From the course: Social Media for Video Pros

LinkedIn

From the course: Social Media for Video Pros

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LinkedIn

- How about LinkedIn? It's a great platform for staying connected with others in your industry. Think of it as the ability to bring a database together of all of your professional connections. And even as they move around or change jobs, you can engage them. As you find new companies you want to work with you can find peers or colleagues that have past experience who can help introduce you or give you an inside edge. LinkedIn is a great tool that many of you use. Here ae a few tips. In the world of video, LinkedIn is quite relevant. It makes it easy to find perspective employees or subcontractors for your project. You can get a great idea of who you want to hire by looking for their connections as well as the recommendation engine. It's really known as a business networking site, but it's gone well beyond job hunting. You'll find a wealth of articles, video, essays available where people are sharing thought leadership. This type of content goes a long way to help you learn more and stay connected or be influential. Video content is very welcome. You should also build up a list of contacts that you know and trust. This will help you when you're looking for work as well as referrals, or potential contractors. This network is what drives all of the features on the site. By connecting with other professionals in your field, it's going to continue to make recommendations and show your content to other people that are going to be interested. It's a very intelligent algorithm. Your network is designed to have important, real world results. Well, what sort of results? In order to get those results, you need a completed profile. Take the time to fill this in. Go ahead and add your past experiences, your jobs, your references. Take the time to endorse others for their skills, and they'll come over and fill in endorsements on your profile. But don't beg for recommendations or endorsements. Instead of asking for somebody to endorse you, go to their page and provide a reference for them. They're far more likely to return the favor. Also, add projects, publications, or jobs that you've held to drive connections, and read your messages. While they'll be plenty of people offering you search engine optimization and lead services for your business, there are real world opportunities that pop up, people reaching out that want to connect with you and hire your company, or ask you for consultation, or services. Additionally, as you meet new people, connect with them. As you have business meetings, connect. As you meet prospects, connect. Go to a conference, connect. Treat this, if you're old, as your Rolodex or your business card portfolio. This is the new business card and it allows you to stay in touch. But don't spam others, sending out a bunch of connections to people you don't know. If you're watching this course, I invite you to connect. Just put in the note that you are connecting because you watched this class. I like to have a broad network of many professionals that are working in the creative field and I welcome your connection. It doesn't mean that I necessarily have work for you, but I do use my network to drive other results and I find that being connected to other professionals that want to improve themselves and are passionate about video is good for building up my database of connections. Don't beg for work and try to be responsible when you connect. Be present, be there. Make sure people see you because you're publishing content. You'll find a lot more about the benefits of LinkedIn by just exploring their documentation, as well as poking around in the communities. You can setup a free account which offers a lot of benefits, but some of the most robust opportunities giving you professional insight into your network and job opportunities will come with a paid account. But even if you can't afford a paid account at this point, do establish a free account and regularly share content.

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