LinkedIn is a fabulous platform to engage and connect with fellow business owners and prospective clients.
Like any social media platform, you need to be active on LinkedIn consistently in order to increase your visibility. The problem is, most of us do not much time to spend on improving our LinkedIn presence each day.
So, to make the most of the time we do have, here are my top five, super-helpful LinkedIn tips, that should help to generate more leads and make valuable connections.
1. Make full use of your LinkedIn cover photo
Do not, I repeat, DO NOT leave this space empty. A picture is worth a thousand words and your LinkedIn cover photo is a great opportunity to tell the lovely people who view your profile a little bit about you, your business, or the services you offer.
I have used the space to show off my business banner with the strapline – ‘achieve more with a virtual assistant’. My profile viewers will immediately understand I am a virtual assistant who can help them achieve more in their day.
Think about what you want your profile viewers to think when they see your profile – what are the key points they need to know?
2. Stop sending your prospective clients to a competitor’s LinkedIn profile
There is a feature on LinkedIn called ‘People Also Viewed’ that appears on the right side of the page when you view someone’s profile. This feature can be useful if you are looking for potential connections but not such a great feature to have on your own profile.
If you leave this feature on, anyone who visits your profile will see a handy list of your competitors, just a mouse-click away! Noooooooooo!!
The good news is you can switch this function off for your profile. Yay!
Go to ‘Settings & Privacy’ in your profile setup. Click on ‘Privacy’ in the top navigation area. Then locate “Viewers of this profile also viewed” and make sure this is set to ‘No’.
3. Increase the number of your LinkedIn Followers
LinkedIn has a network size limit – you can’t have any more than 30,000 1st degree connections. While this is ample for most of us, people who might use LinkedIn for lead generation or for establishing their thought leadership may well want to exceed that number.
Thankfully, there is a solution to this, through the ability to ‘follow’ people without connecting to them.
You can reserve your 30,000 connections for people you know, clients – current and potential, and you can ‘follow’ others such as those you would like to learn from, get inspiration from, etc.
When you ‘follow’ someone on LinkedIn you will be able to see their posts and articles on your homepage, however, the person you are following will not see your posts or articles.
You can see who is following you by clicking on the ‘Followers’ blue highlighted text in the ‘Activity’ section of your profile.
Obviously, you would also like to have people follow you so that they see your posts on their feed. So how do you go about getting people to follow you on LinkedIn?
Remember that the goal should not be so much about having the most followers but rather to build your credibility as an authority on your topic. Become an expert in your field.
Work to build your authority by posting regular status updates, and articles, and you will naturally gain new followers.
When you are putting out new content on LinkedIn (and in fact, this applies to all content you post on any social media platform) make sure you keep in mind the following four points:-
(a) Create high-value content
(b) Focus on your field of expertise
(c) Write what you are most passionate about
(d) Be consistent – create and share content regularly
(I go into more detail about these four points in this blog post)
4. Use ‘Who Viewed Your Profile’ to find potential clients
A great place to find potential clients is in the ‘Who viewed your profile’ page, which can be found via your profile dashboard. Here you will see a list of people who have viewed your profile in the last 90 days. You can then check out each person’s profile to see if they could be a potential client and if they are you can follow up with them by sending a personalised connection request.
5. Don’t forget to be you
Remember to be YOU! There is so much competition out there, and inevitably your clients are going to be drawn to your business or service because of how they perceive you. This means that when you do have time to post or comment you should try to write the way you speak. The easiest way to do this is to say what you are going to write out loud. Pretend you are having a conversation with someone. If it sounds false to you then it will seem insincere to people that read your messages and posts.
There are some good apps that let you speak your ideas straight into your phone, just like with a voice memo app, except they will instantly give you a transcript of your words. All you need to do is make a few edits and hey presto you will have the perfect post.
No more staring at a blank screen for hours wondering what on earth to write – just speak your mind and let the app transcribe it for you. I personally use https://otter.ai/ and they offer a free plan of up to 600 minutes per month.
This is very useful if you get an idea of content for a post when you are out and about – no more having to scribble things down on scraps of paper that inevitably get lost.
I hope that these tips will help you start making more use of LinkedIn. My LinkedIn profile is here if you would like to connect. If you have any other LinkedIn tips that I haven’t mentioned in this article, I'd love to hear them. Let me know in the comments below.