LinkedIn Two-Step Verification - How to enable

LinkedIn has followed close on the heels of Twitter and have released two-step verification. Adding a two-step verification system - this allows you to better protect your LinkedIn account. So in-case someone tries to hack your account or gain unlawful access, they will not be able to do so easily. There are many reasons why you might want to protect your LinkedIn account. If someone breaks into your account, there are chances that slanderous mails will be sent to your contacts. You need to protect your reputation and all the hard-work you've put into building your account. two-step verification also adds for better maintenance.

This is how two-step verification works on LinkedIn. You need to add a mobile phone number to your account. Once added a code will be sent to your phone. This code needs to be entered before you are able to log-in again. So the next time you login to your LinkedIn account - another security code will be sent to your phone. Only after entering this code will you gain access to your account. So if anyone else tries to access your account they will not be able to do so - as they don't have the code. This is definitely an added layer of security and if you feel this is needed for your account. Here is how to set it up.

How to setup, turn-on, enable two-step verification on LinkedIn
1. Login to LinkedIn.
2. Go to your settings page.
3. Now click on account
4. Click on manage security settings
5. Click on Turn-on
6. Add a phone number
7. Save and you're done. You will be logged off and need to login with the security code.

Every-time you try to sign-in you would need to enter the security code sent to your phone number.

Video below if you'd like the visuals

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvFlzXwwPyo

How to use LinkedIn Mentions in Status Updates and Conversations

LinkedIn has a new feature that's been announced. The ability like in Facebook to use Mentions - this would mean that on LinkedIn you can mention your connections in a status updates and you can also mention companies in your updates. So let's say you start a conversation and would like to mention some of your connections. Start by typing their names and a drop-down should appear with all your connections beginning with those letters. Choose the ones you want and get their names added to the conversation.

When you're replying to a status update that has you mentioned you can use the Facebook style @Name to reply to a person or a number of people in the conversation. The feature is being rolled out to all English speaking LinkedIn users over the next few days, and later on to all LinkedIn users. The feature will ensure that there are now threaded conversations on LinkedIn, and have a very Facebook style of conversations. This would definitely be at a huge advantage for LinkedIn, as they seek to become a Social Site with more sharing and more conversation. This was announced via the LinkedIn Blog.

Once you add someone as a mention in your status update. They will get a notifications letting them know they have been mentioned in a conversation. This feature will also be available to companies. So when a company has been mentioned, they will get a LinkedIn notifications letting them know that their company has been mentioned.

Source: LinkedIn Blog.

Start a Conversation with Mentions on LinkedIn from LinkedIn

LinkedIn Ignore Privately: How it works

LinkedIn has something called 'Ignore' and 'Ignore Privately'. Ignore is something you see beside invitations to connect in your LinkedIn Inbox. LinkedIn Ignore Privately is an option you see beside invitations to connect in your email Inbox. There are many reasons you get invites 1. People find you and send you an invitation to connect 2. You have already rejected their invitation to connect but you get an invite again. Maybe because they allowed LinkedIn to access their email contacts and send out invites again. There are many case scenarios, however there are these invites from the same people that keep following you around. If you get a LinkedIn Invite in your email inbox, like Gmail or Yahoo Mail. You now get the grayed out button option to ignore privately.

What happens when you ignore someone privately on LinkedIn?
For one thing only you will know that you have ignored that person's invite. No notifications are sent to the person who sent the invite. Only you know that the invitation has been ignored and the other person is not added as a contact on LinkedIn. They will eventually figure it out that you have rejected their invitation to connect since your name does not get added as a contact. There is however no notification being sent and everything remains quiet. So clicking ignore beside an invite gets the other person off our back and you continue on as usual in LinkedIn. Helps you maintain your privacy on LinkedIn. There are times you get the option to ignore privately because LinkedIn has detected that account as Spam.

How to get the New LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn has been hard at work releasing improvements, that it believes will help build more interaction between you are your connections. With that said -- LinkedIn now has something called the New LinkedIn Profile. The new LinkedIn has an all new sleek look and you notice that it has a Twitter style header. That is one of the first things you notice, you can place you photo with a brief bio about you. Below that is the The brief bio is for visitors to your profile to get a good first impression. The Snippet of you profile has your current company, previous company, education and geographical location. Below which is your activity, this is new as older profiles have background and experience. Now activity has taken the top spot, a clear indication in the shift in  Social Media being incorporated on LinkedIn. What you share is very important and user engagement adds credibility to your influence among the community.

