5 things you didn’t know you can do on LinkedIn

It’s hard to remember what life was like before LinkedIn. Many of us can thank the site for our current job or the networking opportunities it has given us. Despite this, there are so many features on the site that many of us are still completely unaware of. Try these features out and it could help your presence on the site.

 1. Export your contacts
You never know what could happen to your profile. So it’s best not to even take the risk, as if something did happen, you would lose all the contacts you could have taken the last few years to gain. Export your contacts and save them elsewhere on your laptop so you have a backup of their information and don’t lose their contact details. Go to Connections on the main menu tab and click settings. You will then see ‘Export LinkedIn Connections’ option in Advanced Settings.

2. Your social selling index
This tool is useful if you want to see how you compare with your peers, and your competition. Although it was created for sales people, anyone can use it to see how their LinkedIn activity is compared to people of the same age, industry and experience. After looking at it, you can see where you need to improve or what to spend less time doing. Simply follow this link to see your selling dashboard – https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi.

3. Sync with Twitter
If you struggle to keep on top of your various accounts and have a presence, it could be worth syncing your LinkedIn profile with Twitter. Not only will this mean that you can easily share your LinkedIn activity on Twitter, it will also mean that you will receive a notification on Twitter every time someone shares a post of yours on LinkedIn, which you wouldn’t see otherwise. It is a good feature if you’re intrigued to where your posts get shared and who your audience is.

4. Save contacts
You can actually save contacts without having to connect with them. So if you’re on the lookout for someone but don’t have time to message them there and then, it could be worth saving them and having a proper look at their profile later on and asking to connect then. When you view someone’s profile, you will see a star on the page. This person will then be added and found under your connections without actually connecting with them.

5. Turn off the “viewers of your profile also viewed” option
This is a really helpful feature which may have helped you in the past when you’ve been trying to find a particular person. However, if you’re on the lookout for a new role and are hoping that your LinkedIn profile comes in handy, head to your settings, then to privacy controls and choose to hide ‘viewers of this profile also viewed’ box. The people that come up alongside you are often your competition and you don’t want to make it easy for employers to discover someone other than you.