LinkedIn; you’ve been told it’s like Facebook for professionals - but are you using it correctly? Read our guide on how to setup LinkedIn for optimum business use. Once you’re up and running, please see our Advanced LinkedIn Guide for Small Businesses (Part 1) for information on how to really launch your business forward with LinkedIn.

The first step is to design your profile that so those who find your page will get a professional snapshot of you and your business.

• When choosing your LinkedIn name, make sure you choose a name that you are known by at work. If you’re full name is ‘Thomas’, but you introduce yourself as ‘Tom’, make sure you use ‘Tom’ so that people can find and recognise you.
• Your photo on LinkedIn should be a head and shoulders shot of yourself looking professional yet approachable.
• The next step is to use the LinkedIn headline, which appears below your name, to brand yourself or your business. When a user searches Linked in, your headline and your name are the only things that come up. Be specific – state your roll and your speciality within the company.
• In the Summary section, ‘tell your story’ in a more fluid way than would be found on a C.V. Think of this as an excerpt from your biography. Explain your path – where you’ve been and where you you’re going – in a human way that will allow you to connect with your reader.
• By including your school and/or University, along with accurate dates of graduation, allows you to easily network with old school friends.
• If you wish, you can upload your résumé, which will save you time when you create the Work History section. Like the Education section, providing the dates that you worked within a particular company allows LinkedIn to match you up with previous colleagues who may prove valuable for your business.
• Finally, remember to add your website and links to other social media platforms that you are active on.

The next step is to get connecting! The two basic ways of doing this are:

• Add Connections: Adding a connection is much like adding  a friend on Facebook. You can use the feature to invite colleagues, and those who you want to intensively network with, to join your first-degree network. Remember to change the default invite message to a personalised invite. Also, be careful not to send too mny generic invitations to people you do not know and who are not expecting invites – you may lose your invitation privileges if you ‘spam’ people indiscriminately.

• Connect With Your Address Book (Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook etc): You are able to import your contact list into LinkedIn. This will not result in a message being sent to the entire address book. Instead, LinkedIn will simply tell you which of these people have LinkedIn accounts so you can choose who to connect with.

Slightly more advanced ways of connecting:

• Join groups: A good way to find people of interest to you, including potential customers, is by joining groups relevant to your industry. Remember to be active within the group and create posts.
• Status Updates: Forget Twitter-style status updates about what you had for dinner. Use LinkedIn states updates to prove you are keeping abreast with the latest developments within your industry.

These are the basics of using LinkedIn as a small business. Have a play with LinkedIn and make sure you have set up your account and profile in the above manner. Once you’re ready, see our Advanced LinkedIn Guide for Small Businesses (Part 1) to really get ahead.