How to Leverage LinkedIn's AI to Drive Engagement

Your skills have always been important to your LinkedIn profile. They show your experience, serve as keywords to help you appear in Google and LinkedIn searches, and they show your target buyers and future employers your strengths. They also offer a way for you to get endorsements, which adds credibility and proves to your profile visitors that you do in fact have those skills.

But soon there will be an even more important way for you to leverage your skills. You see, LinkedIn has unveiled a new feature that uses artificial intelligence to push your posts out to people who share your skills, based on the content of those posts.

That’s right. LinkedIn is using what appears to be AI to create further engagement with your posts by sharing them with a targeted audience which most closely matches the words in your status update who are likely to be interested in your content.

New #LinkedIn AI on posts drives #engagement w/ #buyers. #socialselling

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How Does the New LinkedIn Magnet Work?

This new LinkedIn feature uses AI to pull in the right people for your post because LinkedIn now reads your posts in real time while you type. So LinkedIn is actually using the content of your post and your endorsed skills, to find people who share your skills and may be interested in your share.

What does that mean?

This means that while you write your post, the magnet suggests up to three skills (or you can choose the three yourself) to push your content to a targeted audience. But you can’t push your posts to people that have, let’s say, the marketing skill on your profile unless you, yourself, have that skill on your profile.

And in order to avoid the problem of users simply changing their skills to match those of a specific audience, this new magnet requires that the skills you want to target be endorsed a certain number of times.

As this is a new feature that has only been rolled out, it’s still too early to know exactly how many endorsements is “enough”. However, this does protect against people simply adding skills and pushing out content, then changing their skills to match a new audience. It also means that you actually need to have the skills you’re targeting.

Creating engagement for active users

Since active LinkedIn users are likely to have more endorsements than inactive users, LinkedIn is rewarding members who contribute to their community and network, engage on the platform, and continue to get endorsements for their skills.

How?

By sharing their posts with a wider, more targeted audience.

Share your #LinkedIn posts with targeted #buyers through new #AI feature.

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Who sees your posts?

Instead of a post just going to your network’s home feed as it always has, it will now go to a more specific audience. All you have to do is click on the magnet, type your post and then, before clicking ‘Post,’ choose three skills you want to target.

Then, once you click ‘Post,’ in addition, to it showing up in the news feed of everyone in your network who “might” see it, it will also strategically show up in the notifications stream of everyone who has the skills you selected during posting. It will ask your audience to “Add Your Thoughts” in your notifications stream. This is a great way to engage with people or buyers who share similar skills, but also a way to target your buyers by developing skills they’re likely to have. The result—your status posts can target specific markets to show the value that your content has to offer to create engagement which creates more conversations.

New #LinkedIn #AI feature uses your skills to start conversations with #buyers

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What Does the New LinkedIn Magnet Mean for You?

First, the most important element of the new LinkedIn magnet feature is that all of your skills must be up to date. Yes, this means you need to have all 50 available skills filled in so you have as many opportunities as possible to connect with your relevant buyers.

What should these skills be?

 Your proficiencies

 What you want to be found for

 Skills that match your buyer or target audience

Don’t fake the funk! If you post skills that you don’t have, you won’t get any endorsements and, as a result, those skills won’t be available to the LinkedIn magnet feature, causing your profile to be less credible. As a sales rep, account executive, or business owner, you always want to look as credible as possible. That’s one of the reasons why having your LinkedIn profile match your target buyer is so important in the modern B2B sales environment.

Are your #LinkedIn profile skills updated for the new AI feature? #socialselling

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Make Sure Your LinkedIn Profile Is Up to Date

Acting fast will allow you cto be one of the first to really start leveraging this exciting feature. I have been fortunate to have been one of the first to test this new feature. As I continue to testing it make sure to follow my feed as I will be sharing with you, my clients and followers, different ways of leveraging this new magnet to connect with your buyers and continue growing sales.

Don’t miss out! Make sure your skills are up to date, that you have endorsements, and that your LinkedIn profile matches the buyer’s journey. That way, when LinkedIn rolls out this new feature to everyone, you’ll be positioned to take full advantage.

As always thank you for reading and sharing

Joshua B Lee

Want to learn how you can use social selling in your business? Grab 15 Minutes with me now by clicking here.

Make sure to check out my other articles like ~ If You're An Introvert, LinkedIn Is Your Secret Weapon

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