Читать книгу LinkedIn For Dummies - Joel Elad - Страница 19

You have your network today, but what about the future? Whether you want to move up in your industry, look for a new job, start your own company, or achieve some other goal, one way to do it is to expand your network. LinkedIn provides a fertile ground to reach like-minded and well-connected professionals who share a common interest, experience, or group membership. The site also provides several online mechanisms to reduce the friction of communication, so you can spend more time building your network instead of searching for the right person.

First and foremost, LinkedIn helps you identify and contact members of other people’s professional networks, and best of all, you can contact them not via a cold call but with your friend’s recommendation or introduction. (See Chapters 9 and 6, respectively, for more information.) In addition, you can find out more about your new contact before you send the first message, so you don’t have to waste time figuring out whether this is someone who could be beneficial to have in your network.

You can also meet new people through various groups on LinkedIn, whether it’s an alumni group from your old school, a group of past employees from the same company, or a group of people interested in improving their public speaking skills and contacts. LinkedIn groups help you connect with other like-minded members, search for specific group members, and share information about the group with other members. (I cover LinkedIn groups in Chapter 16.)