LinkedIn is a great platform to promote your business, regardless of whether you are a business-to-business brand, a business-to-consumer, a non-profit, or any other. It’s also a great way to build your personal brand and attract the right attention for the products or services that you offer. Not convinced? This article might persuade you to use LinkedIn a little more.

Believe it or not, LinkedIn has been around for almost 20 years! Launched in 2002, it quickly became known as a place to find and apply for jobs. I actually got my first marketing job through a LinkedIn ad back in 2011, so it definitely works for that. But it quickly gained a reputation as a very sales-led platform, where users create a profile that looks very much like a CV, search and apply for jobs, get spammed by recruiters, and scroll through sales messages by other businesses. To this day, I still meet a lot of people that hold this negative opinion about LinkedIn and don’t necessarily use it as a place to make meaningful connections.

But over the years, LinkedIn has really evolved to become a place for networking, starting conversations, building relationships, and spreading the message about who you are and what you do. It often takes some convincing, but I recommend it to all my clients. And, if used right, it can work wonders for generating new business.

In this article, I’ll share 6 ways you can use LinkedIn to get more engagement and drive the right leads to your business. Give it a try and tell me what you think!  

 1. Optimise your profile

Your personal profile is your most important LinkedIn asset, so make sure you’re making the most of it. You might also have a business page, but LinkedIn members are more likely to interact with a personal account rather than a business account. So it’s important to make sure your personal profile drives the right attention. Here are some tips for ensuring you have an awesome profile.

• Profile & background photos

your profile photo should look professional but not boring! Don’t use a selfie of you at the beach, or a group photo where you have cropped out the other people in the pic. Your background photo is an opportunity to showcase a little more personality. Choose something that speaks to you, such as a scenic photo of your favourite place, or a photo of you in action (at work, presenting, in a group setting, etc.). You could use this as a place for a branded photo – highlighting your business and what you do. The options here are endless, just make it interesting and make it personal to you. Don’t leave this section blank or just have geometrical shapes or something – that’s a wasted opportunity.

Here’s mine below: my profile photo is a simple headshot, and my background image is a photo of me presenting on a topic I love.

• Headline

The headline is so important! It’s the bit of text that follows you around LinkedIn – everywhere you post, your headline and your profile photo will be visible. So, use this space wisely.

My recommendation? Avoid having a generic job title as your headline. This doesn’t tell people much about what you do or what value you bring. It just tells them what job title you have on your business cards. Instead, use this as a place to tell your ideal customer what you can do for them. Use relevant keywords that describe your product or service and avoid using ambiguous terms like ‘guru’ – that doesn’t mean anything.

• About section with links

The ‘about’ section is an introduction of who you are. It allows you to write about yourself, what you do and what you can do for your customers. Don’t write about yourself in the third person here, it sounds strange. Instead, use this as a place to start a conversation with a potential customer. Tell them about yourself and your experience – tell them what problems or challenges you can solve for them.

You can (and should) add links to this section – this really stands out. You could link to your website, any recent work you have published, a link to a portfolio or a case study, a podcast you host, or anything else your potential customers might want to know about you.

• Work history including links

In the ‘Experience’ section you can list your work history and again, there is space here to add text and links – use it. Don’t just list your history as a collection of companies and job titles, but provide more detail about what you did during that time, and links to any notable work. This is an opportunity to use keywords and for people to find out more about your skillset.

• Accreditations & volunteer work

It’s great to call out any accreditations or qualifications you have gathered over the years or any volunteer work you do. It’s not just a way to brag about what you’ve achieved, but it allows people to find out more about your values, your beliefs, your experience, and what you do outside of work.

• Skills & endorsements

This is great for getting ‘found’ based on your skills. Make sure to list all of the skills you want to be known for, and ask your connections to endorse you for them. You are then more likely to show up for skill-related searches.

• Recommendations

If someone is thinking about doing business with you, they will likely want to read case studies and testimonials from past clients or colleagues. So, make sure to use this feature and keep it updated. If your last recommendation is more than 3 years old, it’s time to get some new ones in. You can then shout about this in a post, re-purpose this as a testimonial on your website or use this as a quote in a case study. It’s also a great pick-me-up for any time you might be feeling a lack of confidence in yourself and your abilities!

 2. Optimise your company page

It’s good practice to also set up a company page, even if your company is very small. This is so that you can associate a company page within your work history, it’ll rank on Google when someone searches for your brand name, and it gives you a more professional look.

To optimise it, make sure to fill in all the sections using keywords that describe your business. Keep the text simple and clear – make it abundantly clear to your audience what you do and how your business can help them.

You can repurpose some of your personal posts onto your business page, or simply share content from your website (such as blog posts) or any other interesting sources.

Make sure that all of your employees have listed their current workplace, have linked it to this company page, and have used descriptive keywords in the description. This allows for more visibility for those key services you want to be known for.

 3. Make new connections

LinkedIn is a networking tool, so you don’t just have to connect with people you have met in real life. It’s a great place to meet new people based on shared interests. So, go out there and start connecting with people whom you find interesting, those you admire, those you would like to do business with, those you see as an ideal customer etc. And because it’s a networking tool, 9 times out of 10, they will accept your invitation to connect and you can start a conversation.

