Why You Can’t Do Without a Powerful LinkedIn Presence
With more than 467 million users , LinkedIn.com is one of the world’s fastest growing social media networks. Unlike other social platforms such as Facebook, where you share content and develop relationships with people you already know, LinkedIn is designed as an outlet to develop new relationships with people and organizations you don’t yet know. As the world’s leading professional network, LinkedIn has proven to be a successful tool for career development, lead generation, corporate recruitment, and company branding, but with more features than typical social media networks, LinkedIn takes time to learn how to use effectively.
Career Development
LinkedIn has become the standard networking tool for professionals around the world. Whether you are a recent college graduate entering the workforce, or an established career professional, a personal LinkedIn profile is key to both getting noticed as well as building professional relationships with people inside your industry. However, it is not as simple as just creating a profile and waiting for others to come to you. Learning how to effectively build your profile and market yourself is key to successful networking on LinkedIn.
For jobseekers, you can think of your profile as a kind of expanded resume. Make it personal, but keep it professional. Write an engaging summary that emphasizes approachability and highlights your accomplishments. Think of it as your 60-second marketing pitch. Don’t forget to include a professional looking profile photo as well. Profiles with photos receive 36x more messages and 21x more profile views, than those without photos.
Unlike a resume that you may want to keep to one or two pages, don’t be afraid to expand a little more on your LinkedIn profile. Include things such as volunteer experience, personal and professional awards, organizational memberships, certifications, skills, and a summary of your career goals. Use your profile as an opportunity to convey your personality and approachability. Remember, recruiters are not just looking for candidates that match the job requirements, they are also looking for someone who is a good organizational fit. Don’t forget to reach out and make connections with friends, colleagues, and other individuals in your industry. LinkedIn can conveniently scan your contact list and make suggestions for connections. These individuals can in turn provide recommendations and endorse your skills to add to your credibility.
Get noticed by others in your field by joining and participating in groups. There are thousands of active groups available to join where you can network with others as well as stay up to date on the latest industry trends. Participate in groups by posting articles and making comments. Show others that your active and knowledgeable in your field. Many job openings are never even advertised publicly, only spread via word of mouth, and professional networking has never been more valuable.
Prospective employers will look you up on LinkedIn. Use it wisely to your advantage and make your best impression. Unlike the standard resume format, LinkedIn allows you to express your personality in addition to your professional accomplishments and goals. Used well, there is no better tool available to professionally network and find new opportunities.
Company Branding
Businesses are increasingly using LinkedIn in order to market and maintain their brand. However, unlike other social media platforms such as Pinterest and Facebook, where companies often market their products and services directly for sale, LinkedIn works as a more effective platform to develop relationships and build trust with other businesses and individuals.
Create a business page where you can showcase your organization’s accomplishments and develop effective marketing techniques. With the wealth of marketing data LinkedIn collects on its users, it offers targeting marketing approaches that allow you to engage the audience you want in more effective ways than traditional marketing.
Don’t underestimate the power of publishing content on LinkedIn to attract the attention of others in your industry. Publishing informative and engaging content helps establish your organization as a trusted industry leader. Other individuals can like, comment, and share your content to help attract an even wider audience.
Another useful feature of marketing on LinkedIn is Sponsored InMail. With Sponsored InMail you can send personalized, direct messages to the target audience of your choosing. Sort your audience by a whole host of options in order to find those most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. You don’t need to wait for clients to come to you, you can go directly to them to generate leads and drive brand awareness.
Social media is more important than ever for businesses to build sales and maintain branding, and no platform should be overlooked. As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn allows business to target those individuals that matter the most. Integrate LinkedIn as part of your digital marketing strategy to help reach the decision makers that can help you build your organization.
Recruitment and Talent Acquisition
Tired of advertising positions on job boards and being flooded with too many generic resumes? The days of posting to job boards and waiting for candidates to come to you are over. More and more businesses are developing an active strategy of discovering and contacting those individuals they are interested in recruiting. As the largest online professional network, LinkedIn is an ideal talent pool for businesses.
With LinkedIn’s Recruiter tool, you can run targeted searches based on everything from headlines, past and present employers, job titles, skills possessed, universities attended, and much more. Once your narrow down your base of potential candidates, you can send out customized messages on LinkedIn, which has proven to be a more effective method than cold calling or sending unsolicited emails.
With the wealth of information an individual can include on their profile, LinkedIn provides recruiters with a much better sense of a potential candidate’s skills, experience, and personality. And with LinkedIn’s endorsement and reference features, you can trust that they are backed up by the good faith of others.
With job hopping more common than ever, most professionals are passively seeking new opportunities to develop their careers, so don’t limit your searches just to those actively seeking new positions. LinkedIn’s job postings feature does now work like traditional job boards. Individuals can customize their profile to automatically suggest specific kinds of positions based on industry, company size, experience level, job type, location, and more. When openings are posted to LinkedIn, they are delivered directly to the individuals feed and provide information such as job requirements, expected duties, company description, and even how many alumni work for the organization. With LinkedIn’s Premium membership, individuals can track how many other people have applied to the position and learn how they stack up against the competition.
With more and more of the most successful professionals choosing LinkedIn as their preferred networking tool, businesses and individuals alike ought to think about how to optimize their presence on the popular social media platform. For job seeking, recruitment and talent acquisition, and targeted marketing, few services can compare to the power of LinkedIn’s approach. Take advantage of all the features and watch your personal career or business thrive in the digital world.
Interested in looking for new job opportunities? Let the professionals at Razor Edge Resumes help you market yourself. Find out more about what we can do. Email your resume to resumes@razoredgeresumes.com for a free consultation with a professional resume writer or use our online scheduler to make an appointment today.
