Linkedin is popular today, mainly as a Facebook for the career, Linkedin is one of the most popular platforms when it comes to business, jobs, and careers.
Linkedin is owned by Microsoft and it’s popular across the world. Linkedin has 575 users with 260Million active monthly users among which 39% are premium users, 57% men. Linkedin has 150 M in the US, 50 M In India, 15 M In Canada, 25Min UK, 1M users in Ireland.
In spite of this, many people are still unaware o what Linkedin has to offer them. Linkedin is like a huge virtual meet up where you meet with other businessmen, share your card or introduce yourself, and connect with other fellow solopreneurs and business owners
On Linkedin in your network with people by making “Connections” similar to Facebook where you send friend requests. You converse via Private Message and you have a neat profile setup where you can show all your academic and other achievements.
There are four premium packages on Linkedin:
1.Career $29.99/mo
2.Business$ 59.99/mo
3.Sales Navigator $79.99/mo
4.Recruiter Lite $119.95/mo
but a free account is enough if you are just starting out on Linkedin.
How to Network on Linkedin?
Once you sign in with Linkedin, you will find many features are of like Facebook, but Linkedin has an altogether different audience which is mainly a career community, looking for networking with their other business owners.
You will see the news feed the same as the FB feed, where you will see the latest updates from your follower, then you can interact with them by giving like, comments, share and so on.
A Linkedin Search bar is a very powerful tool that you can use to find people to connect with from your niche.
You will see many options once you click the search icon, you can search by different categories under people, jobs, content, companies, schools, and Groups.
So if you want to expand your connections with people, click on the People tab,
it will give you other options to choose from like “connections”, “locations” and “current companies”, besides that you will see “All Filters”.
All filters give you many options for networking with people from vast variety of options.
In Linkedin, you can select from 1sr or 2nd-degree connections, in short, 1st-degree connections mean with whom you are direct friends, and 2nd degree means you select networking through somebody else.
so to expand your network you should choose 2nd-degree connections,
This is the last box on the page, so here you can choose from which category you want to network or title with people like a bank manager, principal, a coach and so on. so when you hit the Apply” button, you will get all desired results.
It also has options like current companies, past companies, industries, profile languages, schools, contact interest.
So you can see, Linkedin offers rs great opportunities to connect with the old school mates also. If you choose the “school” option, it is possible that you will find some school mates on Linkedin.
You can also select profile by language preference, so you can connect with people other than English speaking audience.
You can target specific industries, to choose to connect with.
Now you can send these people a message to introduce yourself to start the conversation. Usually, it is important to focus on them, instead of your own achievements. It is also important to always follow up with people and connect with them.
Linkedin offers many ways to connect with other people. Every profile on Linkedin comes with some extra unique way to interact with people.
In these options, you will see some great options like Share Profile. If you think a friend of yours has some special and unique to offer people, you can directly share their profile with your network.
Give Kudos – It is another unique way to give appreciation to people, but it has its own unique style. you can give up to three kudos in a week.
These kudos include titles like “Making an Impact”, “Going above and beyond”, “Inspirational Leader”, “Amazing Mentor”, “Outside the box thinker”, and Making Work Fun” to appreciate them
Request A Recommendation – It is another great way to get some great testimonials from those who have familiar with your services & products. So you can request them to give a recommendation to you so that it can show up on your profile page. It certainly built trust with your audience.
Recommend –
At the same time, you can recommend other people, if you like their services, you can share their profile with others.
Conclusion
Linkedin is a great platform to connect with people, specifically as a business networking platform. It has a totally different objective of bringing people together for a commercial purpose.
It offers some unique ways to connect with people, with a wide variety of options to choose from. LinkedIn is the only platform that offers so different options to connect with people.
It has a premium as well as free membership but a free version is enough if you are starting out with Linkedin.
Linkedin offers you a great opportunity to present your resume in a very professional way, which you can directly link and send to other companies while applying for a job.
Though it is important to interact with people in a natural way by commenting, on their profile or shared posts. Engagement with people is the main criteria for any social media platform.
Also sharing your own blog or article is important. You can also interact with people by providing them help. It is all about interacting with your audience, only sharing your stuff is not going to give you any result.
Apart from direct messaging giving kudos recommending to other people, is a great way to connect with people on Linkedin.
Connect with me on Linkedin @ shubhangi rane.
Friens, what are your experiences with Linkedin, how do you interact with people on Instagram? My favorite is giving kudos, but you can give only three kudos in a week:((
Also sharing other people’s posts is a great way to connect with people on Linkedin. Do you have any question or suggestion regarding this article, pl let me know in the comments below, I will be more than happy to guide you in the right direction.