5 tips for getting started with LinkedIn

If you’re looking to build your brand awareness, create an engaging community of like-minded people or stay up to date with your industry, LinkedIn is the place to be. But just like taking that first step to build your business, getting started and hitting ‘send’ on your first post can feel daunting

There are some easy steps you can take to shine a light on the unknowns. So, here are our top tips for making the most of LinkedIn.

1. Get set up for success

There’s more to setting up your LinkedIn profile than adding your job history and choosing your profile picture. 

While your photo is one of the first things users will see (and so it should be a friendly, engaging, recent photo of yourself), there are other tools that can help to boost your profile.

Your profile banner is a big space that can be used to give more information about yourself – and your business. The best profiles use it to showcase things like:

• Reviews and customer quotes
• Their unique selling point (USP)
• A call-to-action (CTA)

So, your profile visitors can get the most important information in a bite-sized chunk.

Bonus tip: If you don’t know where to start, free design tools – like Canva – have hundreds of templates available to test out.

You can also add a custom website link to your profile (you’ll find this within your profile settings). This can be used to send users to your website, to view your case studies or portfolio, or even book a call with you.

2. Choose the right content

There’s a wide range of post types available for you to use on LinkedIn. 

Text, image and video posts are some of the most popular on the platform. But there are a couple of other options that you might not be aware of:

• Polls are a great way to start a conversation with your connections. Use them to ask for opinions on a core topic in your industry. For example, if you work in recruitment or HR, you could ask a question around in-office vs at-home working.
• Documents lets you upload PDFs directly to LinkedIn, including carousels. Using carousels is a great way to share tips to highlight your expertise in an easily digestible format. On average, carousels get 4x more engagement than text posts.
• Articles are useful for building your thought leadership, which is a core part of LinkedIn’s algorithm. Long-form content lets you show the depth of your knowledge and experience in your industry. It also gives you the chance to appear in Google search results, to further widen your reach.

3. Encourage engagement

LinkedIn is becoming far more community centred. So, sharing insightful content that sparks meaningful conversation is key for driving engagement.

In fact, LinkedIn posts with comments can get up to 60% more impressions than those without.

Bonus tip: It’s best practice to make sure you reply to any comments on your post to continue the conversation – and reply in a timely manner!

4. Dive into your data

There’s a lot of debate around the best type of content to post – and the best time to post it.

While, generally, it’s advised that you avoid weekends and evenings, the truth is that there’s no secret sauce that will guarantee engagement. 

A number of factors can impact the number of eyes you get on your posts, including: 

• Your target audience 
• Your industry
• And even your location

The good news is, LinkedIn has an analytics dashboard. So, you can see what’s working best for you, and let your own data guide you.

5. Consider upgrading

LinkedIn has a couple of paid options: Premium and Sales Navigator. 

While they both have their benefits, whether it’s worth the update will depend on what you want to get out of the platform.

Premium gives you the option to:

• See who has viewed your profile
• Send InMails to users you’re not connected with
• Access their AI assistant.

Sales Navigator is a prospecting tool available in the platform. It’s targeted at sales teams who want to find, connect with and build relationships with potential customers.

LinkedIn best practices

There’s a lot to consider when you start posting on LinkedIn. 

Hopefully these tips have given you a good starting point and some food for thought.

To round things up, we’ve covered some of the best practices to keep in mind as you begin to grow your network:

• Share your expertise to build your profile as a thought leader and expert in your field.
• Break up your content by using whitespace and make paragraphs 2 sentences long, at most.
• Use images to increase engagement.
• Tag relevant connections to bring people into the discussion and expand your reach.
• Use keywords to ensure your posts are discoverable for your audience.
• Test, test and test again to try different techniques and find what works for you.