3 Tips for Growing your Network with LinkedIn

In the social media world, Facebook and Twitter get a lot of time and attention. Both platforms have huge user bases and appeal to both businesses and consumers. However, LinkedIn is the go-to professional network for over 347 million members in over 200 countries worldwide.

When I originally started using LinkedIn it was generally more of a consumption model – meaning people looked at content but didn’t necessarily engage with that content. I know my personal habits were to post some things, update my profile as needed, and “just browse” what was going on with my connections. Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has made significant changes to their user interface (UI) to encourage more content posting and engagement within the platform.

Here are three top tips to leverage LinkedIn’s feature to help expand your network.

Go beyond the basic profile

LinkedIn has added ways for you to really shine and leverage the platform as an online portfolio. For anyone who produces online content, this is a boon for us. It gives us one place to consolidate our professional content. However, the new UI calls out Patents, Languages, Awards, Causes you support – and more. One of the most important aspects of social media is to be human – and your LinkedIn profile really gives you a chance to show your personality and your talents!

Blog on LinkedIn

Last year, LinkedIn opened up the platform so all members could blog. When you publish on LinkedIn, it goes into their Pulse news feed and your connections are given a notification you have published. So how can you leverage this? One way I recommend is to share updates about what you are doing on a professional level. For example, if you are a blogger for your company, write a brief intro about that blog on LinkedIn and connect to your original blog article. Or, if you worked on a product that was just released, write a note about how exciting it was to be part of the development of the product and link to the official release or website. The one rule of thumb: don’t over do it. Be very selective in how you use this feature so you don’t end up over-notifying your connections causing them to tune out your updates.

Be generous

Share content from others. Comment and like their posts and milestones. LinkedIn has re-designed the UI to make this easier – watch for it on your home page and make good use of it!

What’s your favorite feature or hot tip for using LinkedIn? Comment below and share it with us!