Tips for Boosting Engagement on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a terrific social media platform to use, whether you're looking to expand your personal network or to increase attention to your business profile. When properly used, LinkedIn can go a long way toward increasing brand recognition and directing traffic to your business. Unfortunately, many users don't make the best use of LinkedIn's capabilities and opt for the easy way out. It will rarely lead to increased engagement, leads, or sales when all you're doing is copying and pasting successful blog posts to promote your business.

Instead, you should take advantage of the fact that LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform for business professionals. In addition to that, LinkedIn's active user account has recently soared to nearly 600 million users, and the platform recently enjoyed a 33% increase in revenues as a direct result of its investment to increase the user experience on the platform. With LinkedIn having made great strides in the last couple years to improve user experience, and make itself more attractive to business users, it simply makes great sense to maximize LinkedIn usage and to do whatever is possible to boost engagement with your LinkedIn followers.

Make the best use of your personal profile

Personal profiles are still the dominant feature of LinkedIn professionals, although company pages are increasing their presence as well. Company pages do provide a great deal of information about your business, as well as a link to your homepage, and a support network for employees of your company. However, there is no doubt that personal profiles still get many more views and have much greater engagement, for several reasons.First of all, it is not possible to make use of LinkedIn Publisher from your company page, and you also can't send personal messages or connection requests from that company page. The truth is that people are much more likely to engage with a personal profile than they will with a company brand, simply because people prefer to associate with other individuals, rather than with companies. All this means that you should maximize your use of your personal profile, rather than your company page.

Keep your information updated

It's very easy to forget to update your LinkedIn profile when you acquire a new skill or when you've taken that new position with another company. You're doing yourself a disservice when you forget to update your LinkedIn profile because the more skills you can display on that profile, the more appealing you make yourself to potential employers. It's also true that outdated information is a sign of inactivity on your part, and it leaves a bad impression with viewers. That may be a signal to readers of your profile that you are not worth engaging with. You should also keep in mind that people who are searching for specific skills on LinkedIn would pass right by your profile if you haven't updated it with your most recent skills.

Use a professional photo

Don't lose sight of the fact that LinkedIn is a platform for business professionals, and that means you should have a professional-looking photo attached to your profile. Your headshot photo is the image that viewers will see whenever you show up in a news feed, or when you interact with other users, so it's very important to make this photo as professional-looking as possible. LinkedIn says that having a polished headshot photo will garner as many as 21 times more views of your profile, and at least nine times more requests for connection, than will a profile with no photo.You should also take advantage of updating your LinkedIn background photo, rather than using the default provided by the platform. Background photos can be very effective at showcasing important information and communicating your brand to others. This means you should choose an image which shows your industry standing, your geographic location, or something about your brand itself, in order to maximize the effectiveness of your background photo.

Proofread all your content

Since LinkedIn is the chosen platform of business professionals, it will be to your advantage to make sure everything on your profile is businesslike and correct. Your credibility and your reputation in the LinkedIn community will depend to some extent on how well-crafted your profile content is. If it's full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, that will reflect poorly on you as a business professional, and it will probably lead to lower levels of engagement with others.To be sure that everything is correct on your profile, proofread it yourself and then ask a friend to review it with the second set of eyes. There are also a number of apps you can make use of to catch any grammatical or spelling errors so that you can be confident you're putting your best foot forward with regard to your profile content.

Get yourself recommended

Recommendations are one of the best forms of social validation, and they provide support for the fact that you are a legitimate professional who is well-established in the business world. If you have no recommendations on your profile, you should definitely seek them out from followers you have. You should also contact any current or past clients you have, as well as all of your professional contacts, because the more recommendations you have, the more credible will be your standing.When you do reach out to these individuals, request that they share specific details about your good features or skills, or anything else that you would like to bring to the attention of users. This can be business achievements such as increasing revenue, cutting costs, or any other good things you helped bring about at your company.The reason you should ask for these details is that specific quantitative accomplishments always carry greater weight than do generic, vague-sounding recommendations. If you can get at least five recommendations, especially from other established professionals or influencers, it will definitely increase your credibility, and help to boost your engagement with other business professionals on LinkedIn.