How do you keep those valuable connections you’ve made out networking engaged between events? The simplest tool, literally at your fingertips, is LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is an online platform that can help expand and engage your network. As a business owner, manager or executive, it’s a way to gain referrals, to learn, to share, to understand and to show off… (just a little bit!)
It can be daunting, sometimes scary, if you’re not quite sure what to say or even if you think no one will be interested, but stick with it is the advice from Debbie Frith at The Passionate PA! Overall, LinkedIn is a supportive place to be.
Here are The Passionate PA’s top tips for building your network through LinkedIn:
- Connect with the key people you meet daily through meetings or networking. Think clients, potential clients, suppliers, referrers, inspirational business people. Always send a personal message. Remember though, you don’t have to connect with everyone!
- Carefully consider accepting people who want to connect with you, particularly if you’ve never met them and they’re not extensively connected to your existing network and haven’t bothered sending you a personal message.
- Building your LinkedIn connections is easier on a local basis rather than a national basis. It can be done but expect a slower result and to work harder at it.
- Use great photos to accompany your posts. Free stock photos are available from Pixabay and Unsplash but try to scroll beyond the first 10 as they’ve all been used before!
- Use hashtags (#) to enable your posts to be searchable. Think about the words you use in your post that are keywords or likely to be searchable and then hashtag them. LinkedIn advise a maximum of three which is a lot less than when using Twitter and Instagram – but it’s important to play by the LinkedIn rules.
- Spend time each day working on your LinkedIn engagement. If that’s a struggle for you, consider every other day or using Hootsuite to schedule your posts. You could also consider outsourcing your activity to a professional. At The Passionate PA, we manage many of our client’s LinkedIn accounts but, importantly, usually alongside the client’s personal input. This combination of planned strategic posting working alongside more organic personal posting is a recipe for success.
- Be a regular worthwhile contributor, even if you can only manage weekly, don’t just drop in when you feel like it or when you need to push your sales. It’s easy to see through that kind of behaviour and it won’t win you any favours from the active daily LinkedIn community.
- Join some LinkedIn groups that you’re interested in – local area groups are ideal to find out what’s on in terms of exhibitions, courses, networking or workshops.
- Stuck for something to say? Pose a question in your post, it gets people thinking rather than just scrolling on by.
- Recently LinkedIn has introduced a set of ‘reactions’, so make the most of these and like, love, celebrate or mark as insightful or curious. Use of these reactions shows you’ve really taken the time to read and appreciate a post rather than just clicking the like button on every post on the page.
- Tag your posts with people from your network or organisation if you think that the content will be something they would personally benefit from reading.
- If you receive a challenge to a post you’ve made and you’re not comfortable with it, our advice is, don’t react. LinkedIn is not the place to start an argument. If someone has been downright rude, ignore or report it if you feel strongly.
- Don’t be afraid to unfollow someone whose content just doesn’t float your boat. LinkedIn should be a positive experience and if your feed is full of posts that make you cross or bored, simply unfollow and build a network that does add value to your business life.
- The trick really is NOT to use LinkedIn as a platform for a blatant sales pitch, you must be more subtle than that. Give something away (knowledge or information), to get something back.
At The Passionate PA, we regularly share content that appeals to entrepreneurs and ambitious business owners, as this is our target audience, so our content is quite varied. We use LinkedIn to impress upon our network the benefits of outsourcing and using our individual skills. We also use LinkedIn to talk about our work with clients as a way of demonstrating the diverse abilities and skills each member of our team has.
If you need help with a LinkedIn strategy, why not get in contact to see how we can help. www.thepassionatepa.co.uk