Linkedin is more than just “another online community.” Power users on Linkedin create and host conferences, generate millions of dollars in revenue, become thought leaders, and find their next job.
Additionally, as the largest career-centered social network, Linkedin houses many smaller communities that are bound to overlap with your location of work to some extent. While perhaps you don’t work in business development, sales, or marketing, on Linkedin, everyone can play the role of all three. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in this guide.
Why You Should Level Up On Linkedin?
- More than on other social networks, people on Linkedin are looking for their next hires, they’re looking for partners for their next business venture, or they’re sourcing ideas on how to solve a business problem they have. That means for enterprising individuals, opportunities abound!
- Linkedin has over 722 million members. This means there’s undoubtedly members with the same interests, career titles, and overlapping goals.
- Linkedin is the largest concentration of international business members
- Linkedin has provided a variety of tools for reaching out to others, and tracking what’s working and what’s not.
Master the Profile Page
One major advantage of Linkedin over other platforms is that once you have meaningful engagements with others, they want to check out your landing page. And in this case, it’s a landing page all about you!
There are tons of templates online for really mastering a profile page. But here are a few rules of thumb that many have found useful.
- Focus on client issues. You’ll see this in everything from headlines (ex: “I help SMBs generate leads.”
- Use quality design. You can embed elements like a highly produced PDF, or edit your profile image or background to share more information quickly (for example: “looking for work” embedded in your profile image around the edges. Or “i’m hiring”)
- Emojis catch eyeballs. While some are perhaps overplayed (the rocket ship), you can include these in your headline as well as your name to stand out in other people’s feeds.
- Quality posts drive individuals to not only check out your profile page, but see a list of your past posts. Your profile page is like the index page of your blog!
Use Recommendations and Endorsements
Linkedin is social and slightly gamified in the sense that the platform seeks to promote engagement. When you go out of your way to provide recommendations and endorsements to others you may have worked with, more prompts emerge for these individuals to recommend and endorse you.
Endorsements and recommendations also factor into search results. These are like reviews with even greater specificity. Individuals searching for hires with specific skills can not only see that you claim to know a discipline, but that others who have worked with you have cited your expertise in this area.
Join a “Workplace”
Or if your place of work doesn’t have a formal “workplace,” then start one! This is a great way to gain synergy for posts as being in the same workplace prioritizes the content of others in your workplace. Whoever runs your organizational account can also notify all coworkers of new posts. Each re-share within an organization meets a new secondary network providing the chance that more posts will go viral!
Linkedin Groups Are Where the Action Happens
There are professional forums for almost every discipline online. But there’s no other site that hosts so many of these popular forums than Linkedin, and they’re called “groups.” Gaining a reputation for regular and quality engagement within groups has led many individuals to solid revenue streams for their business, job offers, and partnerships. Groups are also often private, so you can speak your mind to a greater degree to a group of similarly focused professionals.
Stay in front of your audience
Even if you aren’t a marketer or content producer, chances are you have some thoughts on what your working on. And chances are you have more experience than someone else out there in your field. Share these insights! In an age in which anyone can become a thought leader, you’re missing out on opportunities by not staying in front of your audience.
Of note, this process can start small. Spend a few minutes every day — or a few hours once a week to come up with a number of posts you can share. As you get deeper into content creation you’ll see ways you can repurpose content or perspectives you’ve already documented. Even if you report an earlier “take” nearly word for word, chaces are a different audience will see it a second time.
Use Inmail
Inmail is the ability to message someone else on Linkedin, and there are a few routes to gain this capability. First, you can “connect” with someone and once they agree to connect you can gain their direct inbox. Secondly, you can pay for a premium Linkedin plan, which allows you a specific amount of inmail you can send whether you’re connected to individuals or not. Third, you can effectively run inmail ads, which show up in someone’s inbox based on their meeting some set of criteria (a job title, location, or so forth).
Inmail has THE BEST response rate of any personalized messaging ads on any other social media service. And because Linkedin has a ton of profession-related data, you can often get in front of exactly who you want to talk with. If you’re using inmail not as an ad format, reach out for advice, for partnerships, or just to be nice about a recent development in a colleagues career.
Don’t Spam
This may seem contrary to “stay in front of your audience.” But there’s a difference between spam and regularly posting. Regularly posting in a “non-spammy” way provides value. And that should be the key deciding factor you think of every time you post, comment, inmail, or talk in a group. Am I providing value here? Those that do on Linkedin often get noticed, and this can lead to job opportunities, people wanting to work with you, partnerships, or posts going viral.
Use Automation Tools
Time spent being thoughtful, providing values for others, and figuring out your messaging is time much better spent than dealing with the minutiae of actually using a platform. Automation that’s of value on Linkedin tends to come in a few forms. There are social media planning and posting tools which provide information on trending topics, the ability to schedule posts in the future, cropping of images or videos to the proper size for each platform, and so forth.
Additionally, there are web scraping tools that can provide you the name and details of everyone in a given group or the most popular posts in a given topic. These can be valuable for discerning who you should follow, what types of posts succeed, and generally attaching some data to your process of reaching out on Linkedin.
Plan Your Posting In Advance
This point goes hand-in-hand with using automation tools as well as “staying in front” of your audience. The key point here, however, is that you can nurture relationships with potential clients, partnerships, and more by providing a coherent narrative. Some Linkedin influencers have built out their posts like they’re giving a course on a topic. With each interaction, they gain a bit more community and some feedback on their topics. And several of these individuals have gone on to bandy these exchanges into hosting their own formal courses or conferences!
Thoroughly Follow Through With Comments
When someone comments, you’ve already won the battle for their attention. More than that, they’re genuinely interested in continuing to give their attention to the topic you’re talking about. Additionally, as more quality engagements stack up on a post, it gains synergy, through notifications to individuals who have liked the post already, or showing up in new feeds. Use this to your advantage even if your follow up is as simple as saying thanks!