How to use LinkedIn

2001: The Business of Strangers - Stettner

As a holistic financial planner my main role is to help my clients. Normally that means creating a workable financial plan, getting investments right and making sure that clients achieve their goals. However there are other aspects too - such as putting clients in touch with others that can also help them through my own network of connections - such as Accountants, Solicitors, Marketing Specialists and Business Consultants to name a few.

Yesterday I invested time in gaining better knowledge about social media as the more I read about the way people connect now and in the future, it seems that this is something that  a forward-thinking successful business, organisation or service will need to master. So I spent a highly valuable day with social media expert Phil Calvert who specialises in helping IFAs around the world with this topic. He provided really helpful insight into a variety of social media applications such as LinkedIn and has given me much to think about and put into action. He demonstrated how whilst originally considered to be little more than a business job site, LinkedIn is an invaluable business tool to enable networking, sharing, understanding, communicating and a great search engine. In essence it helps to communicate who you are and business wisdom is that "people buy people". So whilst networking and LinkedIn can appear to be a collection of business strangers, it can, when used correctly (suggests Phil)  be everything that Facebook is not and rather more.

I shall be taking his challenge seriously and will be improving my use of LinkedIn and many other aspects of communicating with clients and contacts, so do keep an eye on my LinkedIn profile and link to me. If you have a LinkedIn account, I now have some tips to share on how to make this a better business tool.