Sarah Burness's Blog: Using The New LinkedIn For Personal Branding And Career Success

Tuesday, 21 November 2017

Using The New LinkedIn For Personal Branding And Career Success

Are you making the most of the new LinkedIn?

If you’re like most people, you log in to LinkedIn whenever you need to update your resume, click “like” on your colleagues’ work anniversaries and maybe post a link relevant to your field. Then, you log off for the next six months until something else happens in your career that you need to update.

If you haven’t logged in for a while, you might not have noticed the changes taking place all over LinkedIn. And with that, you also might not know what you are really missing out.

What’s New on LinkedIn?

To start, there are literally millions of more people on LinkedIn now than there probably were when you first signed up. Back in 2011, there were just 140 million users. Today, there are 500 million users, 9 million companies, more than 10 million active job listings and 100,000 new articles published daily.

There are new features that tell you when people are online so you can chat with them on the new messaging system. You can share your story via native video with filters, too. You also have access to top leaders in your field and there’s a possibility that mentoring services will roll out soon, in addition to many other updates rolling out weekly.

Forget Resumes – Get Hired on the New LinkedIn

The days of mailing out hundreds of copies of your resume in hopes of getting a few job interviews are in the past. These days, if you want to advance your career, you need to connect with people in your field on LinkedIn.

Where do you want to work and what do you want to do there?

Highlight your skills set on LinkedIn and show them why you would be a great fit for the job. Grow your network by engaging with people one on one. Show people what you’re made of by creating engaging posts. It’s all about ongoing engagement.

Remember, people log on to LinkedIn now more frequently than ever and they spend more time there. This creates a more open and collaborative environment. So, find the job you want on LinkedIn and then go after it.

In fact, 75% of people who recently changed jobs used LinkedIn to research their options and make decisions about where to go. More than a third of job seekers use social media to contact potential employers.

When you think about it, it totally makes sense – we don’t fax our resumes to potential employers anymore. How do people communicate these days? The answer is social media.

So, it only makes sense that we search for new jobs through the platforms where we do most of our communicating.

Personal Branding is the New Resume

What do you think makes a bigger impact — a piece of paper with a few facts about you or your longstanding digital footprint?

These days employers are searching for you online before you ever step foot in their office. This is where personal branding comes into play and your LinkedIn profile is the perfect place to build it.

We all know that networking is crucial for professional growth, but we all also know that going to “networking events” is not the most effective way to do so. You need to connect with people who share your interests and work in your field. The mishmash of people who show up to “networking events” aren’t always going to be the people you will make the deepest connections with.

Networking on LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to network with people who share your interests on a whole other level. 61% of professionals say that this kind of interaction has led to new job opportunities for them.

On LinkedIn, half of its users say that they have found a job through a mutual connection while 35% say that a casual conversation on LinkedIn has led to a new opportunity. There’s power in the new LinkedIn and you just have to take the steps to unlock it.

Learn more about the new LinkedIn by the numbers from this infographic. Are you making the most of the power of LinkedIn?

Source: Number Sleuth