These are the most basic, critical steps to setting up and using your LinkedIn account. Whether you’ve only just heard of LinkedIn or you signed up months ago on a whim, these are steps you can take today to craft a more visible, more useful LinkedIn profile. Expect a follow-up post in the future detailing more ways to connect on LinkedIn and describing the advantages (and peculiarities) of this social network.
- Import your GMail, AOL, Yahoo!, or other email contacts. This is an easy step to take. However, if you have a very long and messy contact list it might take you several minutes to go through your list and remove old or undesirable contacts that LinkedIn would otherwise import on your behalf.
- Fill out your profile details! Try to put in as much information as possible about your Education, your current and past jobs, and any associations you may currently be a member of.
- Make it personal. Add your interests (personal and professional), connect with close relatives who use LinkedIn, upload a recent photograph of yourself. All of these things will make your profile snap when someone finds it and give potential clients and partners a better idea of who you are.
- Set a “custom URL.” Facebook and other sites refer to this as a “vanity URL.” Whatever name is used, the concept is the same. You can’t easily fit http://linkedin.com/pub/really-long-random-url/454545 into your email signature or business card (or Twitter update!). Pick a url that is as close to your name as possible. Avoid adding a number to your name in order to make this step work. Instead of doing that, add a word that describes your career in general (use linkedin.com/in/JohnSmithInsAgent not linkedin.com/in/JohnSmith2009 ).
- Clarify your “Contact Settings.” At the bottom of the page for editing your profile there is a section for explaining how you do–and don’t–want to be contacted. For example, if you list your job description as a “web programmer” you may want to specify that you are looking for career opportunities and blank out most of the other reasons listed by default. Or, you may want to add detailed information about things you don’t want people to contact you for (for example “I don’t do web-design, just PHP and ASP programming” or “If you want help finding a great health insurance policy I can point you in the right direction, but I don’t resell that product myself”). While all of the other steps are designed to draw attention to your profile, this step should hopefully push unneeded or unwanted attention away from your profile.
