The largest professional network on the internet is called LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn profile can help you find the ideal job or internship, establish and strengthen professional ties, and acquire the knowledge you need to advance your career. You can access LinkedIn from a desktop computer, a mobile device running the LinkedIn app, a mobile web browser, or the LinkedIn Lite Android app.
In terms of design and the variety of features it offers, LinkedIn is comparable to Facebook. Because they are designed for professionals, these features are more specialised, but overall, if you know how to use Facebook or any other comparable social network, LinkedIn is somewhat comparable.
What can you do with LinkedIn’s (benefits) features?
It should be obvious that you can utilise LinkedIn to improve your professional networking and job-searching efforts.
The website is frequently used by users to expand their network and discover professional prospects, and the Jobs portion of the website is an effective resource for locating and applying for jobs. On LinkedIn, there are options that allow you to notify employers that you are actively looking for work. By posting in the news feed and leaving comments on other people’s posts, some users of LinkedIn use it to boost their professional profile.
A variety of extra features are added to LinkedIn Premium, a subscription-based version of the site, including online professional development courses, information about who is seeing your profile, and the ability to instantly communicate anyone on benefits of LinkedIn, even if they are not in your network.
How to effectively use LinkedIn?
Complete your LinkedIn profile.
A strong component of your personal brand may be your profile. All registered LinkedIn users will be able to view it (unless you switch it to private mode) (unless you set it to private mode). You can also have a public profile that can be seen by outside search engines, allowing LinkedIn users who are not signed in to see it.
Only “full” profiles are found by LinkedIn’s proprietary search algorithm, and these can receive more than 20 times as many views as incomplete profiles. Therefore, it’s crucial that you finish yours. The following are the key points to keep in mind:
Include a decent photo of yourself, preferably one that was taken by a pro. Look smart, smile, and don’t have any distractions in the image.
By including a background image—also referred to as a “banner” or “cover” image—that captures your persona and line of work, you can make your profile stand out.
Mention your industry and location in your headline. For this, you have a character limit of 120.
Include a brief description of your background, scope of expertise, and value proposition. There are 2,000 characters available for you to use, but you don’t have to. To make your profile stand out, you can upload or link to six examples of your work.
Include your present employment and outline its responsibilities. Be precise. Even if you are a “great communicator,” avoid saying things like that. Instead, give details of your communication skills , and examples of how you’ve used them. You have 2,000 characters again.
Include at least four skills or areas of expertise, as well as information about your education and previous employment.
Connect with and message other LinkedIn users
You can network with individuals and businesses in your industry using LinkedIn. This is a fantastic method to remain current on new advancements and to exchange knowledge with experts in your industry. Anyone can accept your invitation to connect (and you can accept their invitation to connect with them), but in order to use LinkedIn, they must have their own account.
LinkedIn records the connections that you make to a list called My Network. When you make a new connection, you gain access not only to that person’s profile, but to their publicly available connections, too. These become your “second-degree connections.” This opens up even more networking opportunities , as you can then invite them to connect directly with you. You can also introduce any two LinkedIn connections who haven’t yet connected to one another, but who might benefit from doing so.
Give and Get Endorsements and Recommendations
Your connections can write “recommendations” for your profile, and offer “endorsements” of your skills, and you can do the same in return.
Recommendations are personal testimonies that showcase your professional qualities. Moreover, aim to collect a handful of these (between five and 10 is a good “rule of thumb”) by asking people you’ve worked with to write one for you. Instead of making general statements such, “Bella was fun to work with,” ask them to specifically mention the qualities or accomplishments that have pleased them.
Endorsements are simple notifications confirming that you have a particular skill. If a connection recommends you for something—leadership skills, for instance—it may not have the same impact as specially written recommendations, but it can still make you stand out from the competition.
LinkedIn’s Main Features
Here are a few of the fundamental functions and benefits of linkedin that this business network provides and how they are intended to be used by experts.
Home
Once you’ve logged in to LinkedIn, the home feed serves as your news feed and displays recent updates from the corporate pages and connections you’ve made with other professionals.
