Start at the home page for LinkedIn and fill in your name, email, and a password. Next you will want to fill in your profile.
Your profile contains your work experience, education, contacts, and contact info. You can also upload your resume here. You can change things by clicking on the “edit” links, or clicking on the green plus signs.
LinkedIn prompts you to fill in your profile. You can also control how “open” your profile is here.
On the settings page you can control what opportunities you are willing to accept.
You can decide what elements of your profile can be seen publicly.
Some parts of LinkedIn are not free.
On LinkedIn, you can import your contacts from your email account, or invite someone whose email address you know. These are your 1 st degree contacts. Your 2 nd degree contacts are the friends of friends. You can check to see if you know any of these people, or ask your friends for an introduction. 3 rd degree contacts are people who are friends of your friends.
This is my contact list. On the right of each entry you can see how many contacts that person has.
At the top you can see the contacts my friend and I share, below that are her contacts. These would be my 2 nd degree contacts. Interestingly, my name is in her “other contacts” list.
I can look at my friend’s friends profiles, but not their friends. You can see that the word Connections on my friend’s profile is blue, but not on her friend’s profile. On the other hand…
I can see other people’s profiles…
LinkedIn tells you how you are connected to other people.
To organize your contacts you can create tags by clicking on Manage. You can assign tags by selecting people, then clicking on edit tags.
LinkedIn organizes your contacts by company, location, industries, and recent activity.
You can import contacts from your email address books, then invite them to link to you. You can see if they are already on LinkedIn, as well.
You can join or create groups on LinkedIn. There is a directory of groups that can be searched. To join a group click on Join this group.
When you click on Join a group, it takes you to a page that describes the group in more detail. You can decide if you want to join it from here.
The groups you belong to show up on the My group tab. The goto menu takes you to different parts of the group’s page. The action menu lets you share, start a discussion, or leave the group.
You can even create your own group
One of the big differences between LinkedIn and Facebook is the ability to search for jobs or search for people looking for jobs.
Searching for jobs is free, but posting a job has a fee.
Like other social networking sites, LinkedIn has an email system. You can email people who are on LinkedIn. It is one way to become linked.
You can add applications to your page. Fnd the “more” tab at the top of the page and choose applications.
Some of the applications available.
If you are an expert at something, you can answer questions posted by other LinkedIn users. Or…you can ask a question of the experts! Click on “more” then Answers Questions are divided into categories, so you can narrow them down to what you are really interested in.
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