LinkedIn is one of the most valuable social media platforms out there. It is an active, living community of over 740 million professionals.
People from all types of career paths, experience levels, educational qualifications, and types of employment have found their way to LinkedIn.
If you’re reading this article, chances are, you have too.
In this article, I break down some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your LinkedIn experience. Whether you’re a freelancing professional, a student yet to begin your career, or a small business owner looking to start harnessing the power of this awesome website, the following article will have something for each of you.
Before we get started, though, it’s important that you understand why getting into LinkedIn is so important in the first place.
Getting Started
Like all social media, LinkedIn is a platform to tell your story. Specifically, your career story.
In fact, LinkedIn is a huge library of millions of people telling their stories. Through the power of the internet, LinkedIn connects these stories. And through these connections, emerge the highly interdependent stories of partnerships, businesses, and employment.
No matter what career path you have set for yourself, LinkedIn will connect you with people who could help you reach your goals, and people who you could help reach theirs.
If you’re still on the fence about joining LinkedIn, take a moment to hear me out. Then, come join us here on the dark side, I promise you won’t regret it.
Your Profile
Once you do decide to get started, you’re going to start work on your profile. Your profile is going to be a very important part of your LinkedIn experience, and you want to pay attention while designing it. Here are a few pointers that you should keep in mind-
Your Profile Picture
The profile picture that you keep on LinkedIn is going to be the very first impression anyone you connect with will derive of you. It’s important that your profile picture gives a good representation of the best version of you. It might be prudent to keep this picture simple. Think high quality, formally dressed, clean background, and good lighting.
Your Bio
A common mistake that people make on LinkedIn is to write some form of their resume in their Bio. You have an entire profile for that. With your bio, your goal should be to hook people in. Try writing your story instead of your status (to quote Isaac Morehouse). In a few sentences, try and explain what led you to where you are right now? What are you passionate about? Why should someone else spend time and effort connecting with you?
Try humor, attention-grabbing sentences, and short, simple narratives. As long as you don’t go over the top, having a memorable bio different from the thousands that look the exact same, will go a long way in improving your Linkedin experience.
The Rest of Your Profile
While filling out the rest of your profile, there are two main things that may be useful to keep in mind. Firstly, arrange your profile in such a way that your most important credentials/achievements/experiences always show up first. While trying to accommodate everything you’ve done, have a clear priority order, and don’t be afraid to not include something.
Second, it’s always a good idea to link projects or actual evidence of value created while talking about any skill.
You’re a great graphic designer? Awesome! Link some of your design work so that we could see it for ourselves! (Instead of just mentioning it in your skills)
Connecting
LinkedIn offers tremendous opportunities to connect with people. In fact, it is a common practice to connect with people you’ve never met in real life on LinkedIn. Out of about 86 connections (at the time of this writing) that I have, I have met five in real life. Two of those are my own family.
From mentors to successful entrepreneurs, to the YouTubers that you admire, there really isn’t a limit on the people you could connect with on LinkedIn. To really take your networking game to the next level though, there are a few things that you should keep in mind:
Networking
Although LinkedIn is very lenient with its networking possibilities, there’s a mindset that is very important to have.
Before you send a connection request to anyone, ask yourself, “how can I help this person by becoming a part of his network?” That is the single most important question to keep in mind while connecting.
Helping someone can take many different forms, including being a good potential employee at their organization. But, if you think you really have nothing to give back to the person you’re connecting with, reconsider before sending the request.
If you are connecting with someone to learn from them, and don’t have a lot to give back to the person, consider sending a connection request along with a personal note-
Use those 300 characters to really convince the person why a connection with you is a great idea.
Engagement
After you’ve connected with someone, it’s important to keep nurturing your connections. The single most important way of doing this is by comments. It’s surprising how few people comment on LinkedIn posts. Every comment thus becomes a personal message and works wonders to improve the quality of your connection.
Posting
The quality of your personal brand on LinkedIn will also depend upon the consistency and quality of your posting. Posting once a week is a healthy schedule to maintain. Also, make sure that every post you share creates some value for others (even if it’s just promotion of a different post).
When your post deals with/talks about a different company/person, it might be a good idea to tag them. That way, you can grab their attention, and sometimes, also their likes! In fact, I’ve personally seen this work wonders for me.
A few days ago, I made a Customer Success project using Drift (and some other CS software tools). I promoted it on LinkedIn, and in my caption, I tagged all the software companies whose tools I had used. I knew there was a very slim chance I could even hope to capture the attention of these software giants. But-
Drift saw my project. And due to their engagement, my project got into a lot of feeds. So keep connecting and creating value for others, you can never know when you find who you’re looking for on LinkedIn.
That was my 2 Rupees on LinkedIn. Hope you found it valuable, and that it boosts up your experience on the site.
See you super soon with another article (: