LinkedIn is a great place to share your skills, experience, and meet other professionals. It’s the best networking site for business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives online today. If you’ve started an account, but find yourself clueless on how to use LinkedIn to its full potential, keep reading.
It Starts with Connections
LinkedIn allows you to connect with people in your address book, and then connect with users who are connected to those people. This is how the linking works on the site. It goes right along with the saying, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” The only thing is, LinkedIn is about what you know as well. The number of people who connect back with you after you add them will depend on how well your profile looks. So set up a great LinkedIn profile. You should include a profile picture, cover image, summary, headline and fill in all your past positions and education. Getting recommendations and endorsements can also help as it drives up social proof.
Show Off
Once you have some connections, which you’ll have to continue gaining, you need to start showing off what you know. You don’t do this in a promotional way, but rather, in a professional way. For instance, you can write an article, post it on your blog, and then post the blog post’s URL on your newsfeed. You can also publish articles on Pulse. Your connections and many other people will see these articles, and this is how those interested in what you do can find you and connect with you.
Start Conversations
It’s not about just gathering connections and publishing posts. You need to engage with people you’re connecting with – that’s how you form a community. Send some messages, post engaging posts in which people comment on them, reply to those comments, and comment on other people’s posts. The more you talk to other people, the more they will talk to you. When they talk to you, they form a relationship with you. This is when you start to see your community on LinkedIn working for you.
Growing the Community
Once you have formed a small community by engaging with people, you should actively work on getting more people to join. You can do that simply by connecting with more people and engaging with them. You can also do something else that will really boost the number of people in your community.
Join a Group
LinkedIn groups are great to grow your community. Join groups that have members you want to connect with and participate in them. Comment on posts, like posts, and publish some of your own. The idea is to connect with people by sharing information and your opinions. This is how you start to show people you’re an authority in the industry.
Start a Group
Once you have a good community started, you can move on to bringing everyone together in one place – in a LinkedIn group. You can invite all of your connections, and then as people learn about your group through word of mouth or using LinkedIn’s search feature, you will be able to grow your community even more.
As you can see, there are many opportunities for you to start, grow, and manage your LinkedIn community. There is a significant time commitment associated with this, but it’s worth it. Networking online is preferred nowadays. People will appreciate how much you want to help them with your information, and they will want to follow you because of that. In addition, you will be able to benefit from them because they will also want to share knowledge that you can use to grow your business.
Get started with your LinkedIn community today. Before you know it, you’ll be so popular that you’ll wonder why you hadn’t done this much sooner.
