If you’re new to LinkedIn, your very first steps should be to create your LinkedIn profile and build your core network.

An Effective LinkedIn Profile

Your LinkedIn profile is your calling card as you register your existing relationships through LinkedIn and create new ones. Entire books have been written on how to write the perfect profile, but most people can go a long way by attending to the basics: your photo, a headline, a summary of your bio, an outline of your past experience, recommendations from colleagues and other contacts, and endorsements. The quick thirty-minute setup guide at the end of this book walks you through the how-tos of getting started on all these elements. Even people who’ve already created a LinkedIn profile should review those basics to make sure they’re sufficient.

Make sure to update your LinkedIn profile regularly, especially after any job change or significant professional accomplishment. Get in the habit of updating your profile every quarter, or better yet, commit to a half-hour each month in which you will do at least one of the following:

• Review and update your bio.
• Add past jobs or past job details.
• Add a presentation, publication, or award.
• Upload a video.
• Update your picture.
• Ask a current or former colleague or client for a recommendation.
• Update your areas of expertise.
• Join a new group or weigh in on one you’ve been neglecting.
• Add connections by letting LinkedIn access your e-mail program to identify new contacts.

Keeping your profile updated regularly will ensure that anyone who looks you up gets a current picture of who you are and what you’re about. Even more important, it ensures that you’re not suddenly updating your profile the next time you’re ready for a career move and potentially tipping off your employer that you’re looking for a new gig. Pay it forward: while you’re doing your monthly outreach for recommendations, write a few for others.

FROM A LINKEDIN USER: I vet everyone who is on my internal and vendor team through LinkedIn. If someone doesn’t have a picture, that means they don’t really care about their page, and that tells me something. Also their summary is really important: I’m not looking for someone who can list the things they’ve done. Tell me a story; tell me about yourself, and how you are passionate about social media or tech or whatever you’re passionate about. Those people are always the most compelling LinkedIn profiles because you can tell that they are very well-rounded.—Carla Saavedra Kochalski, manager, social media and digital, Samsung Mobile USA

Understanding Connections

Once you have your profile set up, it’s time to start making connections. Connections are the essence of LinkedIn: they provide a map of who you know, who they know, and how those relationships can connect you to just about any industry or company you want to reach.

When you search LinkedIn for a name or keyword, you’ll see that the profiles in your search results come in different flavors:

• 1st degree. These are the people you have specifically connected with on LinkedIn; these should all be people you know and who pass the favor test (see below). Though you need to be selective, you do want to have the largest possible network of meaningful 1st-degree connections: people you will rely on to make introductions or offer advice, and people you want to help with their own business and career goals.
• 2nd degree. These are people who know someone you are connected to on LinkedIn. LinkedIn can help you to identify people who are 2nd-degree connections—and who might become useful 1st-degree connections. Because they are only one degree of separation away from you, you can get personal introductions to them or ask for candid, firsthand evaluations of them from someone you know. Even a modest 1st-degree network can net you a broad 2nd-degree network (if you have two hundred 1st-degree connections, each of whom has an average of two hundred connections, that means you have forty thousand 2nd-degree connections).
• 3rd degree. These are people who know your 2nd-degree connections. Those two degrees of remove make 3rd-degree connections much less likely to be useful since you probably won’t be able to get a personal introduction. You can still use these results to identify a role or an individual in an organization you are researching, however.
• Group. These are people who are in a LinkedIn group you belong to. Unless you’re in a selective group (like an alumni group or one for senior execs in a specific industry), your group membership is unlikely to translate into deep affinity. You can make your group memberships a source of real relationships, however, if you decide to actively participate in one or two groups.
• LinkedIn member. These are people who have no known connection to your network. You will see them listed as “LinkedIn Member” with minimal biographical details available to you.

FROM A LINKEDIN USER: The most useful LinkedIn feature is groups because you can network with people who share similar interests in a professional context. I started a group called “Personal Branding Network” back in 2007, grew it to a thousand members, and now it’s nearing ten thousand. The community has grown itself, and it’s become a great platform for me as I build my business and brand.—Dan Schawbel, personal branding consultant and author, Promote Yourself.

In the rest of this book, “connection” will mean a 1st-degree connection unless otherwise indicated, but it’s important to note that these other flavors exist and can be very important as well.

By thinking carefully about whom to connect with on LinkedIn, and just as carefully about how to stay in touch with them, you can turn your LinkedIn network into the best-case version of your real-life professional network. That includes your offline colleagues, clients, employees, and mentors. It also includes the relationships you have formed or supported online by making smart use of Facebook, Twitter, and (yes!) LinkedIn itself.

Connecting Selectively

Since 1st-degree connections are the basis for just about every relationship you establish through LinkedIn, your strategy for making those connections determines the nature of your LinkedIn experience. While some people advocate connecting with as many people as possible, you will build a more useful and meaningful network if you take a more selective approach: what I call the favor test.

The favor test is simple: only connect with people on LinkedIn if you would either ask a favor of them or do a favor for them.

This standard is in some ways a bit broader than the fairly common “only connect with someone you actually know” rule. Unlike that rule, it recognizes that you may well be prepared to connect with someone you’ve never interacted with if you have heard him speak, read her writing, or have a mutual colleague who has suggested you two have a lot in common. If you know that Kim Smith is a brilliant HR strategist because your best friend hired her as a consultant, even though you don’t know her personally, you might well do her a favor like introducing her to someone who is looking for HR support. That scenario is enough to warrant connecting with Kim when she asks.

On the other hand, and very importantly, the favor test keeps your network more focused on the people who matter most to you professionally than the “someone you know” rule. You might know Chris Thomas quite well, having worked with him on a major project. But even though you like him personally, you disliked working with him, have no intention of asking him for any work-related favors, and if someone called you to ask about your experience working with him, you’d have nothing positive to say. There’s no reason to connect with him, and if he asks, I recommend quietly ignoring the request.

In a similar vein, think carefully before connecting with personal friends or other nonwork acquaintances. If you have personal friends you know from past workplaces or who happen to be in the same field, by all means connect with them. If you have personal friends you know well enough to ask for introductions to their colleagues, again, it may be useful to connect on LinkedIn. But if you’d be too shy to call your college roommate for a professional introduction after ten years of radio silence, then don’t connect with him on LinkedIn.

The favor test applies when you are checking out LinkedIn’s suggestions of people to connect with. The suggestions are often startlingly accurate in terms of naming people you know, but just because you know them doesn’t mean they’ll pass the favor test, so be sure to run them through it before clicking “Connect.”

Similarly, you need to be careful if you use LinkedIn’s “add connections” function to search your e-mail address book for people you should connect to. This is well worth doing, not only when you first join LinkedIn but every three to six months, so that any new colleagues or contacts get added to your LinkedIn network. By connecting LinkedIn to your preferred e-mail service, you can easily identify the people you already know and want to connect with. Just be sure that you limit your connection invites to the people you know are already on LinkedIn (because the last thing you want to do is spam non-LinkedIn users with LinkedIn invitations), and run everyone through the favor test before you connect with them.

TIP: Create a LinkedIn schedule in your calendar or task list. Your schedule should remind you that it’s time to scan LinkedIn for recently joined contacts, update your profile, ask for new recommendations, provide recommendations, and undertake other maintenance tasks. Build these into a schedule so that you work your way through the list every three to six months, and set reminders so that your schedule doesn’t slide.

Where the favor test gets tougher is when you’re assessing incoming invitations to connect. For one thing, if you’re anything like me, the process of reviewing your incoming invitations with the favor test will be a close encounter with the darker side of your personality. No, I wouldn’t do a favor for the would-be social media pro who keeps approaching me at local networking events, even though he is a perfectly nice guy. He just doesn’t strike me as the sharpest knife in the drawer, and I can’t imagine lending him a hand. But yes, I would totally do a favor for this random journalist I’ve never met, because I want to be on her radar in case she is ever looking for social media experts to quote in a story.

This is the kind of triage process that makes me feel like a terribly opportunistic person, but that is the point of LinkedIn: to find opportunities. So as long as you don’t use the same criteria in deciding who gets to partake of your food supply after the global apocalypse, I fully endorse you being as brutally self-interested as possible when you decide which LinkedIn connections to accept and which to ignore.

Thankfully, “ignore” is the operative term here. You don’t have to send someone a message actually declining her LinkedIn connection request; you can just quietly click “Ignore” and it goes away. In some cases, however, writing a note may feel like the polite thing to do, particularly if the connection request comes with a personal message rather than the standard-issue, “I’d like to add you to my professional network.” In these circumstances, I recommend sending a note like: “Thanks for reaching out. I maintain a very limited network on LinkedIn, but if you’re on Twitter, I’d be delighted to connect there.”

TIP: Remove extraneous connections. If you’ve made or accepted too many connections, it’s not too late to triage. Just go to the Connections page on LinkedIn (under contacts in the main nav bar at the top of the page) and choose “remove connections” from the upper-right of the page.

You can always expand your network after you have a feel for the kinds of people it’s been useful to connect with, but once you’ve created a LinkedIn network that is full of meaningless connections, your LinkedIn experience will be so full of noise that it will be hard for you to find real value in your network searches. Err on the side of selectivity, and not only will you find LinkedIn more valuable, you’ll find your connections list is a true reflection of your professional identity, experiences, and goals.

Connecting Abundantly

There are some exceptions to the rule that you should connect selectively—cases in which your success does depend on the quantity of your relationships as much as on their quality. That’s typically the case in “matchmaker” jobs: event planners, journalists, venture capitalists, and recruiters are all people who need to connect to as many people as possible so that they can cast a wide net when they’re looking for the right quote, speaker, investment, or hire.

