Maintaining a killer resume and bringing your A-game to each cover letter is still important.
However, one’s professional online personas play an increasingly important role in employers’ hiring strategies.
You might already have a LinkedIn profile, but is it helping you get clients and refine your skills? If not, you might not be using LinkedIn to its fullest.
Here are five tips to help you grow your professional & personal brand on the platform and get the kind of engagement you need to succeed.
1.) Create An Unforgettable First Impression
Each week, more than 60 million people search for job opportunities on LinkedIn.
Companies and recruiters may only spare a glance at your profile, so make sure it’s all they need to get hooked.
Your profile page is the most powerful tool you have to create and refine your brand. Use it well.
Let your profile picture convey a sense of professionalism and enthusiasm without coming off as too formal.
Use the headline to briefly explain your role and expertise while including the appropriate keywords.
Deliver a brief summary about yourself, your strengths, and how your skills can help potential employers prosper.
Leverage the employment history section to showcase current & past responsibilities and demonstrate how your actions helped add to the company’s success.
You’ll also want to populate the featured section with content you’ve created and insightful posts you liked recently.
This demonstrates your engagement and tells onlookers more about your specific professional interests.
2.)Â Manage And Grow Your Network Organically
Cultivating a network of relevant connections is a cornerstone of your LinkedIn success story. If you’ve been on the platform for a while, it may need to start with pruning.
Remove or mute any connections that don’t help you advance a career in your chosen niche. You can always maintain relationships with old colleagues through other means.
Connect with people genuinely first before sending a formal connection request. It may come naturally if you’re already friends on other platforms or have several connections in common.
The best way to reach out to people you don’t know is to follow what their companies are up to and see what kind of content they create.
Ask questions or offer helpful suggestions to get noticed. Make sure you’re genuinely interested in the answers and contribute meaningfully to the conversation. People will smell disingenuousness a mile away.
3.) Publish Content Others Find Value In
LinkedIn is home to far too many self-congratulatory posts and recycled stories.
That shouldn’t dissuade you from creating your own content on it! The trick is to contribute something others find useful, inspiring, or thought-provoking.
Helping other professionals in your field grow is admirable, but you’ll want to focus on clients’ needs.
Introduce a pain point they can relate to and break down how you overcame it.
Alternately, take examples of recent successful business moves and highlight how clients can use them as general guidelines to further their growth.
Always leave room for discussion and engage with the audience in good faith.
4.) Don’t Shy Away From LinkedIn’s Growing Features
LinkedIn keeps introducing ways to reach a wider audience. This may not impact you if you want to build up a curated network of professionals and don’t expect to venture out of your niche.
However, embracing LinkedIn’s features can help you grow your brand or expand your client base if you’re a freelancer.
Creator Mode streamlines building an online following. It lets you create a newsletter and start integrating targeted hashtags into your posts.
You can even organize live streams or add an introductory video to your page. Polls are all the rage since they increase reader engagement without having to comment or directly interact, so use them when appropriate too.
5.) Stay Safe
A massive social network all about creating opportunities is also a natural breeding ground for fraud.
A small dose of healthy skepticism in all your LinkedIn activities will keep your finances, reputation, and account safe.
LinkedIn is free, so no one has any business asking for your banking information. You should vet every contact before accepting to ensure they’re a real person/company and don’t have ill intentions.
Protect your account with a long, complex password, and secure it with two-factor authentication.
If you share files, do so through secure cloud storage and private links so you know who accessed them and when.
Do your part! Reach out to LinkedIn if you experience abuse or see someone trying to pull a scam. Your vigilance could save someone from becoming their next victim.
