Week 22: Exploring Industry-Based and LinkedIn Apps
Let’s take a look at some more industry-based third-party apps.
Monday: Explore Apps for Legal, Business, and Creative Professionals
Take a quick look at all the other third-party apps that LinkedIn has to offer.
JD Supra Legal Updates
I’ll spend a lot more time on JD Supra’s Legal Updates later in Chapter 11, but for now, those of you who are attorneys or work in the legal field, know that Legal Updates will likely be an incredibly important application for you.
The Legal Updates feature allows you to post and read legal updates relevant to your area of legal expertise:
- Legal documents
- Court filings
- Legal articles
- Newsletters
- Client alerts
- Repurposed blog posts
- Legal forms
- Checklists
- Templates
- Fillable forms
- Contracts (for public record)
- Other transactional docs
These can be read and uploaded directly on your LinkedIn Legal Updates page, as shown in Figure 7-19.
What I like about Legal Updates is that you can customize your legal updates with the subjects and the specialties that are relevant to you. You don’t have to read about banking and finance law if your focus is real estate law.
Another excellent thing about JD Supra is that when you upload an article, your name and profile is attached to that article. This increases top-of-mind awareness, and also makes it easier for the people reading the article to get in contact with you (or for you to get in contact with the writer of an article that interests you). This is obviously much easier than trying to track down the contact information for the author of an article you might have read in a journal. If you have any questions about the article, or would like to make a connection, all you have to do is click on the author’s name and LinkedIn will take you to their LinkedIn profile, where you can send them a message, an InMail, get introduced to them, and so forth.
Figure 7-19: Legal Updates
To find Legal Updates by JD Supra, just go to the application on your LinkedIn profile, where you will be able to, according to JD Supra, upload documents, search documents, browse articles by subject or popularity, create a portfolio of your own documents, access legal eagle feeds, and even create favorite documents so that they’re easy to come back to.
Martindale-Hubbell Lawyer Ratings
Another legal application that LinkedIn offers is Lawyer Ratings by Martindale-Hubbell. If you have already received client review and peer review ratings, why wouldn’t you link those to your LinkedIn profile? This will help to substantiate any stated credentials on your LinkedIn profile. You can also provide a link so that your clients can create a client review just by clicking a button right within your own profile.
The Martindale-Hubbell ratings review is a free service, so if you are a legal professional, especially if you’re starting out, consider this service and application.
FT Press E-Bookshelf
FT Press created an application for LinkedIn called E-Bookshelf. This application allows you to find quick and concise business and career lessons from top experts, as shown in Figure 7-20. Although you have to buy credits to purchase these articles, FT Press gives you three free credits to get started on LinkedIn.
Figure 7-20: E-Bookshelf app
I’ve only played around a little with this application, mostly using the free credits, and it does look like there are some decent articles by top experts. E-Bookshelf can tell you how to do everything from buying a car to creating a really awesome Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. You might as well upload the application, try it out, and remove it if you don’t find it useful.
To see the articles you have purchased, click My E-Bookshelf. If you want to find an article, use the search field on the Home or Store tab.
Credits start at $1.99 each (and go down in price when you buy in bulk).
Rofo’s Real Estate Pro
Real estate professionals can use Rofo’s Real Estate Pro to list and promote client real estate transactions on their LinkedIn profile. According to LinkedIn, Real Estate Pro allows you to share the completed deals with your business connections as well as check your market, create a following, and promote your expertise while developing new business. Just be careful not to share any private information.
If you are looking for real estate or office space in the local marketplace, you might consider downloading Rofo for finding office space listings and property for sale. Sometimes you’ll find listings that you won’t find anywhere else. At the very least, it will give you some comparables.
Behance Creative Portfolio Display
According to LinkedIn, Creative Portfolio Display is a professional way to showcase your creative work in your LinkedIn Profile. Many of the cultural creatives are already using Behance as a social portfolio display of their work, so why not link it to your LinkedIn profile so that your LinkedIn network can see examples of your portfolio? Because it is a free and easy way to display your visual work and allows you to present creative projects done for past clients (or for your personal portfolio), it’s a great application to consider.
While it is a little work intensive to create, once you have Behance Creative Portfolio Display up and running, it won’t take much effort to update. If you have a great portfolio, you have a great opportunity to be hired through LinkedIn!