The right column is solely dedicated to your connects. This includes people who you might know. The strength of your profile (All Star) and the 'Also viewed' option. You can get the all new LinkedIn profile now by applying for an invitation. As it is being rolled out in phases. To get started with the new LinkedIn profile please follow the link below and request an invite.
Get the New LinkedIn profile now

Stop people knowing you've viewed their LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn has something very annoying - every time you view someone's profile they get an email notification letting them know, you've viewed their profile. This is also bad news for recruiters and people in the HR Industry. As it could lead to false hopes in people even if you were simply checking out a candidate, it still raises hopes especially for job seekers. Every-time you search for someone on Google and you land on their LinkedIn profile page. Email notifications let them know you're viewed their profile. If this is something you don't want and would rather view other profiles on LinkedIn anonymously. LinkedIn offers the best solution. Follow the below steps to turn off 'who viewed my profile' on LinkedIn.

You can either click here or follow the steps below stop people knowing you've viewed their LinkedIn Profile. 
1. Login to LinkedIn
2. Hover over your name on the right-hand corner and choose settings from the drop-down
3. Under privacy controls choose 'Select what others see when you've viewed their profile'
4. You can choose only name and headline, anonymous profile characteristics or totally anonymous.

This way other people will not get to know you viewed their profile, allowing you to surf LinkedIn profiles without the border of people being notified that you viewed their profile. Stop people from knowing you viewed their profile

How to connect your Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr to Outlook.com

Outlook.com is the new Hotmail and the team have been leaving no stone upturned to get on with it. They have done an AMA on Reddit which we have already covered here. There is a lot of news on the internet regarding the service and it seems they have learned a lot of lessons from other services and launched this new email App which works amazingly. They did however make of ads in Gmail when you login to Outlook.com however they also have ads on the right sidebar. 


If you have decided to try the service one of the things you notice is that you can connect you Social Networks to the service and get everything you love in one place. Outlook.com seeks to work like a one-stop-social-network-shop, used the word shop there to use the age-old adage in a fun way. Anyways   once you login to Outlook.com you can easily connect your Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr accounts to the service. Once connected you get all your favorite social networks in one place and you can start interacting from right within Outlook.com


How to add or connect social networks to Outlook.com
1. Login to Outlook.com
2. Click on the upside down smiley face on the top-right-hand corner

3. At the bottom you see 'Add' click on that

4. Now select the service you want to add - go through the authentication steps. 

5. You're done

An original post by

Sociolatte

LinkedIn: How to change your password

By now you must be aware that LinkedIn was hacked with the hacker leaking over 6.5 million passwords on a cyber crime forum. In addition to this users are now getting mails from phishers who are asking users to reset their passwords. This is a scam and the mail is not even coming from a LinkedIn mail ID. Scammers are tying to steel passwords by sending mails disguised as though being sent from LinkedIn and asking uses to click a link and change their passwords. Clicking on the link is taking users to scamming and phishing sites who are again trying to rob vital info from users. One of the best things to do right now in case you don't know if your password has been stolen and leaked online is to login to LinkedIn and change it right now. eHarmony has also been compromised and users will be far safer if they change their passwords.


How to change your password on LinkedIn
1. login to Linkedin
2. Hover over your name found above search bar and choose settings
3. beside password click on change
4. Enter the old password followed by the new password entered twice
5. Save settings and you're done.


The reason we are not recommending any apps to do this is because it is sometimes safer to take control of your passwords. When creating a password always use a combination of Alpha, numeric and special characters. This makes it harder to break, it is also not unwise to store your password offline like on a piece of paper in your desk. This is old fashioned and really old school but has worked for many people. This way you can also create a long and complicated password. 

An original post by

Sociolatte

LinkedIn: How to leave a group

Once of the first things that many professionals who join LinkedIn do, is to find groups that they might like and then join a group. Sometimes however the group does not quiet deliver as promised and can actually become quiet a headache, in the sense that you keep getting updates that are no longer relevant to you. There are many other reasons however as to why you might choose to leave or unsubscribe from a Group. Leaving the membership of the group means you will have to reapply for membership in most groups. Especially groups that are quiet closed. Leaving, unsubscribing or becoming a non-member of a LinkedIn group is quiet easy and you can follow the steps below to get it done ASAP.


How to leave a LinkedIn Group
1. Login to LinkedIn
2. Click on Groups and then Your Groups to get the complete list of groups you have joined on LinkedIn
3. Click on the group you want to leave
4. Click on 'More' found as the last tab button beside the heading of the group
5. Click on 'Your Settings'
6. At the bottom right-hand corner you find a greyed out link 'Leave group'
7. Click it and you're done.

