Some great information here, but I have to agree with others - the double negative style is really hard to read. It stops me from sharing this post.

Everyone, 
 
Thanks for the feedback about double negatives. We will makes sure to avoid this style in future articles. 
 
Thank you! 
Kipp

Love it!!! 
 
As a LinkedIn junkie, I profess these points to clients and students everyday. I obtain about 75% of my inbound marketing business through social media and a pretty good flow of site visitors come from LI.  
 
I enjoy communicating with people much more through LI than Twitter and FB, better leads for us too. 
 
I like the dbl negatives, Took me 2 reads to figure out what you were doing, but for me it cements the meaning more. 
 
Thanks 
 
Dave Hale

Here's my suggestion for a bad use: 
 
#10 Post Status Updates more than once per day.  
 
I quite often remove people who update their status too often. If you have something good to say then great. But if you just want to post and post and post then you're going to be deleted from a lot of network feeds.

Great post. I especially like the SEO tip for changing the anchor text. That had never occurred to me for some reason! 
 
 
 
P.S. The double-negatives didn't affect my thoughts on the post one way or the other.

I'm with Charles when it comes to #10 and would further like to add "Don't share all your tweets on LinkedIn". 
LinkedIn has an option to only share tweets tagged with the #li hashtag and people should use it. LI isn't Facebook and I don't want to see people updating their status 20+ time a day including updates concerning Australian politics, rugby, and cycling... 
Like Charles, I have disconnected from people or hidden their newsfeeds because they update their status more times per day than I could cope with.

I've learned a lot from joining & participating in groups. Good suggestion. 
 
Let's keep the cheap shot political comments off this site. Thanks.

Thanks for the great article, your "do not's" are straight forward and easy to understand.  
 
I also appreciate the comments on the importance of participating in groups and not simply joining alone... I think this gets overlooked quite often!  
 
Thank you!  
 
Tyrell Mara

Essentially, you're saying the worst way to use LinkedIn is to not use it fully. What's next, an article that says the worst way to drive a car is to not drive it?

Hi Everyone, 
 
Here is another one to add to the list. Get people you have worked with to recommend you. This is a great way to show that you have helped other companies and shows your credibility.

I appreciate all the business tools that hubspot makes avaiable to businesses. Along with the ebooks, videos, and these blogs, I am getting an education and benefit from real people using the resources. I find Hubspot to be one of the best sites I've come across, and I appreicate the comments from others.

Despite what anyone thinks about the double negatives and the political cheap shots this post is going VIRAL! Too many people ignore the power of LinkedIn and I believe that this post/article will change many opinions as it has changed mine. 
 
P.S. This is not an opinion--this is based on fact; many of my social network contacts are chiming in on this.

I agree on all the line, also, about last point, I too believe it's important to make your status updates on LinkedIn a bit lively, or people will think you don't even use the service at all. 
 
I laid down a social media strategy using channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for my company, and I differentiated the kind of updates to post on all of them, limiting LinkedIn status updates to one per day, and strictly for business related blog posts I wrote on my corporate blog (in one of the 3 days a week there's new content there) or I found among the blogs I follow.

I am using social media for my business haven't seen a change yet but hopefully I will soon. I think it is effective.

I will have to say I didnt realize that so many people still used LinkedIn to even make a difference

The last point you made is why I actually don't connect my personal twitter to my LinkedIn. I would be better to connect it to a business twitter account if you have one.

Now that Linkedin has added 'products and services' to Company Pages, I'd say #10 is 'Don't list your products and services on your company page'.

I'll offer a counterpoint to item #8: I will argue that if you don't really know the person who is asking for a connection, it's proper to not accept. Why? How many times have we been contacted by someone in our network asking for a connection to an individual we know. Yet, even if we don't know that individual how can we possibly offer a valuable connection? An overly large LinkedIn network where we don't know a majority of people in our circle is rather worthless.

#10: Don't Confuse LinkedIn with Facebook. No one cares where you're eating lunch or that you got a haircut. Fun is cool...but keep it professional.

Endorsing a couple of the points made above: 
 
1. I also once posted a list of 'what not to do' with your website - my readers were equally confused about the negative approach. I won't do it again! 
 
2. I disagree with #8. LinkedIn tries hard to have some sort of quality control, where contacts are genuine connections (online or offline). However, if you click 'I don't know' someone, and that happens to them 5 times, they are banned as spammers (so it's best to click 'ignore'. 
 

Thanks for the great article... I especially liked the SEO tips. Time to go back and update my LinkedIn profile.

Double negative is not an issue. It helps stress your point. Anyways, it is being picky. 
 
 
 
#10: Do not ask anyone to LinkIn or for a recommendation without personalizing. Just using the LinedIn "boilerplate" text is very impersonal and lazy. Writing your own invite or request, shows that at least a little thought went into your message..

I am new to Linked in, and even though it's written in the negative, the information contained is very helpful. And peoples comments have been valuable. Thank you every one who has contributed.

Great advice, but where is the how to? i want to do some of these things but i am not sure how to find and then answer questions, any advice?? 
 
www.limt.edu.au

Double negatives aside, all of the points you made were great especially for people just starting to use social media. Thanks!

Hi Diana, 
 
I agree with all your points except #8 concerning LinkedIn connections. I feel much more strongly about protecting the integrity of my network on LinkedIn than I do in Facebook. When I connect with someone on LinkedIn, it's a tacit endorsement of the person's professional qualifications. I blogged about it in detail in a post called 6 Reasons for Refusing LinkedIn Invitations:

Some good points. I need to revisit my Linked in account, refresh it & work it more effectively. Thanks

Great list of reminders on what to do - though phrased in a rather quirky way. 
 
I like the above-mentioned suggestions for #10, especially those of Olyn Hyde and Charles Brodeur.  
 
Here is another suggestion for #10: Don't make your profile public and don't allow invitations or messages... 
 
If your profile isn't public and/or people can't send you messages, #1-9 won't matter.

Great article! I think for people just starting out with LinkIn and people that "think" they've got it all figured out...these are good points that should be looked at! Thanks for sharing!

I like it. I think your tips go well with a post I recently made about how to effectively use LinkedIn as an individual Part 1: Secret Tips to Leverage Your Linkedin Network and Part 2: Real Life Success Stories Using LinkedIn

Thanks for the tips. Simple and practical to the point. Certainly they help.

I, too, was bothered by the double negative spin. I found myself having to reread stuff over again (in this case a bad thing). Almost stopped reading it altogether. Good points though.

I thought this article was REALLY helpful, have posted a link to it on my blog and used it to some success already. THANKS! 
 
PS Everybody has a different style of writing, so felt some of the double negative comments were a bit harsh!!