After installing the application, upload your portfolio in the Behance Network. Behance says on their website: “You can create an unlimited number of multimedia projects that include still images, video reels, text, and/or audio samples. You can select which projects are displayed on your LinkedIn profile.”
Tuesday: Create an Amazon Reading List
As an author, I’m a big fan of Reading List by Amazon. It’s surprising to me that many authors don’t even have their own books listed here. So if you are an author and your book is listed on Amazon, then by all means make sure you upload your book, as shown in Figure 7-21.
The Amazon Reading List can be found on the More tab. To link the Reading List to your LinkedIn profile, select the Your Reading List tab and where it says “What Are You Reading?” start typing the name of your book. If you’re not an author, you can type the name of any book you’re reading right now.
Once you type your book name (or your name to find what books you have listed on Amazon), select the book that you found. Then click one of these:
- Read It
- I’m Reading It Now
- I’ve Read It
If you’ve read it, you’ll also want to click I Recommend This Book, especially if it’s your book. You now have 5,000 characters to tell people why they should read your book.
The other cool thing about Reading List is you can also see what your network is reading. How do you use this? If you know what books people are reading, you know their interests and it gives you some good talking points when you reach out to someone for the first time or when you reconnect with someone.
You can check for updates by industry or by connection. You can also go right into your connection’s profile and check for books they’ve been reading recently.
Figure 7-21: Reading List by Amazon
Wednesday: Engage Your Audience with Polls
LinkedIn polls can be an excellent tool to collect feedback and engage with your audience. I think polls have become more popular for two reasons: First, they don’t take much time; you can read and answer a poll in less than 10 seconds. Second, LinkedIn polls provide immediate the demographic feedback of who answered the question (and what they answered).
As LinkedIn says, “Add the Polls application and leverage the wisdom of millions of business professionals on LinkedIn.” LinkedIn polls allow you to easily find answers to your business and market research questions. How do CEOs respond to your question? Do 25-year-olds answer differently than 45-year-olds? Do men and women answer differently? Once you ask your question, LinkedIn will distribute your poll to your connections, and even make it viewable to your entire LinkedIn network. You can share your poll through Facebook or Twitter, and embed the voting module on your own website or blog.
Consider your goals when creating your poll:
- To engage with your tribe in general.
- For market research. (Be aware this is not going to be statistically accurate.)
- To engage with an existing client or customer (for top-of-mind awareness).
- To engage with a potential client or customer (by asking leading questions).
LinkedIn polls can:
- Help you get more information about your market
- Clarify your message to be more impactful
- Test receptivity to new products or services
- Find new clients
- Keep you top of mind with your connections
Like with all social media and indeed marketing in general, you will want to measure the results of your poll very carefully. Apart from the results of the poll, you can see a few demographics as well such as age, seniority within a company (based on job title), and gender. Polls are a great source of general information, but not all polls are statistically valid. If you’re simply posting a poll on your website or letting it run viral, that sample is not truly random. It’s generally self-selected and that means that you have to read that data with care.
To create a poll, click the Polls link on the More tab. This allows you to see your existing polls as well as polls you’ve created, answered, or added to your profile.
Ask a question and give up to five responses. (I recommend using Other > Please Comment as your fifth option.) Use a conversational tone when creating your question and answers.
Here are the limitations, according to LinkedIn:
- Questions can be no more than125 characters.
- Up to five responses are allowed at 40 characters each.
- Responders can choose only one answer.
Once you’ve created your poll, you can share it on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. You can also create and share your polls in your Group Discussion field, as mentioned earlier in this book.
Once you have created a poll, you can keep an eye on it in the Polls section, as shown in Figure 7-22.
Figure 7-22: LinkedIn polls
You can see the answers and the demographics of the people who responded. You can continue to share your poll from this page. Note that the LinkedIn Share button on this page acts like the Sharing bookmarklet by allowing you to share in a status update, on Twitter, in groups, and with individuals. This feature is a lot more substantial than the LinkedIn Share when you first create the poll (which just goes out to the general LinkedIn membership).
You can share the link and even embed the poll in your blog. You can comment on the poll yourself and see the comments of those who took your poll. LinkedIn will email you any poll comments.
I just love the Polls feature and always have success connecting and re-engaging with my tribe when I use it. Go ahead and create a poll right now. Send it to me! I’ll be happy to respond.
