A good way to start using LinkedIn is to pick up on the experiences you have.

Often, people have not written too many cover letters or CVs when they start at – or graduate from – the university and it can therefore seem like a big task to map out what you have actually done.

Here, LinkedIn can be a great tool.

Fill in your profile with your education, your projects, volunteering experience and adding skills. Take it step by step, and when you're done, you'll have a good foundation to build upon when you need to use the resume and application information later.

You also need to reflect on how you can best communicate what you have done and the competencies you have gained from your experiences so that whoever sees it understands it. Communicating your professional profile is something that requires practice – and through LinkedIn you can monitor how many views your profile has had. Not that the number of people who have viewed your profile is necessarily a stamp of approval it may be an indicator of the “relevance” of your content.

LinkedIn is not #hashtag and #lookatme

We sometimes hear that students are a little tired of hearing about LinkedIn. Our experience is that it is a platform that makes sense to use actively.

There will always be some people who, in the eyes of others, take up a lot of figurative real estate in a negative fashion, and those people are also on LinkedIn. Do not be intimidated by them. You decide who you want to follow and how you want to use LinkedIn. You can always stop following specific people or even block them from your network and feed if you want.

Just as you need to target your CV and cover letter so that the recipients get the information you would like them to get, customize your LinkedIn profile. You may not need to list all of your experiences. It all depends on what you want to tell. If your listed experience and the descriptions fit your narrative, then it is relevant to include. Your narrative might come pretty naturally if you have specialized within a narrower field of work and studies, but if you are more generalist or have experience in several different work fields it can be a bit more tricky to choose between the narratives that could be shown. And there are no right or wrong narratives – it all depends of the context.

Fill in all the blanks.

There are many different parts of a LinkedIn profile, and it is a good idea to do the things that require some extra work.

Some of the benefits of having a well-completed profile are:

• Visitors get a ”better” (more in-depth or understandable) impression of you
• Your profile will appear more frequently in relevant searches
• In the process of completing your profile, you become more aware of your professional competence and the way of explaining it
• You have a place where you can remind yourself of what you just learned and the context of your acquired competencies (you don’t have to put all your experience on LinkedIn – e.g., create a document on an online document platform where you can make your compile all of your experience)

Use the profile text as a reading guide.

Once you've figured out what story you'd like your overall profile to tell, you can use the profile text to set the scene. Your profile text can be used to frame how viewers read your profile.

It is partly about getting other people to understand and be curious about your profile and partly about getting the machine (LinkedIn algorithm) to understand it. So, to some extent, you should think about "search engine optimizing" your profile – both the profile text and the rest of the profile.

Everything is publicly available on LinkedIn.

You have to think about what you comment on and how – just like any other place.

Your network and your network's network will be able to see what you write. It's a good thing, because it allows your professional and sharp messages to spread like a wildfire. It also means that a potential future employer can see it – so what you write and do on LinkedIn should ideally support your profile narrative.

And just like on all other media, don't post anything here that you can't stand by if you face a person in real life.

It's not just people who are on LinkedIn. Companies, universities and all sorts of other institutions and organisations are also on LinkedIn. Their presence allows you to gain insight into the organisation and see when something new is happening. And it is a great platform for them when hiring or branding their company.

There are a number of benefits to that:

• You can use LinkedIn in your company research
• You can become more aware of your own career choices and wishes
• You can follow companies (public and private) on LinkedIn to keep track of what is happening in their world - and also keep track of when they have vacancies.

Many companies use LinkedIn for recruitment. This also means that if you search for a company through LinkedIn, the company will see your profile. That is why it is important that you keep your profile updated and that the content is well thought out. Chances are that your potential future employer will look at your profile, especially because Google is also looking into LinkedIn's databases. This means that if you "google" your name (what many employers do during the recruitment) your LinkedIn profile will appear.

Find and follow professionals, alumni and companies that match your profile.

Think about your “story” and which profile you have – or would like to build. Who are the leading people and companies in your field? Follow them if they have a profile on LinkedIn – then you will gain new knowledge and inspiration in the area, and it can help underpin your profile's "story".