CHAPTER 6

Using LinkedIn: Not Only an Online Résumé

CAROLE’S WORK EXPERIENCE at Addison-Wesley publishing was invaluable in developing the concept of building “strategic alliances.” In the era when Silicon Valley was exploding in tech innovation, we aligned publishing efforts with cutting-edge thinkers. We also aligned with a common set of goals to create one profitable corporate press book series after another, leading the pack in book title sales, revising biannually into brand-new editions, and continually growing volume by volume. With or without the Internet (we were only moving atoms back then), it was an effective strategy to link with others who had a built-in audience, addressing their needs and exchanging specialized content.

As publishers we were able to reach a wider audience than corporations could, with approachable prose in book form, well before the era of LinkedIn and online social networking. And it’s just as critical today that authors develop and explore mutual goals with a broad list of contacts throughout the manuscript process and after the book is published.

Definition of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the largest online professional network, starting out with the concept of professional résumé posting and growing well beyond and achieving a global networking reach. Reid Hoffman launched LinkedIn in 2003 based on the idea of “Six Degrees of Separation” and that every human being is actually connected to every other human being by no more than six intermediary people. Once you join LinkedIn you’ll see the power in using this concept.

Why LinkedIn Is Important to Authors

One of the major unseen benefits of LinkedIn is that talent scouts are looking for you. Agents, acquisitions editors, TV producers, radio show hosts, and many other talent scouts search LinkedIn in the same manner as employers seek job candidates. In addition to subject matter expertise, we in the publishing industry search for an ability to communicate and reach a large audience, as well as cultivate a dedicated following. This magic combination has always been hard to find, but thanks to LinkedIn, finding talent has become far easier.

Now agents and publishers can find and contact potential authors, discover a single person or organization, and find subject matter experts by just typing in a keyword. This chapter shows ways to use LinkedIn as a magnet for unexpected opportunities, a valuable online location for your author brand, social authority, and professional presence, and a place to gain ground in growing audience and building co-branding affiliations.

The new rules on the web require that to be noticed, you need to be actively engaged in the business of reaching out, growing your author brand, and showcasing your book. As a professional network, LinkedIn is a fantastic platform for growing awareness about you and your writing. It’s also free (for basic membership) and easy to use and provides these additional advantages:

Network with millions. More than 259 million people use LinkedIn. It’s a well-established and well-recognized global professional network for every type of author. Connect with other authors to announce your book, to share ideas and communities that will support your writing goals, and to find out about events and opportunities.

Connect with more than 100,000 moderated LinkedIn groups. Through membership in groups targeted to your subject matter, you can easily post your book announcements to a large number of professionals who have expressed interest in your subject matter. Your informational posts, discussed later in this chapter, will reach all members in targeted interest groups. Post about your book publication manually, or, as we recommend, through an automated service like HootSuite to automatically send the same post to every relevant group you belong to. This is especially helpful to announce a new blog post quickly and easily. Members of your group generally respond with kudos, advice, and information, and by telling their friends, they can help you reach a larger audience in ways you hadn’t imagined. A viral message to friends will expand your announcement far beyond your initial list of contacts.

Connect to organizations and businesses. Many businesses purchase large numbers of books for their employees or clients. People who are connected to you on LinkedIn may be tied to particular companies or industries in ways you’re not aware of. For example, a book on using preventative measures to take control of your health could be a perfect title for an insurance company to distribute to their members to help them keep their health-care costs low. And the company could potentially be looking to buy hundreds or thousands of copies of that book.

Rank higher on web searches. Try a Google search on your name from a friend’s computer. If you have posted your profile to LinkedIn, your presence on the site will appear near or at the top of the search. The reason is that LinkedIn is a well-respected and trusted site, and therefore its profiles rank highly on search engines like Google.

Control your updates. When you make a change to your profile, such as adding information about your upcoming book, you can use your settings to broadcast this to your whole list of contacts, automatically. All new viewers of your profile, regardless of whether they’re in your contacts, will see your book announcement! Your connections will notify you of updates in the same way.

