This is the fourth email in our LinkedIn setup strategies presented this week. So far, we've explained good methods to fill in your Summary, Specialties, Experience and Education sections.
Today, we want you to look at the Twitter settings in your profile. From your Edit Profile screen, click the tiny "Edit" link next to the Twitter setting. From the Twitter Settings screen, you can put in your Twitter account name and select it to be visible to anyone.
As we discussed last week, Twitter should be used at least once per hour. That's a lot of noise to be making on Twitter and you don't want to overwhelm your professional users on LinkedIn. So make sure you select the setting to "Share only tweet that contain #in." This is a good practice even if you only tweet a few times a week. Simply put, Twitter is a great tool, but even greater at getting you ignored if you allow tweet noise to overload any social media network other than Twitter itself. Using the #in hashtag will allow you to manually select which tweets show up in your account. Make them worth while to your LinkedIn connections.
Before you leave the Twitter Settings screen, you should also select the option to "display rich links" in your Tweet display.
Save your Twitter settings and navigate yourself back to the Edit Profile screen. Let's now look at the Websites settings. Click on the tiny "Edit" link next to Websites to bring you to the Additional Information screen.
LinkedIn provides only 3 links for your websites. They suggest Personal Website, Company Website, Blog, RSS Feed and Portfolio. They also have a selection for Other--which is what you should select.
Once "Other" is selected from the drop down menu, you will be able to edit the name of the site and the URL. This is something that almost everyone completely overlooks. Instead of using the built in default "Company Website," you can now freely type in "Custom Jewelry Design" or "Nashville's Jewelry Store" then type your standard http://www.jewelrystore.com website address as the URL.
This technique is good for leading people back to your website because they will see descriptive text that might apply to them. With your 3 website options you could link to your store's website, your Facebook and any other site you might have. Make the descriptive text good.
However, there is an important SEO strategy we need to mention. (This might be more advanced for a few of our readers, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven't studied link-building.) If you are currently working on a link-building campaign, you should only use the built-in "Personal Website" and "Blog" settings from the drop down list. Even if the URL is your store's website, and even if the Blog isn't really a blog. LinkedIn will not follow all the other options except "Personal Website" and "Blog." Obviously the link text is garbage, but the PR3 from your LinkedIn public profile is easy gold. If you are looking for link juice, you can set the first to Personal Website and link it to your favorite page (not the home page) inside your store's site. Then select the second as Blog and link that to your actual blog site or blog page on your store's site. Then the third could be set to Other and type in "Nashville's Jewelry Store" and link that to your store's home page. You need to account for "first link priority" (which is way beyond the scope of a Nugget) so make sure you only use the Other option as the 3rd website.
Whew! Did you skip that paragraph or have your eyes glazed over? Let's move on to our last topic for today: Groups.
Well, we were also going to cover groups today, but this Daily Gold Nugget is already getting long, so we'll pick up with this tomorrow.
