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Friday, October 30, 2009

The LinkedIn status update is your friend, whether you're looking for clients or a job

LinkedIn status updates are a low-key way of reminding your contacts that you exist. My status updates have directly resulted in an editor asking me to write an article and new subscribers signing up for my newsletter. 

A brief positive message 
A status update is a brief update on your activities. It's designed to show off something positive about you. For example, an asset manager might say "Peter Portfoliomanager is sharing his latest Economic Update." A job hunter who wants to show that she's not moping around might post "Joan Jobhunter just completed a marketing plan for Her Favorite Charity."

Include link to maximize your impact
Peter Portfoliomanager should provide a link to his Economic Update. This makes it easy for a reader to engage more deeply with him. He can use a site like TinyURL.com to shorten the link to his Economic Update. This is worth doing because long links are cumbersome and LinkedIn limits the length of status updates. Here's one of my status updates as an example: "Susanblogged: Statistics to calm nervous investors: Research on dollar cost averaging http://bit.ly/qKf3p" 

Everything you need is on your LinkedIn home page 
When you go to your LinkedIn home page, you'll see below your Inbox the Network Updates section. First comes the box where you can update your status. Below that, you'll see status updates from your connections. Status updates are also emailed to your connections as part of their Network Updates. By the way, LinkedIn lets you exercise some control over who sees your updates.

LinkedIn provides instructions for how to update your status.

Have YOU benefited from LinkedIn status updates? I'd love to hear your story.

Related posts
* My top tips for LinkedIn newbies who want to attract financial clients, referrals, and jobs 
* "Exploring the Social Media Networking and Media Landscape" for financial advisors
* Useful LinkedIn groups for investment and wealth management job hunters
* Compliance makes social networking tougher for registered reps than for RIAs


____________________
Susan B. Weiner, CFA
Check out my website at www.InvestmentWriting.com or sign up for my free monthly e-newsletter.
Copyright 2009 by Susan B. Weiner All rights reserved

2 comments:

  1. LinkedIn has been my 2nd best referral source for traffic to my blog this month (behind FriendFeed, believe it or not).

    In the month of October, LinkedIn made up just over 11% of all referral traffic (e.g. people clicking links posted on other sites). LinkedIn referrals lead to longer visits, too.

    My average visit from a LinkedIn referral is just over 2 minutes, while the average visit from a Twitter referral is just 45 seconds. That statistic makes a lot of sense.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bill,

    Thank you very much for sharing the specifics of your LinkedIn visit statistics.

    You're making me think I should link more frequently from LinkedIn to my blog. It's great when blog comments help me refine my strategy!

    ReplyDelete

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