Week 5 in a Five-Post Series

This a blog post series for beginners on how to quickly get started with the social media site LinkedIn.

This is the last in the five post series.

(Here’s the first LinkedIn post, and the second , third and fourth in case you missed them.)

This week, the last in the series, your to-do list includes:

Go back to your profile and make sure you’ve filled out your Experience section fully – I noticed a few of you only have the name of the law firm listed. Provide a description: what is a full service family law firm? How is your firm different from everyone else? Who do you want to hire you? What do you enjoy doing the most? What would you hope someone would say about you to a potential client?

Post an Update – what are you working on, what have you learned or what news can you share? Try to post one update a week, more if you can. Your connections will see your name more often and think of you.

Follow two more Groups and find additional discussions to participate in, remembering to provide value and not sell.

Follow these two LinkedIn Experts:

Jill Konrath, a well-respected sales guru is rocking LinkedIn with great tips and case studies. She’s sending out daily videos and is talking about LinkedIn on her blog.

Author Wayne Breitbarth wrote the book on LinkedIn. His book is called The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success. I highly recommend it; I used it to get up to speed on LinkedIn. Wayne isn’t some slick social media salesman from Silicon Valley; he was the CFO and accountant at his own office furniture company in Pewaukee, Wisconsin when he learned about LinkedIn.

Here are a few of Breitbarth’s suggestions to hone your success with LinkedIn going forward:

Daily:

• Respond to messages in your inbox.
• Check in on discussions in groups you are following to see if you can add value.
• Post a status update offering any good blog posts, information or insights you have.

Weekly:

• Review profile updates of the most important people in your network.
• Review the new connections of your No 1 connections to see if they would be people for you to connect with as well.

Monthly:

• Update your profile with any new information – projects, webpages, documents.
• Go through your connections land write two unsolicited recommendations.
• Review your competitors profiles and see if you need to tweak any of your information.

After working on your profile for the past five weeks, you should be well on your way to having at least 150 connections in your network, at least three to five recommendations, a full profile that’s showing up regularly for keywords you chose, and regularly getting emails from other people seeking to connect with you, including potential clients.

I’d love to hear how well this series worked for you. Let’s discuss your results in the comments below.