How to increase your LinkedIn Influence?

This is part-2 for a short post I made recently.

I started on LinkedIn when it was fairly new. My initial intent was to be connected with my colleagues, clients and friends as a pure networking focused objective. When LinkedIn started groups/forum to share knowledge like what Quora is doing currently, it excited me and I contributed to a few groups. Later on other features such as News Feed and Posts, I started sharing things that interested me by sharing them to

One suggestion is to follow the FORWARD principle that can be derived from the famous book FAILING FORWARD by John C Maxwell.

• F ==> Finalize your Vision, Mission and Priorities – What do you want to achieve in LinkedIn.
• O ==> Order your Priorities.
• R ==> Risk failing by taking actions on your priorities.
• W ==> Withstand your failures and mistakes
• A ==> Advance based on response to your actions.
• R ==> Re-prioritize by taking actions and tracking your progress continually
• D ==> Develop new strategies to get the results you want to achieve.

Experimentation can be multifold.

When I started posting my articles, I used to get limited engagement – be it likes, comments or shares. However, it didn’t deter me from posting my articles. I used to share links and short articles to begin with. Starting 2014, I started posting long article that was a key feature during that time. I happen to interact with a lot of solid bloggers who impressed me and inspired me to start sharing my articles. Long articles started becoming my interests and my intent was to share my thoughts on areas of my interests. It was across Technology, Software Testing, Leadership and personal experiences. My viewership started increasing and over two years I had a pretty decent following and engagement to my articles.

I happened to get a good amount of followers starting Mid-2016 with about 50-100 followers per day and slowly increasing to 500-1000 followers at times. During this time I started focusing more on shorter posts that were more viral and started sharing videos and images that were of virility. As I was in a day-job, I used to spend limited time posting my content and tried to make it a valuable post in terms of content and entertainment and it resulted in excellent engagement. The engagement was fluctuating most of the time. Some articles and posts used to get 1000’s of viewers and engagement and some used to get single digit engagement. It didn’t deter me. I found the root-cause. I was not engaging enough with other posts and influencers. 

Next phase was on engaging with engaging posts. Given I had limited time, I used to engage in posts of value and good visibility. Authors such as Brigette, Oleg and such famous personalities were some of the early LinkedIn stars I engaged with. I definitely started seeing some surge. Still, I was not engaging much on my own posts by responding to the comments. This was my next target as engagement with your audience is important. This is an area I am trying to improve still, given paucity of time. I tried to maximize the time I had.

To increase virility, you need to build engaging content. Videos and Images are excellent way to connect better. However, preparing videos and images takes a lot of effort. At the same time, very impactful story telling in 1400 characters with virility is powerful as well. Pick your strength and focus on your capabilities. Not everyone is photogenic or can be a powerful Video story teller to begin with. However, it comes with good practice and it involves effort. This is something I will be focusing sometime in the future. I used tools such as Canva to help me with the images and it resulted in great outcomes.

One thing to keep in mind is that your followers are of varying skills, capabilities, needs and expectations and it may be a bit difficult to keep all of them happy all the time. Based on the content you produce, they may be engaged or disenchanted. This will result in fluctuations in engagement levels and follower counts. You need to be ready for this. There could be a plateau of the followers count and it is better not to be deterred by it.

Key points to keep in mind are related to the previous post which I am rekeying here.

What works and what does not work?

1.     Be Original - Be yourself

• There is only one of you
• BE Yourself
• Share Original Stories
• Share Original Tips
• Share a piece of yourselves
• Share Useful Tips
• Captivate the Audience

2.     Be Viral - In a Positive manner

• People like content that connects with them
• People like content that makes them feel better, awe, emotionally linked, feel good, can associate with
• People like content that is fun, makes them laugh, energized, appreciate, connect better

3.     Use Visual Media - To make a visual Impact use images and videos that tells the story quickly

• People have a short attention span - 3-5 seconds.
• You need to connect in 3-5 seconds
• Videos with brilliant start & outstanding images connect faster
•  Not everyone can appreciate long reads - Shorter reads, videos and images have a bigger reach than long reads

4.     Connect with the Influencers - Create content that resonates well with co-creators and influencers

• Create content that can impress big influencers to become your marketing engine
• Can you influence @Brigette, @Oleg, @Talal, @Anthony, @Joshua, @Tim and such big influencers?
• Can you get good endorsement by providing value to the audience?

 5.     Have a Niche area - Do not become a one cast of thousand million

• Find your niche
• What is your passion?
• What is that you can write a book on?
• What is that you can explain to a 5-year old, 80-year old, a post-doctoral PhD scholar, a School or College Graduate well?
• Will people be willing to pay you for what you will share?
• Is there any uniqueness and relevance for your content?

LinkedIn Algorithm changes very regularly to keep up with the changing user profiles, content posted, rules and gamification followed by the users and the platform. Abide by the rules and ensure that you build content and engage in a legitimate manner. Some rules to follow will be,

• Keep your tags to a maximum of 3 per post.
• Keep minimum tagging of profiles (3-5 max)
• Do not promote your posts by joining LinkedIn Pods using a quid-pro-quo mode of likes and sharing - This is construed as gamification
• You can share your posts using 1-1 engagement with a few users - again keep it to minimum of 3-5 per post.
• Build genuine content engagement for long-term user basis.

Again how you move ahead building your content is in your own hands. You can enjoy journey by following the rules or choose to wonder what happened. The choice and solution is in your own-hands.

I hope you enjoyed reading the post and comments on this topic. Caring is sharing. Feel free to like, share or comment on what you think! Please tag me if you forward this for relevance.

Credits: Header and most of the images are designed using Canva. All other linked quotes and images available freely on the Public Internet. Respective trademarks owned by corresponding firms. Opinions highlighted are from a personal experience standpoint and in no way reflect the views of my current or past employers or clients.