Are you making the most of LinkedIn? We asked Jade Pluck, from LinkedIn to Success to share her tips for anyone looking to make better use of the platform as part of their social media armoury.
LinkedIn status updates are a fantastic way to share your wealth of knowledge to all your connections.
If you are not utilising this feature you should be making it part of your LinkedIn routine so that your connections can see the expert you are. Now don’t panic it’s not like Twitter where it is acceptable to post 10 times a day, LinkedIn is different, you don’t want to bombard your connections, I always advise posting 1 or 2 status updates a week. From my experience, the mornings always work well, plus people are starting to be more active on the weekends especially Sunday evenings.
What have I got to tell the world I hear you shout – well here are a few ideas to get you started:
- A useful article – make sure you have read it and put a comment with it too, you could tag the author to gain more exposure if you like.
- Post a video – videos get lots of attention on LinkedIn. Create your own and upload straight to LinkedIn or upload from YouTube.
- Your blog post – start a discussion around your blog post, with a link to the post on LinkedIn publisher – share your knowledge, post a snippet from the post itself or a question around the post to entice people to read it. Make sure your blog has an enticing image, you could even brand them to keep your branding consistent.
- New work/clients – give a bit of detail, if people know the type of people you work with it might encourage them to get in contact with you.
- What are you up to – by saying what you are doing will plant the seed of how you help people generally.
- Got a recommendation – draw attention to it by saying thanks to the person giving it. (Use the @their name)
- Tips and useful info – help your connections and show your expertise, people will know who to turn to when they need help then.
- Talks/exhibiting – are you getting your business out there by speaking or exhibiting, tell everyone. You can @tag the other speakers and organisers for more exposure plus give a link to the event.
You should also add relevant information to your profile to show your expertise.
If you have images, photos or video they can all sit on your profile in places like the media section on your summary or experience section. Blog posts can sit in the publications section too.
My Tips
- Reply to other people’s status updates – this keeps you top of mind with your connections and will definitely get you more connection requests.
- Don’t forget you can tag a person into a status update by using @their name, this means they get a notification to say you have included them in a post. Plus if they like the post it will get shared in their news feed.
- You can post direct to Twitter – by checking the Twitter button your tweet will go straight to your Twitter account, however, remember Twitter 140 character limit, you don’t want to send half a message.
- Schedule your posts with Hootsuite – a great way to ensure you have content going out is to schedule it in advance. Do make sure you check back regularly for comments in case you need to respond.
- Add a link/picture to your update to make it more visually appealing to your readers, this will encourage more click-throughs.
- Tidy up your post, once you have added your link and the link pops up below your status update, you can remove the link in the update itself.
- By being active on LinkedIn and posting content your connections / potential clients want to read, you will get more reach as they start to like comment and share your posts – by this I mean if they like your post it will go into their news feed and their connections may see it – this means more exposure for you!
Go on get posting your LinkedIn status updates, show your connections what you can do and how you can help them in a subtle way that doesn’t say selling!
