For most lawyers, the reason to be on LinkedIn is to make business connections, or to advance their relationship with connections they already have. Your LinkedIn participation can help you:
- Meet new people
- Get ideas about how to work better with your clients
- Make connections with an industry or business person that might lead to new work
- Find experts
- Act as a platform to demonstrate your expertise and inform people about what you do
...and more. But it won't be very effective if you don't have a good network of connections.
One of the best ways to begin building your LinkedIn network is by connecting with people that you already know in real life. But trying to do that one by one is time-consuming and you may forget some of the people who might be your best connections.
Instead, consider uploading your address book to LinkedIn - that way you can see who you already have contact with in the 'real world,' which of those contacts are already on LinkedIn, and you can easily send them an invitation to connect with you.
A lot of lawyers are afraid to upload their address book to LinkedIn because they're not sure what LinkedIn will do with that information, and they're not sure which people in their address book they want to connect to on LinkedIn. But don't let that stop you. By using the upload feature, all LinkedIn does is upload the contact information so that you can view it from LinkedIn. You can invite some, none or all of your contacts to connect with you - LinkedIn won't email or invite them without you taking specific action to do so (see my caution below).
LinkedIn also uses this information to suggest relevant connections for you and to help you browse, search, and organize your contacts within LinkedIn.
To upload your contacts, go to the My Network tab and either enter your email address and password or click on more options.
On the next page, you'll have the option to enter your email and password to upload your contacts:
Or , to the right side of this page, you have options to upload directly from your email service, import your contacts by uploading a file (such as a .csv file), or by inviting contacts via email:
Once you've uploaded your contacts, you'll come to a screen that looks like this:
**VERY IMPORTANT** As you can see, when your contacts are uploaded, the default is that ALL of them are selected. DO NOT leave them all selected and click the Add connections button unless you want to invite all of these people to connect with you on LinkedIn, and do not mind that the invitations will not be personalized (see LinkedIn Tip #1).
Instead, click on the deselect button:
Or click on Skip on the right and select individual contacts you would like to invite to connect and personalize the invitation you send them.
NOTE: This post was originally written in 2013, but has been updated with new screenshots and information following the 2017 LinkedIn UI changes.
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