Ignore LinkedIn at Your Own Peril

You’re ignoring LinkedIn at your own peril and here’s why.

1.  It’s your online resume.  You can keep track of jobs you’ve had, projects you’ve worked on, achievements, skill sets and everything else that’s in a regular resume.  You should be proud of your accomplishments and now they can be on display  for the world to see.  You can even get people to give you “Recommendations” for work you’ve done, like an online reference.

2.  There are many add-ons to your LinkedIn profile that will showcase your work.  The blog link displays your recent posts, the Twitter feed shows your latest tweets, the Flickr feed shows your recent pictures, you can add your Facebook profile, book lists, Youtube channel, your Vimeo videos, basically anything you create online you can displayed on your profile on LinkedIn.   Show us what digital assets you’ve invested in.

3.  It’s a professional Facebook.  You can stay connected with other business professionals you meet, people you’ve met in the past and you can even reach out and meet new people through your current connections.  A new feature even lets you know how many people have viewed your profile and how many times your profile has come up in a search in the past 15 days.  Kind of like a professional Hi5 right?

4.  The precise searching capabilities of LinkedIn make it a valuable tool just for finding people.  More and more Human Resource departments will use LinkedIn as a hiring tool in the future.

Setting up a LinkedIn account is very simple and it takes very little maintenance, seriously, you never have to update your profile until you have something of value to add.  Easy enough right?  You’re ignoring LinkedIn at your own peril.  Here’s the link to set up your own profile.  Be sure to add me as a contact, my profile is here.  If you want to learn more about LinkedIn this is a great video to watch.