An original post by

Sociolatte

Discover LinkedIn Groups with the new statistics dashboard

LinkedIn have announced via a block post that all groups will now have group statistics. With group statistics you can now see what the group is all about, how active it is, demographics and does it contain the right professional group that will help you the most. With the new statistics dashboard you will be able to easily figure out if the group is meant for you or now. 

How to find the groups statistics before joining one on Linkedin

If you go directly to the Groups Directory on LinkedIn you will find the same old page and the new statistics dashboard is not located there. You will need to click on the group, open it and find the statistics located in the right-hand-side tool bar. There will be an image which looks like the one below which will need to be clicked before you can see the statistics. If you visit your groups on LinkedIn you will be able to see the statistics by clicking on the Bar Graph below the name of any group.

Once you click on it you get to see a summary and you can further break it down into demographics, growth and activities. This should give you a fair idea on how the group has grown, where most of it's members are located and how active the group is. Please check out the video below to see how these statistics are further broken down.

An original post by

Sociolatte

Apply with LinkedIn: What it is and how does it work

Apply with LinkedIn is a button companies can use on their personal sites which show current vacancies. The button can be added beside a open job and applicants can apply for that job using their LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn profiles are standard and easy to browse through. Companies will not have a problem as everyone is used to LinkedIn profiles and familiar with how they work. The button 'Apple with LinkedIn' is like the Twitter Tweet button on the Facebook like button. It can be embedded anywhere across the web and the company hopes to make this the standard button to help companies connect with job applicants directly. Currently many of the large companies have a long registration process before you can apply for job they advertise on their sites. This is apart from the many job portals across the internet and various countries. This one button has the power to change everything as the chances of this becoming the standard apply for a job button might become the standard. 


1. How does it work
Companies can add this button beside jobs currently being advertised. Applicants can apply directly from here using their LinkedIn profile. Once a job applicant click on the 'Apply With LinkedIn' button. They can then ask for a referral from their contacts at the company. You can also keep a track of the jobs you apple for using the 'Saved Jobs' tab in LinkedIn. Before clicking send you can make further modifications like choosing which phone number you want to apply with. 


2. For Companies customizations include:

The ability to customize branding to make “Apply with LinkedIn” feel like part of your company’s talent pipeline.
The ability to manage submissions better by routing applications to everything from an jobs@yourcompany.com email address to a URL for a full fledged web application.
Integration with some of the most popular Applicant Tracking Systems on the market


Receive an email with a brief summary of each applicant. Automatically enter candidate information into company tracking systems. 


To get the code and start now please click here. LinkedIn is calling this new feature 'Then power of LinkedIn everywhere'.

An original post by

Sociolatte

What is InMail on LinkedIn

Wondering how to get across to someone who is not a part of your network, maybe contacting a potential employer or getting in touch with a potential new employee to be hired for your company. InMail is for you. The purpose of InMail is to allow you to send an email to any LinkedIn member. This comes in handy especially if there is someone you need to contact urgently and that member is not a part of your network. Sometimes people who you would like to contact are so far away removed from your immediate and extended network that the only way to contact them is to send them an email directly. Recruiters use this as a very powerful tool to get in touch with people they are looking to hire.

To start sending emails you will need to have a LinkedIn premium account, so Inmail is not free and comes at a price. This is also one of the ways LinkedIn makes money.


A little bit more on InMail and how it works
Delivery is guaranteed
No introduction or contact info required
It's credible and your message goes with your profile attached
Each InMail you send comes with a guarantee that if you do not get a response in 7 days to get to send another mail absolutely free. You will also be issued an InMail credit
InMail can be sent directly from a members profile page or directly from search results
Has a much higher response than cold calls and email.

So if you want to make a big impression LinkedIn recommends InMail as this ads credibility since a mail sent through LinkedIn's internal mail service is guaranteed to get a response. To know the prices and rates you can always check once you login to Linkedin the next time.

