Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Network -- or Destroy Your Career

LinkedIn is a fantastic networking tool that can be used to stay abreast of industry news, discuss new trends with people in your field, meet people who can help further your career, and intelligently market yourself and your business to people who will want to meet you and use your services.

You should also be using it to help other people reach their career goals, because that's what social media's about - the more people you help, the more who will want to help you. If you're looking to change companies or jobs there's no better place to research how to make contact with people at those companies. LinkedIn will help you find the person in your network who can help introduce you. You can also reach out to people in your groups (if their settings permit it) by sending them a message and asking them to connect with you.

Do any or all of those things intelligently and LinkedIn can become the central hub of your career advancement. Do them wrong, and you can quickly become a pariah.

Discussion group gold

If you sign up for discussion groups populated by people working in the same field and ask to be notified when people post to them, you can stay on top of what's new almost effortlessly just by scanning those notifications. Daily updates from the groups will include links to new comments posted, which often include links to interesting articles.

You can become a hero to your Twitter followers if you share the best of these on Twitter.

Like Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn provides a wonderful way to:

• Share information you find relevant and useful.
• Become known as someone who stays on top of developments in your field.
• Distribute links to your own relevant posts, articles and other work you're proud of.
• Meet people through the groups by answering questions and providing your perspective to discussions.

Inviting connections

Everyone is on LinkedIn to advance their careers by expanding their professional network. But you should invite another member of a group to connect or contact them privately only:

• If you have talked to them in the group and find you have common ground or interests.
• If you have a business proposition that is crafted specifically for them.
• If you'd like to meet someone on their contact list and need an introduction.

No one is obligated to help you with any of those things, but if you do it politely and professionally, it can help you grow your business and reputation in ways previously unavailable.

Group no-nos

What you don't want to do is spam a group with:

• Posts that are blatant attempts to drive traffic to your website.
• Posts that aren't relevant to the group.
• Obvious marketing messages (particularly if the product or service isn't even relevant to the group).
• Links to every blog post or article you write, regardless of relevancy to the group.
• Invitations to group members to connect just because you're members of the same group.

All of these transgressions will hurt your reputation, your business, and your career.

For a while, several of my discussion groups were unusable because of the amount of spam posts similar to the ones that land in your bulk mail folder, shot-gun posts from people looking for particular business opportunities, and posts to every blog post a member every wrote, regardless of relevancy to the group.

There's nothing wrong with self-promotion. But it needs to be done intelligently, in a way that doesn't make people feel like the only reason you're talking to them is to blow your horn and sell your product. A post needs to be relevant to the group to justify posting it. Otherwise it's not networking, it's inappropriate marketing.

Connecting wisely

There's a debate in one the Inbound Marketers - For Marketing Professionals LinkedIn group (note: you will have to join the group to read the discussion) on whether you should agree to connect with people you don't know and haven't worked with.

One camp believes you should work with someone before you connect with them. LinkedIn leans toward this end of the debate, recommending that you link only with people you know well enough to know they are solid individuals who won't do anything to hurt your professional reputation. There's wisdom in that.

The other camp believes that judiciously accepting invitations to connect with people you don't know can connect you with people who can help you advance in your industry.

I lean toward the latter. I don't advise connecting with people you don't know unless it is obvious how you can help each other. It's perfectly OK to tell someone that you connect only with people you know or who meet other personal criteria. But I've certainly accepted invitations to connect from people whose profiles looked interesting and for whom a Google search produced data congruent with their profiles.

But I've been flooded of late with invitations to connect that contain messages that are not tailored to me – they're blatant attempts to collect contacts. If the language in these messages weren't enough to make that clear, the fact that they send the same, identical message more than once, without subsequent messages acknowledging that they'd contacted me previously, would be a huge clue.

These people are cluelessly trying to use LinkedIn to grow their email lists so they can spam us directly in our In Boxes.

It's possible to drive traffic to your website and gain new unique visitors who'll return on a regular basis if posts to your website are relevant and helpful. Ditto if you tell them about one of your products that is truly relevant to the discussion and a solution to a problem discussed.

Networking is about human connections

But don't treat your group's members like future email addresses on your spam list. They can help you or you can help them only if you become sufficiently acquainted with each other's strengths and personality traits the old fashioned way: human-to-human communication.

Treat them to spam and you might get added to a list of people with whom they'll never do business, under any circumstances. You're not an anonymous spammer: they know who you are. And will tell others about your bone-headed use for a smart networking tool.

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