How to strengthen your LinkedIn audience without being annoying
Are you trying to expand your LinkedIn audience? Are you using the channel to keep in touch with your current connections?
LinkedIn is the best social network for those looking to establish their thought leadership and expertise.
A few months ago, I watched Stephanie Sammons‘ (as part of Social Media Examiner‘s SMSS) present on LinkedIn. She shared advice on how to use the channel without being sleazy and salesy; I think it’s advice that we could all benefit from.
In this crowded, noisy landscape that is social media, people often resort to shady tactics in order to be found and get discovered.
However, that’s a slippery slope to go down; it only takes 1 slip to kill the credibility that you worked so long to establish.
Prioritizing the platform:
The savviest LinkedIn users are ones that prioritize the platform. They dedicate a few minutes or hours every single day to providing recommendations, contributing to discussions and crafting content on the channel.
The more you can connect people, the more powerful a person you are on the platform.
Expanding your LinkedIn audience:
We’re all on LinkedIn to establish our credibility and create more connections.
So, how do you do it?
Try these 10 tips:
- Commit: Make a commitment to spend 5-10 minutes every day on LinkedIn for 30 days. Engage with others, provide recommendations, create content and send messages. If you reach out to just 1 person each day, that’s 30 people at the end of the month.
- Profile: Change your profile photo when necessary to show your best headshot, and include a strong headline.
- Start smart: Start building a network of people with similar interests, backgrounds and/or demographics. Connect to friends and peers in your niche first before inviting strangers to connect.
- Promote: Let your other social networks know that you’ve got a presence on the platform.
- Engage often: Stay engaged with your most valuable connections on the channel; use the messaging feature to nurture those relationships to stay connected over time.
- Strategic promotion: Follow a few industry leaders that you look up to and strategically share their content. Promote content from these people and mention them whenever possible to get on their radar.
- Quick favors: Spend just a few minutes each week doing quick favors for your connections. Provide recommendations, endorse them for skills and/or leave congratulatory messages!
- Stay in touch: Use the messaging feature to stay in touch with important people in your industry. Give them public kudos and/or send them links to articles you think they’re interested in.
- Ask for engagement: Post updates on the channel that show you want to engage. Ask a question and tell people to chime in with their answer in the comments as a way of starting a discussion.
- Craft content: Position yourself as a thought leader by creating content on LinkedIn Publisher.
There are so many ways to expand your LinkedIn audience.
By engaging daily, endorsing others and sharing great content, you drive engagement.
The more human you are (sharing personal stories and lessons learned,) the more relatable and approachable you’ll come across on the channel.
What do you think of the ideas above? Which ones are you going to try?
Connect with me on LinkedIn and let’s start sharing ideas!