A Student's View: LinkedIn

By Erica Wenham, Friday 24 October 2012.



LinkedIn is the largest professional networking site. While LinkedIn does offer its paying premium members a suite of extras, any member of the public can create a free account with access to the new LinkedIn Jobs page enhancements, enabling you to search by post code, industry, job functions and experience.

Among the many social networks on the internet today, LinkedIn stands out for various reasons. It uses the principle behind social networking but adapts it to suit business and professional purposes.

Another advantage to LinkedIn is that businesses are more likely to connect with people and businesses that help the brands move forward  be it additional staff, suppliers, retailers , customers and other stakeholders. The site’s recommendation feature and referrals from other contacts will help you find what you are looking for much faster and easier. Also, ASOS, New Look and Topshop are able to better connect to people who are also in the same industry or are doing similar things, allowing a better assessment of what else can be done to gain competitive edge.

How to Attract More Followers to a LinkedIn Company Page (“Seven Sizzling Tips”)

1.      Add daily message updates and create a “rich content” company page;
2.      Highlight its presence in company blog/other social media sites;
3.      Invite personal contacts, such as subscribers to follow company page (this can also be done through an email marketing campaign);
4.      Regularly post effective past-press releases and other external content;
5.      Add images to the top of your pages to make the site more ‘eye-catching’ & interesting to new visitors;
6.      Add content to the product/services page – 90% of companies ignore this opportunity to showcase their business;
7.      Invite customers to write reviews of the company websites and their products/services (some sort of incentive can be offered if possible to encourage past consumers from the target market to do this)

3 Ways The LinkedIn Jobs Pages Have Become Powerful Tools

1.      “Jobs you may be interested in”
This will display to the user openings that the professional site believes is a ‘good fit’ based on relevant information on their LinkedIn profile. For example, if your profile indicates that you are in digital marketing and use skills such as social media, the “suggested jobs” would be displayed for the user’s disposal.

2.      “Discover jobs in your network”
LinkedIn’s “discover jobs in your network” feature has made the search much easier, allowing the user to identify jobs that are in ‘closer reach’ that have possible links through current connections and other members of LinkedIn in the users network.

3.      “Improved Page Design”

While LinkedIn has always let their users search for jobs by keywords, the new jobs page provides a single platform, ‘streamlining’ the process by allowing the user to do searches, review suggested jobs and keep a list of saved searches. This enables the job-hunting process more efficient and effective. 

No comments:

Post a Comment