LinkedIn serves as a place for professionals and businesses to connect, share and learn. Simply put, it’s Facebook for your career. But despite being one of the most popular social media platforms, many people, including musicians and content creators, still have no clue on how to use it and how best to benefit from it. LinkedIn is for anybody and everybody that is interested in growing their professional career, whatever field you may be in. It’s like one ongoing networking event.

LinkedIn allows you to add “connections” (friend requests) with other professionals, chat with them via messages, and showcase all your experience, achievements, and goals in one place. Basically, if you know how to use Facebook, you can excel on LinkedIn. So, here’s a question for all you musicians out there – if you’re already utilizing Facebook to grow your career and make connections, what’s stopping you from doing the same on LinkedIn? We’ve broken down LinkedIn’s main features and their uses below so that you can start or continue to navigate this social platform.

LinkedIn’s Main Features:

• Home Page: This is the first thing you’ll see upon logging in and is a news feed compiled of recent posts from your connections and company pages you follow. Many musicians, music companies, record companies, etc. have LinkedIn profiles and pages you can choose to follow to stay up to date within the music scene.
• Profile: Your profile shows your name, photo, location, and occupation as well as gives you the ability to add in a short summary, work experience, and more for those visiting your profile to see.
• My Network: This is where you can see a list of all your connections. You can also go here to discover people you may know based on your profile information, current connections, interests, etc.
• Jobs: All sorts of job listings are posted in LinkedIn every day, and LinkedIn will recommend specific jobs to you based on your current information, location, job preferences, and more, to provide better-tailored job listings to you.
• Interests: Just like following connections, you can also follow interests, such as live music, concerts, venues, etc.
• Search Bar: LinkedIn has a powerful search feature that allows you to filter your results down according to several different customizable fields.
• Messages: If you want to start a conversation with another user, (let’s say a venue promotor or record company employee), you can do so by sending them a private message through LinkedIn. Private messages allow you to include attachments, photos and more.
• Notifications: Just like Facebook, LinkedIn has a notification feature to let you know when you’ve been endorsed by someone, invited to join something, or welcomes you to check out a post you might be interested in.
• Pending Invitations: When other professionals invite you to connect with them on LinkedIn, you’ll receive an invitation that you will need to go in and approve.
• Events: Maybe one of the most important features to musicians is the ability to add, share and promote your own events. This allows you to share the event with people that may not see it on your other platforms.

LinkedIn Main Uses:

• Connect with former colleagues and friends: You can use the My Network feature to find old co-workers, teachers, classmates, friends, and anyone else you think is worth having in your professional network to share updates and events with.
• Use your profile as your resume: Your LinkedIn profile can basically act as a more complete resume that you can share with others via a link.
• Find and apply to jobs: LinkedIn is one of the best placed to look for job listings online. You’ll continually get recommendations from LinkedIn about jobs (or in this case, potential gigs) that you may be interested in. But you can always use the search bar to investigate more opportunities yourself.
• Find and connect with new professionals: LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to discover new professionals and companies that may be able to assist you in your music career.
• Participate in relevant groups: A great way to connect with these new professionals and companies is to join groups based on your interests or current professions and then start participating in these groups. Groups like those interested in live music, music venues, music writing, etc. are great places to get involved in, as other group members may like what they see and want to connect with you.
• Write about what you know: LinkedIn’s very own publishing platform allows you to share your own content and potentially have it seen by thousands. Shared content, whether it be a blog, video, event photos, etc., will also show up on your profile, which will increase your credibility in related fields that are relevant to your music career.

LinkedIn has much more to offer than most musicians realize and can help expand your social media reach. We recommend adding it to your list of platforms and link it in your PickleJar profile to grow your music career!