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LinkedIn: The Social Media Tool Writers Should Not Ignore

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Kath here.  Today’s guest post is by WU community member Crystal King.  Crystal is a freelance writer and Pushcart-nominated poet who is currently working on her first novel. She holds an M.A. in Critical & Creative Thinking from UMass Boston where she centered her thesis on developing a system to help fiction writers in progress. An 18 year marketing and communications veteran, Crystal currently drives social media for CA Technologies, a $4.3B high-tech firm. She has taught classes in writing, creativity and social media at Harvard Extension School, Boston University, Mass College of Art and UMass Boston. Enjoy!

As someone who teaches classes on social media for writers, I spend a fair amount of time explaining how to use tools such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Those channels tend to be the mainstay of an author’s publicity arsenal, and for good reason. However there are other social media sites that are often overlooked, sites that can help writers boost their visibility and reach new audiences. One of the best sites for authors to add into their social media mix is LinkedIn.

It’s likely that you’ve heard of LinkedIn. And no wonder, with over 100 million members worldwide it’s a sizeable social media community. Most know of it as a site for business professionals to network, or a great place for job-seekers. It’s also an excellent place for authors.

Why? First off, it’s a place for you to network with everyone you know—people you have worked with, become acquainted with or to whom you are directly related. It’s not as personal as Facebook so you aren’t “friending” people; rather, you are adding them into your network. A network that can be very powerful if you take the time to build it up before you are ready to publish your book. For example, I have nearly 600 people in my network (all of whom I know at least peripherally). That’s 600 people who may know someone that I want to know—an expert in a field I’m researching, or perhaps an editor, an agent, a videographer that could film a book trailer for me, a website designer, etc.  It’s also 600 potential readers. You can bet that when I finally publish that I’ll be sending a note to my network on where they can buy my book. Those 600 people may share my request throughout their network, which essentially means that I have the ability to tap into an additional 7,309,744+ that are “linked in” through those 600 people I know firsthand. Now THAT is impressive, don’t you think?

How else can you use LinkedIn as a writer? Why, let me tell you:

  • It’s another place for you for individuals to learn more about you. You can share as much or as little as you want, but at minimum include links to your Website and other social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, blog, etc.)
  • This also helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or building links back to your personal website. The more links into your site, the more authority you have in search engines. Hubspot has a great little video on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile for SEO.
  • You can link your Twitter tweets into LinkedIn so that when you tweet it will automatically update your LinkedIn status.
  • You can link your blog posts into LinkedIn so every time you post it will populate on your LinkedIn profile.
  • You can easily keep in contact with people that are important to you in your journey as a writer. This may be other authors you meet, agents you speak with or editors that you might have met at conferences. Be clear when you send a request to explain how you know that person.
  • Use LinkedIn’s introduction feature to work through your network to be introduced to other people. Be thoughtful though; agents and editors may not want to be queried this way.
  • Conduct polls and surveys.
  • Ask for recommendations of the work you’ve done, especially if it’s writing related or specific to a topic specific to your writing. Recommendations help people (e.g. agents, editors, people you might work with) get a sense of the type of person you are.
  • Join and participate in relevant LinkedIn groups.  There are groups for every type of activity you can imagine. Some  groups that are useful for writers are: LinkEds & Writers,  Fiction Writer’s Guild, Books and Writers, Authors & Publishers Association, Writing Mafia and Book Publishing Professionals to name a few.
  • Use the Answers section to ask questions to find experts, share your expertise or to learn more about a topic.

Building your network and growing your LinkedIn presence does take time. But start small, do it in chunks and concentrate primarily on creating your profile then adding in all the people you know. After you meet someone new, make it a point to add them into your network.

One thing to keep in mind about social media in general is that individuals now have the option to consume information in whatever way they choose and via whichever network they want. If you ignore the 100 million members on LinkedIn you may be losing out on the ability to reach thousands of potential book buyers.

Follow Crystal on Twitter at www.twitter.com/crystallyn.

Comments

  1. I’ve had a LinkenIn profile for a while, but never worked hard to build up a network, like I have on FB. Thanks for the advice here. I will put it to work!

  2. Thanks for this. I always wonder about whether it’s a good use of time to pump up Linked In (or SEO, for that matter) for genre novelists, simply because it seems like more of a stretch. If I only have an hour a day to promote on top of a day job and writing the next novel, and it’s a choice between hanging out at a book forum or maybe doing Twitter/FB, and bumping up my Linked In network… I don’t know. Also, as far as building SEO, are you bumping up a certain keyword or keywords through your LinkedIn profile? It’s building up your authority, but for what search term? “paranormal author” for example?

    I”m still wrestling with the different approaches. It can be a little frustrating.

    • The good thing about LinkedIn is that you can set your profile up and then go in periodically to add information or to search for people you know. You don’t need to spend loads of time in the forums or with the Q&A if it doesn’t suit your needs. So if you think of it that way it doesn’t need to be any sort of timesink. I probably spend a total of 15 minutes a month in LinkedIn. For me it’s about the network; having that ready for when I want to share and find key information is what is most important for me.

