So you have decided to create a LinkedIn profile. Good for you! Often, the hardest part of anything is getting started. Here are some step by step tips to guide you through your profile set up.<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0Let LinkedIn search your email contacts.<\/strong>\u00a0Right after the initial screen where you input your name, title, company and industry, LinkedIn will search your email contacts to find people with LinkedIn accounts. You can choose not to allow this search, but we suggest letting LinkedIn do its thing. This will make it easy to identify\u00a0people you already know using LinkedIn<\/strong>. Once you do this, you can choose whether or not to send them an invitation to connect.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0Pay attention to the next step<\/strong>. \u00a0LinkedIn is going to ask you:\u00a0Why not invite some people?\u00a0<\/strong>These contacts will all be pre-selected with a check mark. Before you click anything else, be sure whether or not you want to invite all of those folks to join.\u00a0 If you aren\u2019t paying attention, LinkedIn will invite your entire contact list to join. (This is not a bad thing, as every professional should be on LinkedIn. But this should be your choice, not an OOPS.) If you don\u2019t want to invite everyone, choose\u00a0Skip this step<\/strong>\u00a0and then you will be presented with all of your contacts and can choose individually those you wish to invite.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0You only need a FREE account<\/strong>. A step or two more into the process and LinkedIn will ask you to\u00a0Choose Your Plan Level<\/strong>.\u00a0 You can do plenty with a free account. We are all using free accounts at Emerson and we accomplish quite a lot.<\/p>\n 4.\u00a0Follow LinkedIn\u2019s advice for Completing Your Profile<\/strong>. LinkedIn will walk you through steps to enhance and complete your profile. Let the program help you. You can always decide to skip a section completely, or come back to it later.\u00a0 Just save your changes and log out. It might take several visits to complete your profile. Some people never have a 100% complete profile! That\u2019s ok. Just get started, add some information, connect to some people you know, and you are well on your way.<\/p>\n 5.\u00a0Requesting and accepting connections<\/strong>. When sending an invite to connect,\u00a0personalize your greeting<\/strong>. No one likes form mail. Let people know that you meant to send the invite and you didn\u2019t just mindlessly invite every profile you ran across. An example would be: \u201cHi Jim! I haven\u2019t seen you since college. I just joined LinkedIn and am looking to grow my network. Hope all is well<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n TIP:<\/strong>\u00a0Make your request message\u00a0brief<\/strong>. The initial message length before you connect is approximately 282 characters, or about four sentences long.<\/p>\n Conversely,\u00a0send a quick note<\/strong>\u00a0after receiving a request to connect. It\u2019s the little human things that will make you stand out from others. Remember you are online. It\u2019s up to you to make it personal. Here\u2019s what I do. \u201cDear Pam, Thank you for the invitation to connect. Please let me know if I can make any introductions within my network. Best regards, Bonnie<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n I hope these tips are helpful getting you up and running on LinkedIn. Please leave comments and let us know how you are doing. Now go start building your network!<\/p>\n Posted by Bonnie Jeffers<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So you have decided to create a LinkedIn profile. Good for you! Often, the hardest part of anything is getting started. Here are some step by step tips to guide you through your profile set up. 1.\u00a0Let LinkedIn search your email contacts.\u00a0Right after the initial screen where you input your name, title, company and industry, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}