Getting the most out of your LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn can be a great tool but there are a lot of settings you can change to help you see people, companies and content that are relevant to what you are looking for.
There is also the question of what you want to be seen by other people on LinkedIn. Do you want your Employer to see that you are interested in New Opportunities? Probably not.
This article is written for people that are interested in making new connections.
Making changes to your Profile
The first setting you should look at before making any changes to your network is Share profile updates with your network.
If you have this set to ‘yes’ then your network will be notified when your profile is updated and upon work anniversaries. Recommend you leave this set to know if you are going to make frequent changes to your profile. Wait until your finished and you can turn this back on when you are ready.
Manage your Active Status
Since we are going spending a lot of time making changes to our profile and looking at all the awesome new connection requests we are getting we should probably decide if we want to change our Active Status visibility.
If you see a green circle on the bottom right of someones profile picture it means that they are on LinkedIn right now. If the green circle has a white circle in the middle it means that they are on a mobile device.
You will have a better chance of getting a quick response from someone if they are currently active on LinkedIn. Likewise, you will also more likely be contacted if someone sees your profile and you are currently active.
The downside is if you are supposed to be working on that TPS report and your boss sees that you have been on LinkedIn all day.
You have the option of changing your Active Visibility settings for just your 1st-degree connections, all LinkedIn members or no one.
Downloading Your Data
You may want to download your data so that you can see who you are connected to. You can download it in a csv format which makes it easier to navigate than on the Linkedin website.
After you navigate to your ‘Privacy and Settings’, you will select ‘Data Privacy’ on the left menu and you will see an option on the main menu to ‘Get a copy of your data’.
Once you are in the ‘Get a copy of your data’ section you will select the radio button ‘Want something in particular’ and you can hit the button ‘Request archive’. In the picture below the button will say ‘Download Archive’ because I have already requested mine recently.
After you request the archive it may take around 15 minutes before it is ready.
Visibility of your profile and network
There are several settings here that are recommended to make sure that people can view you in Linkedin but also on Google or other web browsers when they search for you.
Profile Visibility
You will want to leave your profile visibility on ‘Your name and headline’ most of the time. You can also chose to have it on ‘Private mode’ if you are browsing peoples profiles and you don’t want them to know you are looking at them. If you switch it to ‘Private mode’ remember to turn it back to ‘Your name and headline when you are done.
Visibility of your Connections
I recommend turning this feature off. If people are connected to you they will be able to see the mutual connections but I don’t see any reason why you would want non-connections to see your co-workers, customers and business colleagues that you are connected to.
Engaging with people and content on Linkedin
This is the part that will make you more noticeable to other people.
Commenting on someone's post
Not finished but show how you can comment with an @ but not show the full @ text so it looks more friendly. This can also be done with businesses.
Posting content
Not finished but show how you can share a link but not have the full link show up. Also do not use more than 4 hashtags in a post.
How to measure engagement
Not finished – > 1.8% engagement is good
Making new connections
Always send a message when connecting with someone and try to make it personalized. If you can’t think of anything you can always use the following.
Linkedin suggested we connect, lets connect.
When someone accepts your connection try to always respond to them. Here is an example of what you can say.
Thanks for the connection. I am always open to a conversation. In case you are interested in a chat here is my Calendy link.