If the song from the Sound of Music – Favorite Things

could be rewritten to my thinking social media and LinkedIn would be included as one of the items in the list. LinkedIn is one of my favorite social media tools. Whenever I see an article on LinkedIn, I take a peek.  Often the titles are the X number of tools or things you don’t know about LinkedIn.

I have found that there seem to be two types of users:

1. The person that collects connections and updates their resume
2. The person who participates in groups, answers questions and shares status updates.

The more often you participate in LinkedIn by sharing via groups, status updates or showing

Image via CrunchBase

your expertise when answering questions, the more frequently your name appears in your connections updates stream.

This article about announcements raises some good points about direct communication to group members, but unsolicited emails could cause frustration, which we do not want to do when trying to generate leads.

Remember that by participating regularly, your connections will see your name and will be reminded each time they do of what you do or where you work.  As much as we would like things to be simple, they aren’t always easy.  Networking face-to-face and building relationships is often the way to increasing the on-line relationships that you have established.