In honor of our new book, Make LinkedIn Work for You, A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals, my co-author, Dennis Kennedy and I have put together this list of tips to help you with how you use LinkedIn in this new decade.
We've organized these tips into three categories, along the lines of what we call the three "building blocks" of LinkedIn: Profiles, Connections and Participation.
The tips are pulled straight from the book - please let us know in the comments if you've implemented any of these tips and how they are working for you!
LinkedIn Tips: Profiles
- Add a banner/header photo to your Profile to highlight a skill, achievement or area of focus.
- Look at the Profiles of some power users to see how they’re maximizing their LinkedIn presence.
- Use stories or examples in your About section to illustrate what you do for clients or to provide additional insight.
- Include keywords that your target audience is looking for in your Profile, including in your headline.
- Use LinkedIn analytics to help you to refine your keywords.
- Name your target audience in your Profile and speak their language.
- Demonstrate your message; show, don’t tell.
- Add relevant, appropriate video, audio, presentations, or other extras to showcase your work and what you do for clients.
- Keep your Profile fresh – don’t forget to update on a regular basis (at least quarterly) and put time for updating on your calendar.
- Add your bar admissions information to your About, Experience or Licenses and Certifications sections of your Profile to make it clear where you practice.
- Add an explicit call to action to your About section (download a PDF, subscribe to your email newsletter, schedule appointment).
- Make your Profile stand out and make it easier to read with short paragraphs and bullet points.
- Compose your entries in a word processing program, then copy and paste into LinkedIn.
- Review your Profile on both the desktop and mobile app versions of LinkedIn to see what information appears before the “see more” link; put your most important information first.
- Click on “Add Profile Section” periodically to see if LinkedIn has added new sections that might be relevant to you.
LinkedIn Tips: Connections
- Use the “People Also Viewed” results on your Connections’ Profile pages (and your own) to find people who might be good Connections for you.
- Convert the business cards you receive into LinkedIn invitations while the memory of the in-person meeting is still fresh.
- Accepting more of the invitations you receive is an easy way to build your number of Connections. If you are unsure about the inviter, send them a message in LinkedIn to start a conversation before you accept the invitation to connect.
- In meetings or other events, consider suggesting that people use the “Find Nearby” feature in the mobile app to let everyone easily find and connect to others who are there.
- Don’t forget that you can cultivate Connections over time: remove, block, ignore or remove invitations, and otherwise manage your Connections to make your Connections list more tailored to your goals.
- Because many people have premium accounts, they will see that you have viewed their Profiles. Simply viewing Profiles can be a way to see if someone who you don’t know well will invite you to connect with them.
- Invite people to connect with you when you speak, in your communications, and even on your business card.
- Don’t forget that premium account options have additional features that can help you find and add Connections. You can take advantage of a free 30-day trial and, if you purchase a premium account, you can turn it off at any time.
- If you use Twitter, a great technique is to see who follows you on Twitter and, if it makes sense, send them LinkedIn invitations.
- Send invitations to second-degree Connections who like or comment on your Posts.
- If you sincerely like a presentation or article, let the speaker or author know and ask them to connect.
- Look at your Connections’ connections – if you see someone you’d like to meet, ask if they will make an introduction for you. The introduction doesn’t have to occur on LinkedIn. Or, simply ask your Connection if you can use their name in your LinkedIn invitation to your desired contact.
- Be creative. We are always finding new ways to use LinkedIn to identify potential Connections.
LinkedIn Tips: Participation
- Create posts for LinkedIn in batches so all you need to do is post something you have in your queue.
- Use a scheduling tool to schedule some posts in advance.
- Create a LinkedIn SlideShare account and upload presentations to your Profile.
- Take your LinkedIn relationships offline by scheduling lunch, coffee or phone calls.
- Schedule regular weekly or monthly time for LinkedIn participation activities.
- Follow companies, individuals and influencers whose content is valuable to you and your network.
- Use self-promotion sparingly, self-deprecatingly, and subtly on LinkedIn, but do not be afraid to promote yourself.
- Consider whether you want to sync your blog and Twitter accounts to LinkedIn to allow for cross-posting.
- Use “Congratulate” options LinkedIn gives you to acknowledge new jobs and other changes for your Connections.
- Use Groups as a way to meet new people and make Connections.
- “Follow” individuals of interest to you within a Group to receive their Posts.
- Use LinkedIn’s analytics tools to see who is engaging with your content and engage back with them.
- Tag LinkedIn users with whom you would like to establish or continue a relationship to help them to engage with your Posts.
- Watch how LinkedIn power users participate on the platform and see what ideas you can steal from them.
- Vary the types of posts you make and the format of your posts and learn from these experiments.
- Repurpose articles you’ve written into shorter LinkedIn posts or republish as a LinkedIn article.
- Try to always use images with your content, especially photos of you with others.
- Post short videos.
- Share documents on your Profile and in other places on LinkedIn.
If you want even more great practical tips like these, you can find them in our book, Make LinkedIn Work for You: A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals, available on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback versions. Get your copy today - or better yet, buy copies for your whole firm or organization!
Stay tuned for more articles, webinars, presentations, and online courses on LinkedIn topics from both Dennis and me in 2020.
Happy New Decade!
Thank you for the tips to improve my LinkedIn results. I feel these results also help my/our overall SEO results since LinkedIn is a highly rated website! It seems like all websites must work non-stop to be found in searches.
Posted by: Trish Blassingame | February 12, 2020 at 02:18 AM
Thank you! As much as I like LinkedIn and have discovered some wonderful connections, it's as confusing to me today as it was the first day I used it.
I'll be going through your 47 tips slowly and taking notes.
https://misnylawcolumbus.com/
Posted by: Lee Paladin | January 26, 2020 at 10:54 PM