Too many businesses are just “doing” social without training… or worse… without a strategy.

We’re on a mission to sort that out for 2012, the first step is a week of training courses open to anyone:

The Get Social in 2012 training week is the 23rd – 27th January 2012 at the RT Media offices in Wimborne

• MONDAY 23rd: Introduction to Social Media
• TUESDAY 24th: I’m on LinkedIn, But…
• WEDNESDAY 25th: Twitter 101
• THURSDAY 26th: Facebook for Business
• FRIDAY 27th: Better Blogging

All sessions are 9:00 for a 9:30 start, finishing at 12:30.

Please contact Corli or Luke at RT Media on 01202 888192 or email Luke to book your place.

For more details, see Get Social in 2012

Extra super 2012 BONUS :: To help you on your journey here are 3 links I think are essential reading for 2012 (don’t forget all the things I bookmark as interesting can be found be clicking the delicious icon up there top right!)

1. Facebook makes up 52.1 percent of all sharing on the web in 2011
2. The psychology of social commerce explains why and how people shop together
3. Sony says choosing the right social network is critical, we agree!

This article was written for the appointment magazine (April issue).

The effectiveness of social media platforms as a means of finding a new job remains a hot topic of debate. Of the ‘big three’, LinkedIn seems to the most obvious fit for a career search. Certainly if you’re not one of the five million UK users now harnessing the power of this business-focused social network you could be missing out on a valuable addition to your job-seeking arsenal. But how to use it effectively?

Luke Williams, specialist trainer at SocialTech, provides some top tips for growing your network, optimising your profile, some of the general do’s and don’ts for job hunting on LinkedIn and outlines some strategies for finding that new job.

Top profile tips:

[To edit your profile go to ‘Profile’>’Edit profile’ from the menu at the top]

Have a 100% complete profile, including previous jobs and education. LinkedIn will tell you how complete your profile is on the right-hand side of the profile page and advise you which sections need completing.

The usual good CV writing tips apply when listing previous jobs and experience on LinkedIn. What are the things potential employers are looking for on your page?

If the job role you are looking for requires specific industry skills or qualifications re-arrange the order of sections on your LinkedIn page to bring these nearer the top. You can drag and drop sections by clicking and holding on the cross in the top-left of each section.

If you haven’t already, get a good headshot for your LinkedIn page. Try searching for a common name and look at how much the profiles with a picture stand out.

Update your “professional headline” – this is the sentence of text under your name on your profile page and is one of the few things that shows on search results. As standard this shows your current or most recent job title but it can be changed to highlight your position i.e. “Currently seeking a role in ___ in the ___ industry” – choose edit next to your name and the headline section is halfway down the page.

Have an up-to-date phone number on your profile – I’m always amazed at how many people do not have a phone number on their profile. Add your number in the personal information section on your profile page.

Note: your contact details are ONLY visible to your connections and not visible on your public profile.

Update the web address of you public profile to a more professional one. Change the public profile options with the edit link next to the URL (web address) In the public profile settings, update your public profile URL to a more friendly one i.e “linkedin.com/in/lukewilliams”, this makes it easy for you to remember and looks a lot more professional if you use it on a CV or in an email.

Grow your network including university classmates, former colleagues and friends. LinkedIn works best through a larger network. When you do a search for people on LinkedIn it will return results to you from your network, your connections’ network (up to three degrees of separation) and people you share a group with (see groups below). If your network isn’t large enough you won’t find or be found by people that you want to connect to.

When you invite someone to connect, always add a personal note. The standard note is perceived as rude by some and it is better to include a reminder of how you know that person or a friendly note that you are growing your network on LinkedIn with the goal of finding a new job.

Three quick tips for growing your network:

1. Import your email address list – LinkedIn will look for matches from your address book to emails used on LinkedIn. Select contacts/add connections from the main menu and follow the steps to sign in and connect to your hotmail, gmail or other web based email client. (You can also import an address book file from email programs like Microsoft Outlook using the ‘import your desktop email contacts’ link slightly lower down on the page.)
2. Post your public profile URL onto other sites like Facebook and invite people you know to connect.
3. Browse the “People you may know” section in the top-right of the home page. This list is based on mutual connections, or groups you share with others. It becomes more accurate once you have a more complete profile.

Please note: It is a policy of LinkedIn (that you have agreed to when you signed up) that you only connect to people you know – you should ask for introductions or use the InMail feature to contact people you don’t know (InMail is available with a job seeker premium account).

Finding jobs on LinkedIn:

Create and save advanced job searches. Select jobs from the main menu and then the advanced search tab near the top. Customise the search using keywords and the tick boxes. Once you’ve done the search you will see a ‘save search’ button in the top-right; this will also offer to send you email alerts for new jobs that match your criteria daily, weekly or never if you wish to just check jobs online.

Improve your chances of finding work by getting involved and joining groups on LinkedIn – look for your university or college alumni, industry groups and professional bodies (IOD, CIMA, CIPR etc.). Answer questions within the groups to demonstrate your expertise. Some groups will also contain job listings.

Identify and follow companies for which you would like to work. If there are specific companies you would like to work for change the option next to the search box in the top-right to companies and search for the name of your target company. Once you are on the company page you will see a ‘follow’ button in the top-right hand corner. You will then be notified of any new jobs posted by this company. Some organisations monitor who is following them and, if (as above) your headline reflects that you are looking for work, they may well contact you despite having no jobs listed if they are looking for someone with your skills and experience.

