3 easy LinkedIn strategies to boost your profile visibility

What LinkedIn Strategies should you use? One of the top questions job seekers ask me is how do I get found on LinkedIn. Obviously many sources promote tricks, but in essence LinkedIn is a content management platform, you need to share content.

First step always is to have a complete LinkedIn profile

What I mean by complete profile is often different from others may suggest. I believe that LinkedIn is an opportunity to share your strongest resume stories. My contention is that more people see your LinkedIn profile than will ever see your resume.

Just to clarify, your first step is to build a solid resume but on LinkedIn, you want to share your accomplishment-driven resume content. While you can change it and you should remove any confidential or proprietary information or statistics, LinkedIn should show your value.

The next question many job seekers ask is what should I share on LinkedIn

To attract people to your LinkedIn profile, share content that fits your brand. How?

Focus your LinkedIn strategies on your areas of interest

The easiest way to share content is to share content someone else wrote. If you are an expert in the Internet of Things (IoT), find articles from good sources that fit your areas of interest. LinkedIn makes this easy in two ways.

What people are talking about now

Every day LinkedIn updates the home page segment “what people are talking about now”

This will tell you top topics in the news. You follow the link to find a full stream of articles from different news sources to follow: Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, CNN, TechCrunch and other resources. You can share any of the content if you desire.

I read everything before I share because a headline can be deceptive and I want content I share to be truthful relevant, and useful to my community.

Setting your LinkedIn Feed Preferences

One setting some people don’t know is the LinkedIn Feed Preferences

1. Go to Settings/Privacy and today the 7th setting on the Account tab is Feed Preferences.
2. Find content that you identify with and follow it by clicking on the Follow button.
3. As you read content that fits your brand, share it on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Strategies: Write your own content

I find that when I write my own content — even just a paragraph, I may get more attention than sharing someone else’s content. Position yourself as an expert by using this LinkedIn Content Strategy. Last week I shared content I wrote about how to have a successful LinkedIn experience and 3 days later it had 460 views. (Those aren’t big numbers but it shows someone read it.)

What you share should fit your brand and be intriguing enough to listen. I paired the above content with a photo from Pixabay and that may have gotten it more attention. I test posts with photos and without to see what resonates.

LinkedIn Content Strategies: Write articles

In addition to a post you just write on the home page, LinkedIn gives you your own blog. If helps if you know something about writing content for blogs but you can learn much of that online from sites like Copyblogger or Hubspot.

An article or blog post on LinkedIn should be between 300 and 500 words. This article would be called a long post. You can write them occasionally to position yourself as an expert but people like shorter content. You can also break up a long post into multiple posts to get more traction.

In addition, as you build content, you can reuse it. Most people don’t remember what they read yesterday.

LinkedIn Content Strategies: Tag your content

Social media brought us the hashtag. Most people know hashtags and they are pretty universal #topic so just put the # sign before the topic. #applicationdevelopment #resumewriting #innovation and you can certainly make up your own hashtag. You do need to put the two or more words together if you use more than one word.

In addition, if you are sharing someone else’s content, tag them with their name and the @ symbol. If I were to share this inspiring post by my friend (and Olympic Gold), Joe Jacobi, I would tag it @JoeJacobi. You really should follow that link to read it and play the video. Joe’s post about Amy Down’s experience in the Oklahoma City bombing gave me chills and left me in tears more than once.

Your tags (hashtags and names) appear in LinkedIn’s branded blue color.

Share content of people you admire as well as your connections.

How will LinkedIn Strategies help you?

When you are purposeful in what you share and say, you will get looked at on LinkedIn. You will be positioning yourself as an expert. It takes an investment of your time but when you get used to it, it will be easier. Content marketing is key in all social media but on LinkedIn, it can drive your personal results.

How do I know all this?

I do it for myself. Located in central Wisconsin, I have clients and friends all over the globe. Many of these clients and friends were built through content marketing strategies I deployed for my business Design Resumes on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. As a LinkedIn profile writer, I teach these strategies to my clients. When I see my clients start using my strategies, it makes me happy.

Do you need someone to craft your resume, write your LinkedIn profile content, and coach you on ways to be more effective in your job search? Learn more here.