ACS Creative

If you’re serious about your business, it’s time to get serious about LinkedIn! Maybe you don’t know what LinkedIn is or perhaps you’ve started a profile—personal or business—but you haven’t invested the time to build out your network or make working LinkedIn a habit.

Now’s your chance! Commit to taking just 15–30 minutes on each of the next 21 days to explore LinkedIn and get first-hand experience with the features and benefits it has to offer you and your business. You’ll be glad you did.

What Is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site that launched in 2003 to enable and enhance professional networking. As of October 2009, LinkedIn boasts more than 50 million registered users worldwide, representing 170 industries. About half of LinkedIn users reside in the U.S.

LinkedIn helps registered users develop and maintain a detailed network of business contacts they know and trust. As a registered user, you can invite anyone (whether a LinkedIn member or not) to connect with you on LinkedIn and start the relationship-building process.

In a nutshell,

• Your LinkedIn network consists of the people you directly connect to (1st level connections), the people your direct connections connect to (2nd level connections) and all the people they connect to (3rd level connections)—so it’s big
• You can use this extensive network to gain an introduction to someone you want to know and connect with through a mutual, trusted contact
• You can use your network to find and recommend companies, business opportunities, people and jobs—just like you do with offline networks
• You can research companies—and your competitors—to learn about their employees, location, offices, important news and activity on LinkedIn
• You can ask and answer questions to engage with others, build community and enhance your professional reputation
• You can establish new business relationships through professional, industry, alumni and other types of groups
• You can list jobs and search for potential candidates
• You can manage virtual and offline events
• You can conduct market research, share interesting articles and resources with customers and prospects and post your professional presentations

As you can see, LinkedIn is a powerful social network that provides robust capabilities to benefit businesses. Through dedication and setting aside a manageable amount of time each day, you can establish a respectable presence on LinkedIn, check out its special features and begin to experience some of LinkedIn’s usefulness to businesses. Are you ready to take the challenge?

What to Do in the Next 21 Days
To help you take action over the next 21 days, here’s a suggested task list, starting with basic tasks then exploring additional features and functionality. Some of these tasks you’ll do once, some you’ll do frequently or even daily and some just occasionally.

These suggestions in no way exhaust all you can do with LinkedIn, but at the end of three weeks, you’ll understand the site’s capabilities, overcome the “overwhelming-ness” that new users often experience with LinkedIn and realize some of the important benefits to your business.

Your To Do List

1. Sign up for an account or revive your old one by signing in at LinkedIn.com.
2. Create or update your personal profile. Start by filling in essential information and plan to add more detail as you go along. The more detail you add to your profile, the more exposure and trust you’ll garner within the network.
3. Build connections—at least 10 each week: For starters, invite your colleagues, hook up with your existing contacts who are LinkedIn members, invite your customers and partners, ask your direct connections for introductions to your 2nd-level connections, search for others in your industry you’d like to connect to. LinkedIn provides tools to make this ongoing process relatively painless.
4. Create or update your company profile.
5. Get to know your way around the LinkedIn Learning Center.
6. Update your status every day with professional news about you or your business.
7. Share content and links to articles that your growing network will find interesting and useful.
8. Respond to emails that appear in your Inbox each day; send messages to touch base with select contacts.
9. Join one or more groups and engage in discussions and conversations.
10. Display your blog posts, Twitter comments or other social networking feeds on your profile.
11. Ask a question on LinkedIn Answers.
12. Use LinkedIn Answers Advanced Search to discover questions people are asking in your industry, identify unanswered questions that you can answer and determine how active your competitors are. Answering questions on LinkedIn Answers can be time-consuming, but the value of building your reputation as an industry leader is significant. LinkedIn Answers often show up in the results pages of major search engines.
13. Write a recommendation for a partner, vendor or supplier; request one from a satisfied client.
14. Upload a professional presentation to display in your profile.
15. Create a simple poll to engage people and gain insight; share the results with your network.

Don’t forget to visit the ACS Creative company page and feel free to invite me to join your network. Good luck with the challenge!