Why should you use LinkedIn?
With over 242 million business professionals on LinkedIn looking to network, to engage and to share it is a rich source of insight and opportunity.
LinkedIn enables you to safely leverage your network, the networks of staff and the personal brands of the team to drive the business brand and enhance the corporate reach. You can build profiles which get you found, get your noticed and sought after for your expertise, eminence and credibility. Advanced personal profiles can also include rich content such as images, presentations, video, blogs, files and more – all for free. If you want to know what your profile is like try this free test.
Even within 10 miles of the central London there are just under two million users on LinkedIn and IT is the second largest audience! It is packed with a cornucopia of business professionals not just IT but from the world of finance (over 25,000 investors and VC’s for example), law, marketing and more.
Your company or organisation can also have a profile that reflects the broad range of services and / or products that overlays all staff profiles, so that the full range of professional services can be accessed to enable cross selling opportunity, rich YouTube content shared to views, and recommendations for the company specific offerings can be collected at this level to enhance reputation and credibility. This profile can also automatically configure itself to present differently to different types, levels or markets of clients to enhance engagement.
The platform enables you to get your message out to an exponential audience, control it, enable social sharing and, if required, monitor it within that setting.
Most importantly it enables the business to shorten sales cycles, by engaging the current, past and future clients with updates. LinkedIn can automatically search through individuals’ connections networks to identify easy to reach potential clients, partners and routes to market. This enables referrals to be delivered to sales and consultancy teams for them to easily access new clients and this is all free.
Connections, clients and partners are never ignored and can be kept engaged, up to date and aware of the value of the team, the services and the value add of the business.
The three levels of separation that LinkedIn provides gives you a safe platform to retain clients, leverage their networks and all of this outside of competitor vision, once you are up to speed on the platform, the profiles and behaviours that come together to make LinkedIn work.
It is also a highly effective and efficient platform, with even 15 minutes a week paying dividends, even I use just one hour per week in total on LinkedIn to achieve significant results, in my case over £10 million in the first six years of new sales revenues from corporate roles, my largest corporate made over £20 million last year and even a single person made over £125,000 in the last twelve months.
LinkedIn enables you to make more of the people you know, to access easy to reach referrals, to raise the brands and credibility of staff and the company to get the success it deserves.
If you’d like an informal chat or to know more about how to make LinkedIn work then get in touch via 07802 392925, LinkedIn or just email james@thelinkedinman.com
LinkedIn: In May 2016, LinkedIn had 164 million email addresses and passwords exposed. Originally hacked in 2012, the data remained out of sight until being offered for sale on a dark market site 4 years later. The passwords in the breach were stored as SHA1 hashes without salt, the vast majority of which were quickly cracked in the days following the release of the data.
Dear Rich, I am interested to know your source for that if you could share with me. It is interesting to get to the truth beneath these things as there are so many myths and stories that the underlying facts are sometimes hard to find so I appreciate your insight as I haven’t seen a reputable source yet. Thanks. On the day of the original hack a few big name websites were hit and exposed. I do know that the security was as you say originally SHA1 hashes but this was subsequently changed, like many cyber attacks sadly after the event. James – The Linked In Man
Hi James – You can use https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to check to see if any of your email addresses have ever been exposed. If so, they will give you the source. The email address I used for LinkedIn had that comment.
I am always a little hesitant of sites that offer to check things as a few times the sites themselves have been scams :/ sadly people take advantage all too often. Interestingly checking that one out it appears on a quick check to be ok, but it had no trace of my own LinkedIn email address there, so perhaps a) I’ve been lucky, b) the sources could be outside of LinkedIn (surprised by the list of sites breached there!) or c) the email address could have been exposed in a paste (never knew what that was until ten minutes ago!). I am not sure of the credence behind the site so I have to say I wouldn’t advise or rely on it just yet but you make your own choices. Thanks for sharing. Best wishes, James – The Linked In Man
I have several email addresses i use for different things (like most people these days i suspect). I can tell you that two of them were compromised by different breaches. In both cases the https://haveibeenpwned.com/ site had what appeared to be accurate information.
I use one email address for online gaming and the site reported the breaches that occurred with DDO and LoTR (online games) associated to that email address.
Other companies also use the site in researching complaints about potential security concerns (See Teamviewer for example) They acknowledge that their list is by no means comprehensive. They further explain in the FAQ how they verify alleged breaches:
How is a breach verified as legitimate?
There are often “breaches” announced by attackers which in turn are exposed as hoaxes. There is a balance between making data searchable early and performing sufficient due diligence to establish the legitimacy of the breach. The following activities are usually performed in order to validate breach legitimacy:
Has the impacted service publicly acknowledged the breach?
Does the data in the breach turn up in a Google search (i.e. it’s just copied from another source)?
Is the structure of the data consistent with what you’d expect to see in a breach?
Have the attackers provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate the attack vector?
Do the attackers have a track record of either reliably releasing breaches or falsifying them?
Thanks for that 🙂