Thursday: Organize Your Travel with My Travel
TripIt.com has created the My Travel app that organizes travel plans into an itinerary that has all of your trip details in one place. According to TripIt, the free account allows you to automatically create itineraries by forwarding confirmation emails to [email protected]; create custom itineraries; add maps, directions, travel notes, photos, recommendations, and more; and easily access your itinerary online, via mobile devices, calendar feeds, or social sites (like LinkedIn!). You can also share itineraries with family, friends, and co-workers to keep them in the know and connect with them on the road, as shown in Figure 7-23.
Figure 7-23: My Travel by TripIt
Use the My Travel app by TripIt. It lets people in your network know where you are going to be so they can contact you for a meeting. One of the best things to do with LinkedIn is find individuals to meet with face to face (F2F). However, even if you live in or near a big city, it’s not always the local person who is the perfect person.
Fortunately my job allows for a lot of travel, and so I use My Travel to turn my URL LinkedIn experience into an IRL (in real life) F2F meeting. And you don’t have to travel as much as I do to make it work. Any trip you take—even a family vacation—can result in a game-changing meeting.
My Travel not only tells you when your connections are traveling, but also lets them know when you are traveling. And what else are you going to do on the 6-hour layover in Phoenix? Might as well meet with a LinkedIn connection who also has a layover in Phoenix at the same time! Alan Martin, an Oracle professional, uses TripIt to plan and organize trips with colleagues in order to facilitate meetings and save on resources and expenses.
My Travel is on the More tab. Once you have created an account with TripIt, you can check out these features:
- My Trips
- Add A Trip
- Share My Travel
- Settings
- TripIt Support
My Trips are the trips you have booked (and previous trips). You can add a trip here (although if you set up an account with TripIt, it will automatically add any trip you send to [email protected] and even that can be automated). I think the Share My Travel link is pretty nifty too. You can pick who in your network you want to share your travel with, and LinkedIn will allow you to send a link (to sign up for TripIt) in a message to up to 50 people at a time. You can customize the message to say whatever you want it to say. If you don’t want LinkedIn to share your travel in an update, you can adjust those settings in Settings. And if you have any questions, TripIt Support is there for you.
The other really cool feature is your travel stats. When someone asks you if you travel much you’ll have the number of trips you’ve made, cities and countries you have traveled to, miles you have traveled, and days you’ve been on the road all in one place (year-to-date [YTD] and Total).
Friday: Use Skills
The Skills feature allows you to add your own unique skills to your LinkedIn profile. We already looked at Skills (on the More tab) to find Related Skills you can use as keywords. But what else does this feature do?
First, LinkedIn pulls a description of the skill from Wikipedia. If you are having a hard time finding things to put into the Experience section of your profile, consider using information from this section to describe your skills in more depth.
LinkedIn also lets you know the relative growth (popularity) of your skill on LinkedIn. Don’t let this keep you from adding a skill; it’s some good information to tuck away.
LinkedIn shows you which of its members are most proficient in your skill. I find this section particularly useful. LinkedIn gives you members’ first and last names—which you can’t get in a search unless they are a first-level connection (with the free account). It’s good to be connected to Influencers, and that’s exactly who these people are!
To the right of the LinkedIn professionals, you will see companies to whom this skill is relevant. They might be good prospects for you to follow. You can follow a company right from Skills. Then LinkedIn informs you of both updates and job opportunities from these companies.
LinkedIn also suggests groups you might be interested in based on your skills. Sometimes these are more relevant than groups you find on your own in the Groups directory. You can join a group right on this page.
If you are a job seeker, Skills will suggest jobs that have been posted that need people with your skills. You can apply for the job (or at least check it out) right from this page.
Skills is pretty much one-stop shopping on LinkedIn! If I only have a short time to show people the power of LinkedIn, I’ll give them a quick tour of Skills and that is usually all I need to do to convince people of LinkedIn’s significance.
So there you have it! Who knew so much was hidden on the More tab on LinkedIn? Keep an eye on this section since this is often where LinkedIn will stick its newest services or applications—all of which can be extremely important in marketing your business!
Guess what? This concludes the architecture of LinkedIn. Now you know where everything is and how to use it. It’s time to get into the really fun part of strategizing your marketing with your new LinkedIn knowledge.