. Instead, sift through your own connections and start endorsing the people you know. They will get a notification and many will reciprocate.

Take the time to check out this LinkedIn feature, and you might get some real value out of it.

This post originally appeared here:
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=mike-allton/1249416/secret-benefit-linkedin-endorsements