LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the internet. You can use LinkedIn to find the right job or internship, connect and strengthen professional relationships, and learn the skills you need to succeed in your career. This makes it a great place to network to grow your business.

You can also use LinkedIn to organize offline events, join groups, write articles, post photos and videos, and more.  Here’s our tips for getting the most out of LinkedIn.

While the presence of company pages is growing on LinkedIn, personal profiles still dominate the platform.

Company pages are valuable; they can provide more information about your business, link out to your homepage, and support a network of your employees. And there are ways that you can boost the visibility of your company page. Plus it is an essential if you want to do any paid advertisements on LinkedIn.

However, the fact is that personal profiles get more views, and greater engagement for the following reasons:

• You cannot send connection requests or personal messages from a business page
• You can’t use LinkedIn Publisher from a business page.
• People are more likely to follow a personal profile than a brand
• People want to engage with other people, not companies

Which means you should be posting from your personal profile for maximum engagement.

It’s an easy thing to forget to update your LinkedIn profile when you’ve mastered a new skill or started a new position at work. However, outdated information doesn’t leave a good impression.

People can easily assume you’re not active and will not be worth engaging with.

In addition, people often search based on key criteria. If you don’t keep your information updated, you’ll be left out of relevant search results – for example, people may search by:

• Industry
• Company
• Location
• Job Position

Be sure to consistently update your profile with new accomplishments, skills, and job descriptions.

LinkedIn is a platform for business professionals, so it’s important to showcase a professional appearance.

There are two primary photos on your LinkedIn profile:

Your Headshot –This is the image people will see every time you show up in someone’s news feed or interact with them, so it’s important that you invest in a high-quality and professional-looking photo .Of course, professional doesn’t mean formal and buttoned-down. If you’re in a creative industry, a suit and tie could seem out of place. According to LinkedIn, having a good profile photo will result in up to 21x more views of your profile and 9x more connection requests.

Your Background Photo – If you’re still using the default LinkedIn background photo, you’re missing out on an opportunity. Background images can help you communicate your brand and showcase valuable information. Select a quality image that demonstrates your standing within the industry, your location or your brand to maximise this element.

You want the content on your profile to accomplish three things:

1. Clearly communicating your brand story and value
2. Using keywords to show up in relevant search results
3. Providing value for people who find it

The most important content on your LinkedIn profile is your headline and summary. Your headline acts as an instant elevator pitch, helping to provide context and a “hook” to keep them on your profile.

Your summary should clearly state what you do, and how you can help your target market.

Here are some tips for crafting a compelling profile summary:

• Use clear and simple language – avoid jargon and acronyms
• Communicate concrete results you provide to your customers
• State how your offering is different than what else is in the marketplace
• Avoid hype and superlatives. For example, don’t claim you’re “the greatest” at something. Stick to facts and measurable achievements
• Make it easy to read and skim
• Include a call-to-action
• Provide your contact information
• Add external links such as your website and other social profiles

Beyond your headline and summary, you should seek to post content on LinkedIn that people need.

You wouldn’t expect to get hired if there were spelling and grammatical mistakes on your CV would you?

Remember, that LinkedIn is a platform for professionals. Your profile helps establish your credibility and standing within the LinkedIn community – this means that if it’s full of grammar and spelling mistakes it’ll harm your image, and lower your engagement.

Don’t trust your own eyes to catch mistakes either. If you don’t have a human proofreader, make sure you invest inn app to check your grammar and spelling for you.

Your default LinkedIn profile URL is likely long, and will include some strange combination of numbers. Thankfully, LinkedIn makes it very easy for you to create a customized vanity URL instead.

This makes it easier for people to link to and search your profile. Just make sure to update the URL anywhere you’re linking to your page, such as on your other social media pages, or in your email signature.

Make sure that everything on your profile, including any images and videos, still function and look good on the mobile app.

In March 2018, Google rolled out mobile first indexing for search results. While you know this impacts your website, it’s important to remember it also impacts your LinkedIn presence. This is because both your LinkedIn profile and articles can rank in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

This is why it’s critical for your LinkedIn profile to be mobile friendly if you want people to find and engage with you.

LinkedIn offers a number of optional sections that you can use to pad your profile. These include:

• Languages spoken
• Volunteer work
• Honors and awards
• Patents you hold
• Causes you care about

Adding more elements to your profile creates new opportunities for people to connect with you. One particularly valuable section is ‘Skills and Endorsements’ – in fact, LinkedIn members who list at least five skills on their profiles will experience up to 17x more views.

Make sure you order your skills so that the top three are the most relevant, as these ones will get the most visibility.

Recommendations are a form of social proof – they provide third-party validation that you’re an established and credible professional. If you don’t yet have any recommendations on your profile, it’s time to start asking for them.

Ask professional contacts and past clients to recommend you. 

Aim for at least 4–5 recommendations. Target people who are influencers or established professionals. If you receive a poor recommendation, or one that doesn’t showcase your skills well, you can delete it from your profile.

For every first degree connection you add, you instantly gain hundreds of 2nd-degree connections and thousands of 3rd-degree connections.

And if one of your connections likes a post of yours, all of their connections have the potential to see that update, so when you increase your connections by one, you’re actually increasing your network by thousands.

