Hidden Gems in LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an amazing social media channel for professionals. You are probably well aware of that; however, what you may not be aware of is how much LinkedIn actually has to offer. It offers some features that are not so well-known but if you start to use them, you will not understand how you ever did without them in the past.

For the benefit of the user
It is not uncommon for business people to use LinkedIn in the most basic manner. That may be because they feel that they get what they need from those features and everything is fine or it might be because they are not aware of how much LinkedIn actually has to offer and how much it can benefit their businesses. Now is the time to delve more deeply into LinkedIn's features, common and less common so that you can bring your business to the next level.

However, it is important for you to understand that those LinkedIn features are not apparent when you go to LinkedIn. You will need to work to find them.

The recommendations and endorsements feature: When it comes to your professional relationships through social media, recommendations through LinkedIn are an essential contributing factor to your professional success. The same thing applies to endorsements. If a person is trying to find information on what you happen to offer, a great way for that person to determine if you are the person with whom he or she should interact, recommendations and endorsements will elevate you to the top of the search engine page.

The reason for that is probably obvious. It gives you and your business credibility and it makes the other person feel that he or she can trust that you know what you are doing because you are positioned as a subject matter expert. The truth is that it is generally pretty simple for you to obtain endorsements and recommendations. Of course, that is, assuming that you have a strong enough connection with the other person that he or she is willing to give you an endorsement or a recommendation. Of course, you have the control, once the recommendation or the endorsement has been written, to display it or to hide it (and to use it when you feel it will have the greatest impact. If you wish to hide an endorsement or a recommendation, go to profile (at the top of your screen) and select "edit profile."

Once you have done that, you will see "Skills and Endorsement and it will allow you to make changes to your profile. At that point, you should select "manage endorsements." At that point, you can eliminate what the skill(s) that you don't want to show. However, it is important for you to realize that your recommendations create a very important perception in the eyes of the other person. You want him or her to view you as knowledgeable and you want that person to come to you before anyone else when he or she needs what you are offering.

Contact information tab: In this tab, your online connection can enter his or her contact information. That is a beautiful thing when you want to synchronize your contact list on your smartphone with your contact list on your computer or other devices. Everything will be pulled into the right places. How convenient is that? In some cases, you will even receive an alert about certain pieces of information, such as birthdays, anniversaries, etc. With this tab, the chances of your losing the connection with the other person is slim to none. Indeed, you are probably well aware of how important those connections are.

A personalized portfolio: The whole idea of using social media is that it gives you a way to stand out against your competition and it allows you to let numerous people know why they should build relationships with you. One of the effective ways to do that is by displaying a sample of your work on your LinkedIn profile.

If you happen to have a large number of portfolio items, you may want to choose the one that you consider the best. A portfolio should feature the best of your creative talents. Too much may not necessarily be a good thing. There are a few ways to show off what you can do. One is by adding still images. Another is by creating a video or a slide show in which you show off what you can do.

The feature to show how you are connected to your LinkedIn connections: This tool, which is on your profile page, will allow you to connect with other people who are second-tier (or beyond) connections to you. This is a great way to get to know those people and to begin interacting with them. This feature lets you see your connections' connections.

In addition to communicating how you are connected to your first-tier connections, it also allows you to see how other people are connected to their first-tier connections. After that, you can go about acquiring introductions to the people with whom you would like to interact.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is a fabulous social media tool that has tremendous capabilities and it is up to you to leverage whatever you feel is effective and appropriate for your particular business. It will be worth your while to study all that LinkedIn has to offer and then you will be in a position to pick and choose what you think will work best for your business.

Michael Cohn is the founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CompuKol Communications. He has over 25 years of experience in IT and web technologies. Mr. Cohn spent a significant amount of time at a major telecommunications company, where his main focus was on initiating and leading synergy efforts across all business units by dramatically improving efficiency, online collaboration, and the company's Intranet capabilities, which accelerated gains in business productivity. He also reduced company travel and travel costs by introducing and implementing various collaboration technologies.

