4 Things You Can Do About Declining Reach On LinkedIn

It seems every week or two someone complains about declining reach on LinkedIn, usually backed up with some homegrown (ie not sanctioned or confirmed by LinkedIn) statistics. And while we can cast doubt on whether the statistics are accurate, there is no doubt that the trend for reach is down.?

This has been going on for a year now, and the one method everyone seems to have with dealing with it - complaining loudly, and often - doesn’t appear to be helping much.?

So I have given this some thought and come up with four ideas you can use to make the best of this situation, that is despite the current state of affairs, increase your reach on LinkedIn.?

These ideas are based on the idea that LinkedIn is not going to promote or distribute our posts widely, so the naked truth is we can’t depend on Linkedin anymore. It’s up to us.

Idea 1: People Are Going To Have To Find You

Well, if LinkedIn isn’t going to show me interesting content from new people, I’m going to have to go and find it myself. So your first step is going to be making sure that your profile is findable by visitors. That means keywords and phrases you want to be found for in key places like your headline and experience section titles. Don’t neglect Skills either. If you want to increase your reach among people looking for Java programmers, you had better have a bunch of Java related skills on your profile.

Idea 2: When They Do Find You, Be Ready

By this I mean having the type of content topics on your profile - either in your featured section, or in your activity section - that your target audience wants to know more about. You should have content attached to your profile that show two things in particular:

• You understand the problems your visitor is facing
• You have experience helping people in the past with these problems

When someone visits your profile, the reaction you want is them thinking, “Jackpot.”

Idea 3: Now That You’ve Got Them, Keep Them

What you want now is one thing: turning these people into subscribers. Either subscribers to your newsletter, or followers who click to subscribe to all of your content. There are two reasons for this: the first is you want them exposed to a continuous stream of your content. The second is, if they subscribe or follow you, you can identify them from these lists, and decide if you want to reach out to them. If they don’t follow or subscribe you will have no idea who they are. My LinkedIn newsletter gets put in front of eight hundred to sixteen hundred people every week. Around 30 or 40 of them self identify by subscribing. I have no idea who all those other people are, but you can bet I pay attention to those new subscribers.?

Idea 4: Be Proactive

Still with me? Good. Now comes the hard part: augment your incoming visitors by going out and finding new ones yourself and inviting them to follow and subscribe. Look through the lists of members in a group, conduct LinkedIn searches, but get out there and find people who might benefit from your product or service. And then do this: contact them, describe how beneficial the content is that you publish and invite them to subscribe. That’s it. It’s not threatening, it’s not a pitch, it’s not asking for a call. Really, all you are doing is asking for an opportunity to prove you are an expert in an area they may need help with.?

And it works. This is particularly effective in your allocation of free messages you can send to fellow group members every month.?

If LinkedIn is going to reduce our reach, we had better be making the most out of the people that do find us.?

Today’s newsletter is a shorter version of my email newsletter. I usually publish one of the four articles from my email Newsletter on LinkedIn, so next week’s LinkedIn Newsletter will be:?

• How many people are using LinkedIn?

Next week’s email newsletter will include articles on?

• How many people are using LinkedIn?
• The Future Of LinkedIn Newsletters??
• 6 Mistakes LinkedIn Users Make In Outreach Message Subject Lines
• Just How Many Fake Profiles Are There On LinkedIn??

If you are interested in this much deeper weekly dive into Using LinkedIn Effectively, here’s a link to the signup page: https://www.practicalsmm.com/free-email-newsletter/

The obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for or have any business association with LinkedIn other than being a user who pays for a Sales Navigator subscription.?