This is why one of the greatest ways to increase engagement is to actively boost your connections. Target influential people, thought leaders, and other key professionals in your industry.

Make sure you send a personal connection request each time. You can mention a person, group, or hobby in common, or simply let them know why you’d like to connect. Including a personal touch increases the odds of your request being accepted.

Here are some more tips on finding relevant connections:

• Connect your email accounts to find people in your email contact lists
• Join LinkedIn groups – it allows you to connect with anyone in the group
• Connect with anyone who engages with your content or content you’re mentioned in

Investing in LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Sponsored InMail can help you discover leads and connect with them in a personalised manner, even at scale.

There are three types of content you can create directly on LinkedIn:

1. Posts – this is short content, such as status updates and quick shares
2. Videos – you can directly upload video files to LinkedIn
3. Articles – LinkedIn Publisher enables you to publish long-form articles

You have up to 1300 characters for each post, but the first 2–3 lines are critical, because everything after this is hidden unless the viewer clicks ‘…see more.’

Formatting is important. Use shorter sentences, spacing, and emojis to break up the post. No one wants to read a wall of text.

One of the biggest mistakes people also make is sharing links to external articles or websites. Instead of including a link in your post, consider putting it in the first comment.

External links don’t perform that well on linkedin. For this reason, videos uploaded directly to LinkedIn will perform better than sharing external videos such as ones from YouTube.

LinkedIn ramped up its investment in video in 2018, so native videos (videos uploaded directly to LinkedIn and not a Youtube link) now have a prime opportunity to be seen and engaged with.

LinkedIn native videos can be up to 5Gb in size or 10 minutes in length, however those under 90 seconds seem to be preferred.

The platform does support captions, and as most videos are listened to with the sound off, you should incorporate this into your video strategy to boost engagement.

LinkedIn Publisher posts don’t see the same level of engagement as posts and videos. This is because people need to click on the link to your long-form post for it to count as engagement – so while your numbers will be smaller, they could also be stronger signals of audience interest.

Publisher posts need to be promoted through feed posts the same as if you’re promoting external content, however the perk of LinkedIn’s long-firm option is that the links are not external, so they’re less likely to be punished. In addition, LinkedIn Publisher posts show up as larger thumbnails on your profile page.

You can also work more external links into an article without getting punished by the algorithm – in fact, Publisher posts are a great way to offer lead magnets and execute lead generation on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s feed algorithm promotes those who post frequently. Most advice suggests at least 1–2 times per day.

That said, if you’re trying to boost the engagement of your company page, LinkedIn recommends consistently sharing content 3-4 times a day.

But remember: this has to be high quality, valuable content.

LinkedIn also hosts thousands of groups, often run by leading industry professionals. Contributing valuable content to these groups can help establish your credibility as an industry leader – plus, it’s a unique opportunity to connect with people in your audience.

But there’s also another benefit – if you don’t have a premium version of LinkedIn, you can’t request to connect with someone who’s further than a 2nd level connection from you. Unless you’re in a LinkedIn Group together.

Belonging to a group instantly grants you access to sending connection invites to every other member within that group.

LinkedIn groups are not overly very user-friendly, but the company is focusing on how to improve them. In the near future, a new group infrastructure is likely to be released, and while we can’t be sure of what the result of this will be, getting involved now could be beneficial.

To do this, you can set up and run your own LinkedIn group. Not only could you stand to benefit from upcoming changes, establishing a group can also help your target market find and engage with you.

Liking and commenting on other people’s posts can boost your own engagement in two ways:

1. You can gain new connections – People outside your network will see your engagement. If you’ve provided a valuable or thought-provoking comment, that could lead to them connecting with you.
2. People love to reciprocate – The more you like and comment on the posts of others, the more likely they will return the action.

The more you provide value to others, the more engagement and value you’ll get in return. Remember, social networking is all about being ‘social’. If people feel like you’re just focused on sales and business, they are less likely to engage.

Did you know that LinkedIn supports the use of hashtags? A few years ago, the company had stated that hashtags were of no use, but that has since changed. Hashtags on LinkedIn are now searchable, and can significantly increase the visibility of your posts.

When using hashtags on LinkedIn, make sure they’re relevant to your content, your company, and your industry. You should also aim to use no more than 5–6 hashtags per post (including long-form content).

If someone engages with your post, everyone in their network can potentially see it. This creates a huge opportunity for leveraging influencers – having one influencer comment on a post can lead to thousands of new people becoming aware of you and your business.

So how do you encourage influencers to engage with your posts?

Mention them within the post. Of course, it has to feel natural and cannot be overused. If you just throw influencers names into every post it will destroy your credibility and likely annoy people.

Here are four ways to naturally mention influencers:

1. Ask them to contribute or provide feedback on something interesting
2. Create an appreciation post acknowledging the help they’ve given you
3. Interview them and then upload the interview with them tagged in the post
4. Share a quote by them

Linkedin can be an invaluable tool to grow your business but it is important to make sure you are using the right social network and that you don’t spread yourself too thinly.

Check out our blog WHICH SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORK IS BEST FOR MY BUSINESS IN 2021? to review the pros and cons of each platform including LinkedIn.