Is Linked In a Big Waste of Time?

 

How have you used LinkedIn? 

 

If you are like me, someone sent you an email invitation and you waited before checking it out.  Eventually you went to the site, filled in your job history and maybe uploaded a photo and then forgot about it.

 

That was about the extent of my LinkedIn involvement for the first year. Oh – I went through my Outlook addresses and sent invitations which led to connections with prior peers.  I had fun reconnecting with people I’d lost touch with and pretty soon my number of connections grew. 

 

Like Six Degrees of Separation, it was fun seeing just how many connects I had in my network and soon amassed more than 1,000,000.  However, other than bragging that I was connected to a million people, I didn’t really see the benefit.

 

Until recently.

 

I’m starting a new venture in speaking wrapped around a speech entitled Make or Break Moments.  I’m concentrating on expanding the idea into a series of workshops. In an effort to gauge interest I used the QUESTION function of LinkedIn to send out a message to my network. 

 

Or so I thought.

 

I posed the question “How do your associates handle Make or Break Moments and would you be interested in a workshop that would help them face those customer moments with confidence?”

 

Not only did my connections respond, but others on the LinkedIn system viewed my question and weighed in on the topic.  Pretty soon I’m emailing people from around the world talking about make or break moments.  I mentioned this at the monthly meeting of Akron Bloggers and learned that answering questions on LinkedIn benefits you in a variety of ways:

 

1. You share your knowledge on a given topic

2. You are connected with people outside your network – building relationships

3. Answers are ranked in terms of “best answer” thereby enhancing your expert status

4. All of the answers and questions are indexed on the Internet and become additional touch-points in the search results

5. Some people have turned the answers to their questions into a blog post – repurposing the information in other venues on the web

 

LinkedIn has a variety of benefits, far beyond serving as an online resume of your work history. 

Joan Stewart has written an article sharing 7 Tips for Using Linked In.

Comments

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And good point, in that viral does have a simple definition about pass-along that seems to nonetheless confuse people (primarily because some are looking to make it the next "brand-building," perhaps a useful term but one that people want to write all their failures off as successes by putting them under that category).

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Linkedin can help users to have nice profiles but now people prefer to interact better on facebook

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I've found Linkedin to be very useful, particularly with other businesses contacting me looking at opportunities to work together. Its one of those resources that the more effort you put into it, the more you get out.

[Leticia]

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How do your associates handle Make or Break Moments and would you be interested in a workshop that would help them face those customer moments with confidence

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Linkedin can help users to have nice profiles but now people prefer to interact better on facebook

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the problem with linkedin is that it didn't improved its features.

[Andee Sellman, One Sherpa]

Thanks for the post Deborah,
I've been on Linked In for ages and never found it that useful. I'm going to try the function you mention as well as go to the 7 tips at the end of your post