How to make the most of LinkedIn

Written by Ellie Taylor on .

(Co-written with Mujamel Khan)

LinkedIn is a platform that can help you display your professional career in a positive light. In this article, we’ll share some tips and tricks on how to take advantage of LinkedIn to sharpen your skills and professional image.

Complete your profile

This one is pretty self explanatory and should be the first thing on your agenda when creating or visiting your LinkedIn profile. Tasks such as uploading a professional image of yourself, filling out your past education and previous work experience, are essential if you want people to pay attention to your profile. LinkedIn has a great list of tips and tricks of how to keep your profile professional and up-to-date over on their blog here, which you can use as a checklist.

Potential job applicants may find your profile when searching but skim over it if it isn’t fully complete, as jobseekers will want to work for people who are confident about themselves as well as open to showing off who they are! Don’t be shy to include small but influential moments in your career on your profile, as this will make you stand out even more to potential network connections.

Study and create engaging content

You should aim to create content that is engaging to entice users to want to have you as a connection, but how?

Ultimately, that’s up to you to decide, but the best way to gauge what you should do is studying what others in your field are sharing. Understanding what they are doing can help you brainstorm ideas of your own.

Content can be anything! Some text, an image or even a video can help capture someone’s attention, however studies show that having an image or video alongside some text is much more appealing to have compared to just text alone.

Expand your network

Networking is key to LinkedIn. One of the easiest ways to expand your network is to sync your address book from your email or phone. These are people you already know or have spoken to in the past. When sending connection requests, take a few minutes to personalise the message, as Shaun Corness over on The Linked People says that a generic one ‘will seem as if you are not interested in building a personal relationship with the individual and are only there to pitch more of your products or services’.

Think of your 1st connections as people you know, for example previous colleagues. 2nd and 3rd connections which are typically people you may be familiar with or have no direct connection with, but you share a connection with somebody else. Reaching out to these individuals may require you to speak to a 1st connection as a reference, but doing this can give you another contact to work with now or in the future!

Talk!

Having lots of connections to many people is great, but will be utterly pointless if you don’t communicate to each other. This does not mean you need to speak to everyone, but it does mean you should make an attempt to connect with and contact the people who interact with you, especially if you are looking to fill a vacancy in your company.

Showing that you are actively listening and speaking to others can boost your confidence and present you as an engaging individual. This intertwines nicely with the content you share on your profile as the ability to comment on people’s posts means that you can speak to share an insight or just another point of view to look at.

Next Steps

Now that you have a basic understanding of how to make the most out of LinkedIn, you can get your feet off the ground and make a profile that is bound to impress in no time at all. LinkedIn is just one of the many tools that can attract job applicants to your company – and with TalentSpa, you can get even more job seekers applying for your vacancies, with benefits such as improved job specifications and having your adverts placed on industry-specific job boards.

Click here to learn more about how we can do the hard work of recruitment for you, and to find out more about our exclusive 14-day free trial for new clients.