Avoid spamming them with a message in their inbox as soon as they accept your invitation to connect. Unless you have something specific to ask them, this can be quite annoying and put people off. Instead, build a relationship by joining in their conversations, commenting on their posts, or sharing interesting content that they will naturally want to engage with. Think about it logically: if you were at a networking event, you wouldn’t just go over to someone and start selling to them. You might want to start a conversation first, get to know them, understand their needs and when the time is right the opportunity will present itself.

 4. Post frequently

Posting frequently is the key to getting more engagement on LinkedIn. If you only post once a month, the engagement simply won’t happen. You need to make yourself heard on this platform, there is a lot of noise going on, and the only way to do that is to be present consistently.

• Text posts

Text-only posts work quite well on LinkedIn, but especially if they have a more personal touch to them. Try sharing experiences, asking questions, asking for advice, or sharing advice. Sometimes the most random posts will get the most engagement – such as a post about the weather, or how you make your tea. Experiment with different types of posts at different times of the day and see how it goes.

Also, try adding emojis to bring some more personality to your posts, or use hashtags to make them reach a little further.

• Sharing links

If you’re sharing a link within your text post, this will always receive less engagement than a text-only post. This has to do with LinkedIn’s algorithm. So the advice here is to share the link in the comments section instead. Try it out and see what results you get.

• Video & stories

Videos work very well on LinkedIn, as long as you have uploaded the actual video and not a link to the video. Try using more video content as part of your posts and measure how much engagement these receive. You can also add stories to LinkedIn, much like you would on Instagram or Facebook.

 5. Interact frequently

As a networking tool, it goes without saying that you can’t just have one-way conversations. You can’t just post about yourself all the time and expect huge engagement. You also need to contribute to other conversations. And this should happen as frequently, if not more, than your posting schedule.

Make it a habit to log in at least once a day and interact with other people’s posts. You’ll be surprised how many relationships you can build by joining interesting conversations.

6. Publish articles

Articles tend to get less engagement than posts, but they live on your profile for much longer. They’re a great way to express an opinion, to share some knowledge, or to showcase your skill set in a way that you can’t do in a simple post.

Experiment with writing long-form articles on LinkedIn. They work much like a blog article, only they live on LinkedIn rather than on a separate blog. Write about topics you’re passionate about, topics you think your audience might want to hear about, or anything else that interests you.

 

Key Takeaways

If you do all of the above, your LinkedIn engagement will undoubtedly grow. You will start to receive more connection requests, your posts will get more comments, you will receive messages from people that are interested in getting to know you, and over time, working with you.

It won’t happen overnight, so if you don’t see results right away, don’t panic! Stick with it and you’ll soon see things pick back up.

Before you go off into the world of LinkedIn, here are some key takeaways to remember:

Experiment, Test, Learn

Don’t be afraid to try different things. So what if your post gets almost no engagement? Now you know that this isn’t the right post for you. If you don’t try it, you’ll never know.

So many people are afraid to try new things on LinkedIn for fear of doing it wrong, you can’t really go all that wrong if you’re being authentic.

See what other people do on LinkedIn and take inspiration from them – this is another great reason to interact more, so you can learn from others.

There is no magic formula, it takes time and patience to build a good engagement rate on LinkedIn. And it also takes a little bit of testing and learning. You might spend ages writing a great post only to get almost no engagement, while on a different day you might post about the weather and get 20 comments in the first hour. Take note of these instances and see if you can spot the patterns – was it a specific day of the week? A specific time of the day? Did you use a certain hashtag? Or an emoji? Was it the word length?

Keeping track of what you do and how well it works will help you figure out what works for you.

Get personal

Being generic doesn’t work on LinkedIn. There is just too much noise and your content will get lost. Make it stand out by being yourself – add a personal touch to your posts so people can relate to you.

Be authentic

Don’t try to be something you’re not. Be your authentic self. Share the good and the bad. Some of the best posts on LinkedIn, the ones that get 1,000s of comments, are ones where the author is being authentic and sharing a struggle or challenge. People relate to that and often comment and open up. Authentic conversations are where you can build real relationships.

Be consistent

This one applies to anything in marketing, but even more so when it comes to LinkedIn. If you’re on it for a month, but then don’t log in for weeks on end, this won’t work. You need to be consistent. Make it a habit to log in every day, to check-in and join conversations, to post at least 3 times a week, to update your profile any time something new happens. Don’t disappear and then expect to find the same level of engagement when you log back in months later – it won’t be there.

Trust me, I’ve been through it. It’s like when you workout at the gym every day for a month and build all this great muscle and endurance, then you go on holiday and laze by the pool for 2 weeks. When you get back to the gym, you’re simply not at the same level you were 2 weeks ago.

 

So that’s it, 6 tips for increasing engagement on your LinkedIn profile.

Try these out and let me know how it goes. And if you need more LinkedIn advice or training, get in touch, I’d love to hear from you.