Similarly, you can and should make abundant connections if you are a “fairy godmother”—someone who is in the position to make other people’s wishes come true. Fairy godmothers include recruiters (who can bestow job opportunities), journalists (PR opportunities), venture capitalists (investment dollars), and CEOs or public figures (high-profile professional opportunities and introductions). If you are in such a position (and expect to remain there), then go ahead and make as many connections as you’d like. Since almost anyone you connect with will be someone you can ask a favor of, you don’t have to worry about cluttering up your network with connections you can’t leverage.

Note that even matchmakers and fairy godmothers who rack up abundant connections still adhere to the favor test: their jobs or accomplishments simply mean that they have a lot more people they can ask a favor of (or do a favor for). So if you are not sure if you are a matchmaker or a fairy godmother, you can still run each and every connection possibility through the favor test and err on the side of rejecting connections rather than accepting or inviting them.

Staying in Touch with LinkedIn

LinkedIn does its best to persuade you that, like other social networks, it offers a great way to keep in touch. Write messages! (Like e-mails, except you can send them only to the people you’re connected to.) Send InMail! (Also like e-mails, if you paid a fixed rate to be able to send a set number of e-mails a month, without knowing the recipient’s address.) Post an update! (Like a long tweet or a Facebook update, except in a context that feels more like an office than a clubhouse.)

But while LinkedIn is a great way to track who you know and, more usefully, who they know, even social media enthusiasts generally prefer other ways of actually staying in touch. Unless you’re part of a niche community or group that is unusually active on LinkedIn, it won’t be your main online hangout.

LinkedIn Updates

You can still get some value from sharing links or status updates on LinkedIn. Just don’t feel you are honor-bound to update it as frequently as your other social media presences. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, where you probably need to post about something other than yourself most of the time to keep readers interested, you can treat your LinkedIn update as a real-time résumé, updating it only when you have a new publication, presentation, or accomplishment to share. Just once a week is fine. You can also share links to articles or resources that reflect your professional interests and that may provide value to your colleagues, but you don’t need to. Think of your updates as a way to engage anyone who views your profile with a bit of fresh content or a snapshot of what you are currently working on, rather than a constant feed of information.

FROM A LINKEDIN USER: Status updates are the engine that drives LinkedIn. If I rely on my profile as the main way in which I share my story, then I’m assuming people will think of me, seek me out, and digest the considerable amount of content in my profile. I think it’s much better to tell your story one sound bite at a time via status updates. Doing so allows you to make an impression without needing to be sought out (since they’re automatically populated to your connections’ news feed on the home page).—Anthony Juliano, LinkedIn trainer and consultant

There is also widespread antipathy toward the practice of cross-posting from Twitter to LinkedIn (or vice versa). If you post from LinkedIn to Twitter, your post may be too long for Twitter’s 140-character limit and get ungracefully truncated. If you post at the typical Twitter velocity and cross-post to LinkedIn, your torrent of updates will feel out of place in the more sedate pace of the LinkedIn news feed, and any hashtags you include in your tweets will generate annoying links to nowhere if they’re viewed on LinkedIn.

FROM A LINKEDIN USER: Watch how you link your accounts together. If you link LinkedIn to Twitter, and you tweet about your crazy nights on the town, how does that look to a potential employee? Anyone can find out anything, but you should be careful about what you put where—especially if someone is headhunting you or you are looking for a job.—Lou D’Angeli, senior director of marketing and public relations, RSD, North America at Cirque du Soleil

It’s better to recognize that these are different networks with different audiences and norms. Even if you want to post something that is fundamentally the same content (like a link to your latest blog post), you’ll get the best results if you take the extra thirty seconds to tailor your update to your LinkedIn audience. You can make this easier by using a tool like HootSuite to manage your LinkedIn updates. Add LinkedIn as a network within HootSuite, and occasionally when you’re sharing a link to Twitter via HootSuite, take a moment to compose a separate update sharing that same link to LinkedIn. Picture this update sitting at the top of your online résumé (which is more or less where it will sit), and you’re likely to hit the right tone.

Managing Messages

Unless you are the rare person who feels as if you don’t get enough e-mail, I recommend minimizing your use of LinkedIn’s internal messages and InMail. It’s just one more inbox for you and others to check or, more accurately, one more inbox to neglect, until the person you messaged notices you messaged him with a fantastic business opportunity . . . two months ago.

The best way to avoid making your own LinkedIn Messages inbox into yet another communication chore is to let people know how you’d prefer to be reached. Include your Twitter handle and/or e-mail address (ideally in a somewhat spammer-resistant form) in your summary, and make sure to add all relevant contact details to the contact section of your profile.

LinkedIn also poses the risk of overloading your primary e-mail inbox, unless you carefully calibrate which kinds of notifications and messages are forwarded to you by e-mail. The quick thirty-minute setup guide at the end of this book outlines my recommended e-mail settings. Later in this book, I’ll also talk about alternatives to reaching out to potential contacts over LinkedIn’s own messaging system.

Even if its built-in contact options are limited, LinkedIn offers a great way to define the network of people you know and whom you can approach to share professional ideas and work. But perhaps its most powerful strength is that the network can help you make new connections, opening up even more possibilities.