6 Ways to Maximize Your LinkedIn Profile's Impact

Kevin Leyes

With 722 million members, LinkedIn is the largest social-media platform for business interactions. It's a powerful tool for both recruiters and job seekers, as well as business-to-business (B2B) interactions: 55 million companies and 61 million senior-level influencers are on LinkedIn. With so much opportunity, it's important to have a LinkedIn strategy that helps you build relationships for a high return. So what does that look like?

Why you need a LinkedIn strategy

Like any other large social-media platform, as LinkedIn grows there are more and more people who use the platform to spam users directly in an attempt to sell something. It might be tempting to go this route, but building relationships before selling is key on LinkedIn. This way, you build trust with potential clients or customers, which will make them much more likely to buy what you’re selling.

With the right LinkedIn strategy, you can easily form those relationships. LinkedIn states this itself: “LinkedIn is most effective when you use it as a relationship-building platform.” You might have hundreds of connections, but if you’re not building meaningful relationships with those connections, you won’t see much productivity or profitability from the platform.

The best LinkedIn strategies for building relationships

1) Research your prospects

Before you connect with someone, do your research on him or her. Read through his or her profile, taking note of any commonalities you might share that you can bring up in later conversations. While you’re at it, check out what LinkedIn groups the person is in. Then, take your research off LinkedIn and check out his or her company’s website and social profiles. You can even google his or her name to get a complete picture of who the person is.

2) Use LinkedIn groups

Not sure where to find prospects? If you’ve exhausted your other lists, LinkedIn groups are a great place to look. The groups are meant to help people find others in the same industry or with shared interests. Since LinkedIn only allows you to join 50 groups, be mindful about which groups you join. You can also join groups that your prospects are in if you don’t have any other acquaintances to give yourself an in.

3) Be open and honest

When you connect with your prospect, send a personalized message along with it. Include why you’d like to connect and, if possible, include what the mutual benefit would be. Perhaps you just met at a networking event — or maybe you don’t know them at all and have no acquaintances. LinkedIn is made for these types of connections, so don’t be shy.

See all 6 ways and the complete Entrepreneur article

 

 

Five Tips For Becoming A LinkedIn Thought Leader

Christina Hager

When you're an expert, you eat, sleep and breathe your subject. If someone set a timer and said, “Go!” you could probably talk their ear off about your area of expertise for an entire hour. 

But it’s not enough to just be passionate about your subject: If you want to be seen as an expert (and hired as one), you have to show the world why you're the authority on that subject.

Part of being a thought leader in 2021 means building your digital presence. Take household names like Dr. Oz, Oprah and Bill Gates: They have put in years and who knows how much money into publishing opportunities, TV appearances, commercials, media spots and multimedia channel opportunities.

You probably don't have the budget that Oprah does. I know I don't.

So what does the average business leader need to do? You have to somehow find the budget, time and energy every single week to position yourself as a thought leader, all while wearing the many hats of your business role.

Where do you start? 

Showcasing your brand on LinkedIn is the perfect way to demonstrate your thought leadership — and it doesn’t cost you anything but a few hours of your time.

Here are your first steps for building thought leadership on LinkedIn:

2. Identify your target demographic. 

Who is your ideal client or consumer? Now go further: What kind of content do they want? The C-suite will want different information than middle managers, and members of HR are going to be interested in different topics than those in marketing or finance. Learn to speak to your audience about what they are interested in, and be sure to use the terms that they would use when talking about the subject matter. 

3. Start building content and sharing updates.

If you want to be a thought leader in any field, you need to be published. Being published is a huge “proof point” that shows your audience that you really are qualified to talk about your particular areas of expertise.

If you have already been quoted in interviews, terrific: Now start dripping those URLs out across LinkedIn with an introductory sentence or two. If you haven’t been published, now is the time to start courting those opportunities.

In the meantime, you can start publishing your own articles right on the LinkedIn platform (again, for free), then sharing them as updates on your feed and in your LinkedIn groups. 

Attention: LinkedIn groups aren't there for you to hawk your product or service. This is what LinkedIn refers to as “overly promotional” and what the members of your group will call flat-out annoying. So if you're trying to sell something, then save it. If you can use your article to incite interesting conversation, then it’s okay to share it.

See all 5 tips and the complete Forbes article