Top Tips on How to Grow Your LinkedIn Audience

Why do you and your business need a LinkedIn profile? How to grow your LinkedIn audience and promote your LinkedIn account? Read the article below to find out!

We live in a time when knowledge and professional skills are valued. Companies want to hire the most experienced employees quickly with great and proven portfolios. LinkedIn is used for that, where the emphasis is on work and business processes.?

A LinkedIn profile is a kind of work blog, where you can find information about one’s experience and achievements, as well as all sorts of beneficial content like 'tips on how to stay motivated.'

Why Do You Need a LinkedIn Account?

Specialists, business owners, and companies can have their profiles on this social network. At first, it’s hard to understand the structure of the platform and how it works, but everything becomes clear in 1-2 weeks.

The social network can be used by both job seekers and companies.

LinkedIn for Specialists

If you don’t own any business, it’s worth trying to promote yourself as a specialist. Start a profile, fill it out, and you can already start looking for a job.

A LinkedIn advantage is that you can find a remote position worldwide. The only issue is language proficiency.

It’s worth noting that LinkedIn has long ceased to be a platform for IT specialists only. Initially, it was, but now enterprising people from other spheres don’t hesitate to use the platform. You can even find profiles of electricians and call the master at home.

Moreover, the fulfilled profile can attract HRs. Companies themselves actively use this social network in search of talented employees. Your LinkedIn profile is a complete resume. Therefore, define the content and insert information that will be of interest to a potential employer. However, remember that the information must be relevant. The boss-to-be doesn’t need to know how many shots you can drink on a Friday night.

LinkedIn for Business

Every entrepreneur needs a LinkedIn profile. If you actively work with your account, it can give a solid boost to your business.

The value of LinkedIn is that it has a fairly large free database. Many recruiting resources require a monthly fee and provide no guarantees that you will hire someone. On the social network, this is done as quickly as possible.

In addition, you can find business partners there. You can find a supplier with better terms. You can find an investor who wants to support an existing company with a development perspective. You can find a partner with competencies you lack. You can find new clients if you work in the B2B segment.

How to Grow Your LinkedIn Audience?

After you signed up, decided on your LinkedIn profile’s main tasks and goals, and got all the necessary photo and video equipment to create content, it’s time to expand your audience and define this content.

And so, let’s figure out how to increase reach and engagement in your publications.

Complete your profile

At the very beginning, you need to fill out your profile so that visitors can learn more about you. Choose a suitable avatar and LinkedIn cover photo — something catchy, businesslike, and serious (but not too much).

In filling out the general information, you can use some SEO optimization techniques and insert several keywords.

The main thing is that your LinkedIn profile should be as informative as possible and without any mistakes. Then your account will look presentable.

Define content

LinkedIn is a professional social network, and the audience prefers to read valuable business content rather than funny pics. But don’t overdo it with the business style. Publications should be interesting, ideally in the format of stories and with a bit of humor.

Schedule

LinkedIn values regular posting. The platform will reward you with great reach whether you post daily or every Monday and Friday for several months.

Analyze your target audience to understand when they are most active. But since LinkedIn is a network for business communication, it’s best to choose the time between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.

Use various formats

Don’t limit yourself to just writing posts and uploading photos. What do you think about videos? Add some video content to your LinkedIn account. It can be tutorials made with HD screen recorder, entertaining clips (but related to your activity), your video CV, and so on. There are plenty of ideas. Turn on your creativity. And if you are a job seeker, the future employer will definitely appreciate your approach.

Companies may use LinkedIn profiles as another platform for launching their video marketing campaign. The main thing is to share not only beneficial videos but high quality as well.

Engage your audience

To grow your LinkedIn audience and increase reach, you need to engage your audience — just add a little interactivity.

Try to involve followers in some kind of activity: likes, comments, reposts. Ask your audience to answer questions under the post or insert open-ended questions and call-to-action in videos.

Use hashtags

Certainly, if your subscribers read the post, that’s good. But why not grow the audience and use hashtags along with SEO optimization? Use up to 3 tags; otherwise, your post won’t be seen.

Participate in discussions

In addition to writing your own content, your profile may appear under other authors’ posts and LinkedIn accounts — you need to participate in various discussions.

