4 Steps to perform on LinkedIn

[1,2,3…7] Every seven seconds, LinkedIn gains a new subscriber. This trending social network has nearly 722 million users worldwide, including 163 million in Europe alone.
Over the last decade, LinkedIn has experienced a rapid growth in popularity. It allows you to expand your professional network and potentially find opportunities for a job, an internship or to start your business.
Given the high number of users, it is sometimes hard to stand out. To ensure good visibility, it is necessary to understand the LinkedIn algorithm and to adapt your actions accordingly.

How to be successful on LinkedIn in 4 steps ?

TIPS:

Your profile picture must be 400 x 400 pixels. Your background photo should measure 1536 x 768 pixels.

Another key element is your profile headline. It describes your professional identity. Therefore, it is important to be precise and to choose the right words to be spotted by recruiters more quickly.

Don’t forget to include your contact details (telephone and e-mail) so that you can be easily contacted. This will increase your chances of getting interesting opportunities.

…THE SUMMARY IS JUST AS IMPORTANT!

The summary is also important to grab the attention of visitors on your profile. They will only be able to see the first lines of the summary. It is therefore recommended to use catchy sentences that make people want to read the rest. It may be relevant to rely on the curiosity of readers thanks to a touch of originality.

As for the content, don’t hesitate to describe your education background and professional experiences in detail, clearly explaining the missions and activities you have carried out. Try to make the transitions smooth. In addition, cleverly adding your areas of interest will allow visitors to learn more about you and thus indirectly enhance your profile.

It may be better to spend some more time on your sumary in order to tell your personal story and bring it to life.

Finally, to make your profile as complete as possible, it is important to mention your skills but also to have recommendations from third parties who can make them more relevant.

“Personalise your LinkedIn URL so that it corresponds to you (www.linkedin.com/in/yourname).”

This has two benefits:

• It inspires confidence in potential recruiters.
• You can easily remember it and share it during a meeting.

LinkedIn has created profile levels which evaluate the strength of your page. The fifth and maximum level is “All-Star”. You should aim to achieve this profile status in order to obtain a complete and efficient profile and get the best value out of LinkedIn.

2. BOOST THE VISIBILITY OF YOUR POSTS BY CREATING ENGAGING CONTENT

Once your profile is complete and well constructed, it is time to understand how the LinkedIn algorithm works in order to maximize your exposure.

There are different criteria that make your post appear or not in people’s feeds.

The two most important are engagement rate and dwell time.

The engagement rate measures the level of interactions (likes, comments) your post receives compared to the people who see it. It is precisely calculated as the total number of interactions, divided by the number of person exposed to your post, multiplied by 100.

As for the dwell time, it represents the time visitors spend on the post.

As you can imagine, the more time users spend and react to your post, the more the algorithm will suggest your content because it is considered to be relevant to your audience. It will then appear in many feeds.

To induce such engagement, you may use one key : content marketing.

But what is content marketing ? It consists in creating and sharing informative and stimulative content which conveys meaningful messages.

In order to achieve this, you can :

• Share helpful advice on various topics such as work methods or new tools.
• Discuss topical events, especially facts that could interest your community. You may then give your opinion before asking your subscribers.
• Do some storytelling. It is often not recommended to talk about yourself in an egocentric way on LinkedIn. However, talking about your personal life and tell anecdotes which can be helpful for your community is popular. Then addressing a more global topic and broaden the topic is also very appreciated.
• Express your anger about something may also create a lot of reaction. The idea is to criticise a behaviour or something in the professional world that bothers you, and can affect many people. For example, repeated notifications from communication tools like Slack. Think of two things if you want to develop this technique:
  • 1. Adapt the topic you denounce to your community. This way, people will feel directly concerned.
  • 2. Provide advice on how to improve the situation, and thus provide added value to the users.

Bad buzz has also always worked on social networks, whether one likes it or not.

Whatever method you choose, it is essential to be punchy and to encourage a reaction.

Thus, we advise you tu use punchy sentences, particularly for the title. You can ask a question or display a figure to grab attention.

In the same way, asking a question directly to Internet users and asking them for their opinion at the end of the post is relevant. Comments are more effective than likes in increasing search engine rankings.

Finally, sharing content using a humorous tone is also effective.

3. THE SMO TO BOOST THE REFERENCING OF YOUR POSTS

Once you have chosen your topic, you should think about using SMO when writing your post in order to increase the referencing of your post once published.

SMO (social media optimization) covers all the techniques and methods that allow you to increase the number of viewers to your content.

On LinkedIn, there are many of them:

Make your text more pleasant to read : avoid writing long blocks of text by spacing paragraphs, and highlight the title of your post.

Use emojis to make the text more attractive : they are popular on LinkedIn. But use no more than one per line. You can also find websites allowing you to use special characters or bold text in your post from, which is normally not possible with the integrated LinkedIn functions.

Use hashtags at the end of your content (3 or 4 are enough) to increase the reach of your publication.

Add images and videos which will attract the users’ attention.

Tag people and/or companies in your post so that they react and your publication appears on other news feeds. One technique is to get in touch with people you tag each other with in each of your posts. These are called pods.

4. MISTAKES TO AVOID

You now know how to make engaging and better referenced posts. But you should also be aware of the mistakes not to make on LinkedIn.

Such faux-pas will prevent you from really performing on the platform because they will harm your visibility.

To begin with, you should avoid putting external links on your posts. The algorithm prefers your posts to stay on the platform. Therefore, it is better to share your videos and images directly in your post.

Similarly, simply sharing an existing post without adding some content from your part is less likely to be suggested by the algorithm. It is better to create a post and integrate the link to another post (within the text or in a comment) that you want to share.

When to publish on LinkedIn?

This question is essential! Publishing when you feel like it, without considering the time, will inevitably decrease the reach of your posts. You should aim at publishing content on the periods when people are most present on LinkedIn. Indeed, it is the number of reactions during the first hour that is crucial because it ultimately determines the visibility of the post.

Not being active on the platform is a real mistake. You have to be proactive on LinkedIn, publish regularly (2 or 3 times a week), but also be original and innovative in your content. Once you have posted, you must pay attention in order to respond and react to each comment. It is by creating this interaction that you will boost your visibility.

Thus, creating an editorial planning will allow you to be consistent and therefore more efficient. In this schedule, plan the days on which you will publish content. It is recommended to anticipate the topic of each post in advance.

This technique will allow you to be more motivated and better organised. We would also advise to write your content in advance.

Finally, never analysing the results of your publications is a mistake not to be made. Analysing your performance is essential in order to be aware of the posts that are successful or not with your community. You will then be able to guide your actions to improve your performance.

You can also gather information on the activity and location of people who consult your posts. This can be interesting to adapt your content to your community.

TIPS: Switch to LinkedIn Premium.

There are 4 levels of LinkedIn Premium subscription : Career, Business, Sales Navigator Core and Recruiter Life. Each level comes with its own particularities. For an individual, it is recommended to take the first level. The other three, more expensive, are more intended for companies.

The advantages of LinkedIn Premium Career :

• See who has viewed your profile from the last 90 days and send 5 InMails per month. InMails are messages you can send to people you are not connected with on LinkedIn.
• Jobs, companies and salaries insights as well as top applicant recommendations.
• Have access to 16,000+ LinkedIn learning courses and the Interview Preparation tool.

Thus, you will have all the keys to find a job easily via the platform. According to LinkedIn, this subscription can double your chances of being recruited.

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Congratulations, you have now become a LinkedIn expert!

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