LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site launched in May, 2003 and mainly used for professional networking. As of October 2009, it had more than 50 million registered users across more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.
We advise our SEO client’s to include a LinkedIn account as part of their SEO Social Networking strategy. I recently came across a good article which provides excellent tips for maximizing the value of LinkedIn and wanted to share some of that here.
LinkedIn is probably the most used business networking system. Companies from large to small are represented (see Linkedin.com). Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members! The purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection.
The article on LinkedIn SEO tips included the following useful items. (You can read the whole article here.)
- “Fully complete your profile – Ensuring that this contains all relevant career history and interests. LinkedIn makes this easy by displaying a percentage score to show how complete your profile is. A LinkedIn profile basically acts as an online CV, so make sure you’re being honest and describing yourself and career clearly.
- “Make your profile publicly available – You can set the information which is publicly available to non-members/contacts, be careful with blocking too much information as this will also be unavailable to the search engines. As a minimum, I would recommend providing enough information for the search engines to index your profile and cache the external links you have listed! In terms of optimising your profile, the main goals are normally to rank for your own name, company name and possibly industry keywords related to this.
- “Make connections – Increase the reach of your profile by connecting with current and former work colleagues, clients, friends and family. I’d also recommend adding any industry contacts, perhaps from people you have met at conferences/events or are connected with on other social media sites and share a similar interest.
- “Register a company profile – If your company doesn’t already have a company listing, you should create one! Here’s an example of the SEOptimise company profile, if your company does have a profile, you should encourage employees to create their own individual LinkedIn profile’s and ensure the current employer entry is completed. This will automatically update all employees listed on the company profile, providing the company name is exactly matched.”
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
Another consideration is the power of one (you) versus the power of many – your team, friends, etc. It takes time to use social media sites like LinkedIn. Also, LinkedIn is a closed network, so links out from LinkedIn are generally only visible to members that are logged into the site.
The key thing I look for in any social media site is how many people can I touch with a single action. My strategy for LinkedIn includes joining high volume groups, and then adding discussions and news items to these groups. Some of the groups have over 100,000 members and posting just one item for this group can touch them all with one click.
How much is your time worth?
What return are you getting for your time on these social media sites?
I spend about 3 hours per month on LinkedIn, but I get a tremendous return on my time investment for this little bit of time.
Keep in mind that there are over 2,000 social media sites out there and you can’t participate on them all – no one has that kind of time, except maybe John! (just kidding!)
Yes!
- John