LinkedIn Quick Tip: Increase Your Presence With Network Updates

What “Network Updates” Is:

An underused—yet valuable—feature on LinkedIn is the “Network Updates” element, says Eve Mayer Orsburn, CEO of Social Media Delivered, a social media consultancy. The Network Updates box, located on your homepage below your Inbox updates, is the area that you can use as your “professional billboard,” using 140 characters or less, Orsburn says.

Why “Network Updates” Is Important:

When you log in to LinkedIn, your homepage pops up and it shows status updates from your connections. “If you haven’t updated your status that day, you’ll be invisible to your connections,” Orsburn says. To make yourself more visible, Orsburn recommends updating your status once a day. “This gives you the opportunity to make a pitch, announce something special or talk about an event, so you stay top of mind with your connections,” she says. One Warning:

Remember that your LinkedIn status updates should not be used in the same way that you use Twitter. “LinkedIn updates should almost always be professional, whereas Twitter updates can be personal and professional,” Orsburn says. If you do choose to take advantage of the option to cross-post your updates with Twitter and vice versa, do so sparingly, she says. “You don’t want to send all your tweets to LinkedIn.” To send certain tweets to your LinkedIn profile, visit your “Twitter Settings” page. You’ll see an option to share only tweets that contain the hashtags #in or #li, or not to share tweets at all. Using these hastags in Twitter will allow your tweets to auto-update on LinkedIn.

Staff Writer Kristin Burnham covers consumer Web and social technologies for CIO.com. She writes frequently on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. You can follow her on Twitter: @kmburnham.