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If we had to pair social media platforms with professions they benefit or boost best, then we would club Instagram with photographers and videographers, and TikTok with dancers and singers, similarly Linkedin would pair best with businesses and entrepreneurs. This business and entrepreneurial social network has been around longer than Facebook, Twitter and Instagram yet is more relevant now than ever. As it hosts more than 600 million business profiles giving each user an unlimited supply of network connections and job opportunities. It assists users from the initial stages of job hunting to bigger leaps of building a personal brand.
Hence it is important for working professionals to pay attention to their presence on this site as with the right updates their audience can increase rapidly. The platform not only lets others know about your business but gives interested parties an insight into your work, skills and growth. Whether or not hiring managers admit it but the majority of the time they look up applicants before calling them for interviews to verify details and have a clear picture of who they are dealing with. So here is a list of four tips and tricks for you to ace the LinkedIn game for your benefit.
1. Find A Niche
To become an industry thought leader entails you having a unique specialism and command of your subject matter. Therefore, it is essential to pin-point, from the beginning, what you wish to be an expert in. It is not possible to be the jack-of-all-trades. Narrowing down your specialism as a thought leader will help you deliver more value to your audience and increase your earning potential. Take it a step further and unpack what you really want to deliver and to whom, to create your sub-niche. To do this effectively, you need to be clear on your target audience and what questions you will solve for them. For example, wanting to become a life coach is too generic, because there are tons of life coaches, all promoting their services and claiming to have the answer to life’s problems. Becoming a life coach specifically for, say, working mothers or for women in their 40s, takes your industry knowledge and value to another level.
2. Share Your Clear Thoughts On Current Conversations
Thought leaders are so named because they are brave enough to think outside of the box. They have unique ideas and perspectives that make them invaluable. They don’t establish their thought leadership through reposting others’ insights on social media, or commenting “I agree,” or “Great post”. There’s nothing original or unique about doing any of those things. The next time you see a post on social media related to your industry or target audience, ask yourself, What original value can I bring to the conversation? How can I challenge this person’s thinking? How can I inspire others to break out of the status quo through introducing a fresh idea, or an innovative point of view?
3. Boost Your SSI
A good majority of Linkedin users are unaware that there is a Social Selling Index (SSI) that scores each profile for Linkedin to determine the content shown to the individual profile and places the profile can reach. This score essentially measures your social selling skills and executions, interestingly the score can be increased with four primary components. The first component is your professional brand which you can establish by filling in all the details asked in the profile. The second component is connecting with the right profiles. Linkedin wants users to use Lead Builder to find the right profiles. They also want you to save leads which lets them send you insights for you to take action on. The third component is engaging with these insights. Linkedin wants users to engage with the content on the platform and follow their recommendations. The platform often prompts users to update parts of their profile or publish some posts. The fourth component is building relationships. The correct way to do this is by being thoughtful about who you send a connection request. The platform is keen on seeing a high acceptance rate for your connection requests.
4. Search Like a Pro
The platform has robust search abilities that are not used enough. There are a good amount of modifiers that can be used to narrow down your search and find accurate results. Some of these modifiers are Quotation marks ‘AND’, ‘OR’, Parentheses and ‘NOT’. Using these modifiers between two or more words can help the search engine narrow down profiles easily by including or excluding profiles that match the instructions. If you only want to look at the profiles of Founders who are not CEOs, simply type “Founder” NOT CEO. Similarly, If you want both founders and CEOs then write “Founder” AND “CEO.” The parentheses are a combination of these modifiers, for example, Founder AND CEO OR Entrepreneurs.
5. Pins and Keywords
You can draw more attention to your important skills by Pinning them on your profile. Scroll down to your skills and endorsement section on your profile and hit the edit button. Then proceed to pin the skills you want to be highlighted and take this time to reorder the skills listed in order of importance. While you are doing this try to pin skills that use keywords that recruiters look for the most. This sends Linkedin a signal in their algorithm about your speciality. Since the algorithm works on Keywords to show recruiters good profiles/candidates based on individual users’ keyword usage in their respective summaries, skills and more. For example, if you are a freelance writer then you should use terms like “freelance,” “writer,” “content writer,” “copywriting,” and “web writing”. Some important areas to use the keywords are the Headline, About, Experience, Skills and Recommendations.
6. Explore Job Transitions Via Career Explorer
A tool that is often overlooked is the Career Explorer. Career Explorer assists users in finding potential career paths and real job titles based on their skills. A simple way to use the tool is by first selecting your city, which is where you live or work. Then enter your job title by selecting the job you are interested in. After this, look at what skills are important for the job and analyze the skills listed that overlap with yours. This will help you understand what you already know and what you need to build on. As a last step, find current job openings in those positions or look at potential connections with those job titles on Linkedin.