      As for SEO it’s not about keywords on LinkedIn; it’s about links into your Website, blog or wherever your homebase for information might be. Links in help build your ranking so having extra links in LinkedIn that lead back to your Website help to build that up.

  3. Oops, I deleted my LinkedIn profile the other day… :P

    You make a lot of really great points about its usefulness, and you mention some features I didn’t even know it had. That said, LI just wasn’t doing anything for me at this time. Maybe I’ll rethink it later on in my journey. Thanks for the food for thought!

  6. I just spoke about social media at a con last weekend, and I wish I would have had this link to add to the list for the attendees!

    Lots of great advice here. Thanks!

  7. My working life has included time as a musician, a pilot, a writer and a politician. Sometimes all those lives overlap, at least to an extent. LinkedIn has been a terrific tool that has allowed me to stay in touch with a broad spectrum of former associates, friends, and acquaintances who occasionally come into play as sources or even the basis for a story.

    I use Facebook daily, but it is often more social than business for me. I use LinkedIn less often, but with far more emphasis on work. I’d give up Facebook before I gave up LinkedIn – although I’d rather keep and use both. They’re different tools, for different uses, even though they do have certain similarities.

  8. I absolutely agree that writers need to be on LinkedIn. It’s a business social network. Many writers seem to miss the fact that if they want to be successful, they need to be thinking like a business person.

    Great advice.

  9. I’ve used LinkedIn to search for article sources, especially when I need experts (as opposed to sources based off of personal experiences).

    I also like that it’s a bit more formal than Facebook or Twitter, where a lot of people will request to connect with you even though you’ve never actually met or interacted. It seems a LinkedIn connection has to be based off a prior experience of some sort, which I can appreciate.

  10. My first experience with LinkedIn left me feeling very uncomfortable and reluctant to use it. Despite my efforts to limit it to people I knew in a writing context, it spammed everyone I had ever emailed with invites, including my own email address for my day job. It then continued to send reminders to those email addresses, leaving me feeling rather embarrassed about the whole affair. I didn’t delete my profile, but since that experience I haven’t touched it.

    I have noticed several twitter pleas from people I follow to stop spamming them with LinkedIn invites and wondered if the same thing had happened there too.

    So far, twitter wins for me.

    • Rosie, there’s a setting somewhere in LinkedIn where it “helpfully volunteers” to share your address book. If you leave that box checked, it harvests your email contacts and spams them. The trick is to find and uncheck that box.

      Other than that pretty slimy tactic, LinkedIn is a valuable tool for business professionals to network. I haven’t found any real advantage as an author, but for my corporate career it’s an important resource.

      • Actually, LinkedIn doesn’t send out information to your address book unless you allow for it in the set up or if you go in to find followers.

        You can choose to keep your personal email address book private. However if you do put in your password to allow LinkedIn to pull in your contacts what it first does is look for users already on LinkedIn for you to connect to. Then it asks you if you want to send invites to people who are not on LinkedIn. If you then invite them to connect, yes it would send an email to everyone in your address book it didn’t find in LinkedIn (in my case it’s about 700 people). If the person doesn’t respond within a certain time frame LinkedIn sends out 1-2 reminders about connecting.

        There isn’t a setting to prevent LinkedIn from doing this. It’s you who decides whether or not to hit the button to follow or invite people.

        If you don’t want to share your address book with LinkedIn (and even if you do you can still decide who gets emails…just check and uncheck boxes or skip steps to not send to anyone) you can search manually for people you know by name or email address.

  11. Lol, my first thoughts while reading this were something like, “Ah, now I get it! As Linda mentioned in the comments above, I have been on Linkedin for a while, but really didn’t know what to do with it. Your information is the most valuable I’ve read, Crystal, and I thank you very very much, for giving me the spring I needed to finally launch off the diving board.

  12. Thanks for this post. I’ve been on LinkedIn for awhile. But I find the templates to be unhelpful for writers. I feel like I’m really struggling to fit my writing credits into these little slots. I’m going to try some your suggestions to see if it helps.

  13. Crystal,

    This is fabulous information. I’ve only begun to tap into the power of LinkedIn, but I love that it has the social networking feel of Facebook without being too personal. It’s a great venue for growing your presence. A great example: I spent $$ on a Facebook ad to grow the fan base of my parenting page & blog and netted decent results. However, I joined a group on LinkedIn (free) and we networked with each other’s Facebook pages and I had more than twice the success with LinkedIn than with a PAID Facebook ad!!

    Thanks for the great insights!

  15. Thank you so much for this information. I’ve had a LI profile for months but have never used it or updated it or anything. You have given me some very valuable information here, along with the info from the comments left. THANKS!
    Patti

  16. I’ve had a LI profile that I’ve been slowly completing these last few weeks, mostly because I wasn’t sure if putting some energy into it made any sense.

    Thank you for giving me some compelling reasons to finish my profile and start actively adding to my network.

    Crystal–thank you for clearing up how Linkedin interacts with my email contacts. I was more than a bit leery of letting it access my accounts. Now I know just to go the slower, but safer route, of searching for colleagues manually.

  17. LinkedIn is an online social network for business professionals. It’s different than other social networking sites out there… I must say, online social networking has exploded in recent years and for writers such myself, it a fabulous marketing tool…

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