Top Tips For Using LinkedIn To Grow Your Business In 2023

Make A Good First Impression

First impressions really do count! You can give people the wrong first impression if your profile is outdated, not set up properly and sloppy.

You can present a professional image by making sure your profile is set up correctly.

To do that, you’ll want to make sure you have these things included:

Profile Photo: Use a quality photo with a simple background that presents a professional image. And make sure it isn’t blurry or skewed out of proportion.
Headline: Craft a concise, attention grabbing headline that highlights your current role, industry, key skills and include some of the words people would search for if they were looking for your skills.
Summary: Write a compelling summary that includes a brief personal introduction, your expertise and passions, and your USP - Unique Selling/Serving Point (the thing that sets you apart).
Experience: List your work experience in reverse chronological order. Include job title, company name, dates of employment, and a short description of your responsibilities and accomplishments there. If you’ve had a career break you can even add that in now too.
Education: Provide details about your educational background, such as degrees or qualifications and any relevant honours you’ve achieved.
Skills: Add the skills that relate to your profession and current career direction, then if you can, ask colleagues or contacts to endorse those skills for credibility. You can endorse theirs as well.

Also, consider seeking recommendations from clients you have worked with, update your profile regularly when things change, and weave keywords throughout your content so that you can potentially appear in searches.

Don’t forget to proofread for any typos too!

Make A Feature

The Featured section appears at the top of your profile and is a space to showcase specific pieces of content and media. It gives your profile visitors a quick overview of your most important work or achievements. Using this section helps you to prominently highlight your accomplishments and makes it easier for people to see your background and skills at a glance.

You can ‘feature’ posts or articles that share your thoughts and insights on various industry relevant topics, links to your website, media files like images, videos or PDFs, or posts where you’ve been mentioned or tagged by others.

All of these featured items help to build professional credibility and represent your skills and expertise.

It’s Not About You, But It Kind Of Is

Your About section should be interesting and compelling. It should NOT be a boring third person summary of your career to date. Funnily enough, your About section isn’t really about you, it’s about what people want to know about you. So, consider that when putting it together. Try to highlight things that are interesting and the problems you can solve for people. I’ve got some great recommendations for copywriters who are experts at putting together About sections. Let me know if you’d like a recommendation for one to help you.

Engage, Engage, Engage

Like many things, you will only get out of LinkedIn what you put in. Therefore, I recommend that you put aside time two to three times a week (though daily would be better) to read other people’s posts, make comments on them and ask relevant questions.

This will raise your personal profile on LinkedIn and creates great opportunities to network and connect with others in the business world.

It’s also an opportunity for give your thoughts, tips, insights and share some of your knowledge in a useful and supportive way to your network, as they can all see what you comment (so be mindful of what and how you say things).

Make Connections

Maximise the opportunity from the connections you make when you go to business meetings or networking events by connecting with those people on LinkedIn afterwards. (Try to do this within 24 - 48 hours after you meet them and remind them how you met). That way, you have an easy way to contact them, can find out more about what they do and they can gain more insight into your business. Plus, it helps to strengthen the relationship between you and puts your content in front of them to keep you top of mind for potential collaborations or referrals.

Post Consistently

Fill your feed with useful and valuable content on a regular basis. It is better to post once a week consistently than post three times one week, two times the next and then nothing for a month! Your content should add value to your audience.

Here are just some of the content types you could post:

Short or long form written posts
Links to interesting articles
Videos
How to tutorials
Infographics
Behind the scenes photos or videos from your business
Downloadable checklists
Freebie downloads

Be Professional

LinkedIn is known to be a professional platform, and while there is space for candid content, it is not really the place to share your cat videos and mildly offensive memes! So, when you are publishing your own content and engaging with other people’s, make sure you remain professional so that you create a good online perception for your business.

Be A Thought Leader

Sharing your expertise, insights and perspectives via articles and other forms of content can be a great way to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Being known as a thought leader can help you to build a strong reputation for your business, which in turn will be able to generate sales leads both in the short and long term. Your comments on other people’s posts are another great way to develop yourself as a thought leader.

Monitor Your Analytics

Like other social media platforms, LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to view analytics. You should take advantage of the tool to check what kinds of content are resonating with your audience. You can then use that data to refine your content strategy and improve your engagement.

Share And Share Alike

Keep an eye out for opportunities to share the content your business connections publish. Sharing pieces that your audience might benefit from has a number of benefits. Firstly, it is a great way to supplement your own quality content. Also, if you share content from a complementary business that has a similar audience to yours, then they may return the favour and share your content, doubling your chances of being seen online.

You can do this organically as the opportunities arise, or establish a formal collaboration agreement where you partner with other businesses to share each other's content.

Sort Your Socials

LinkedIn is a powerful resource that can generate great visibility and engagement for your business. But, in order to maximise the returns, you need to use it properly.

If you need help getting your profile set up for that great first impression or coming up with a strategy for the content you should be publishing, then it can be valuable to get an expert on the job.

At Face Up Now, I specialise in making social media accessible and easy for all business owners, regardless of your tech knowledge or experience using LinkedIn.

That's why I offer a short, sharp Sort Your Socials Session. This very practical session is held with you one-to-one and we dive into your LinkedIn profile, ensuring it is set up correctly and discussing a content strategy for you to utilise. Book your Socials Sorted Session now, I’d love to help you use LinkedIn to grow your business.