November 22, 2023
Last update
11.22.2023
07 MIN.
Your LinkedIn profile is more than a virtual calling card, it's your website, your product brochure, and your ticket to the big leagues - Read our detailed guide with actionable tips to aid you in your LinkedIn growth journey from subpar to star!
Antonio Gabrić
Presently, LinkedIn is considered to be amongst the most nurturing social media platforms for new content creators.
The now 20-year-old platform has come a long way from its inception as a recruitment tool. It now grants professionals and businesses access to an organic audience with a genuine interest in their domain.
However, earning the stamp of approval from users and LinkedIn can be frustrating without a roadmap.
So that's what we've put together for you — a detailed guide with actionable tips to aid you in your LinkedIn growth journey from subpar to star.
Your LinkedIn profile is more than a virtual calling card; it's your website, your product brochure, and your ticket to the big leagues.
This is what a truly polished profile looks like. It uses a mix of visual elements and lead magnets to establish credibility and drive conversions.
If you want your profile to hold its own against the millions of other professionals clamoring for the limited attention of an over-saturated audience, you’ll have to optimize it by
You can’t keep using the one from when you first made your LinkedIn account twelve years ago. Or the one from your fishing trip. Ensure your profile picture is a clear headshot with good lighting and an unobtrusive background.
Cover pictures are canvases for showcasing your services, promoting your products, or flaunting some social proof. Don’t let that precious real estate go to waste.
Use benefit-driven language to describe your offerings. When listing outcomes of previous work, lose the jargon and use words that resonate with your audience. You can also ask peers or clients to endorse your skills.
If people visit your profile, you want to lead them to a product page, a client testimonials page, or a newsletter subscription page. Don’t let your profile become a dead end.
The best content is the kind that answers your audience’s questions before they’ve asked them.
And the main ingredient for it is an innate understanding of who they are, the problems they grapple with, and the solutions that would make their lives easier.
For that, you'll have to:
With Iconosquare's social media monitoring feature, you can 'listen' in on the chatter without spending hours on it.
Create posts centered on these trending topics to keep them fresh and relevant.
When your audience feels
they will want continued access to your insights.
Research reports, podcast interviews, and case studies; there are multiple ways of providing value to your audience without compromising on content quality.
You can buffer these ‘heavier’ posts with tips, infographics, stories (with takeaways), reposts of industry news or unique perspectives, and celebrating current events.
Stories with personal elements make you more relatable and memorable to your followers.
Images in posts can 2x the number of comments it gets. And if you are using images, make sure you include alt text to make your posts more accessible.
Use tools like Loom and Synthesia for videos, Audacity for audio, Restream or Vimeo for live events, and Canva for carousels and images to give your posts an edge.
LinkedIn has several features that can be harnessed to connect better with your audience.
You can create polls to address topics that are on top of your audience’s mind.
Encourage them to explain why they picked the option they did in the comments.
This fuels discussion, both with you and amongst themselves, and builds a stronger sense of community.
Real-time conversations are unparalleled in the synergistic impact they have on engagement. Your audience feeds off the energy of the speakers and fellow viewers and this can propel further interactions.
LinkedIn offers both video and audio Live Events to interact with followers.
You can invite SMEs to your events, demonstrate your own expertise, or use them for product walk-throughs.
Posting can expand your network, but it is the one-on-one interactions you have with connections and followers that will tether your audience to you.
One of the easiest ways to do this is via comments, on other people’s posts and your own.
But they’re only worth it if you have something to say.
Generic comments like “Well said!” or some variation of “I agree” without any meaningful explanation for your stance are just a drain of resources and time. And you can be certain they won’t get you any new followers either.
Be confident in expressing your opinions. Even if you disagree with someone, it’s perfectly acceptable to say so as long as you’re being polite.
DM connections to build better rapport and strike a friendship. You can ask peers or experts for advice, share links to helpful resources with potential leads, or discuss common interests.
But most seasoned social media users can tell when they’re blasted with copy-paste messages, so keep this in mind when automating LinkedIn.
When you send a connection request, a personalized message lets them know you’re not a spammer.
Follow a three-step format of
to come across as authentic and sincere.
Hi {first_name},
Your {tip/technique} on {topic} is my go-to whenever I {situation}.
Thank you for all these brilliant tidbits you keep sending our way.
Hoping we can connect because there is so much to learn from you.
Best,
{name}
But LinkedIn’s latest move limits the number of customized connects to 10 a month for non-paying members. That means you'll either have to upgrade to Premium or, if you haven’t already, set up more independent alternatives to connect with your base.
If you’re the proud owner of a LinkedIn account with growing followers, you should move fast to safeguard the stockpile of leads you’re sitting on.
