Should my college or school or program be on Linkedin? Yes, it should.

I recently met with a gentleman from Linkedin who was interested in helping the university advertise on the business social network.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Linkedin. I think it’s how a lot of business networking gets done because you can do it at any time. Instead of cold calling companies, you can reach out through the people you know who might know someone working at the company.

You can also find out a lot about a company. That’s why we have our Linkedin presence for the University of Notre Dame. But the problem is that we can’t list out every great college/school/program that the university has on our profile. Linkedin company pages are built more for companies than universities.

But this is going to change. And soon.

In the meantime, though, the Linkedin salesman said that we should follow the Harvard model on Linkedin. In other words, set up company profiles for each individual school/college and do programs if you want. This way you have a larger digital footprint in Linkedin and you can tie in your social media content and news content to specific pages.

So I’m encouraging you that if you are a main school/college or major program/center/institute, that you should create your own pages and link them up. They aren’t hard to create and you could be up and running and no time.

Then get the word out to your alumni to link up with your profiles so it also displays on their resumes. It’s a great tool to keep in touch with your alumni without a lot of time invested.

Also, don’t forget to be a part of the other Linkedin groups that the university is promoting like the Alumni Group, our own Notre Dame Campus Communicators group (closed group for employees only) and specialty groups for your field. I recommend Marketing Over Coffee’s group for marketing techniques. Very robust community.

If you have any questions about how to do this, just email me or hit me via the different social networks.