Work Smarter with LinkedIn

By Alexandra Samuel

If you think LinkedIn is just for job hunting, you’re missing out on the many ways you can take advantage of this social network to build the professional relationships you need to advance in your career. LinkedIn can help you initiate, strengthen, and use the very real human connections that make you effective on the joband help you get ahead. This short, practical book shows you how.

In Work Smarter with LinkedIn, social media expert Alexandra Samuel demonstrates the most effective ways to actively build and use your network, sharing tips and tricks on:

Deciding which connection invitations to accept
Searching for potential connections when you need to establish a new contact
Using business travel to make the most of face time with colleagues and contacts
Capturing all the connections you’ve made at a conference
When not to use LinkedIn

The book also includes a 30-minute quick guide to startingor perfectingyour LinkedIn profile.

Interested in learning more about how social media can help you get ahead of your daily workand get ahead in your career? Look for more in this series of short, digital books from Harvard Business Review Press and social media expert Alexandra Samuel. Other installments provide the best tips and tricks for using tools like Evernote, Twitter, HootSuite, and Gmail to get organized and improve your performance on the job.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781422195130

Alexandra Samuel

Alexandra Samuel is a tech speaker and data journalist who has worked remotely for most of her 25-year career. The co-founder of pioneering social media agency Social Signal, Samuel creates digital content and workshops for companies including Google, Discovery and Sprinklr. Her writing on digital productivity appears frequently in the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, and she is a digital columnist for the CBC. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Book preview

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Introduction

This book is about using LinkedIn to build the professional relationships that will help you succeed in your current job or set you up for new opportunities. It shows you how to use LinkedIn, along with a handful of other social tools, to strengthen the professional relationships you already have. It also shows you how to extend that network of relationships by focusing on getting to know the people and organizations that will make the biggest difference to your professional goals.

Twenty-seven percent of American Internet users now use LinkedIn (compared to 90 percent for Facebook, and 30 percent for Twitter). A recent study conducted by my colleagues at Vision Critical found that more than 40 percent of LinkedIn’s users visit the site less than once a week. Many of these professionals use the site as a contemporary résumé, making some effort to keep their LinkedIn profiles updated and accepting and making connections on the site. But, frequently, I have heard even professionals who keep their LinkedIn profiles up-to-date say that they aren’t actually sure what LinkedIn is actually for.

Those professionals are missing out. LinkedIn is very powerful because it can not only help you find a potential contact in just about any organization (or at least, any industry), but also show you the road map of relationships that can get you an actual introduction to that person. The confusion about LinkedIn’s purpose may have come about because unlike Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, LinkedIn isn’t primarily an online hangout or communications channel. It’s more usefully understood as a cross between a dream phone book (one in which you could search people by any combination of company, job title, and keyword) and an atlas of human relationships (mapping who knows whom,