Building Your Professional Credibility with LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the social media outlet of choice for most business professionals. But many individuals aren’t utilizing this resource fully to grow not only their business, but also their professional credibility. Fortunately, there are a few steps that will help grow the number of connections or followers and raise influence.

Enhancing Your Personal Profile

LinkedIn began as a person-to-person networking platform focused on work-related communication. This core focus remains crucial. People connect with individuals, not just companies. Here are four tips to effectively build your personal brand on LinkedIn:

1. Your profile information: Ensure all sections are complete. Pay special attention to your Title and About section. Your title should be more than a standard job description; use engaging keywords that highlight your capabilities. The About section is where you detail your skills, expertise, and most importantly, how you can help others. Incorporate keywords and update it with significant career changes, association memberships, or awards.
2. Post to your feed: At a minimum you should post a few times a month. Even better is a few times a week. If there is something timely to talk about in your industry, add an additional post before it’s old news. Be mindful that LinkedIn isn’t Facebook. Stick with business posts predominantly. A few personal posts of significant events are fine. After all, businesspeople are still living personal lives!
3. Reach out to people you know to connect: Continually build your network. While not imperative, LinkedIn recommends that you strive for a minimum of 500 connections. Start by searching for people you know and requesting to connect. You can also allow LinkedIn to pull from your contact list. Finally, when you meet new professionals you wish to connect with, send a personalized message reminding them where you met.
4. Engage with others: This is the part many people neglect. Actively liking, commenting on and sharing other people’s posts shows you are engaged and encourages reciprocal interaction. Every time that happens, your content appears in the feed of people who may not follow you but do follow your connection.

Elevating Your Business Page

As a small business owner, or someone responsible for the face of your company, it’s important to have a positive corporate presence to reach professionals, whether to promote services or job openings. Many of the same tips apply to developing this page as to your personal profile page:

• Update the information sections fully
• Post regularly (at least once a week)
• Share other content to your company page. This can include links to outside information, but even better is reposting and commenting on an interesting post from another user. To do this, choose your company page in the drop down next to your profile name after you hit repost.

Where the Magic Happens: Connecting the Two

Once you have established a solid presence for both your personal and business pages, it’s time to help them work together to show leadership in your industry.

• Invite your connections to follow your company page. You can invite 100-250 personal contacts monthly to follow your business page, depending on your page type and activity.
• Post “thought leadership” content. These are different than blogs and more in-depth than posts. They should be relevant and timely. Share the content between your pages.
• Join groups. LinkedIn has thousands of groups. While you join and post as an individual, you can share content from other sources, including your business page. If you are actively participating in groups, you will start to develop leads, recognize trends and identify problems that you can help solve (or talk about in an LI article).

These tasks aren’t difficult, but they do take some time. A full-service marketing agency with social media expertise can help you manage these tasks, especially the profile information, if you can’t dedicate a few hours a month to strengthening this valuable tool. However you get it done, be sure you are maximizing your LinkedIn presence!