Upwards of 80% of employers use LinkedIn at some point in their recruiting process and if you are looking for a job or fear you may be soon, you want to be a star on LinkedIn. (And for all you not looking for a job, pay attention, because these tips are good for growing you LinkedIn presence in general. The better social media influence you have, the better you are for promoting yourself or your company.)
Here are 5 steps to quickly push your LinkedIn profile into the limelight. If you take each of these steps and spend some quality time tending to your professional network, your profile is going to start looking a lot better very quickly. Don’t be one of those people with one connection and no picture!

1. Recommend Someone: One of the underrated and underused features about LinkedIn are the professional recommendations. Even though it nags you constantly to try getting endorsed, most people aren’t. Take a few minutes and recommend someone you have worked with in the past. Once you are done, request that they recommend you. The chances for the request being honored go way up and you are on your way to being one of the very few on LinkedIn with multiple quality recommendations.
2. Add Products & Services: LinkedIn recently added a new feature for company pages that allows you to post products and services. Simply go in and edit your company page (if you have the power) and populate the forms for products and services. Not only does this increase awareness for your products among your professional network, it makes it extremely easy to get quality reviews of those products and services. It’s still early, so get on it and reap the benefits of being one of a small number of companies taking advantage of this so far.
3. Join Groups: There is a movement on LinkedIn toward open groups and this is great if you want to meet professionals with similar interests. Find some groups that apply to your industry or that you are interested in and join them. Post in a group one time for the next five days. We’d be really surprised if no one from the group responded or ended up looking at your profile.
4. Link Twitter: Not totally sure when this happened, but LinkedIn has a little section on the main bio for your Twitter handle. It adds a live link to your Twitter page and makes it easy for someone to find and add you there. Believe it or not, there are many job applications that have ‘Twitter handle’ as a required field.
5. Add ‘Sections’: Another new LinkedIn feature can be found right under your main bio section and before your summary. Click on the ‘Add Sections’ button to bring up a host of different content you can now easily display on your profile. Anything from patents, to certifications, to languages. It’s a really nice way to make your profile richer and display some of your work alongside the regular resume type information.

Take a few minutes every day to log in to LinkedIn. After you add people you know, look through their contacts and add even more that you probably know as well. Post one thing a day on your profile and one thing in any group you have joined and try out the 5 steps above. Watch your profile views jump and your network start to look really legit. Check out who is viewing your profile and reach out to them to connect further, especially if you’re looking for a job.
It’s still fairly easy to set yourself apart on LinkedIn, while at the same time, there are probably a ton of people you know already on it. The days of boring paper resumes are dying out. The job search is going social and with LinkedIn you can be ready. If you want to learn more about leveraging LinkedIn for personal use or business use, talk to us about one of our social media classes. Have a great week and enjoy some quality time with LinkedIn, it will absolutely pay off one day.