Saturday 5 March 2011

Time Wasters - LinkedIn

LinkedIn is by far the easiest network to control and therefore I'm covering it out of completeness to the time wasting series (Groupon, Twitter & Facebook)

LinkedIn is the professional social tool. A marketing platform for your CV and a way to keep in contact with past colleagues. Being on it is a no brainer for job opportunities. With the appropriate security settings, it can link you to recruiters looking for the skills you possess. People you've worked with can see how you've progressed and potentially re-engage with you for their next project.

Like Facebook and twitter, managing LinkedIn is about reducing the noise, getting rid of irrelevant updates.

To do so -

Hide updates from busy users
This is incredibly easy, can be done with a single click.
There are 2 groups of people who I 'hide'
  1. Recruiters (a high number of updates)
  2. Those who connect LinkedIn to Twitter (a pet hate)
    The 2 platforms are very different and flooding my LinkedIn with twitter updates is annoying and adds no value 'professionally', especially if i'm following you on twitter too.
Review LinkedIn Group memberships
These are mostly created by recruiters fishing for leads. If you need to be in them, disallow the group from sending you email updates of activity.

Being mostly text based, my top tip for LinkedIn is to enable (and subscribe to) your network updates via a private RSS feed. Saves a lot of time and you see all the same information.

No comments: