Source: www.business2community.com
Keeping your LinkedIn profile active is a lot like keeping a baseball glove worn-in and ready to use. When I was growing up playing baseball, my dad always told me to oil up my glove and use it regularly. Otherwise, it would get stiff and make it hard to catch fly balls and grounders. Catching these fly balls and grounders would be critical in a game to maintain the favor and friendship of my teammates! Little did I know my dad was teaching me a LinkedIn lesson in the 1970′s!
An active LinkedIn profile is similar to that glove. If you don’t keep it active, then you will not be regularly connecting with your network, and, therefore, might fall out of favor of your constituency!
Here are 5 easy ways to keep your LinkedIn profile “oiled” up to you can catch all of your opportunities!
Once at the beginning of the day and another at the end of the day. Factbrowser reports that 77% of LinkedIn members use the site to research people and companies, 69% to reconnect with past business associates and 50% to build new networks, so regular updates will help you get found! If it sounds like this scheduling and updating is a lot of work, it’s not. Use a tool like HootSuite to schedule your twice-daily updates from curated sources, like the Wall Street Journal or MarketingThink.com. This tool makes it easier to plan your communication strategy from the comfort of your couch! (No … two daily updates are not too much. No one has EVER complained about my volume of updates!)
Even with 50 groups to join, you will never be able to activity engage in all of them. So, pick the most relevant ones and maintain a contributing and consultative presence. Your contribution formula should be 10 consultative posts for every 1 “sales-ish” post. Participating in 3-5 LinkedIn groups can get hectic, too. You don’t have to log into LinkedIn every time you check on a group since you can use tools like Flipboard and HootSuite to check the activity.