Showcase you résumé. Of course, LinkedIn showcases your experience and accomplishments on your résumé. Your LinkedIn author profile promotes your author brand as a storefront, along with your book image. Your public photo, author profile, and book description add up to essential multiple exposure to your audience.

Collect public “endorsements.” These are the short words taken from the “skills” area of your LinkedIn profile. Your contacts are automatically encouraged by LinkedIn to endorse you for special skills you have. LinkedIn also prompts you to endorse others, so every chance you have, endorse others generously and you will find that others do the same in return. The more public endorsements you collect, the more your social authority rises by virtue of the fact that others see power in numbers.

Share public “recommendations.” Recommendations on your LinkedIn profile are the best recommendations you can get, as they are posted in public and often show up on searches on your name. Positive recommendations equal their weight in gold in terms of their importance to your author platform. Satisfied clients are generally happy to write a short recommendation for you, so it’s appropriate simply to ask for these. Recommendations should be short and have a boost for you right in the first sentence, as people tend to scan these. And when people recommend you, reciprocate.

Creating and Optimizing Your LinkedIn Author Profile

If you are not already among the 259 million people in more than 200 countries who have posted a résumé or biographical description on LinkedIn, it’s easy to start, as we illustrate below. And if you already have a profile on LinkedIn, you can rework it so it’s aligned with the author profile and brand you’ve established on the rest of your platform. It’s also easy enough to add information about your book.

LinkedIn is straightforward, and our primer will get you started, but if you wish to read more as you go, top LinkedIn reference books have been published, including books by our clients: Joel Elad’s LinkedIn For Dummies (Wiley Publishing, Inc.) and Eric Butow and Kathleen Taylor’s How to Succeed in Business Using LinkedIn: Making Connections and Capturing Opportunities on the World’s #1 Business Networking Site (Amacom).

It is critically important to fully complete your LinkedIn profile. Complete profiles appear in more search results on LinkedIn itself, and it’s a professional necessity to communicate to your potential audience, colleagues, potential booksellers, agents, editors, and publishers a complete picture of your background and subject matter experience to establish your authority in your field.

Getting Started

When you open your LinkedIn profile page by clicking the Profile tab at the top of the LinkedIn window and selecting Edit Profile, focus on the following:

Photo. To ensure consistency and recognizability, use the same author photo that you included on your author website in Chapter 1. LinkedIn claims people respond to profiles with photos seven times more often than those without.

Name. Use your name the same way you do in other parts of your author platform: first and last with no variations. Searches depend on the exact same set of letters, so be careful to keep this 100% consistent.

Headline. Your headline is your advertising for your author brand, so be sure to include the identifying term of “author” somewhere in your headline. For example, on LinkedIn, Carole uses the headline “Literary Agent, Author Platform speaker, author and consultant” under her name. You can use Author of [BOOK TITLE], Publisher, or any short form as long as it includes your identity as author and, ideally, your book title. Front and center, your headline is tagged to your name. Your headline appears in search results, on your comments on LinkedIn, in your use of Answers, and everywhere else on the network. Your headline is a signature line that becomes part of how your audience knows you as an author and it also entices and motivates people to go further in reading the content of your profile.

Summary. If your headline is the catch-phrase description of your career, your summary is the quick overview of your career, showing who you are, what you do, and what you’ve done. It’s acceptable to duplicate content you already used in creating the author biography on your book and author websites.

Experience. This is the detailed résumé section of your profile, and you have an opportunity here to go far beyond the traditional chronological list of your employment history. Include everything that proves your subject expertise, including nontraditional roles and projects that do not fit in a conventional résumé. For example, create job titles that fit nonemployment segments of your professional timeline. I often use the self-created title of “Idea Magnet” to show my interest in cutting-edge thought. List your position as author, and then go beyond using some of these possible job titles for yourself:

• Contributor: If you regularly contribute to your blog, or other publication or website, include these in the separate position spaces and add a description of your articles and/or posts that you wrote for these.
• Journalist: If you write a popular blog.
• Student: If you have spent long periods researching or studying a particular topic.

  You can add portfolio items to each entry in the Experience section to enhance your authority. Link to pictures of your book covers, YouTube videos, network television interviews, and presentations. Every site you regularly post to should be included in your profile.

