Send and receive messages - LinkedIn Tutorial

- [Narrator] Another benefit of LinkedIn is that it can be used as a powerful messaging platform, almost in the same way that you'd use email or instant messaging. You can access your messages by navigating to the messaging icon up at the top. I'll click on this, and this brings up Lisa's messages. On the left hand side, we have the messaging window and here's all of the messages she'd received. So she's only received two messages here, but that makes sense. She hasn't had this account for very long. If you click on a person, you'll then see the message thread displayed over here to the right. We can see the message here where we said, "hello, Lisa, I enjoyed being in your group for the marketing project. Let's connect." So this is already connection that I accepted and just put in here and I'm going to send back and put, thank you for connecting. When I'm done, I'll hit send and you can see that it sends that right inside of here. Now, over on the left, I could click on Tracy Westbay and it will bring up her messages. Here I can see that she actually responded. Earlier in the course, we had asked her for a letter of recommendation or a LinkedIn recommendation, and she did provide that, so it's showing it right here. I could click on that and then accept it. In this case, I'm going to say thank you to her for sending that over. And then I can click send. Now, I do want to point out here too that you can also include an image. You can include a file, a gif, or emojis as well. But in this case, I just want to say thank you, Tracy, and I'm going to click send. In order to create a new message, I can go up to the top right where I have this pencil icon and I'm going to click on that, and when I do, it asks who I want to message with. Now, this needs to be somebody I'm connected with, but let's say for instance that I did want to send a message out to one of these people. I'll put in, Tracy. Starts generating this. I'll go in here and then I can send that message. So this is one where it brought up this conversation that already existed. If it didn't, I could start a new conversation from here. So this is a great place to navigate to to be able to see all your messages. If you want to quickly access messages and use them while you're on LinkedIn, you can do that by clicking in the bottom right on this messaging tab, which you can now open up and you'll see those messages here where you can really quickly navigate to them and start typing here. The nice part about this feature is that if you're on other parts of this, say I'm here on my network, on the jobs page, you still have access to this, where I can now respond, I can message people and I don't have to navigate to that messaging page. Now, it's important to note that you'll only be able to send messages to your connections on LinkedIn, and this is a good thing because it prevents you from being bombarded with spam messages from anyone and everyone. Before you communicate with someone, you have to be connected. There are a couple of exceptions to this though. One is if they're a premium member who turns on a feature called open profile, if they do, you'll be able to send a message to that member. Also, if you have a premium account on LinkedIn, you have the ability to send messages using InMail. You receive a certain number of InMail credits based on your subscription, and you can use those to send messages to people that you're not connected with. Finally, when sending messages on LinkedIn, there are a few things to keep in mind. If you're messaging someone that you don't know, include details of how you might know each other and why you're interested in connecting with them so it doesn't feel as much like a random connection. Remember, LinkedIn is a professional network, so be thoughtful of other people's time, keep your messages short and to the point. And lastly, try to approach each connection with a mentality of adding value, not just extracting gain for yourself.