LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the internet. You can use LinkedIn to find the right job or internship, connect and strengthen professional relationships, and learn the skills you need to succeed in your career. You can access LinkedIn from a desktop, LinkedIn mobile app, or mobile web experience.
What is LinkedIn and how can I use it?
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the internet. You can use LinkedIn to find the right job or internship, connect and strengthen professional relationships, and learn the skills you need to succeed in your career. You can access LinkedIn from a desktop, LinkedIn mobile app, or mobile web experience.
A complete LinkedIn profile can help you connect with opportunities by showcasing your unique professional story through experience, skills, and education.
You can also use LinkedIn to organize offline events, join groups, write articles, post photos and videos, and more.
Who should be joining LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a platform for anyone who is looking to advance their career. This can include people from various professional backgrounds, such as small business owners, students, and job seekers. LinkedIn members can use LinkedIn to tap into a network of professionals, companies, and groups within and beyond their industry.
How do I get started on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is an online platform that connects the world’s professionals. Here are a few steps to get started on LinkedIn:
Create your profile:
Signing up and creating your profile is the best way to begin using LinkedIn. A complete LinkedIn profile will summarize your professional experience to your connections, current and future employers, and recruiters. Through your profile, you can showcase your professional life, milestones, skills and interests.
Build your network:
Your network plays a crucial part in unlocking the power of LinkedIn. It’ll help you understand what is happening in your industry and professional circle. You can begin by adding your family, friends, past or current classmates, and coworkers to your network. You can also follow people, companies, or topics by navigating directly to the Follow fresh perspectives page, which displays recommended sources to follow. You can use the LinkedIn Events feature to create and join professional Events such as online workshops, seminars, sales and marketing Events, networking Events and more.
Find a job:
If you’re looking for a new professional opportunity, you can get started on your job search on LinkedIn. You can use LinkedIn to research companies and reach out to the hiring community. You can also apply directly for roles, save job searches, and notify your connections and recruiters that you’re open for job opportunities.
Participate in conversations:
You can easily participate in conversations on LinkedIn. Participating in conversations can allow you to share your perspective on relevant issues and topics with others. You can like and comment on posts and articles on LinkedIn. You can create or join LinkedIn Groups to connect and grow with members who share your interests, experiences, or aspirations. You can also use a set of lightweight expressions called LinkedIn reactions, to easily communicate with your network.
Post content:
Millions of members come to LinkedIn every day to connect, learn, and share. You can empower and educate your professional circle with the content you post on LinkedIn. You can also share your thoughts and ideas with LinkedIn members using the share box.
LinkedIn’s free service vs. paid subscriptions
LinkedIn offers a free, basic membership to anyone who wants to create and maintain a professional profile online.
If you upgrade to a Premium subscription, you’ll gain further access to LinkedIn’s products and features. Our paid subscriptions include marketing, recruitment, sales, and learning products. You can try LinkedIn Premium for free for a month.
LinkedIn Pros & Cons
LinkedIn Basics
As with any other online networking site, new users set up a free LinkedIn account and draft an online profile. Here, however, profiles resemble resumes. Where general-interest social networking sites frame tiresome lists of movies, bands, and favorite quotes as evidence of one’s persona, LinkedIn emphasizes professional affiliations, work experiences, skills, and job titles.
You can even add multimedia to your profile to showcase videos you’ve created, articles you’ve written or that have been written about you, and other spotlight moments. For advice on setting up these multimedia pieces, read my tips for getting the most from LinkedIn.
Free to use, LinkedIn requires little more than an email address and password to get started, although you’ll want to fill in your profile completely to get all that the site has to offer. As mentioned, the profile is similar to a resume, with a summary section and job history prominently displayed. LinkedIn prompts you to upload other information about yourself, including a photo. Until your profile is 100 percent filled in, the site will remind you periodically to complete the process, and it’s mutually beneficial that it does. Users get more out of the site when their profiles are complete, and the more user data the site has, the better an experience it delivers.
The next step is to connect to people you know. You can find them by importing names and addresses from a variety of email programs. If one of your providers isn’t supported, you can always upload a .csv, .txt, or .vcf file containing other contacts. To be connected on LinkedIn, both parties must agree to the relationship. Additionally, before you can request to connect with someone, you need to either note your relationship, such as colleague or former colleague, or know a piece of verified data about him or her, such as an email address or phone number that the person has provided to LinkedIn. If you don’t know someone, you can still send them a LinkedIn private message, or InMail, though you need credits to do so. To get InMail credits, you need a Premium account, which you can read about below.
As you connect with coworkers, friends, and business partners, LinkedIn begins to suggest people you may know based on shared relationship and company affiliations. Sometimes I find these suggestions a little nagging.
People who use LinkedIn are usually looking to find a job or clients; hire or partner with new people and experts; keep tabs on their business acquaintances; and network, or more specifically, become visibly active in professional communities that matter to their long-term career goals. For all of these purposes, LinkedIn is pretty stellar.
When it comes to finding employment or employees, LinkedIn offers phenomenal search tools that let you drill down by multiple factors. You can search for people or companies by location, field of expertise, skill level, and even keep the search to people within your network or who are only one degree removed (in which case, you can request an introduction from the mutual contact).
In terms of design, the LinkedIn website has a busy, modular look. LinkedIn’s Android app and iPhone app, however, recently got a redesign that gives them a much more contemporary spin, among other improvements. If you were disappointed by them in the past, there are new reasons to try LinkedIn’s mobile apps. Here’s to hoping some of those updates make their way to the main site soon.
Premium Accounts
Like many online sites and services, LinkedIn is free to use but offers a Premium subscription upgrade with some added perks. There used to be just one Premium account that cost only $20 a month, but now there are four, which makes sense because people use LinkedIn in very different ways depending on their roles. The four Premium account types are:
- Job Seeker ($29.99 per month)
- Business Plus ($59.99 per month)
- Sales Navigator ($79.99 per month or $700 per year)
- Recruiter Lite ($119.99 per month).
A representative also explained to me that LinkedIn offers a full-strength package for recruiters sold separately by its Talent Solutions division. Contact the company for pricing if that sounds more like what you need.
Job Seekers get three InMail credits per month, 90 days’ worth of “who’s viewed your profile” data including how they found you, featured applicant listing for job applications, and applicant insights that show you compare with other candidates for the same position. New, improved job listings with richer information about the listing company, among other improvements, are in the process of rolling out as of this writing.
Business Plus members get 15 InMail messages, 90 days’ worth of “who’s viewed your profile” data including how they found you, advanced search filters, and unlimited profile searches up to three degrees of separation.
Sales Navigators get 15 InMail messages per month, advanced search for creating custom lead lists, lead recommendations, and the ability to save leads.
Recruiter Lite members get 30 InMail messages with templates, enhanced information on who has viewed your profile, automatic candidate tracking, unlimited profile search results up to three degrees of separation, and more.
LinkedIn for Everyone
If you’re at all invested in your career, you really should be on LinkedIn. The site makes it easy to have an account that provides real value without asking much of you in return, although you can certainly explore the site’s many features and services, too. Setting up an account takes some time, but it’s worth doing. Have a resume handy when you do.
LinkedIn remains a great site that delivers real results for both networking gurus and people who are sometimes wallflowers in real life. For all it can do to help you get ahead, LinkedIn is a clear Editors’ Choice for employment related social networking.