Over 90,000 companies and freelancers already have a XING Company Profile, and this number is rising all the time. The first thing companies want to know when weighing up whether to create a Company Profile is what they can do with it or what other companies have done with theirs. We therefore decided to put together an overview of the top five use cases to show you how you stand to benefit from a Company Profile.

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About a week ago we launched some new Company Profile features. So far more than 90,000 users – ranging from freelancers to SMEs to large concerns such as Siemens and Daimler –have already claimed their XING Company Profile. While talking to customers to find out their needs we noticed that there’s often a simple solution to their questions and requests, so we decided to write a summary with main five tips.

Tip 1: Search engine optimization
Make sure your profile can be found by search engines as you may well be reaching the right people on XING, but when it comes to range the more the better. So if your Company Profile can’t be found by searching on Google, Bing or Yahoo, you’re completely invisible beyond the realms of XING. We recommend you change this in your settings by going to your Company Profile, then clicking on “Company Profile settings” on the right-hand side and ticking the box next to “This Company Profile is visible to search engines and non-XING members.”

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Editorial comment: This MaximiXING article is by Vivian rather than Silke Schippmann, who we hope will get well soon!

Anyone who has been a member at XING for some time may well have looked at someone’s profile or a message they wrote and immediately thought “So that’s how they tick”. This is by no means intended to sound negative, and we certainly don’t want people to pigeonhole others, but characterizations can actually help to facilitate communication by adjusting our expectations. After monitoring this for some time, we have identified four common categories of people on our platform: (more…)

No, I don’t think so. At the moment I seem to be receiving invitations to all kinds of events from Budapest, Vienna, the United Arab Emirates, and a whole range of other places. I don’t play golf, I’m not interested in wine tasting or a seminar on optimizing my finances. And no thanks, I’m not interested in attending a lecture on growing tomatoes. I just want to be invited to events that are relevant to me.

So if I now create and post an event, it’s all too easy to just invite all of my contacts in one go. But that’s really not a good idea. (more…)

“Visitors to your profile” is one of the most popular and useful functions available on the XING platform, and there are various ways to gain access to this information:

• Via the Powersearch function: Members who recently visited my profile
• As an RSS feed
• As a box on your homepage (Find out more about the homepage options)

If you look at the list more closely, you will notice that it not only contains people, but also the reason why they viewed your profile. Non-members who view your public profile are stated as arriving there from an “External link:” followed by the corresponding address, which in turn allows you to see where your profile is linked to online. (more…)

Dear XING members,

Sooner or later everyone has something particular they’re looking for, or has something to offer that other people will be interested in. XING is a great way of matching up demand with supply in this sense. I’ll be looking into this in more detail in today’s MaximiXING post as it is something with the potential to bring many benefits to members. To keep things as brief as possible, I will not go into the search alerts again. You can find tips and tricks about this feature in a previous post. I’ll be leaving out  events, Company Profiles, groups, articles and the group member search today as well, for brevity’s sake.

First things first, you should be sure to fill in the “Wants” and “Haves” fields in your profile. Quite obviously, your “Wants” refer to all those things you are looking for and require. This could include terms like job commissions, orders, a new challenge, a building surveyor, project sponsors, and much much more besides.  Your “Haves” field is just as self-explanatory and might include things like consulting expertise, SAP experience, New York apartment for sale. The list just goes on and on! (more…)

Welcome to the first maximiXING in 2010, this time on Monday, the first working day of the new year. You’re bound to have goals for yourself and your company this year, and maintaining your contact network can help you fulfill them. Here are ten tips for the new year:

Spring clean your profile. It’s worth giving your profile a once-over. What can be improved? Is everything correct, am I happy with the order and focus of what’s in my profile? Perhaps you’d like to add or delete keywords,  or maybe it’s time to change your profile picture. (more…)

Are you a particularly ambitious networker? Would you like to set up a large network in a certain industry or region quickly, or grow a group in a hurry? If so, you probably already try to be as effective as possible on XING, are active in your groups, and use your status update to communicate with your network.

But being in a hurry can have drawbacks as well, namely that you lose sight of the personal touch that is so important for networking. Using software such as Phrase Express can accelerate writing and sending contact requests, but can lead to mass mailings lacking individuality (and which can be seen as spam). Try to avoid this at all times, make sure to include a personal note in every contact request or message.

Effective event invitations

Whenever you invite someone to join your network, be sure to add appropriate tags, and tag the rest of your network as well, if you haven’t already done so. This helps you invite certain parts of your network to events, and when introducing contacts to each other.

Inappropriate invitations are often seen as spam, especially when they’re sent more than once a month. Repeated invitations are only acceptable if the person invited has shown a clear interest in the group or contact, and has indicated this in his or her profile. (more…)

You’re bound to have heard of the new service from XING, the individualized Company Profiles. These profiles offer much more than a ‘name and number’, Yellow Pages-type listing: they provide a corporate presence on XING. It gives you the opportunity to promote your company and communicate with customers, alumni, applicants and more, using either the free basic service or the “Standard” and “Plus” packages.

If you want to optimize your company’s online presence, it’s a good idea to inform your coworkers and employees in time. Let employees know what kind of site use you support, and what their usage patterns mean for the company. (more…)

Like every year, Christmas has crept us on us again and is now just around the corner once more. As the festivities get underway, the piles of party invitations and greeting cards gradually begin to pile up. This week’s MaximiXING post is all about how to make the most of XING for personal networking at this time of year.

Christmas: A time to come together

Why not take some moments over the coming few weeks to post a Christmas message in your contacts‘ guestbooks? Basic members can do this too. You could also think about giving your status update or your profile photo a festive feel too (see XING Coach Joachim Rumohr’s profile if you’re stuck for some inspiration). As is so often the case: Don’t go overboard with the xmas cheer – a day-by-day countdown to Christmas would be going a little too crazy for instance. (more…)