A couple of weeks ago I sat in on an American Marketing Association presentation, Leveraging Social Media in a Downturn and a statement made by one of the presenters, Charles B. Kreitzberg, Ph.D, Founder & CEO, Cognetics, has stayed with me. He said that the key question he asks himself is, “Am I more visible today than yesterday?”
Maintaining your visibility is truly the point of any networking, whether it be live in person or online social networking. Yet how do you stay visible without being a hard sell or constantly showing up with drivel that nobody really cares about? The answer lies in what my business partner, Dean Guadagni, taught me about networking. It’s about providing value. It’s about building a reputation of being a go-to source for information.
Here are 2 tips on how to provide value that results in visibility on Linkedin:
- Use your status box (aka What are you working on?) frequently to offer links to articles of value written by you or a well-respected source. This demonstrates your expertise or knowledge while you share valuable information with others who choose to view it when the tidbit shows up on their Network Updates. Use http://tinyurl.com to shorten your URL.
- Answer questions in groups you belong to or topic matter that you subscribe to through an RSS feed. I always see a direct correlation between my profile view numbers and my answer activity. You can subscribe to answer categories from the Settings page on your account.
If you’re not clear on what kind of value you should provide, think about the expertise you want to be known for. Then start offering it up using these two techniques. If you have other best techniques to share, I’d love to hear them.
And by the way, that AMA presentation, Leveraging Social Media Networks in a Downturn, is available in pdf format on my Linkedin profile.