If someone in your network is connected to a person who works at the chosen organisation it will show you how you are connected to this person on this page. You can ask for an introduction by clicking on that person’s picture and selecting get introduced through a connection on the right hand side of their profile page.

I really hope you found this article helpful, there are so many ways to use LinkedIn to find work and I’d love to hear any of your suggestions in the comments below.

We have a series of Public Courses during May, at our Bournemouth training centre, that will help provide you with the right skills and techniques to fully utilise these services to the maximum potential.

• I’m on LinkedIn, but…
  Wednesday Morning, 11th May, 2011
• Twitter marketing
  Wednesday Afternoon, 11th May, 2011
• Facebook for business
  Wednesday Morning, 18th May, 2011
• Business blogging
  Wednesday Afternoon, 18th May, 2011

Places will be limited, so to book your place or to find out further information on any of our courses and secure an early bird discount, visit our ‘Course Dates‘ page at socialtech.biz, or contact myself, Danny on 01202 798098.

Interesting that the “All employees” option will only be available to paid up members, but is free for now.

Uses?

If you wanted to work for specific organisations, you can now subscribe to them to receive an email when they post a new job (assuming they used LinkedIn to do so of course).. probably has some uses for recruiters too.

One idea that I’d suggest to any organisation looking to recruit, is to monitor if anyone is following your company page – I think it’s interesting that you could see potential candidates before posting a job advert.

Do you think this is a useful feature? I can’t see much use in it yet (apart from recruitment), if it published the news items into people’s feed it would be more useful.

See also: LinkedIn Blog about following company pages

It used to be that the status updates on LinkedIN were actually quite useful, to see what people were up to, get a snapshot of what they are/were working on… but alas no more.

Given the option to link a twitter account to LinkedIN (good) most people have chosen to send ALL tweets to LinkedIN (bad) rather than use the selective “#in” option which only sends selected tweets to LinkedIN (good).

The result?

The status updates are all RT’s (the twitter version of forwards) and off topic, no where near as useful as it used to be.

To me, it devalues the activity stream quite a bit – which is kind of a pity as the other things on there are still great – Q+A, groups, events…

Have you noticed this too, or is it just my network of people?

Please, if you link twitter and Facebook together use the selective updates function – make sure your messages are “fit for purpose”, does everything you tweet, really need to be on LinkedIN?

Select “edit my profile”, then click on the “edit” link next to your twitter username and select the option highlighted below.

Next time you want to send something to LinkedIn just include “#in” in your message.

Thanking you in advance… Luke.

———

Luke Williams on LinkedIN – I run 1/2 day LinkedIN courses in London and Bournemouth if you’d like to make more of this great business platform.

LinkedIn is changing its homepage quite a bit – there’s a good write up on Mashable – it’s not live for all users yet, so if you don’t see it, you will soon.

Really though, this post is more about….

Change #2

Since August, I’ve been delivering most of my training under the joint venture I set up with Web Matters (as Web Matters Training) – it’s worked very well for both of us and I’m proud to say we’ve now partnered up with 2e2 to provide a range of Social Media for Business Courses (launching in Feb ’09) based at their London (Victoria) training facility.

In line with this, I felt I should add “Trainer at Web Matters” to my LinkedIn profile, as the 2e2 venture is a partnership with WMT and it would make it clearer for anyone looking at my details via that site.

I’ll post again once the course details are live. Its a great opportunity and if it goes well, we’ll be looking to expand to their other centres around the UK – exciting times.

Take this example:

One of the other members asked a question about what people thought was the best product in a certain field. 4 out of the 5 responses recomended my clients product. From a PR point of view that is great, but it also enabled me to identify the person asking the question, the company they work for and their office location.

How valuable can that be?

excerpt from weetpr

Now that’s good to hear. I bang on about using Q+A on LinkedIn to generate interest, promote yourself as a centre of authority and to get leads in my seminars.

…I can’t take direct credit for this particular lead, but the blogger had attended my seminar in November…

Which leads me nicely to mention my next seminar on Social Media Marketing (exploiting social networking to the benefit of your business) as one of three speakers at the Original Business Thinking Event on 29th Jan.

So if you’d like to learn more about how you can use social networking in your business, follow the link above or drop me an email.

In total my update went out to around 750 people across three platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) – through a status message I sent out a simple request for people to get in touch.

I’d hoped for 10 or so, during the day…

…within 30 minutes I had 30 replies.

Wow.

THAT is the power of the network, to be able to broadcast out a simple message – in this case on twitter, which automatically updated my Facebook status (would be nice if LinkedIn status could be done via twitter too – hint hint, any techy friends listening?) and get 30 replies in 30 minutes.

An hour later, I was visiting an office space with a friend/business partner of mine which we’ll likely rent together and I have plenty of likely candidates.

In further evidence of the power of the network: I noticed a business contact had changed their LinkedIn status to mention they were working on a particular project… which I was writing an article about for here (to be published later in the week – when its finished) a quick email exchange later and a meeting is set up so we can collaborate.

Within 2hrs my network has provided:

A good group of potential employees
A business partnership
and Office space

My “Springers final thought for the day” – courtesy of GrindVision:

the most successful people are great networkers and in in this day and age the most successful businesses are great at social media

I couldn’t agree more.

I see this as a smart move by LinkedIn.  By maintaining control of the apps, they make sure they remain of a high quality and relevant to their users.  More interaction with the site equals more page impressions, along with a new revenue stream.  It’s certainly something I’ll be looking into in much more detail; if I can inspire others to look at my profile and create genuine new contacts while enjoying the site more than a simple contact manager then I’ll certainly be spending more time on it.  I’ll post with my findings soon