His expertise includes business analysis; project management; management of global cross-matrix teams; systems engineering and analysis, architecture, prototyping and integration; technology evaluation and assessment; systems development; performance evaluation; and management of off-shore development.

Mr. Cohn earned a Master's degree in project management from George Washington University in Washington, DC; and a Master's degree in computer science and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ.

Mr. Cohn is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

The Thinking Behind Your Social Profile

Psychology figures into every aspect of our lives. It certainly is a factor in our behavior as human beings and it also factors into what we do professionally and how we do it. There is a strong possibility that you have social media profiles for your business and that you interact with other people online on a regular (or, at least, semi-regular) basis.

Having a well-organized strategy for your social media profiles
The fact is that even if you have profiles on several social media channels, it doesn't necessarily follow that you are using all of the opportunities that exist within those particular social media channels.

There are so many features and tools that you may not even be aware that a lot of them actually exist. Well, the first thing that you will need to do to change that situation is to research what the various social media channels have to offer you. Once you have accomplished that, the next thing that you will have to do is to button down the strategy that you will use for your particular business. That is where the thinking part comes in.

It is very common that you launch your business but don't give the thinking behind that business much conscious thought. That is probably a very big mistake. Before you can run, you have to crawl and then walk. In order to do that, you need to understand why you are doing what you are doing and to make sure that your thinking is sound before you execute your strategy. If you have not gone through those steps initially, you may really be affecting your business in a negative way.

Of course, that is not the end of the world and it is reversible. You can begin to take steps that will make a difference to the level of success that you realize for your business.

Getting people to pay attention to your brand
Your first objective is to draw a lot of positive attention from other people. You are an astute business person so you understand fully that it is necessary for you to interact with people online in addition to sharing an in-person relationship with them whenever possible.

It is all tied into how successful you can be and, of course, that means selling more of what you have to offer. The fact is that you can accomplish that quite easily if you have an effective social profile (in each of the social media channels that you have chosen).

Okay, let's go through the steps, which are quite simple. First of all, assuming that you have established your social media profiles appropriately and completely, you write and post (and syndicate) top-quality content, which you have put a great deal of effort and time into developing.

That content can be posted in a usual place or it can be posted by someone else with whom you share a relationship. That opens up all sorts of possibilities as far as the exposure of your content is concerned. That content has the potential to be read by a large number of people who don't know you or your business yet. That is actually a good thing initially. Don't worry. Those people will get to know you and what you represent. It won't take very long at all. Your ultimate goal (and this is the ultimate goal of most people) is to increase your revenue stream at some point in the near (or not so near) future. Why else would you be in business?

Of course, the challenge that faces you when it comes to your unfamiliar audience is that they may be less accepting initially than target audience members who already know you. You have no reason to be concerned about that. They will not judge you for very long. Just be as genuine and helpful as you possibly can and everything will be fine. That is your approach anyway so you actually will not be doing anything different with that audience than you would otherwise. This is where the thinking behind your strategy is so important. The new readers will be getting the first impression of you and it needs to be extremely positive. In fact, it needs to be positive enough to allow them to want to read on.

Leveraging the new relationship
You should try to consider your potential relationships with new people as an exciting challenge and an exciting opportunity. You will want to leverage those opportunities to the best of your ability. So much good can come out of that situation. If you connect with someone for the first time, the chances are that the other person will have very little knowledge about who you are as a person (on any more than a superficial level).

That is not necessarily a bad thing. If you are faced with that situation, you are starting with a blank sheet of paper. You have the option of viewing that as a challenge (a negative challenge) in which you are stumped about what you should be expressing or you can look at it as a wonderful opportunity to express yourself in any number of exciting and creative ways. You have a world of possibilities in front of you.

Which path you choose in that situation will either make or break what happens in the future. It is up to you to choose wisely. That is a critical point at which you need to really think about how you want to approach the other person. Your social media profiles are tools that will help you to gain entrance to interactions with the other person.

Conclusion
Thinking is a huge factor behind your professional success. In fact, you can't do anything without putting a lot of thought into it first. It is a necessary preliminary step and without it, you will have no foundation upon which to build. Your thinking will pave the way for all that comes after it. Sometimes you will need to take risks with your business but you need to make sure that those are calculated, educated risks. If you do that, everything will work out as it should.

Michael Cohn is the founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CompuKol Communications. He has over 25 years of experience in IT and web technologies. Mr. Cohn spent a significant amount of time at a major telecommunications company, where his main focus was on initiating and leading synergy efforts across all business units by dramatically improving efficiency, online collaboration, and the company's Intranet capabilities, which accelerated gains in business productivity. He also reduced company travel and travel costs by introducing and implementing various collaboration technologies.

His expertise includes business analysis; project management; management of global cross-matrix teams; systems engineering and analysis, architecture, prototyping and integration; technology evaluation and assessment; systems development; performance evaluation; and management of off-shore development.

Mr. Cohn earned a Master's degree in project management from George Washington University in Washington, DC; and a Master's degree in computer science and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ.

Mr. Cohn is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

5 Tactics You Can Use To Manage Google+

Google+ is a very powerful social tool which needs no introduction. According to a report by the Tech Times, Google had an estimated 300 million users in 2015. The number must have surged in the past year. Google+ is a platform which has a very strong user base- like the LinkedIn.

Use the +1 button to get inside other G+ user's follower-base
Since there is no way to get a viable list of the followers of a Google+ user, we can use the plus one button to get into them. When you hit the plus one button, it will show a profile icon on the right-hand side.

When you click on this profile icon, Google+ will show you the recent activity- the shares, plus ones (which is their version of a like) and the comments. All the people engaged in one or all of such activates is listed. There you can hover over their icon to follow them.

Use Circloscope to manage your Google+ followers
This is the last week of October 2016 and it is free. Circloscope is a tool which will show you the people, who are not following back, your fans- whom you are not following, whom you have blocked, etc.

It will also list the people according to the group they belong to. You can directly un-follow the un-followers and follow your fans.

This is a technique every G+ user should know. But this technique can be used only in the classic G+ interface. The new G+ interface does not support this functionality.

Create a group for ease of use to keep track of whom you follow
Not all those whom you follow, follow back. So, to keep track of the people, you must create a new group. It will aid you in using the Circloscope tool effectively.

Name the group you are going to create related to your niche- such as travel, technology, blogging and so on. And there is already a group/circle called the following. Add new people to the niche group while you un-follow from the following group.

And when there is none left, start the reversing the process. Add new people to the following group and un-follow from the niche group. This will give the people enough time to follow back. You don't want to un-follow a person the day after you have added to your circle. Use this technique. This technique gives them enough time to respond. It works!

Be careful of whom you follow
When you start following other's followers, your feed can get very populated. And if you follow haphazardly, your feeds will get irrelevant and sometimes it might even contain adult contents. So, be careful when you start following. When you see something that is not safe for work, immediately un-follow them. Since there are no profile explanations in G+, it might be difficult to know who you are following.

Engage with your circles
Engagement is pivotal if you want to keep the audience you have gained. Imagine yourself in a situation. You see a post like it, share it and ask a question to the person who posted the update. The person who posted the update does not respond. Would you like and share the next content you see by the same person? I guess not.

But if you actually get a response, you feel exalted. Someone cared about your comment and responded. That will make you feel good (about the person) and the next post you see by the exact same person will get plus 1'd and shared by you. That is the simple part of the complex human nature. So, never ever hesitate to engage with your audience.

If someone says nice, comment back thank you or at least +1 the comment.

Engagement is not only about replying to other's comments and +1nning the comments. You must also like and share other's contents. This will help you building a better relationship with other people and groups.

Conclusion
Google+ is a platform with a lot of potential. You can do targeted marketing with Google+, build a following base keeping an eye on the professional advertisement prospects, drive traffic to your site and much more. If you are able to use it wisely, you will reap a lot of benefits from G+.