I’d Like To Announce… With LinkedIn

Received a note from Mary in the mailbag to spark today’s post.  She purchased the e-book and enjoyed it – finding it useful, but writes “How do you bring people up to date on your company’s happenings?”

Well, she’s right – the book doesn’t cover this topic very well because this really isn’t something that LinkedIn was designed for.  LinkedIn is aimed at connecting you to specific individuals (and vice versa).

So let’s go through some options together.

Announcements, Announcements, Announcements!

Sorry for the camp humor there, but let’s face it – nobody really loves announcements.

They’re a necessity and everyone appreciates when they are concise, timely, and interesting…

So if you’d like to use LinkedIn (or any system) to make an announcement, you’ve got some work to do.

Network updates

This is an easy to use feature.  Just continue the statement “Steve …”

The reference starts with you, but the action can be about your company.  “Steve plans to attend Digital Rochester’s Networking event tonight – hope to see you there!”

You’ve got twitter’s 140 characters, and all the freedom your imagination gives you.

The notice will go to all of your direct connections, and depending on your settings, will be visible to everyone that visits your profile.  I’ve also noticed that one can see the network updates of group members.

You don’t have to submit updates frequently, but you’ll want to remove or replace updates that become “stale”.

Direct messages

LinkedIn allows users to send a direct note to 50 different direct connections, so that’s another way.

You’ll find “Compose Message” under your Inbox.

Now – 50 is a large, but not complete number for most users, so you might plan to do it in several batches.

That’s a lot of work, but you get a more extensive message delivered to the mailbox of each of the recipients.

If you craft the message well, they might feel like relaying it to their friends, and now you’ve had a much bigger impact.

Groups

When you participate in groups, you get to start conversations, and could use one of those to make your announcement.

But let’s think for a moment – if you start dropping your announcements in groups where it doesn’t belong, or take very little care in the wording, you might just offend group members…

An offended group member reports abuse or otherwise complains to a group owner – and then you’ll find yourself out of the group.

Your own group

And this is worth noting separate from your participation in other people’s groups – if you run a group based on your product or company, you get to send messages to group members as frequently as once a week.

I wrote about this just a bit ago, and my warning still applies – if you spam your group often, the members will decide that they don’t need to be members any longer…

(This is like getting booted out of the group except that all of the group members decide to remove themselves…)

Q & A

Have you ever been able to make a statement in the form of a question?

Well then you can probably ask a question and get it in front of a whole bunch of people through the questions and answers section.

And this is a powerful but double edged sword.

Will you write something that improves people’s perceptions about you?  Have a look at other people’s questions, and you’ll see that some people find a way to show that they can’t form coherent thoughts or just lack the ability to write complete sentences…

Just don’t let that be you, ok?

Your method?

Well there’s a handful of ways you can get your message out on LinkedIn.

And here’s my turn to hear how you might be using LinkedIn – have you found a novel way to get your message across with LinkedIn?  Just let me know in a comment below.

Happy announcing…

To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock