After the success of part one of our blog 5 Ways LinkedIn can help you do your job right now, here are some more ways you could be using LinkedIn to help you with your networking, profile and role.

LinkedIn is a veritable Swiss Army Knife of tools and rather than have that ‘odd bit’ you don’t know what it is for (horses hooves normally) here’s another five ways you could use LinkedIn to help you with your role:

1. References for skills of suppliers using recommendations or endorsements.
With over 546 million users on LinkedIn it is sometimes tricky to know which person or supplier you might want to shortlist to meet or engage with but LinkedIn can really help here.

The obvious places to look are at profiles (do you like what / how they write), recommendations and endorsements (consider contacting the people that gave them), and the dates (have they not done any good work recently?). There is a whole blog you can read on this.

2. Visual credit check – do they feel like they’re worth investment?
This is often used by lease companies, asset finance and more.

People are often surprised that financial organisations such as venture capitalists, investors, banks, finance companies (we’ve even trained casinos!) look at your profile, activity and connections as an indication of your value both as an investment but also as a potential recipient of funding.

Do you come across well and is the perception of you if you read your profile as good as you really are? As an example we’re often seeing startups using LinkedIn to build profile and value perception in advance of seeking funding (as well as finding the funding using LinkedIn!).

3. Address book
This is often where a lot people start with LinkedIn, a way to keep the people they know close and accessible.

As your contact details on LinkedIn are managed by you they’re more likely to be up to date and hence your network of connections can contact you – if they want to engage or purchase from you.

Of course this relies on you keeping your own contact details up to date!

4. Tender research and support
If you have the ‘joy’ of doing tenders then LinkedIn should be one of the first tools you reach for on receipt of any bid.

Not only can you research the profiles of who is on the review panel (you all ask who’s on the review panel when you receive a bid right?), but start to research their style, what they find interesting, talk about and weave this into your tender responses.

Of course, if you’re connected to them already, you’d be searching that individuals connections to see which competitors they’re connected to but then I’m sure you’d do that before each client meeting.

If you are particularly aware you could always seek out the ex-employees of the potential client your tendering to and talk to them about the current supplier, what they could do better and use that to inform your bid / no bid decision as well.

5. PR / Press
To get more press or PR most people just ‘throw’ press releases at the journalists inbox, not pausing to consider that everybody else just does the same so there you have a journalist inbox with a couple of hundred ‘exciting’ press releases – which do they choose?

Now imagine you searched your network to find the editors or journalists your connections knew and got them to introduce you or sponsor your exciting press release by sending it to the journalist – Good huh?

Who’d have thought that you could use LinkedIn in such creative ways? This is only number two in our series of four blogs (you can see the previous one here). Just wait and see what else is to come …

23 April 2018

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