Updated on March 14, 2024 by Adam LaFaber
LinkedIn is currently the world’s largest professional network, making active engagement on this site essential for both businesses and individual professionals. It has over 1 billion members in more than 200 countries and other geographic regions as of February 2024, including over 214 million in the United States alone. The U.S. is LinkedIn’s largest market, with another 120 million users in India and 71 million in Brazil. LinkedIn also reports that six people are hired every minute through LinkedIn, with 48 percent of hiring agencies specifically using skills data on that site to fill their roles. In addition, 65 million people search for jobs on LinkedIn each week.
The following five tips show how you can use your LinkedIn profile to drive engagement, whether it’s to build your sales pipeline or find new job opportunities.
Common Challenges
Many organizations still have room for improvement in creating more conversations with qualified buyers. Common challenges that LinkedIn users face when creating an impactful LinkedIn presence include ensuring the authenticity of their content. In addition, sales teams need to create better profiles, especially stronger summary and about sections.
Additional challenges include the need to provide media that supports sales more effectively, typically in banners, featured sections, and posts. Poor search capability is common to many LinkedIn profiles, which is especially problematic when trying to build a network. For example, keywords are essential for making profiles easier to find on LinkedIn, but they’re often lacking in skills and experience sections as well as job descriptions.
Fortunately, strategies like those offered by Digital Sandwich can overcome these challenges to help you find, engage, and connect with your target audience, whether they’re prospective customers or employers.
Tip 1: Make Your Profile Stand Out
The first step in making your LinkedIn profile stand out is to ensure it has a professional appearance that represents your brand. In addition, you should add rich media to your profile, especially in the featured section. In the case of jobseekers, this could include additional job descriptions that increase your credibility by showcasing your expertise. You should also include detailed descriptions of how you’ve helped clients, thus demonstrating thought leadership in your field.
Businesses using LinkedIn should collaborate with their marketing departments to identify the types of content they should add to their profile, including blogs, case studies, success stories, testimonials, and videos. Add this content to the Featured, Experience, Projects, and Publications sections of your LinkedIn profile. These practices are often overlooked by sellers, even though they can certainly make your profile more competitive.
Tip 2: Visual Branding Opportunities
Your visual brand is critically important on LinkedIn, which can include your banner image, cover photo, profile image, and video. Various opportunities exist for using these features to elevate your brand. For example, you should ask your marketing team for some options if visuals on your profile are sparse or even nonexistent. You should develop multiple banners for static features such as logos and mottoes. In addition, images can also enhance dynamic features like a new product or service, an upcoming event, or awards that your organization has won.
A background banner is like a billboard on your LinkedIn page, so you should use it to promote your business or yourself. It can include a few types of brand messaging, such as a tagline, logo, hashtags, and social media handles. These features assist with brand recognition by providing followers with a sense of who you are and what you can do for them. Tools like Procreate can help you design images that make a connection with visitors during profile views. For example, dry brushes can create textured effects, while pens can create technical illustrations.
Tip 3: Create an About Section People Care to Read
Your profile should be a resource for your audience, so the About section needs to provide a story about how you can help prospective buyers and employers. That means it needs to focus more on the needs of your audience than on your own. The LinkedIn About section is limited to 2,600 characters or about 520 words, so you must be fairly concise when trying to convey an understanding of your audience’s challenges and your solutions to those problems.
The primary objective of the About section should be to get the reader to click the “see more” button. Describe their likely pain points and discuss how you’ve helped others who may have similar problems. Ensure your content is conversational by writing it in first person, rather than third person. You should also introduce some personality by including a summary of your personal life, especially as it affects your business or profession. Include a call to action (CTA) with contact information for direct communication at a later date.
Tip 4: Make Connections Carefully
People who are new to LinkedIn often make the mistake of trying to connect to as many people as possible, but this practice can hurt your ability to make more sales. In the first place, LinkedIn only allows free accounts to perform a limited number of searches. You can use them up quickly if you aren’t careful, forcing you to wait for your search allowance to renew each month.
When searching for jobs, you should use all the filters you need in one search, ensuring you only see people who are relevant to you. You should also sort your results by first-person and second-person connections, meaning people you’re already directly connected to or friends of your friends. This practice ensures you always have a way of introducing yourself to your connections. Other useful sorting criteria include company, industry, and job titles, all of which can provide you with more relevant results. You should also save the most useful search strings, so you can use them repeatedly.
Tip 5: Engage With Your New Connections
Once you reach a target persona on LinkedIn, you need to develop a working relationship with them before inviting them to become one of your connections. This practice significantly increases the probability that they’ll accept your invitation to connect with you and introduce you to other prospective clients or employers. As a result, you must prioritize engagement with their content before sending them a connection request.
One technique for meeting this requirement is to use Sales Navigator to sort results by recent LinkedIn posts, which tells you how active your prospects are on LinkedIn. You can then engage with active users on their LinkedIn feed by looking for points of common interest based on their profile. Use this information in your connection request to increase the likelihood of acceptance.
Key Takeaways
Increasing engagement on LinkedIn generally means making your profile stand out. Effective ways of reaching this goal include providing visual branding and developing a concise, detailed About section. Once you make connections with relevant users, you can begin engagement in a thoughtful, insightful manner.
Your LinkedIn Content Partner
Digital Sandwich Agency provides specialized services for crafting personalized LinkedIn content that resonates with your company’s brand voice and objectives. We also offer comprehensive solutions for content creation, from conceptualization to execution. For example, we develop detailed posting tips and ways to integrate posts with your existing technology. We also customize post captions and visual templates to help align your brand message across multiple content pillars. This approach makes Digital Sandwich an ideal partner for professionals seeking to elevate their LinkedIn presence who lack the time needed to do it alone.
Schedule a consultation with Digital Sandwich today to discover how we can elevate your LinkedIn strategy.