Many people use LinkedIn. Not many use it well. This presentation breaks down 10 powerful features and how to make the most of them.

1. A power user’s guide to LinkedIn
Prepared by @adamkleinberg
February 17, 2011
hashtag: #learnphase
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2. Users: 90,000,000
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3. Users: 90,000,000
Power Users: Not so much
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4. How to be a power user.
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5. 1. Organize Your Profiles
Your best source of new business
is your existing customer base.
You can use LinkedIn’s Advanced
Search feature to find everyone at a
given company with a specific
keyword in their profile and add
them to folders using the Profile
Organizer feature. That way you
know who you know—and who you
need to get to know.
Ordinary business
accounts come with
up to five folders.
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6. 2. Tag Your Connections
Add tags to organize your
contacts quickly and easily.
For example, I’ve created a
“leads” tag that allows me
to put quickly look at people
I might want to contact
when I have news to share
or when I’m looking to drum
up business.
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7. 3. Build Your Company Profile
LinkedIn now lets you trick out
your Company page. It’s easy to
build, but a lot of work to do
well. Traction has a “Toolkit”
you can use a content strategy
template.
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8. 4. Get Recommended
I could tell potential clients this stuff until I’m blue in the face, yet it would not be nearly as
powerful as a real customer saying it in their own authentic voice. When you wrap up a
project that went really well, ask your customers if they’d be inclined to recommend you.
Do this all the time.
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9. 5. Get TwinkedIn
Anyone who logs onto the LinkedIn homepage can see that you can sync your tweets and LinkedIn
status updates, but there are some lesser known features worth looking at. Twitter.com allows you
to discover which of your LinkedIn connections are on Twitter. If you’re a tweeker, this is great
because you’ll find the most relevant people to follow (and who will follow you back). You can
also use LinkedIn to create a “dynamic twitter list” of all of your LinkedIn connections.
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10. 6. SEO (Skills & Expertise Optimization)
LinkedIn has quietly introduced
the ability to add skills to your
profile. This will tie in to new
portals for “Skills & Expertise”
that could potentially become
go-to resources for recruiters,
hiring managers or companies
seeking partners.
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11. 7. Feed Your Expertise
LinkedIn Answers is a great way to contribute content to the platform in a
manner that shows your expertise on a topic. Problem is, it’s a pain in the ass
to hunt down questions you want to answer. Solution: grab an RSS feed of a
topic you’re interested in and paste it into your Reader. Then relevant
questions come to you, allowing you to be an “expert” passively. For active
bloggers who are looking for topics to write on, I often find that Answers that
I write make great posts with minimal edits.
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12. 8. Create Campaigns
Like Google AdSense, you can easily create campaigns on a CPC
or CPM basis with a set daily budget. Because of the profile
information LinkedIn has on their members, you can create highly
targeted campaigns.
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13. 9. Customize Your Feed
Get the information you want on your home page to make LinkedIn the most useful tool for your needs.
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14. 10. Connect inPerson
Overall, LinkedIn Mobile is not amazing. Where
Facebook makes there app feel like a core part of
the experience, LinkedIn’s app feels like an
afterthought.
However, one feature that is unique to mobile is
very cool. LinkedIn inPerson allows you to
connect to nearby users with Bluetooth. This is
great because if you’re at a conference or event,
you can browse who is there and introduce
yourself virtually to someone who looks like a
valuable connection. It’s honest and effective and
far less creepy than looking at people’s name tags
before you make eye contact.
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15. The end.
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