Profile
Right at the top of your profile are your name, photo, location, occupation, and other information. Below that, you can customise a number of different sections, such as a brief summary, work experience, education, and other sections, just like you could with a conventional resume or CV.
Network
A list of all the businesspeople you are currently associated with on LinkedIn may be found here. You can also see a number of other options to add contacts, look up potential acquaintances, and look up alumni if you move your mouse over this option in the top menu.
Jobs
Every day, employers post all different kinds of job listings on LinkedIn. Based on your current information, including your location and optional job preferences that you can fill out to get more customised job listings, LinkedIn will recommend particular jobs to you.
Interests
In addition to your relationships with professionals, you can follow particular hobbies on LinkedIn as well. These include corporate sites, groups according to region or interest, LinkedIn’s SlideShare platform for slideshow posting and LinkedIn’s Lynda platform for educational purposes.
Search field
With the help of LinkedIn’s robust search feature, you can narrow down your results using a variety of customizable fields. To find particular experts, businesses, jobs, and more, click “Advanced” next to the search bar.
Messages
Sending a private message through LinkedIn to another professional is a great way to strike up a conversation. Additionally, you can include photos, attachments, and more.
Notifications
Like other social media platforms, LinkedIn provides a function that notifies you when you’ve received endorsements, invitations to join something, or invitations to look at a post you might be interested in.
Unanswered Invitations
On LinkedIn, you’ll get an invitation to connect with someone who has sent one, and you’ll need to accept it.
What Do People Use LinkedIn For (As Individuals)?
Now that you are aware of what LinkedIn has to offer and who normally uses it, you probably don’t have any precise ideas on how to begin utilising it yourself. In reality, a lot of individuals open accounts just to delete them later because they are unsure of how to use LinkedIn.
The advantages of LinkedIn for beginners are listed below.
Reconnect with former coworkers
Find former coworkers, instructors, classmates, and anybody else you might believe is valuable to have in your professional network by using the My Network area. To sync your contacts with LinkedIn, simply enter or link your email.
Make use of your profile as a resume.
In essence, your benefits of LinkedIn page serves as an expanded (and interactive) CV. When applying for jobs, you might include it as a link in your cover letter or possibly an email. Some job application websites even provide you the option to connect to your LinkedIn page and import all of your information. There are tools available if you need to create a résumé outside of LinkedIn.
Research and apply for jobs
Remember that LinkedIn is one of the finest locations to look for job opportunities online. LinkedIn will constantly send you recommendations for jobs it thinks you would like, but you can also use the search bar to browse for a particular job.
Locate and establish contact with new professionals
The ability to find new people locally or globally who can support your career ambitions is even better than reconnecting with old coworkers and connecting with everyone at your current employer who may also be on LinkedIn.
Take part in appropriate groups.
Joining clubs based on your interests or line of work and becoming involved are wonderful ways to meet new professionals to connect with. It’s possible that other group members will be attracted to you and want to interact with you.
Write a blog post on your expertise.
Users can write blog entries on LinkedIn’s own own publishing platform, giving them the chance to have their content read by thousands of people. Your credibility in linked industries that are pertinent to your professional experience will rise as a result of published content appearing on your profile as well.
What are the advantages of LinkedIn and how may it benefit your job search?
When recruiters and employers use benefits of LinkedIn to search for candidates, you can use it to showcase your profile, expertise, recommendations, and connections. Your profile not only gives recruiters and employers their first professional impression of you, but it also establishes your credibility in your field and draws attention to your accomplishments. Many people continue to undervalue LinkedIn’s advantages in job searches and are occasionally hesitant to use social media. This section outlines LinkedIn’s advantages and the 13 ways that using it can help your job hunt.
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Become more familiar with recruiters and hiring managers
LinkedIn is useful for 93% of recruiters for candidate research and recruitment. Additionally, LinkedIn enables you to build an online personal brand that promotes your availability to decision-makers and recruiters. This implies that you have an online personal brand and show up in search results when your name is typed into a search engine like Google. For this reason, you must guarantee that your LinkedIn page is treated similarly to your resume and that the information on it effectively markets you.
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Show off your leadership skills, knowledge, and credibility.
