A nice way to dip your toes into the social media waters is through a professional networking site called LinkedIn. This site provides a great way to have an online presence with only a small investment of time.
LinkedIn requires very little up-keep once you get your profile up and running. Just make sure you have it set so any activity such as contact requests triggers an email notification to your email account.
Log in to www.linkedin.com and click on the “Join Today” button. All you need to start is to enter your:
Once this is done, start filling in the blanks to complete your profile. Make sure to fill in your work history, education and contact information. There is nothing less useful than a blank profile.
After you have your profile as complete as possible, it is time to start finding contacts.
A good way to find people to connect with is to click on the “add connections” tab. This will take you to a page that has a tab called “colleagues”. Here is a list of all your past places of employment. Click on one of them to do a search for all profiles that have the same place of employment in their history. You can use the same feature to find classmates.
Once you find people that you know or who you have done business with in the past, send them an invite to be one of your contacts. You can also request references from your contacts and they will appear on your profile.
There is a wide range of groups on LinkedIn that you can join. Groups that are formed around everything from financial advice to social media trends. But the main benefits are summed up nicely with this excerpt from LinkedIn’s website:
Through your network you can:
