LinkedIn, your professional network primarily relies on your contacts. Contacts are your community that will nourish when you take organized steps. Whether it�s an individual or a SME, contacts fuel your professional umbrella, so minting your contacts is a challenging objective.
Organize Your Connections
The way we organize our contacts on phone-book or smartphone is the same way we can do in LinkedIn. Failure to do so will result into a junkyard of connections. LinkedIn allows you to save your connections with tags. Tags are useful to organize your contacts and makes search easier. For e.g. if you are a freelance recruitment consultant, you save all your Java professional candidates located in Pune under a tag �JavaPune�. So the next time when you need to search for Java people in Pune, you just need to crawl your tag. If you are a SME, you could use tags and sort your clients, stakeholders etc on the basis of domain, location etc.
Contacts in tag-INSM(India Social Media)
LinkedIn has an amazing inbuilt search facility that traverses your contacts. LinkedIn search is more specific when its based on Last Name, Companies, Locations, and Industries etc.
Search Result for B as Last Name
Invite your Contacts
LinkedIn provides an alphabetic sorted list for you to invite people who are missing. This feature allows you to connect with people whom you might have forgotten to add on your network. �Add Connection� allows you to invite people whom you are connected to other than the LinkedIn world. Desktop and personal email contacts could be uploaded for searching and adding.
Finding Whom You Already Know
�Colleagues� and Classmate� sections provide details of contacts with whom you are connected via your professional and educational network. These features also provide you the missing contacts that belong to the same work place or college.
How many Colleagues are You Connected with
Invite Your Missing Colleagues
People you may know� feature pulls up connections similar to your profile. The criteria�s could depend on your skills, roles, interest etc. This is a great feature to pull up likeminded people whom you can connect with and grow your network. For e.g.: A freelance blogger will find contacts with same profession from different locations. So she can connect with likeminded people across the globe. �Connecting is easy but maintaining is the challenge for any social network� so click to connect for a purpose rather than telling the world your number.
LinkedIn finds People You May Know
Check your Network Statistics
Network Statistics is an insightful statistics about your existing contacts. The data is about your connections tree with details of your direct connections or first degree connections, friends of friend�s connections or second degree connections and the third degree connections that are users whom you can reach through friends and one of their friends.
Network Statistics
LinkedIn also provides your regional networks reach i.e. which are the places on the world map you have reached via LinkedIn and it also provides the fastest growing networks on your network. Keep an eye on this data this might help you to reach out to the fastest growing locations for your professional growth.
Regional Access of Your Network
LinkedIn also provides industry access statistics. The data tells you about the industries you have connected to and what are the fastest growing ones.
Industry Access of your Network
LinkedIn statistics are great free insights of your network that you can analyze and try to fill-in the missing gaps.
What do you think about the various features that LinkedIn has provided corresponding to your connections?
Have you used it yet or are you willing to use it?
