10 Useful LinkedIn Tips & Tricks You Might Not Know

LinkedIn is by far the biggest professional network in the world and a great place to forge B2B connections but far all it’s useful features it can feel a little restrictive at times so here is a list of useful features, hacks and tips that will help you get even more out of the social network. Given that you are probably on LinkedIn to get business, find work or network it’s important that you do something different that helps you to stand out which is exactly what this list of tips will help you do. Make sure you pimp your LinkedIn profile today with some of these great hacks and tips…

Find business people near you

The new iPhone Unsocial is now available for free on the app store and it integrates with your LinkedIn profile to let you find business professionals located near you, to connect with. Almost operating as a Foursquare for LinkedIn, this is all about location services for the professional and is being billed as a particularly useful app for people attending conferences. This process can often be a bit messy, where you meet someone once then remember to hook up on LinkedIn days later. Though you don’t have to use your LinkedIn profile for this to work, it’s a great way to find relevant searches for people near you and connect instantly:

Check your updates any time

If you’re a hardcore LinkedIn user, then you might find it a bit laborious to keep logging in to the site to find your latest updates. The Google Chrome LinkedIn toolbar does away with that and also has some nice extra features, such as the ability to share any article with your LinkedIn network right from within the toolbar. You can also comment on other people’s updates. This could help with one of LinkedIn’s biggest problems – that it’s easy to forget about until you get an invitation from someone to connect. This helps to make it a fluid experience across the web, easily integrating with content that you view to make the experience more social.

Build a beautiful resume

Often your latest work experience and history will be contained within your LinkedIn profile, but when it comes to looking for a job you have to go back to the dreaded word format, likely copying and pasting most of the information from your LinkedIn profile anyway. This handy app takes the job away from you, by turning your LinkedIn profile into a beautiful looking resume, instantly. Free to use and a great product from LinkedIn Labs, this is a little known tool that could save a lot of time for people.

Save your searches

A little known trick within LinkedIn is the ability to save up to 3 searches. This might not sound like much use at the start, but this trick allows you to save searches for people and get email notifications every time the results change. This is a great tool if you’re looking for potential employees, new network connections or possibly employers. To save your search, simply run your search for people in the bar along the top, then click on ‘save search’ along the top right. Think about the kind of searches you can run here that will return relevant and interesting results, to get practically instant industry updates from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn profiles in your email

Finding new connections on LinkedIn can be one of the most daunting tasks and you’ll often forget people that you contacted that you wanted to add but didn’t at the time. This handy plugin for Firefox allows you to bring up the LinkedIn profile of people you’re emailing instantly. This works across most web mail accounts, including Gmail. And a nice add-on to this is that if the person that you’re emailing doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile, you can invite them to join LinkedIn from within the email.

Search LinkedIn through SMS

A recent hack made available within LinkedIn, is the ability to search instantly via text message. This was built with users in mind who don’t have a smartphone but might often be in a position where they want to find out about someone they’ve just met or who might be giving a presentation and you want to impress them after by referencing their background information. This feature can be accessed through mobiles and works by first allowing the app access to your mobile number. You can then search via SMS, though this is currently only available in the U.S.

Manage work projects

This handy LinkedIn application allows you to set up and monitor projects right within LinkedIn, through the ManyMoon software. This is particularly useful if you regularly connect with freelancers on LinkedIn who you work on projects with. Instead of tracking everything through email, your projects can be run right within LinkedIn, with every task and past dialogue accessible through the app for easy management. This app is also particularly useful as it allows you to integrate Google Apps and Docs within projects so you can work on collaborative documents with colleagues, employees and connections. This app is great for many professionals, with a wide range of uses and I recommend you try this out.

Export your LinkedIn connections

This is a nice little trick available within LinkedIn that allows you to easily download your connections into email. To import your contacts into nearly any email account, just go to linkedin.com/connections while you’re logged into your account. Select your connections then at the very bottom of the page click on ‘Export Connections’, and choose your email account to use this with. All your connections will now be available in your mail client, easily bridging the gap between the two.

Optimize your profile for SEO

SEO still applies for your own LinkedIn profile and is an important consideration for being found both within LinkedIn and when someone is searching on Google. You’ve spent all this time building out your profile so you now you want to get found! This presentation contains some handy, basic SEO tips that anyone can implement on their profile: How to optimise your LinkedIn profile (SEO Tips Included!)

Add a video to your company page

LinkedIn introduced video for personal profiles a while ago but now you can add a video to your company profile as well. This is really easy to do within the company page. To add a video, go to your company page then click on ‘services’ along the top. Select ‘add a product or service’ then scroll down to the bottom of this page to step 10. This is where you can add your video and add a title. Make sure to fill out the required fields such as a category and description for the service or product you’re adding. Remember to include a keyword related to your business here, to keep within best practice for SEO. You can currently only add videos from YouTube, but the benefit of this is that they’re all shareable within your company profile.