by: Bill Ringle
A lot of articles have been written about social media and Web 2.0 tools and how they can help you grow your business.
I want to encourage you as a business owner, founder, president, or key executive in a larger firm to use the Linkedin.com web site to build your business and advance your career.
It’s something I encourage everyone in The Franklin 100 Program and other marketing and leadership development programs I lead.
There are five key ways to benefit immediately from using LinkedIn at the basic, free level: setting up a profile, connecting with people in your network, getting and giving recommendations, using the online answers forum, and exploring your extended connections.
- By setting up a profile, you become visible on the playing field of a business network with over 24 million users. Many of the clients and partners you already do business with are already LinkedIn. It’s time you joined the game.
- By connecting with people in your network, you have an easy way of keeping track of who you know. Business cards can easily get lost in the back of a desk drawer. With LinkedIn, you get a detailed reminder of every person in your network. You get to control what level of detail is shared in your profile in terms of your job history, your educational background, and so on.
- By giving and getting recommendations, you establish credibility faster. If you are really expert at what you do, I’m more apt to give more weight to a well-respected third party backing up your claim than your words alone.
- By answering questions, you provide another way for people who might want to engage your services to sample your expertise. I know executive recruiters who use LinkedIn questions to cultivate relationships with new candidates and spoken with other economic buyers who use it to review or attract consulting expertise.
- By exploring your extended connections – the friends and associates of those you are directly LinkedIn to – you have the opportunity to meet new business partners, customers, employees, and friends.
Throughout time, we’ve always used social networks as a way of helping us figure out who to meet, who to trust, who to do business with. Web 2.0 online social networks make the familiar process just that much easier in the 21st century.
Go to www.LinkedIn.com to get started today.
About the Author:
Entrepreneurs can find more resources to build their business at: www.mybusinessgym.com
Bill Ringle works with business leaders from high tech and professional service entrepreneurs in the Greater Philadelphia region and shares the strategies and tools for accelerating growth through my Business Gym with business leaders from across the United States and in 15 different countries.