My Journey with LinkedIn

Early days

My relationship as a member with LinkedIn started on 7th March 2006. In the early days my only job is, to get connected with people. When I surpass 200 connections, I started looking back with whom I got connected, at 500 connections, I decided not to quantify the contacts and hence I was manage to reach only 951 connections in my 14 years stint. My 168-month average is just 5.6 connections per month. I must be a worst member for LinkedIn..:-)

Mid-Term

All that is fine.. My question is, how much this social media platform was/is/will be useful.. If so, what are the ways. After so many years of sleeping on this platform, I slowly wake-up and trying to understand that just by connecting with someone, re-sharing someone else’s post, commenting on every other forum, advertising on top of someone else’s campaign will not fetch any benefits. Am I correct…? Then what else we can do with this..

Old wine

Until 2008, I never tasted a benefit out of Linked (I should say, I didn’t try) but it started showing up that wherever I went for a direct meeting, I was able to connect with them and a person having LinkedIn profile was respected one level higher in the market as everyone wanted to show their status. This helped me to connect with some of the industry leaders, senior management persons to whom I may need to prefix an appointment and of course winning some business as well. For anybody who thinks that he/she can get immediate business through LinkedIn- My answer is either shutdown your profile here or change your way of approaching this tool. Rather, what you can expect is, more professional touch with prospects/influence/customers.

Now a days, we are following the industry veterans, thought leaders etc whom we can’t even imagine meeting. That’s the power of internet and their knowledge sharing is useful when we start applying some of the thought process in our daily routines.  

Even today, Am still trying to learn on how to enhance my image and harvest business through LinkedIn. Value creation (company/individual) is a long-term process but it fetches more gain ONLY IF the efforts are true, I mean, creating value without expecting a business out of that effort.

I think in a way that’s right… We are creating a value to our customers isn’t it !!

Kindly share your experiences, findings and how did you manage to gain more success through your activities in LinkedIn. I highly appreciate, the best practices that you share on how effectively this social media tool can be utilized which may be useful to some of the dumb candidates similar to me…