LinkedIn is, as I’m sure you’re well aware, a hugely popular social media platform for professionals in a wide range of industries. The site allows for fantastic networking opportunities and gives you a place to get yourself, your business, and your skills out there for potential clients, partners, or employers to find.
By following these three easy tips, you can get even more out of the platform by improving your overall skills with LinkedIn.
Tip 1 – Change How Your Profile Is Viewed
Not everything in your LinkedIn profile needs to be visible to everyone who visits your page. Much like the privacy controls on Facebook, you can easily change how your networking and profile information is viewed. Start by clicking on the ‘Me’ icon at the top of the page, then select ‘Settings and Privacy.’ Click on the privacy tab and you’ll see more than half a dozen options for changing who can see what information about you. You’ll also see other privacy-related settings that are customizable. Take a moment to go through these settings and adjust them to suit your preferences.
Tip 2 – View Your Post Statistics
Sharing content to your page is a common use of the LinkedIn platform. If you’ve ever posted an article or video to LinkedIn, you can see specific demographics about your readers or viewers that can give you a better idea of who you’re reaching. To view these stats, click on ‘Me,’ then select ‘View Profile’ and scroll down the page until you see the ‘My Dashboard’ section. Click on ‘Post Views’ and then click the ‘Posts’ tab.
On this page, scroll down to the post you want to view the stats for and you’ll see the view count displayed in the lower left corner of the entry next to a small graph icon. Click on the text next to the graph and the stats of your readers or viewers will be displayed, broken down into company, title, and location. At a glance, you can see who your primary audience is made up of. This is a great way to find out if the content you’re sharing is attracting the demographics you were hoping to reach.
Tip 3 – Use Boolean Search Terms
LinkedIn allows for the use of Boolean search parameters, giving you the ability to filter your searches more specifically to find exactly what you’re looking for. You can do this by adding or eliminating elements from the search parameters. Let’s say for example you wanted to find someone who is an expert in presentation design. If you use that as a key term in your search, your search results would show anyone who had the words presentation and design in their profile, even if the two words were located separately on their page. By adding quotes around “presentation design,” your search results would only list those that had the two words together. Quotations only need to be used when using multiple word-search terms.
Another example could be if you wanted to find someone that has expertise in both infographics and presentation design. This time, you would type in infographics AND presentation design. By adding the AND qualifier, you group those two terms together ensuring that you see more relevant results.
Some other Boolean search parameters you can use for more targeted searches include the qualifier OR, which separates one or more search terms such as “Vice President” OR VP OR “V.P.” OR SVP OR EVP.
Parenthetical searches allow for more complex searches by combining terms and qualifiers using parentheses, such as design AND (graphic OR presentation) or (copyediting OR “copy editor”). The NOT qualifier allows you to do a search that excludes specific parameters, for example, VP NOT director or the more complex (Google OR Salesforce) NOT LinkedIn. A few small tweaks to the way you conduct searches can give you much better results in much less time.
Your LinkedIn profile is a powerful professional tool when wielded properly. There is a lot more you can learn just by exploring both your page and the site itself that can help you do even more with your account, but mastering the basics and learning a few cool tricks is a great way to start.
Ready to learn even more about how you can use this networking and social media platform in new and exciting ways?