This article was written for the appointment magazine (April issue).

The effectiveness of social media platforms as a means of finding a new job remains a hot topic of debate. Of the ‘big three’, LinkedIn seems to the most obvious fit for a career search. Certainly if you’re not one of the five million UK users now harnessing the power of this business-focused social network you could be missing out on a valuable addition to your job-seeking arsenal. But how to use it effectively?

Luke Williams, specialist trainer at SocialTech, provides some top tips for growing your network, optimising your profile, some of the general do’s and don’ts for job hunting on LinkedIn and outlines some strategies for finding that new job.

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Inspired by my favourite bit of course feedback from my training session on Wed:

Excellent seminar this morning on Social Media by Luke @socialtech I’d recommend his straight forward nongeek approach (@poolefamilylaw)

…I thought I’d share with you all one of my secret special training methods…

Any time I use a “buzzy word” (yuk), technical term without explanation or unnecessary acronym… I invite my clients/audience/hecklers to point it out. I keep a score, then donate £1 to charity for each one.

On Wednesday I raised £1, this make me happy.

That makes £8 in the last few months, which I’m donating to the relief effort in Pakistan + a bit more I’ll chuck in myself.

At first it was quite hard but as time’s gone on I think this simple thing has made a big difference to my workshops.

Sssshhh don’t tell anyone, ok?

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Allow me to explain.

It used to be that the status updates on LinkedIN were actually quite useful, to see what people were up to, get a snapshot of what they are/were working on… but alas no more.

Given the option to link a twitter account to LinkedIN (good) most people have chosen to send ALL tweets to LinkedIN (bad) rather than use the selective “#in” option which only sends selected tweets to LinkedIN (good).

The result?

The status updates are all RT’s (the twitter version of forwards) and off topic, no where near as useful as it used to be.

To me, it devalues the activity stream quite a bit – which is kind of a pity as the other things on there are still great – Q+A, groups, events…

Have you noticed this too, or is it just my network of people?

Please, if you link twitter and Facebook together use the selective updates function – make sure your messages are “fit for purpose”, does everything you tweet, really need to be on LinkedIN?

Select “edit my profile”, then click on the “edit” link next to your twitter username and select the option highlighted below.

Next time you want to send something to LinkedIn just include “#in” in your message.

Thanking you in advance… Luke.

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Luke Williams on LinkedIN – I run 1/2 day LinkedIN courses in London and Bournemouth if you’d like to make more of this great business platform.

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Change #1

LinkedIn is changing its homepage quite a bit – there’s a good write up on Mashable – it’s not live for all users yet, so if you don’t see it, you will soon.

Really though, this post is more about….

Change #2

Since August, I’ve been delivering most of my training under the joint venture I set up with Web Matters (as Web Matters Training) – it’s worked very well for both of us and I’m proud to say we’ve now partnered up with 2e2 to provide a range of Social Media for Business Courses (launching in Feb ’09) based at their London (Victoria) training facility.

In line with this, I felt I should add “Trainer at Web Matters” to my LinkedIn profile, as the 2e2 venture is a partnership with WMT and it would make it clearer for anyone looking at my details via that site.

I’ll post again once the course details are live. Its a great opportunity and if it goes well, we’ll be looking to expand to their other centres around the UK – exciting times.

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