What is Linkedin Skills and how does it work

Linkedin has a new feature that they have been testing in Beta. It is called 'Skills' and what it does is that you enter a skill you want to know more about and you are taken to a page where you can track that skill further  the purpose says Linkedin is this 'Discover the skills you need to succeed. Learn what you need to know from the thousands of hot, up-and-coming skills we’re tracking.' This is a feature that is still very raw and in the over. You will really need to wait a while to actually benefit from it. The concept is very simple it is like a Wikipedia article on a particular skill but with steroids. There are people with that particular skill who can contribute and speak more about that particular skill. In Fact there are a few skills listed and when you click on that particular skill you are taken to a separate page which first has that skill as listed on Wikipedia. So if you click on 'Interface Builders' under iPhone you see the Wikipedia article related to the skill with the ability to add that skill to your profile. So people who visit your profile c an see that skill and associate you with it. You can add 50 total of such skills to your profile.

Below the Wikipedia article there is a list of interface builder profiles and below that interface builder groups and on the left related skills. On the right you see a list of fastest growing skills and below that Interface Builder Jobs. This is the whole package. You can really use this page to research skill and find what is lacking in your profile or your professional life. You can use this to also see where the market is headed and what upgradations you might require to enhance your career. For group skills listed you also find featured professionals. This becomes another learning avenue.

How to find the skills page on Linkedin
1. Login
2. Click on More
3. Click on Skills Beta

Check it out now to stay updated on the skills relevant to your job and industry. 

An original post by

Sociolatte

What is Linkedin today and how does it work

Linkedin Today the latest offering from Linkedin has just been launched. The service is very simple you login and you get to see the latest professional news being shared on Linkedin and Twitter. This comes as no surprise that this service comes in partnership with Twitter. So if you want to catch up on the latest news professionals are sharing the best part is that all the news has already been categorized according to industry type. Once logged in you can then categorize what industry news is most important to you and then views your selections first. Once you see an article you like you can then share it with your network.

So follow the top industry news thats most important to you and since it's coming from a community based site they are not curated by an editor but news being share by other professionals and from the same industry as you are. Follow stories and be updated  in real time, with the help of Linkedin and Twitter you can stay on top of your game. Getting to read the latest articles being shared with who share them how many times the article has been shared and read comments.

Check it out now http://www.linkedin.com/today/

An original post by

Sociolatte

How to install Twitter on Linkedin

Linkedin now fully functions like a Twitter client. Once you add the Twitter application to your Linkedin account you can then find and follow your all your Linkedin connections on Twitter. The application has all the functionalities to provide a complete Twitter experience while still on Linkedin. Once you add the applciation on your Linkedin account. The application will ask you for your Twitter email ID and password to login. You can also enter your user name and password and it works just as well.

Once you add the Linkedin Twitter application to your account this is what happens.

1. It will automatically follow your Twitter connections who are already on Linkedin. Provided both of you are already following each other on Twitter

2. It will show you your Linkedin connections who are also using Twitter.  You can then choose to follow.

3. You can update your Twitter status right from Linkedin.

4. There is also a check box if you would like to update your linkedin status as well.

5. Choose to display all Tweets or only Tweets that contain #in

6. The left hand toolbar has a complete list of people you follow on Twitter

7. The "Connections" tab has three options. a) All Connections. These are your Linkedin connections who have added Twitter accounts to their profiles. b) Following. These are people who you are connected to on Linkedin and twitter already. c) Not Following. You Linkedin connections who have Twitter accounts but whom you are not connected to on Twitter.

8. Save your Linkedin connections as a dynamic twitter list.

9. Once you login to Linkedin after installing the Twitter application you would need to click on "More" on the  main tool bar and then "Tweets" to access the application

10. You can choose to display or hide your Twitter account on your Linkedin profile.

It's all about  finding people you want to follow right from Linkedin. You can find all your Linkedin connections who are already on Twitter and follow them if you want. It is also a nice way to use Twitter more from a professional networking perspective.

Install the Tweets application on LinkedIn

[Image Courtesy: Linkedin ]

An original post by

Sociolatte

Linkedin and its Widgets and APIs

Linkedin like Facebook has expanded its platform to allow developers to Create APIs and widgets that can be used on Linkedin itself or on other websites. They plan to do a one-up on Facebbok connect. Faceboook connect is the leader in social sharing and connects people across websites with FB connect. Which has established itself as the platform of choice for website owners to use the share button and other widgets and gadgets that can be built and used for free.

Linkedin now wants to become the professional social connector by offering the APIs and Widgets that you can build and use. If you would like to access the developer platform on Linkedin click here.

Its interesting because I am sure this will be used a lot by recruiters and professional networks to keep in touch with their respective clients. This will help because it is already branded as a Professional Networking Site and people coming across these gadgets already have some preconceived ideas as to what to expect. There will have to be a touch of what it stands for to become a success.

An original post by

Sociolatte