Have you ever thought to use LinkedIn to promote your service club? Service clubs, such as Rotary, Lions, Optimists, and Kiwanis often use Facebook to promote their clubs. I believe that such organizations can also use LinkedIn effectively to help draw attention to their clubs and grow membership.

Recently I gave a presentation on this topic to members of the Lakewood Foothills Rotary Club. Many members of the club have a LinkedIn account and were intrigued by my recommendations. Even the retired members seem open to revitalizing their account to help promote the club.

 

Promote Your Service Club In Your Background Photo, Profile Headline and About Section

  • Consider using an image associated with your specific club or the organization as a whole as a background photo.
  • Include your involvement with your service club in your LinkedIn profile headline. Therefore, the president of the club where I spoke could include “Lakewood Foothills Rotary Club President.”
  • Reference your service club involvement in your About section. Let’s say that you’ve been an active member of your Kiwanis club for over 20 years. Include that information in this section and share the benefits of being a member of Kiwanis.

Promote Your Service Club In Your Featured Section, Experience & Volunteer Experience Sections, and Accomplishments

  • Use the Featured section to share photos or videos of service club activities. You can also include a link to the club’s website. In addition, you can feature a post that you created on LinkedIn about a speaker at a recent club meeting.
  • Include your leadership roles in your service club in your Experience section of your profile. Doing that gives greater visibility to your organization than if you only included it in the Volunteer Experience section.
  • List your positions with your service club in your Volunteer Experience section. For instance, let’s say that you are a long-time leader within Lions International. Instead of listing each position separately, group them into one listing in this section.
  • Reference some interesting projects that you’ve done with your service club in the projects part of the Accomplishments section. For example, Optimist club members are sometimes involved in speech contests for young people.

 

Share Information About Your Service Club Through Posts on LinkedIn

  • Create a post about an upcoming meeting with a speaker you believe would be of interest to your LinkedIn connections.  In addition, after the meeting, post about the speaker’s talk and what you learned from it.
  • Share posts that others in your club are posting on LinkedIn. You don’t even have to be connected with that person on LinkedIn to share their post.
  • Go to the company page of your service club’s international organization. In preparing to speak to this local Rotary club, I checked out Rotary International’s company page. It had numerous posts that would be appropriate for a Rotarian to share.

 

About Joyce

Joyce Feustel helps people, especially those age 55 and up, to become more effective using social media, especially LinkedIn and Facebook.

She works with business owners, business development professionals, business consultants, job seekers, and more – ranging from entrepreneurs to people in large corporations. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com.