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Advanced
Account Settings Advanced connection techniques Job Searching with LinkedIn Premium Using mobile and tablet LinkedIn apps LinkedIn Groups LinkedIn today SEO best practice
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Personnel
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Personnel
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Personnel
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Signing Up
Create your profile by clicking Join Today on the Linkedin.com homepage. You will need to provide your real first and last names, along with a password. Click Join LinkedIn to proceed. You can also sign up using your Facebook login. We do not recommend doing so because of the privacy and identity management issues that may arise. It should go without saying, but you should always create a LinkedIn account using a personal email address. Your current work email wont be of much use if you suddenly get a new job!
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The basics
2 Your email
Linkedin will then ask you to clarify where you live, your current employment status, and your job title and current employer (if applicable). Entering all of this information is necessary to create your account.
You will be prompted to enter an email address again, this time to help determine a list of LinkedIn users who you may already have some degree of business contact with.
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Initial connections
LinkedIn will then take the information you have already provided email address, company and postcode especially and use this to automatically generate a list of potential colleagues and acquaintances. Add as many or as few people as you need.
Social sharing
LinkedIn will create your professional profile at this point, and prompt you to share the news through your Facebook and Twitter accounts. This step is not essential, and simply pasting the URL of your profile into other services will mean you avoid linking them too explicitly..
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This step prompts you to name the role you took at any previous employers. Click no more positions when you are finished.
LinkedIn offer a paid, premium service largely targeted at professionals in the recruitment sector. It is unlikely you will need these features, so click choose basic to proceed.
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Your education
Add a photo
You will also be prompted to provide details of any schools, colleges and universities you have attended.
Add a profile image to your account. Obviously, a photo that has been taken professionally (or at the very least, depicts you looking professional) is preferable. No drunken snaps or cartoon avatars are appropriate here.
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Finally, add skills and any software package or industry qualifications you have. The words in this field will auto-complete to give you the best fit with terms already used on LinkedIn.
Personnel
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Personnel
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Personnel
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Venues
A LinkedIn user has several places available where they can easily share content with others. Current venues include status updates, groups and company pages. Status updates on LinkedIn are much like their counterparts on Facebook and most other social networks. You can share updates on your work, articles you find interesting and other content, and your connections can view that content and interact with you regarding it LinkedIn Groups are free to join, though you may require membership approval from the manager of a group. These spaces are a fantastic way to make new connections with other professionals in your field, or with people with the same interests. As well as listing potential contacts, groups contain spaces for discussion and news feeds full of relevant articles. Company pages are a place for employees and other interested parties to congregate and interact. If youre applying for a role at a company, it makes sense to see if you can get on their radar ahead of your interview, so check to see whether they have an active LinkedIn company page
Personnel
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Personnel
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Personnel
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Personnel
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Account Settings
Your LinkedIn profile contains many pieces of information that, while useful for the purpose of creating connections establishing your presence, are often very sensitive. Changing how information is displayed to others is important, as is keeping your general usage settings relevant to how you wish to use the service. Your account settings can be found by hovering over your name on the top bar and clicking settings. This will present you with the screen provided on the opposite page. In the top half of this dialogue, you have a number of options youd expect to see (email and password changing) and details on your accounts status. If you have invested in a Premium account, there will be extra controls here, including the option to display a LinkedIn Premium badge on your profile. The more in-depth options located in the bottom half of this screen are sorted into four areas: 1. Profile 2. Email preferences 3. Groups, Companies & Applications 4. Account
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Profile
If you find LinkedIn or its users intruding unnecessarily into your life, this section contains many of the most useful controls. Turn on/off your activity broadcasts When you make changes to most aspects of your profile, anyone who can see your activity feed will be able to see what has been changed. This can be a problem if, for instance, you start job searching and your employer notices your profile has been switched on to the job searching mode. Job searchers with Premium accounts should also know that a job searcher badge may be displayed on their profile another dead giveaway that youre thinking of moving on. As mentioned above, this can be turned off. Click the show more items option found in the upper half of the settings page to find this control. Select who can see your activity feed You can control who can view the aforementioned feed here. By default, all of your connections are able to see your feed. You can relax controls so unconnected individuals in your network or globally can see your activity (the latter being especially not recommended). You can also choose to make your feed private.
