Just as Facebook puts your social life online, LinkedIn (NYSEARCA: LNKD) does the same with your professional life. The site, however, provides a lot more than a medium to host your online resume. LinkedIn allows you to connect with a diverse array of professionals across your own industry and related industries. It hosts groups that allow like-minded professionals not only to connect with one another but to engage in thoughtful discussions on how to achieve success in their industries. It serves as an online Rolodex that keeps all your professional contacts in one place and allows you to find and connect with one another on a moment's notice.

As a savvy professional, you can derive a host of benefits from LinkedIn. If you are on the job hunt, LinkedIn, and the connections it makes available to you, can help you land your next career. When you stall out at your current company, the site enables you to network with professionals at other companies that offer higher ceilings.

Additionally, if your career is in sales, LinkedIn offers a variety of tools to help you find leads. Life insurance agents, in particular, can use the site to expand their customer bases rapidly. To acquire new customers from LinkedIn, you have to know how to use the site to its full capabilities. As a life insurance agent, you can locate leads and build your business with LinkedIn by adhering to the following steps.

Too many LinkedIn profiles appear as though they were created with minimal effort. For example, the user has no picture or a generic stock photo; he lists his job history but provides no details about what he actually does at work; the summary section is blank or cursory; and the user fails to join, much less participate in, any professional groups the site offers.

While having such a minimal presence on LinkedIn is better than nothing at all, you cannot find life insurance leads in abundance on the site while maintaining such a weak presence. A minimalist LinkedIn profile does not allow prospective customers or business confidants to learn anything about you or why they should want to do business with you.

You want your profile to stand out. By the time a person is done reading it, he should feel like he knows you as a person and a professional, even if he has never met you. First, upload a picture that exemplifies you as a professional. This means no beach pictures, no pictures with friends and certainly no selfies. While you do not need a glamour shot or a top-dollar photographer, you should pay the small fee to have a professional headshot from a reputable studio.

Next, take the time to write a thoughtful summary. Your summary section should provide rich details about your professional background. This is where you tell visitors who you are, why you got into life insurance sales and what you have accomplished in the field. Without a thoughtful summary, many visitors do not continue scrolling to read the specifics of your job history.

Speaking of job history, do not simply list job titles and dates of employment. This section should read like a resume, with bullet points highlighting your accomplishments in each position, but make your writing more casual and conversational. This does not mean devolve into text-speak, but you want your visitors to feel like they are having a conversation with you over coffee, not reading a boring rundown of your professional accomplishments.

Building your LinkedIn network with people you already know is easy. The next step is to make new connections, and the easiest way to do this is to join groups. The site's group search function allows you to find groups related to your industry, your college and even your hobbies.

Once in these groups, begin engaging with other like-minded professionals. This is important. Simply joining these groups is not going to build your network or get you leads. By joining the discussion and contributing thoughtful comments, you gain the trust of others in the group and establish yourself as an industry expert. When you are considered an expert, professionals in related fields feel confident sending business your way; having someone like you in their network makes them look good by extension.

The LinkedIn forums provide a place where you can offer industry advice to those searching for it. Make use of this function, but do not come across like a pushy salesman. If someone asks about the difference between whole life insurance and universal life insurance, answer the question clearly and concisely, but resist the urge to end your answer with a call to action. People who read your answer and benefit from it can easily see from your profile, assuming you have filled it out thoroughly, that you are a life insurance agent. As you answer more questions and contribute more knowledge, you can expect people to contact you for help based on the expertise you have shown.

LinkedIn is not a sixth-grade popularity contest to see how many contacts you can accumulate. Having a massive contact list means nothing if you do not maintain active and mutually beneficial relationship with those contacts. If the only time you contact the people on your list is when specifically asking for leads or referrals, you are doing LinkedIn wrong. Reach out to those on your list when they need help with something, or simply to say hello, wish a happy birthday or congratulate on a recent promotion. When these contacts have life insurance business to refer, they are most likely to send it to the agent with whom they enjoy the most active and meaningful relationship.

People fill social media, including LinkedIn, with heaps of minutiae. Much of it can be annoying, such as when people post endless pictures of their kids or pets, or worse, when someone feels that what he ate for breakfast is important enough for his entire contact list to see. Sometimes, however, a seemingly trivial social media post can provide an important cue that a person needs your services as a life insurance agent.

Take the ever-present sonogram picture, for example. Yes, these show up constantly on social media, and yes, they can get tiring. However, they also provide a life insurance agent with the perfect opportunity for a soft pitch. A new arrival signals a huge increase in a person's or a couple's financial burden over the next 18 years. This is an ideal time to reach out to this contact, once again in a non-pushy tone, congratulate him on the big news and let him know you are there for anything he needs.