Numerous companies use this type of marketing not only to increase reach and awareness but demonstrate intellectual leadership. It works out when readers want to buy something, realize that you are an expert in the niche, and come to you.?

Targeted advertising

This method requires investment, but if you want fast and effective promotion, then you can’t do without advertising. LinkedIn Targeted Ads provide us with lots of filters — geo, positions, education, skills, age, etc. You will easily reach many users and grow your LinkedIn audience with this method.

Why does your Business need a LinkedIn Profile?

Many businesses, I believe, are missing a trick by not having a LinkedIn company page. Whether you have a number of employees, who have personal LinkedIn profiles or you are a self employed, owner-driven business, a LinkedIn company page serves a number of very different functions, compared with your personal profile.

To create a company page, you are required to have an email address from that business, you can then choose designated admins to help manage the page - they must be connected with you on LinkedIn. Be aware that an admin has full editorial rights on your page and can also add or remove other page admins.?

First, let's briefly list the benefits of having a company page:

1. It showcases your company, not just a single employee.?
2. Your employees act as indirect company ambassadors?
3. You can measure the effectiveness of your updates
4. Be alerted when some mentions your company
5. Promote your most important news
6. Showcase your specialist services

It showcases your company, not just a single employee

LinkedIn's foundations are built upon individual personal profiles, which usually showcase the user's skills, not those of the company they work for. LinkedIn members use the site for numerous reasons, two of which include; following and networking with other professionals or following companies to hear of news and developments from that organisation.

Take a look at the computing giant, Dell. It has more than?4,000,000?followers who are interested in receiving technology based updates. Their news tends to be a mixture of industry developments and their own technology announcements.

Your employees act as indirect company ambassadors

When one of your employees updates his/her current 'Experience' section, on their personal LinkedIn profile, with your company's name, they are automatically attached to your company page. This is identified by a clickable image of your company logo, which allows a profile viewer to move seamlessly from the employee's personal profile to your company page.

Simply by ensuring that everyone of your team has correctly Linked their profile to your company page, increases the chances that their connections will click the link and be sent directly to your company page. All you need to do now is ensure that your employees become well connected in the industry sectors you want to do business in.?

You can measure the effectiveness of your updates

Whenever you post a news update from your company page, LinkedIn provides you with analytics, which amongst others statistics, tells you; how many impressions your post has received (the number of times your post has appeared in front of a follower on their desktop browser, mobile device App); the number of clicks your post has generated (whenever your post is opened or someone clicks from the post onto your company name or logo); the number of Interactions your post has received (likes, comments, shares), expressed as a number and as a percentage of impressions.

Be alerted when some mentions your company

LinkedIn's 'Notifications' feature for company pages is a powerful feature, which sends you an email alert and a notification to your company page, whenever someone mentions your company in their personal LinkedIn status updates.

When your company name is typed into a post, LinkedIn displays it in a drop down menu, providing the person posting with an opportunity to tag your company in the post. It's a double whammy - you are alerted to this happening and other members, viewing the person's post, can click on the link and go straight to your company page.?

Promote your most important news

One of the challenges with posting updates, on social media generally, is that unless you're going to post frequently, your most important information is going to be lost in the vertical time lines of other members, very quickly, as posts from other members arrive. Not a problem with a Company page, as you can select your most important post and pin it to the top of your page's?news feed?and it will remain there until you?choose to unpin it. Promoting a company event or a success story? Pin it!?

Showcase your specialist services

If your company is large enough or offers a diverse range of services, you may want to showcase these individually, using the main company page as a landing page to showcase your business generally.

To really benefit from having a company page, you need to build a following and frequently post and monitor content from your page. It is clear that there are many things you could do to raise your brand profile and create more business opportunity using LinkedIn and you must select the options which are likely to present you with the easiest and most useful returns.

Understanding how to use LinkedIn increases your chances of finding interesting job offers, partners, and colleagues to connect. This social network, unlike others, won’t take your precious time offering useless ads, posts, and other time-consuming content.

A profile on LinkedIn is the first step for anyone who wants to earn more tomorrow than today. It’s a powerful career-building and business development tool. Consider it as an investment.

Don’t think that a LinkedIn profile is as easy to manage as Facebook and even more so Instagram. To get a high-quality account, you will have to work with content, optimize the profile, as well as constantly publish posts and keep abreast of the latest news.