The power of LinkedIn

Do you use LinkedIn if not why not? is my question. Of all the social media platforms it is the one that most easily lets you connect with others in a professional capacity. There are also ways of downloading the contact details (namely email addresses) of all your LinkedIn contacts. See this video for how to do it by Ilise Benun.

I have realised that when I am searching for people to show my portfolio to, that LinkedIn is really helpful for finding out who has what job. As an example, I was looking for the art director for a Magazine, whereas once upon a time, I would have had to have brought the magazine, to find out about who it was I was looking for and often the magazines did not put this information in their masthead (most did). Now all I do is Google “who is the art Director at …” and invariably up comes a LinkedIn profile for the position that I am looking for. This makes it a great resource for finding potential leads. I am guessing that this will be helpful in finding the people I want to work with in the PR and Marketing agencies who will be my clients.

I have also been told that it is important to try to grow your network beyond the 500 number, because once you are at 501, it only shows that you have about 501+ connections. I like this, as with both Twitter and Facebook, it becomes a popularity contest. We do not need thousands of followers to make money, just a few dedicated customers each month. This is the case for most of us in business, we need who we need, to make our careers successful, and the rest help with our sense of vanity.