  As in every other part of your author platform, be sure to include your industry keywords in your summary and experience entries. People use keywords to search, so be sure your keywords match what people search for. For example, if you are an expert scholar of the Gilded Age of United States history, and you want a publisher to find you, don’t refer to “the period after Reconstruction,” or simply list the date range of your interest. Include the phrase Gilded Age in your description.

List of Publications. Be sure to list all of your publications, including articles. For each publication, you can include:

• Title
• Publication (for articles) or publisher (for books)
• Publication date (month/day/year)
• Publication URL: A link to any useful site on the web for information about this publication. This could be a link to any article you have published online, your book site (if you have one), or the Wikipedia entry for your bestseller. You can only list one URL here, so make it count!
• Authors: You can recognize any coauthors you have here, especially if they are already on LinkedIn.
• Description: You’ll want to have a ready overview paragraph, known as a “blurb,” about your book. This can be the descriptive copy your publisher used on Amazon or other online book vendors.

Projects. Consider how you can expand your list of projects to include everything you’ve worked on that might be relevant to your areas of expertise. Consultants have the freedom to list individual clients one by one, and you can take a similar approach if it presents your work in the best light. Each book, article, and course can be listed as a project. The more projects you list, the broader the perception of your social authority. To add a project, click Add at the top of the Projects section. If it makes sense, connect each project with your Occupations; use the Occupation drop-down menu. LinkedIn, true to its name, allows a lot of linking between your profile and other parts of your author platform, so be sure to link a project to all relevant websites.

Contact Info: Website and Twitter Links. At the top of your profile, between your headline and summary areas, is a small Edit Contact Info button. Use this to connect your Twitter account to LinkedIn. It also allows you to create three website links. Use the drop-down menu to select from Blog, Personal Website, Company Website, RSS Feed, Portfolio, and Other. We suggest using the Other option to create compelling headlines for these links, encouraging your audience to “Learn About My Book” and “Buy My Book,” leading to your Amazon purchase page. Also use one of the links to bring your audience back to your author website where your complete author presentation is fully showcased.

How to Increase LinkedIn Connections

You may already have begun building your LinkedIn connections. If not, search through and invite all colleagues, clients, friends, and associates from your address book. If you have not already uploaded your address book to LinkedIn, it’s the best way to build up your LinkedIn connections quickly. In addition, search through others’ contacts to find additional people to connect to on LinkedIn.

The sidebar on your LinkedIn home page shows the current size of your network and lists your direct (1st degree) connections and also tells you how many people you theoretically could link to, sometimes numbering in the millions; that gigantic number represents your 1st degree contacts, all the people whom your direct contacts know (2nd degree), plus all the people that your second-level connections know (3rd degree).

Be aware that LinkedIn restricts communications a little bit, depending on how many degrees of separation exist between you and the other person. For connections beyond 1st degree, you will need one of your connections to introduce you (using the LinkedIn Introductions feature) before communicating directly. Or you’ll need to introduce yourself, in which case we recommend personalizing your invitation email instead of using LinkedIn’s standard invite. As you connect with your peers, consider and suggest opportunities for cross-promotion, such as guest blogs. Build as many connections that are meaningful to your writing as you can.

Finding People on LinkedIn

Building a professional network on LinkedIn is not difficult. With the millions of people already using the network, you won’t have to look very far to find your colleagues and friends. LinkedIn makes it easy to locate them.

List all possible places of work or other group affiliations to find people you may know. As you fill out your profile, LinkedIn reviews its database to locate your current and former coworkers, college friends, and the like. Every time you log in, you’ll be greeted with the names and photos of three “people you may know,” with a link to connect with them.

Email import. Click the Add Connections button in the upper right corner of any LinkedIn page (next to your name). The first screen you see is the Address Book import screen. As with many of the other services we’ve discussed, the import service supports most web-based mailboxes: Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL. They will also pull in Microsoft Outlook address books. Select the people you wish to connect with and send them a note. The import will also identify email addresses that aren’t on LinkedIn, and you can invite their participation as well. The weakness of this method is that you cannot customize the invitation for each user, but the convenience may outweigh the less-than-personal greeting. You have the option of following up personally with another message.

