How to Stay Ahead of the Game on LinkedIn

Earlier this week we covered six social media marketing tips for Facebook. This time it’s the turn of LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, which presents new opportunities for companies in Switzerland and throughout Europe.

In March this year, LinkedIn acquired SlideShare, a popular platform for sharing presentations online. LinkedIn has now incorporated SlideShare into its ad platform.  

Below is an embedded SlideShare presentation about the LinkedIn SlideShare Content Ads. You can also read about it in more detail on the LinkedIn blog.

Did you know, you can send out LinkedIn connection invitations to members of your groups? This is a good way to extend the reach of your network beyond colleagues and professional contacts, but try not to send out too many to people you don’t know. It’s best to actively participate within your chosen groups for some time, striking up a rapport with other members and making a name for yourself. Then, you can request connections with those members you more frequently interact with.

Focus on a few groups to begin with and involve yourself in discussions as much as possible – this will help to establish you as a thought-leader within your industry. If you want to promote your own content – blogs or ebooks, for examples – be sure to also promote articles from other sources.

LinkedIn notifies members whenever their connections update their profiles, so if you want people to visit you regularly, update yours every couple of months. Include new projects, changes of job title, blog articles you’ve written, new skills and experiences, and so on.  

The more people who see your profile, the greater your potential to drive traffic to your main website, landing pages or other social media channels.

Refresh your list of skills, adding new ones as you acquire them. Also, optimise your profile headline using keywords from your own marketing strategy– this will help you to get found in LinkedIn searches, very much like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Google Search. You can use a similar methodology here, always ensuring your headline and skills include keywords from your approved list.

LinkedIn provides metrics to help you evaluate engagement with your posts and followers. These include ‘per post insights’, ‘follower insights’ and ‘page insights’.

Per post insights tell you more about engagement – how many people saw your update, was it shared, was it clicked? Follower insights goes into more detail about your business page network with useful demographics and follower trends. Lastly, page insights is very much like the Google Analytics of LinkedIn – page views, unique visitors, and so on.