LinkedIn Recommendations: Things You Should Know

LinkedIn is continuing to grow rapidly, which means more people are using the tool for intelligence, recruitment, and networking. A social space like LinkedIn can make specific individuals stand out among others; a specific way individuals can best leverage this social network is by gathering recommendations on their LinkedIn profile. 

Here are some guidelines for LinkedIn recommendations: 

1. Ask For Specific Recommendations

When you ask someone for a recommendation, make sure the request is personal and polite. LinkedIn will autofill the recommendation request text box, but remember to take that out. Replace it with asking the person for a recommentaion for something specific you worked on together. Also, ask the person to include what happened as a result of working together. Specific information showing how your skill or work was used reflects well on you. 

2. Don’t Ask Everyone

Don’t send out a defaulted autofill recommendation to all of your connections, because most of those connections haven’t worked with you close enough. You also want to keep the recommendations business related; you don’t want your best friend or landlord to recommend you in a way that doesn’t relate to business. 

3. Don’t Ignore a Request

If you receive a recommendation request from someone that you don’t really know that well, don’t ignore it. Say something like “Thanks for the recommendation request, but I don’t feel that I can endorse your work, since we don’t really know each other that well.” With a response like this, you have let the person down gently and didn’t just leave them hanging. 

4. Be Careful About How You Recommend

While a lot of recommendations look good, make sure your whole team or all of your co-workers don’t recommend each other. Recommendations like that add little value. 

5. Update Recommendations

It’s not very common, but you might want to delete some recommendations you have made. Go to the “recommendations you have made” link in your profile and withdraw it.  You can also revise a recommendation here. 

6. Say ‘Thank You’

When someone writes you a recommendation, you are given the option to return the favor. Don’t do it unless you feel comfortable recommending the person. Regardless, send the person a note saying thanks for the recommendation they wrote for you. 

Social media mistakes

We have been posting a lot of ‘guides’ to social media, so it was great to come across this list of common social media mistakes from Small Business Trends:

• Creating profiles everywhere– Spreading your username around the internet may seem like a good idea, but do research to decide which sites will help your business the most. Being choosy also prevents you from overextending yourself; find out where your customers are, pick your best options and be loyal in your devotion to building those!
• Not completing your profile– This shows a lack of commitment, and it reflects poorly on your membership in the online community. Opening yourself up a bit by customizing your profile will attract like-minded members and show you are there to stay.
• Fake friending– This mistake will prove to be a huge waste of time. Quality of friends is much more important than quantity of friends. “Seek out the people who will be most vocal about you. Then, go out of your way for them. Help them. Connect with them. Build real relationships. That is how social media becomes powerful…You wouldn’t walk into a coffee shop and immediately ask everyone to be your best friend. Don’t do it online either,” Small Buisiness says.
• Selling to everyone, immediately– Be patient through the necessary step of proving yourself to the online community. Take the time to create relationships before pushing a product.
• Using the same strategy on every site– You have probably figured out that social networking sites are not all the same; from Twitter to LinkedIn, each site has its own rules and methods of success. If you don’t learn the ins and outs of each site you participate on, you may fail at them all.
• Not measuring it– Don’t go into social media without thinking through why you’re doing it, what you are hoping to get from it and a way to track your success.

Take these tips, study them, and maybe take a few minutes to reevaluate your own social networking. You may already be on the right track, but there is always the opportunity to make social media work better for you and your business.

Building your brand on Facebook

Once again, we are gaining valuable insight from the social media gurus at Mashable. They posted a great 10-step guide to building your personal Facebook brand…here’s a recap:

1. Know your audience. Too many people are sharing information to the wrong audiences. Remember, you can limit what select users can see on your profile, just by changing your settings.
2. Decide on your branding strategy. It should be based not only on the audience you’re targeting, but your overall life goals.
3. Set your privacy settings. Depending on your Facebook goals, you may set your entire account to private or grant certain individuals permission to view sections of your profile. You can also make your profile public for the world to see, which could be beneficial to you if you’re looking to become more visible in your industry and will result in your profile ranking high for your name in search.
4. Fill out your profile completely. Paint a picture of who you are. When filling out the information fields, be sure to focus on the education and work section, where you can reconnect with fellow alumni from college, or past colleagues that might be able to help you get a job. Also, in the contact information field, be sure to list your blog, any websites you might own and links to your profiles on other social networks. Since hiring managers use Facebook’s search engine to find candidates, it pays to load up your profile with keywords that they can search against.
5. Import contacts and grow your network. Each month, you should go through the process of importing your contacts from your email accounts and your instant messenger screen name accounts. This will help you continue to grow your Facebook network as you’re meeting new people through your other channels. If you have a blog, it’s also a smart idea to use Facebook Connect.
6. Update your status. Based on your branding strategy, you’ll want to update your status to either keep people informed about what you’re up to, push them to your content or both.
7. Start a group or a page.
8. Join or start an event in your area.
9. Link out to your Facebook profile. If your Facebook strategy is to promote yourself and remain public, then placing a link (and possibly a Facebook icon) on other sites to your Facebook profile is a great idea. As the chief marketing officer for your personal brand, you want to build your friend list, so that you have more people to market to now and in the future. Think of your Facebook profile as a digital asset and grow the equity in that asset over the rest of your life.
10. Feed your social networks. By using Ping.fm, you can update your status on Facebook, as well as many other social networks in an instant, without duplicating your efforts. Also, you can import your blog titles in Facebook using notes or by using an application called Simple RSS. Not only does this make you more productive, but it appears as though you’re contributing to your community, without you having to think about it. Since Facebook is all about sharing, those that share more will be remembered more, which is great for personal branding.

With over 200 million active users, and 600,000+ joining every day, Facebook is a tool worth mastering. It could be just the thing you need to get your business or career booming, so get on board!

Check out Blue Media Boutique’s Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/blue.media.boutique