Following on from part one and part two here’s the next exciting episode – yes part three and there’s still another one to come!

Having shared 10 ways to use LinkedIn before you might be surprised to know we have another ten to go so no dilly dallying here’s the next 5 ways to use LinkedIn to help you in your role which you may not have thought of:

1. Build groups or communities – users, clients, intranets and more

Quite often you have a set of people, a group or community or shared interest that you want to bring together to interact, to communicate to or to unlock the potential for them to communicate and LinkedIn groups are ideal for this. These can be gated and hidden away (ideal for intranets or user groups) or public and find-able (ideal for knowledge sharing) and hence a group for all purposes.

2. Newsfeed

We’ve met many users on LinkedIn who ‘just’ want to use the newsfeed on the homepage to track where people move, what they get up to and LinkedIn is ideal for this using your notifications but there is so much more to it!

You can find out what companies, people, famous or influential people say all within your homepage feed and even get themes around areas of interest for you all delivered in real time or popularity order.

3. Thought leadership, influencer or blogging

For some people the idea of sharing their thoughts are scary but for others where they are trailblazing, sharing fresh innovative thinking or keen to get their views, perspective and insights out there LinkedIn gives you a way using the long form/article posting functions.

These work very differently to status updates, and only reach around 60% of your connections, but form a different purpose for reinforcement of thought leadership, permanently embedded in profiles and shared with connections through notifications (where LinkedIn algorithms see a fit).

4. Profile raising

Recommended for You Webcast, August 9th: Improving B2B Paid Marketing Campaign Effectiveness Through Pipeline Measurement

Quite often when we start talking to people it is about “getting the message out there” when they start with a profile but, come on, a profile is like you going to a meeting in a nice suit or dress and expecting someone to go wow you’re here and give you a sale or cash – not real is it?

Profiles are mostly used for validation on LinkedIn to meet the expectations of your audience be they investors, demonstrating your insight or value to senior staff or to collate all your recent recommendations to highlight your expertise or real-life impact.

You have to imagine your profile has met someone in real life – is it as good as you are? You might want to try our profile test to see how it compares with over 15,000 others. It is horrifying to us what people leave out.

5. Market sizing in seconds

Budgets are constantly getting squeezed and marketing is no different! Trying to work out where to focus your efforts, your budgets or even to prioritize is a real challenge.

LinkedIn search lets you identify how many people hit the demographic you want in seconds for free. So if it is Marketing leaders in the UK (over 165,000) or people working in retail in Brazil (over 536,000) and everything in between it takes seconds when you know what you’re doing.

Quite often people have fears about LinkedIn as they think it might all be about recruitment and they are astounded at the top ten industries on LinkedIn right now (recruitment sits in 68th globally), and we wrote a blog on this sometime ago which you can find here.

The reality is that LinkedIn is much more like a room full of business people and you’re just in the room.

Of course, your profile looks as good as you are and you talk to people when you’re in a room full of business people – don’t you?