Are you on LinkedIn? Well, if you’re not, consider this a reason to jump on board right now: LinkedIn boasts a user base of more than 400 million members.
That’s a huge chunk of the social media presence online. By comparison, Facebook, the most popular social media platform, has more than a billion users, and you’d be hard pressed to find a business out there who doesn’t currently have a Facebook Page.
You can think of LinkedIn as the more professionally-minded Facebook. It operates in much the same way as Facebook, with status updates, connections, profile pages, and messaging. But LinkedIn is primarily a recruiting and networking tool. It’s your Swiss army knife for professional networking online.
So, what do you need to do to make the most of your LinkedIn profile? We’re here to help.
Make Connections
LinkedIn is all about making connections, literally and figuratively. You want to make figurative connections with people when you network, of course, but LinkedIn gives you an actual way to do that, too. When you Connect with someone on LinkedIn, you are adding them to your online network. It’s sort of like adding someone as a friend on Facebook. You can see their profile, status updates, job updates and more, and they can also view that info on your profile. Making connections helps you to find people who might be able to assist you in the future. After all, a contact is only a click away on LinkedIn.
Post Updates
Much like other social media platforms, LinkedIn encourages sharing what’s happening in your life with your followers. This can be in the form of status updates, job updates, fun and informative articles, pictures, and more. If you have a company LinkedIn page, you can post updates of the latest news that’s happening within your own company, such as new projects, new employees, and maybe even a cause or event you’re sponsoring. Social media is all about being social, and you can’t be social if you keep everything to yourself.
Inform Followers Of Job Postings
One of the main reasons companies get a LinkedIn page is to supplement their job listings. You can post job listings and applications on LinkedIn, making the hiring search that much easier. You can also message potential candidates for a job directly if you’d like to offer them a job that way. But be sure to always keep your job openings updated so people know when and how to apply for a job!
Fill Out Your Profile Completely
The profile page was created to be filled out completely. Not some of the way, and not half of the way, but 100 percent. Not only is filling out your profile the best way to give visitors to your page all the info they need to know about you, it’s also important in getting your page found. When you fill out your profile with info such as your website URL, company bio, skills, interests, and more, you’re helping your pages SEO (or search engine optimization). I filled out profile is more likely to rank your page higher in search engine results, leading to more people finding out about your company.
Gather Endorsements
This is more for a personal profile rather than a company LinkedIn profile, but endorsements are another great way to utilized your account. You can be endorsed by your followers for an enormous variety of skills, such as customer service, professionalism, social media, writing, accounting, etc. Basically, any skill that you believe you have, you can have your friends, coworkers, and colleagues endorse you for it. These endorsements show visitors to your profile what you excel at doing, and how professional you are, which could lead to even more business opportunities.
Cross Promote Your Other Accounts
Social media thrives off of cross promotion, or sharing content from one social media account on another one. A good example of this is whenever you have an event that’s coming up. Instead of just promoting the event on Facebook and hoping that people see it, you can also post the details of the event on a LinkedIn status update. This will reach more people than just posting on one website alone, and will also reach a different kind of crowd. Be sure to let your followers know about all of your social media accounts, and encourage them to follow you on everything you have.
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