Advanced People Search. If you’re looking for a single individual you know (or would like to know) on LinkedIn, typing the person’s name in the search box at the top of the LinkedIn screen works just fine unless it’s a common name with multiple listings. Advanced People Search can help cut through the clutter. If you’re looking for a specific contributor for a project, click the Advanced link next to the Search box to open the Advanced Search page. Three columns of search criteria appear, but only two columns are available to basic (that is, unpaid) LinkedIn members.

Say you’re researching Martian gravity and want to know who might be the best subject matter expert to connect with:

• For title: Type “astrophysicist” in the field. A drop-down menu will appear, labeled Current or Past. Change this to Current.
• Relationship: Free members can send messages to people they know (1st Connections), people your first-level connections know (2nd Connections), and members of LinkedIn groups you’re part of (see later in the chapter for more on Groups). If you want everyone (not just people you can contact directly), check 3rd + Everyone Else.
• Industry: Check Defense & Space, Higher Education, and Research.
• Click Search, and quickly you’ll get a pretty big list, ten to a page, sorted by their relationship to you. From this screen, you can view each individual profile and send a message to each person. You can further filter the list with the fields on the left side of the list.

What about those fields in the third column of the Advanced People Search? The gold icon clues you in that you’ll need to send LinkedIn some cash to access these fields. Premium membership (discussed later on in this chapter) can be obtained for monthly or annual fees.

For a search like the one described above, you might also try finding people who participate in groups discussing issues in your niche.

How to Join LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups are forums of people with a common interest, and groups are the places on LinkedIn where people post articles, blog updates, advice, and comments. Maximize your presence by joining all groups related to your subject matter; it’s easy, free, and bumps up visibility of your author brand and book. Be sure to join groups that reach the target audience related to your book. Visit Carole’s LinkedIn profile to see her list of author and publishing group memberships for ideas about which groups to join. Find more groups for your subject matter by searching LinkedIn profiles of people you are already connected to in your field. Among the thousands of varied groups on LinkedIn, find at least a dozen to join and introduce yourself to the group. Generally if you are new to a group, other members will contact you immediately, as everyone is on these groups for the same purpose: to network. Remember, most groups have rules limiting promotion, and the general rule is to introduce yourself and what you have to offer with a book “byline.”

Keep the following things in mind when joining and participating in LinkedIn groups:

• LinkedIn limits free members to a maximum of 50 group memberships. Given that you may not know which groups are going to be the most active or fruitful for your activity, you’ll want to scope things out. As you edge closer to the 50-group limit, consider what groups you may just want to monitor for activity. Most groups are designated as Open, which means anyone (including the general web-searching public) can visit and read what’s happening in a group, but only members can post. If you’re already a member of 50 groups and try to add a new one, you’ll get a message that you’ve reached the maximum number of groups. At that point you can choose to leave a group by clicking on the group name within the Groups page and then click the Member button within the group page.
• Once you have joined a group, you can post to it through a single click, forming an immediate audience that helps people to find you and your book. Try to seek out connections for any and all parts of your author platform, including guest blogs, interviews, and guest appearances on others’ podcasts. The best strategy to get support is to give support, that is, show how you can contribute to the success of others’ publications or platforms.
• Groups include professional organizations, educational organizations, and businesses, most likely all of which are also seeking co-promotion opportunities. If any of these contacts are willing to buy some quantity of your book to use in courses or support, that early adoption will increase sales and future publishing opportunities for you. These can also lead to custom corporate writing opportunities, as all organizations now seek out strong Internet content writers. You can also ask your groups for names in your area of specialty to review and write an endorsement or foreword for your book.
• Your own postings to your groups should include only professional announcements, such as book release information, reviews, and interviews. Convey information—not advertising, which is considered “spam.”