By interlacing platform interactions with regular emails, you can:
When you’re sure you’ve made sufficient impact on the lead/(s) in question (could be anywhere between a week to a month after connecting), email them.
If their email address isn’t listed on their LinkedIn profile, you can always use email lookup tools to find their email address.
Your first cold email to LinkedIn followers should always provide more value than it asks.
So, in exchange for permission to continue emailing them, you could share step-by-step instructions to achieve a goal that matters to them.
Personalize the template using data from their LinkedIn profile, like the industry they work in now, the college they went to, a mutual connection, etc.
Use their latest posts or a recent interaction with them to prove they’re not just another name on a list for you.
It’s best to keep an email sequence ready that you can use in conjunction with LinkedIn posts to convert leads.
For example, a day after you post a case study, send out an email with the game plan you followed to help your client achieve their target.
You can either manually keep track of email opens and clicks or use the Engagement view in Campaigns to identify warm leads based on their activity.
Armed with this knowledge, you can monitor leads more closely, up the ante on your email cadence, and create tailored offers to turn LinkedIn followers into paying customers.
The native LinkedIn analytics tool shows you the number of profile visits, followers, post views, lead gen form conversions, etc.
Click on the Analytics link under each post to view its performance and audience demographics such as job titles, company size, etc.
If one of your posts has performed exceptionally well with copywriters, you can head over to Campaigns, filter your lead database based on their profession, and send out a series of emails offering similar content.
But for more detailed breakdowns of your LinkedIn performance, Iconosquare can help.
You can see the stats for individual posts — the total impressions, views, likes, comments, clicks they got, as well as your overall growth — the number of followers, new followers, average views, likes, comments, engagement rate, etc.
These metrics pinpoint flaws in your current strategies and help you develop workarounds for those issues.
Say, for example, if your follower growth rate is stagnant or dropping, you can focus on improving content quality. Or using hashtags to widen reach.
If you’re unsure where to start, take inspiration from those who have cracked the code to LinkedIn popularity.
Punita Parekh, a content marketer with a 50k+ following on LinkedIn, posts three to four times a week to keep her audience engagement game strong.
But reaching individual accounts is time-consuming. As she shares in another post, she amplifies her outreach efforts by tapping into pre-existing pockets of her target audience.
She makes a list of 70 creators in her niche that post regularly on LinkedIn and turns on notifications for their content.
The insightful comments she leaves on their posts get her visibility and ultimately, new followers.
Laura Acosta, brand and image consultant, credits the growth in her following to nailing down a buyer persona, and then creating highly-targeted content that resonates with them.
In the comments, Lara funnels visitors to a paid resource relevant to the topic.
She makes a Harry Potter reference in another comment (also the most liked). It works because there's no plug, just pure relatability.
In that same post, one of her connections, Jim Wall, gives a prime example of what you should do when commenting.
He expands on Lara's post and gives an actionable tip to implement her advice.
That said, no two creators and audiences are exactly alike. Initially, you’ll have to stay open to experimenting with different formats and styles.
I have had a pretty decent run with carousels, the Instagram-inspired format introduced last year, on my LinkedIn.
Carousel posts combine the appeal of images with an ease of consumption that longer plain-text posts simply cannot match.
Trial and error will lead the way to figure out the kind of content you enjoy creating and your audience enjoys consuming.
Everyone values experience, and the world of social media is no different. When a user clicks on your profile after reading an intriguing post of yours, they want to see evidence that the quality content they saw wasn't a fluke; it's your brand identity.
A regular posting schedule, manually or through Iconosquare’s scheduling feature, helps to build an audience that knows exactly when they can expect new content from you.
While there are LinkedIn creators who post every day, it can take time to build momentum. So try posting twice or thrice a week till you’ve figured out what works best for you.
Even posting weekly can get you 5.6x the following of pages that post monthly and 7x the rate of follower growth.
Posting and interacting with people on LinkedIn isn’t and shouldn’t be a quick fix for your business’s teething troubles.
Growing a following on LinkedIn is about establishing your credentials as a trustworthy, authentic professional capable of educating and adding to your audience’s knowledge base. It’s about repeatedly demonstrating expertise and skills so that when someone from your following has a problem, they know exactly who they want to work with.
And that trust is not built overnight.
Start by polishing your profile, creating a content strategy, being consistent, prioritizing relationship-building with your audience, analyzing your statistics and continuing communication with your customers over email. You'll meet your LinkedIn tribe soon.
Antonio is an outreach manager at Hunter. He is passionate about testing different outreach tactics and sharing results with the community. When he is not connecting with industry leaders you can find him on his motorbike exploring off-the-beaten paths around the world.
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