By allowing employers and recruiters to see your recommendations, relationships, and proof of your added value, having a LinkedIn profile helps you establish trust with them.
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Use LinkedIn as a research tool
You may investigate businesses, interviewers, recruiters, and hiring managers on LinkedIn if you have an account there. This is useful before submitting applications, finding out who will be interviewing you, and conducting the interview itself.
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The job board on LinkedIn is excellent.
The LinkedIn website offers new opportunities that might not be available on conventional job forums. Using LinkedIn Apply, you may directly apply for jobs, save job searches, and indicate to recruiters that you are interested in learning about opportunities.
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You can get validation from others for your abilities and capabilities.
Allow others to congratulate you for your abilities and prior work. Additionally, when others recommend or endorse you, your profile will display them for anyone to view, demonstrating that other experts support your claims to possess particular skills. This has great connection-making power. Through the recommendations and testimonials that LinkedIn lets your connections post on your profile, you can increase your trustworthiness.
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Follow businesses
LinkedIn is a wonderful tool for investigating organisations and people that work at them. Using this, you can specifically target members of your network who work for companies that you really want to work for.
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Join LinkedIn Groups
Groups are an excellent method to network with professionals in your sector as well as other recent grads and others with similar professional interests. You can participate in discussions in groups. This is a fantastic method to demonstrate your expertise on topics relevant to your sector, pose inquiries, and strike up dialogues with important figures in important organisations.
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You may create a brand.
It’s crucial for you to develop your professional identity online, just as businesses do. What makes you different from other people in your industry? Why are you marketable, exactly? What justifies paying you six figures?
Personal websites are fantastic for this, but they typically come with added charges — and hours and hours of constructing and finessing. LinkedIn is an easy way to place your name on the professional map. Write a compelling benefits of LinkedIn summary that highlights your abilities and demonstrates your personality, and upload a professional profile photo. Your profile should give recruiters, employers, coworkers, and managers a clear picture of who you are and what skills you can bring to the table.
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It might boost your name’s Google ranking.
It’s likely that if you apply for a job, the human resources manager or employer will Google your name as one of the first things they do. Even sending a new client an email might lead to a Google search of your name. It’s time to Google yourself if you haven’t already. What appears up on the first page of results?
Another advantage of LinkedIn is that Google is interested in it. Ranking on Google’s first page can be challenging, but LinkedIn is a well-known and influential network. Due to this, getting your LinkedIn page to rank on Google is typically simpler than getting your own website or online portfolio to rank. Perhaps it’s time to get one if your LinkedIn profile is the first thing a potential employer sees. or make changes to your current one to make a statement.
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It keeps your contact list on your Rolodex.
Recall that amazing young professional you met three years ago at that conference? Or that friend of a friend who was thinking about working as a freelancer for your business? Honestly, I doubt it.
When you meet new people, add them to your professional network on benefits of LinkedIn rather than filing their business cards away in your desk drawer or entering their email addresses into your dated address book. So that you can reconnect when the time is appropriate, keep them in your connections.
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You may look up businesses and their employees.
Yes, you can access job openings from other job boards if you’re applying for positions; there are a lot of such out there. However, LinkedIn also has further benefits.
Many businesses now maintain their own LinkedIn accounts where they may update their company details, provide company news and insights, and highlight their existing staff members. Before beginning the interview process or accepting a job, you should get a good, solid sense of the company’s culture and people to ensure that it’s a fit for you.
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You can use it to access business news.
When you log in to LinkedIn, it compiles a timeline similar to other social networking sites. You can find news updates from your connections, groups, and business there. Following market trends and news is entertaining and wise.
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a network is essential!
Professionals need LinkedIn so much as a tool for networking.
Even if you detest networking events and are an introvert, you can still develop fruitful LinkedIn contacts. You can establish connections on LinkedIn with people you have in common, experts in your profession, and even your biggest role models.
WINDING UP
The final word? A wonderful place to develop your brand is LinkedIn. Utilizing LinkedIn’s advantages will take time, just like with any other technology, especially as you seek to establish your company’s voice and increase participation.