We just hosted another very successful LinkedIn London meetup last night with some 60 people joining us at the Pitcher & Piano in Holborn. This event is all about how to use LinkedIn for career and business success, a topic that seems to be very useful for most professionals.
The format of the night
The format is that we get everyone to introduce themselves, last night we asked only for name and LinkedIn headline (felt like the army, yes). Laurent then talked a bit about the importance of getting the headline and other bits on your profile right as it’s all about first impressions on the professional network. We then had a Q&A session which went on for quite some time actually, we got lots of questions relating to privacy, premium accounts, profile pictures and so forth. The last part of the evening is all about networking and I’m glad to say that the people who came out last nigh were very keen networkers – I could see business cards flying about and promises of connection requests were abound.
All this for the moderate price of free
The meetup in itself is a completely free event, we don’t pay anything for the venue which is the upstairs section of a bar in central London. The acoustics aren’t brilliant and neither are the seating arrangements but it works somehow. We don’t charge anyone for coming out and we certainly don’t get paid by anyone (not even LinkedIn sadly) to host these meetups. You may ask why on earth we do this? I would say personally I'm very passionate about LinkedIn and can talk about how great it is until the cows come home – meetup or no meetup. Then it's also awareness and reputation building for Link Humans, it's inbound marketing at its finest.
What about the people that come out?
A meetup (or any party for that matter) is only as good as the people that come out. In my opinion it’s the people that make all the difference and can really make or break an event. Luckily we tend to get a great bunch of folks from all walks of life. Last night we had a traveling samurai from Japan, we had a laughter coach (who did get me laughing in the end), a magician (great at card tricks) and we had a number of small business owners and consultants. We encourage everyone to connect and hopefully they will be able to help each other sooner or later – you just never know when a juggler comes in handy now do you!
Twitter and Meetup.com in a beautiful combination
The fact that people come to a social (or was it professional) networking event means they are probably well connected online, something I realized yesterday after getting tweet after tweet about the meetup – Twitter is such a great tool for an event build-up. We are now using the hashtag #linkedinlondon – very creative huh! And in case you were wondering, of course we used LinkedIn Events as well to promote the meetup. For details, see How To Promote Your Meetup on LinkedIn.
See you in a couple of months
As we run other meetups (Social Media London is our flagship), we only do the LinkedIn one bi-monthly which is a good frequency for our schedules. So the next one will be in October, hope you will make it out for that!
At the previous LinkedIn London meetup we were interviewed by The Times newspaper by the way, read the full article here.
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