Select what others see when youve viewed their profile When you view another persons profile, LinkedIn lets them know (in the whos viewed your profile section of your profile). With this option, you can control how much information you reveal: opting for total anonymity, or revealing your industry and job title alone. However, selecting either option prevents you from seeing who is viewing your profile. Select who can see your connections LinkedIn is built upon connections, and therefore, any one you are connected to can see everyone else you are connected to. You can choose to dial this back to only you if you are tired of being asked for referrals to significant contacts, for instance. Change your profile photo & visibility Having a professional photo on LinkedIn is important, but if youd rather not share your likeness to everybody you can choose to restrict access to your entire network, or just your connections. Show/hide Viewers of this profile also viewed box Relating to a trail of profiles people have viewed available on your profile, you may wish to remove this if youre attempting to completely anonymise your connections or if youre simply hostile to the idea of making it too easy for potential recruiters to find similarly qualified individuals. Manage your Twitter settings You can use this screen to integrate Twitter accounts with your LinkedIn presence. This is only advisable if you use Twitter for similarly professional uses.
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Email preferences
Complaints about LinkedIn emails arent uncommon to see on other social networks: its creators seem to be keen on fostering a more active community, but the default notifications can be rather heavy handed. This page allows you to restrict LinkedIns ability to send you updates about new connection requests, activity among your connections and the extent to which others can contact you. You can also turn off LinkedIns marketing emails LinkedIn Communications regarding new platform developments and third party products.
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Account
This final section groups together many of the big settings available elsewhere: changes to your account in the form of upgrades, email addresses, passwords, language and even one or two options from the above menus. Unique settings to note include the option to close your account, manage your security settings and advertising preferences. Manage advertising preferences In addition to offering you the option of opting out of all advertisements from third-party websites, this subsection explains how advertising is used on LinkedIn. Manage security settings This subsection allows you to opt into browsing using a secure connection (https) where available. This secure connection is used on parts of the LinkedIn site regardless of whether you check this option (for example, on the settings page you are currently viewing).
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Company Search
Search for the company employing your contact. The search bar is located on the lower section of the header: switch the dropdown from people to companies.
Employee list
Navigate to the list of employees in the how youre connected listing. On the results page, the first name and first letter of the surname of all employees is typically all that you will have access to (in addition to their position, industry, location and employer).
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Copy and paste the name as provided into Google, along with their job title and the name of the company. This will almost always result in this persons LinkedIn profile appearing at the top of the list, complete with full surname.
At this point, youll have everything you need to send a connection request, and if you have made a genuine connection you can tailor that request to remind them of when and where. Alternatively, if you want to use this method to establish a connection via Twitter, keep following this guide.
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Further details
Search for the persons full name with the name of their employer and the word Twitter in Google, and theres a very good chance you will find their Twitter account. Engage with them, develop a relationship and eventually, pop the LinkedIn question. In a job searching context, this can be particularly useful even if you dont know either the first name or surname of an influential person you need to contact. Simply look for relevant job titles in a search of their company.
Personnel
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Personnel
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Personnel
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LinkedIn Groups
Groups are one of the most important venues for user interaction on LinkedIn, and contributing can be a fantastic way to get noticed and to raise your profile. It follows, then, that whoever creates a group could potentially gain an even greater prominence. Of course, creating groups without reason is likely to be viewed as obnoxious. But if you can genuinely find a niche, find that an existing group has become inactive or run a website that would benefit from a community, consider creating your own.
Creating a group
Group creation takes around 15 minutes, but then, if that concerns you youre probably not going to flourish as a moderator and admin in an active group. Just as with your personal profile, fill out all fields as completely and truthfully as possible. Choose a group name that is descriptive and attractive, use keywords in both your summary and description and upload a high quality image (a maximum of 102x153 pixels are allowed for your groups logo).
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LinkedIn Groups
Notable features
After promoting your groups among your connections and channels outside of LinkedIn, you should start to gain momentum within your groups. While you should rely on your members to create some of the content for the group, there are key features you can use to ensure things keep ticking along nicely. The send an announcement option (manage > send an announcement) allows you to stay in touch with your audience, but dont abuse it. One good use of this feature is for weekly group messages summaries of contributions, or key events outside of the group that bring people back to debate hot topics Groups have their own analytics features, including demographics, growth and activity. These can give you an overview of who uses your group, and what content and/or activity usually results in the highest engagement
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LinkedIn today
Along the header bar you will find the news option. Though anyone fully immersed in their industry will already have a number of favourite websites they visit to keep up with important developments, the LinkedIn today feed shouldnt be discounted for two reasons. Firstly, this feed is easy to customise. In the right hand column you will see the sectors youre currently following and suggestions for others you might like to follow. Secondly, and most importantly, its another way to interact with the wider community regardless of the weight of your connections. Comments on the article and list of all those who liked the article are visible, and depending on privacy settings, you will be able to find their profiles and perhaps develop a professional acquaintance. Your interactions with these posts will show up in your activity feed and you also have the ability to share the content with individuals or in your updates. This can improve your standing among connections, and see you considered authoritative with your sector.
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Personnel