• Be sure to join groups that discuss the topic or product or service your book pertains to. Then be as active as possible in discussions by asking and answering questions. However, don’t push your book when you ask or answer questions. Let people see you as an expert and be intrigued enough by your expert comments to click over to your profile. Once a LinkedIn user visits your profile, you have a better chance of steering them to your author and book websites and your LinkedIn company page, which you’ll learn more about later in the chapter.
• Use groups to find other writers and experts on the topic, product, or service about which you wrote your book. If you find someone in the same group you want to connect with for potential cross-promotional opportunities, consider adding that person as a connection and/or contact that person through InMail, LinkedIn’s internal mail system.

Update Your LinkedIn Profile Regularly

Remember that LinkedIn is a professional network, not a personal one like Facebook, so update your profile and post status updates regularly to keep your search ranking high. Post links to new posts on your blog, repost links to articles (with short comments about their value), write short original posts related to your subject area, and report on events, media mentions of you and your book, speaking engagements, reviews of your book, and guest blog posts. Be sure to post updates as you write your book and keep posting as you launch. Authors generally cheer for other authors, and you’ll find LinkedIn author communities to support you, which will become more valuable as time goes on, especially when you need buzz and reviews for your book to be posted on review sites.

Articles to Repost

Pulse has replaced the former LinkedIn Today to bring you a customized set of headlines relevant to your career and industry. These stories are a rich source of information for reposting to your author platform. When you repost articles that are of interest to your readership, you become a “curator,” sharing valuable information that your audience wants to read and people will thank you and share them. This is a great way to increase your posts beyond what you write in your own words. Reposting information like lists of resources will generally elicit appreciation and yield reposting. The Pulse news feed is also a good way to keep up with your industry and see what your LinkedIn connections are reading and sharing.

You can customize your news feed to select news in additional and related industries of importance to you and also check on the people who are sharing these articles. Here’s how:

• Under the Interests tab at the top of your LinkedIn page, click Pulse. You’ll come to Your News, a batch of stories customized for interests, companies, and industries you are already connected to. Notice the other tabs at the top of this page; reviewing them will further customize Your News.
• Click Influencer Posts. Pulse displays the top posts of the last day from their set of contracted celebrity bloggers. Many of these people are household names, others are famous in their niche. Click the All Influencers tab to see who they are, even the ones who didn’t post today. These posts appear like business cards, following the same format. There’s a featured graphic for the post at the top, followed by the name and photo of the poster. Click the +Follow button if you want to see every post from this person. After the post title and date, you’ll see the Channel it’s in (more on this shortly, but it gives you a sense of the broad category the post fits under). At the bottom of the card are the Social buttons: Page views (in thousands), Likes, Comments, and an arrow to let you share the post with your network.
• Channels are broad categories of Influencer posts and news stories. Channels include perennial topics like Finance and Banking, Higher Education, Law & Government, and Professional Women. There are also channels like My Startup Story, Big Ideas & Innovation, The Book That Changed Me, and What Inspires Me. If any of these match your interest, click the + sign to follow.
• The All Publishers list is an alphabetical list of news sources for Your News. Look for your trusted sources, clicking on each source name to review its stories before clicking the + sign to follow that source. If you have the time to scan the whole list, you might find some interesting places to write for as well.

Note that before LinkedIn bought the company, Pulse was an independent social-news outfit with mobile apps for Apple iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, and the Nook tablet. These are still available.

LinkedIn Strategies

Our author client Eric Butow, coauthor of How to Succeed in Business Using LinkedIn, has summarized the best strategies that authors can use to expose their books to the professional audience on LinkedIn. Note that Butow’s strategies, below, involve interactivity among your LinkedIn contacts.

Status reports. When you get updates about your book, such as a speaker event or a link to a great review of your book, be sure to write a “status report” post about it as soon as possible and share it with all LinkedIn users. By sharing with all users, you increase the chances of someone searching for your book topic to find your LinkedIn update and clicking through to your profile.

Create your own group that discusses your book. You may want to do this after you become familiar with LinkedIn and start to get more interest from people in groups you already participate in. Be sure you invite your connections and do things in your group to help promote exclusivity, such as posting articles and links that readers can’t find anywhere else. Name the group with the subject matter of your book, then send out a group email as a blind copy to everyone in your address book, giving reasons for joining. Keep members engaged with weekly announcements and fresh discussion questions.

