A colleague of mine has been giving me her personal requests for the LinkedIn insights she’d like me to share about how to use LinkedIn effectively right now. I love that she reads my articles and then implements my tips, and I also love that I feel like a DJ taking requests right now! If you are fairly comfortable with LinkedIn and your profile is presenting the best version of you [based on your goals for spending time on LinkedIn], here’s what I think you should be doing right now to stay meaningfully connected to your LinkedIn Community.
1. Expand Your Connections on LinkedIn
Check you’re connected with everyone you know. Think about recent (last 3-6 months) enquires and conversations and check you’re connected to all of these people on LinkedIn. Always send personalised invitations to connect. At the moment you have greater permission than ever to simply ask how they are. Sign off with your website as it’s clickable in messaging and 60%+ users access LinkedIn from the App on their phone.
2. Connect Your Channels
Who have you been chatting to on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and in groups? Are you connected on LinkedIn too?
3. Support Your Community
Are you following all of your clients, suppliers and referrers’ businesses on LinkedIn? Now is the time to be supporting their updates. Help people stay in business so they are here on the other side!
4. Research Potential Clients
Think of your target organisation types and follow their companies on LinkedIn. Also look at their list of employees and view the profiles of the decision makers you want to influence.
Make sure profile viewing settings are in ‘completely visible’ mode, so they see you are looking. If they post content or articles, read them and like and comment, if relevant. You could also follow them. You could also send them a tailored invite to connect.
I recently sent an invitation to connect, with a personalised message, to the Head of Marketing at a large online event listing organisation to let her know about the new Event feature for LinkedIn Company Pages [a great one to share with her community].
If you can add genuine value to a prospect in this way right now, do it!
5. Follow Relevant Hashtags
Follow relevant hashtags and see who’s posting what. Type # in search and see how many followers it has before following it.
6. Clean Up Your Newsfeed
Clean up your newsfeed to improve the relevance of what you’re seeing on LinkedIn. You can control which people and companies you are following. Here’s how.
7. Have Fun
Have fun with the GIF feature in messaging with people you know and are already connected to on LinkedIn. I have a few favourites and they are fun!
1. Click into your LinkedIn message and you’ll see GIF.
2. Click on GIF and type in your mood or the word you’d like expressed in a GIF, then make your selection.
