Sharing news on LinkedIn to stay connected and enhance your profile

Clipping articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals and sharing them with clients, prospective clients, and business associates with an accompanying note of why you shared it with them has always been an effective networking tool. Post-it Notes and the copier machine made it easier.  And today, LinkedIn allows you to share articles on steroids. Log in to LinkedIn and go to your home page. At the top of the page, you’ll see a box that says ‘Share an update.’

1. Copy the link to a news story, blog post, or article you want to share and paste the url into the ‘Add URL’ box.
2. Key in your personal note that you want to share in the box labeled ‘Share an update.’ An insight or comment from you is preferable.
3. Select whether you want to share the article with your network only or anyone on LinkedIn.
4. Hit the Share.

The article you shared will 1) go into the LinkedIn news stream (flow of info ala Facebook that runs on everyone’s LinkedIn home page) and 2) display in your ‘summary profile’ at the top of your profile page. Here’s my my brief profile including reference to a blog post of mine (with the post’s accompanying image) that I shared on LinkedIn yesterday along with the commentary I added. Users of LinkedIn viewing my profile can ‘Like,’ ‘Share,’ and ‘Comment’ directly from my profile. You can already see reference to two ‘likes’ and a comment — true engagement from what I shared. LinkedIn is not sitting on the billions of dollars they raised in taking the company public. The company is pouring their money into development. Development bringing those looking to grow their book of business an even more powerful networking tool. Don’t waste an easy opportunity to network by missing this one.