Ask for recommendations from people who say they enjoyed reading your book. With Eric’s books, he’s found that some people who want to connect with him say specifically that they want to do so because they enjoyed one of his books. Help your connections in turn by recommending them. Remember, recommendations count more than simple endorsements. Your credibility is enhanced by each reader saying something you’ve written has impacted his or her life in a positive way.

LinkedIn Ads

Use LinkedIn ads to promote your blog and the publication of your book. You’ll notice rectangular boxes in the right sidebar, labeled “Ads by LinkedIn members.” You can create these types of ads for any purpose and target an audience in several ways.

• Geography: By continent
• Job Function: a somewhat shorter list of occupations than in the Advanced People Search, but some good choices
• Seniority: target everyone from entry level to the C-Suite
• Industry: another broad range of choices

Before your book is released, you may want to sign up potential media reviewers and academics to use your book in classes. Create your base ad, then come up with various text and image combinations that you can use to customize the base ad and reach your targets (LinkedIn allows up to 15 variations for the same campaign). The ads are simple to create: a 25-character headline and 75 characters for description and call to action. You can point them to your website or a page on LinkedIn. Add a thumbnail image of your book cover to draw the eye.

On the next page, you can target your audience on the categories listed above, and even more narrow groupings: school (as specific as you like), skills, gender, age, and also specific LinkedIn groups.

LinkedIn will charge you only each time a LinkedIn user clicks on your ad, or based on visibility (per 1,000 impressions). This ad can link to another website, such as your book blog. Costs vary depending on the budget you want to set for each advertising campaign, and as with Facebook (described in the previous chapter), you can set a time limit on your campaign or run it indefinitely. You have the option to collect leads, where people who click on the ad can opt in to a follow-up contact from you.

Get more information by moving the mouse pointer over Business Services in the menu bar and then clicking Advertise in the menu.

Best Practices of LinkedIn Networking

Introduce yourself with a factual brief statement. People are inundated with information, so the concise introduction has become critical. Find a way to condense who you are and what you do into a minimal number of words. For example, many people don’t understand what a literary agent is, so by saying “I connect authors to publishers and publishers to authors,” the lightbulb turns on. Present yourself with your name, URL, high point of your career background, and mention one successful or upcoming project. Then the door is open to ask your question or state what you’re seeking.

Post useful content to groups. Make sure that your public postings are informative and open doors to knowledge that is useful. The best way to get a reposting of your work is to find valuable lists, insights, or facts that further the knowledge base of your readers. As long as you include other information, it’s okay to tell people what you are doing, too (publications, events, and the like).

Express appreciation to those who help or comment favorably. Always send an appreciation message to people who’ve given you their time in any way or who may have referred you to one of their contacts. Remembering someone in a “thank you” keeps you top of mind and increases your value when someone asks about you.

Find ways to help others. Always be on the lookout for how you can help someone, that is, when you hear of opportunities that might interest them, and you’ll often find they’ll reciprocate.

Benefits of LinkedIn Premium Accounts

Your account at LinkedIn is free, but paid upgrades are also available. The added features aren’t necessary for basic author platform use, but here’s a note on added features:

InMail. Send messages to anyone on LinkedIn without asking for an introduction.

Profile Organizer. Organize profiles in folders, add contact info and other details to profiles.

Unlimited advanced search. With a free account you can only search up to 100 profiles. With a Premium account, you get access to more profile information when you conduct an Advanced People Search.

Access to the full list of Who’s Viewed Your Profile. Author client Joel Elad, author of LinkedIn For Dummies, which includes step-by-step tutorials on the basic and advanced uses of LinkedIn, suggests having access to the full list of people who have viewed your profile, noting that as an agent, the “list is useful to me to contact authors who are actively searching for agents. If someone views me and I’m interested in their profile, I will always contact that person who viewed me.”

Checklist, Step 6: LinkedIn

Join LinkedIn.

Optimize your author brand profile with photo, name, and keywords consistent with all parts of your author platform.

Upload your address book contacts into LinkedIn.

Grow your contacts list and post updates.

Join groups and post your news.

Seek joint book-marketing opportunities.