5 Ways to Get More From LinkedIn (Without Investing Lots of Extra Time)
You’ll have heard lots of people telling you that LinkedIn is a must-use platform, bringing with it the promise of taking your career and your entrepreneurial endeavors to new heights.
The issue with this is that finding a way to carve out some time in your busy schedule to actually use LinkedIn is difficult. So how can you achieve more while avoiding extra effort?
Look at Examples of Successful Individuals Using LinkedIn in Your Field, e.g. Real Estate
Learning by example is the best way to get to grips with all sorts of skills that you’ve not yet mastered, and it certainly applies to using LinkedIn like a pro. It’s even more useful if you’re getting inspiration from individuals and businesses that occupy the same market space as you.
In the case that you’re involved in real estate, checking up on the biggest movers and shakers in your industry and seeing how they harness LinkedIn will give you an immediate overview of the approaches which work well.
Then with this new-found framework to hand, you can use your brokerage’s LinkedIn account to build a network of contacts and market your business effectively without needing to do a lot of legwork or rely on experimentation to find the path forward.
Post Updates Regularly, but Keep Them Brief
One thing that you might associate with LinkedIn is very long, often very dry, or even entirely meandering posts from users on every topic imaginable.
This might be good in certain cases in terms of generating engagement and raising awareness about your expertise as an individual, or your company’s brand. However, LinkedIn content creation on this scale takes a lot of time, which goes against what we’re looking to do here.
If you’re looking for quick and effective growth, brevity is your best pal. Post updates of 150 characters or fewer and do so on a consistent basis so that others can get accustomed to your schedule.
A sensible option here is to pose a question that will get people talking, and again make sure it’s related to your field. Adding in a link to content that you want to earn clicks in this context can also be done, but only if relevance is assured.
It might sound counterintuitive since LinkedIn is arguably all about bolstering your own profile as a professional, but you’ll do better on this platform if you aren’t just crowing about your own achievements and initiatives at every opportunity.
That means getting used to the idea of sharing content that comes from elsewhere, even if that means sending people to sites that aren’t your own.
Own-brand posts should make up about a quarter of your output. And you don’t need to sweat about finding other content to share, because if you’re already engaged in your field then you’ll always be stumbling across useful tidbits from day to day.
Use Post Scheduling To Save Tons of Time Each Month
Why many people find managing social media profiles while juggling other responsibilities so taxing is because it disrupts the flow of their day, even if it only takes a few minutes to fire off an update or share a link. The solution is to make use of third-party tools which allow you to schedule posts in advance and have them published automatically at a time of your choosing.
Sure, you’ll have to dedicate a good chunk of time to organizing this initially, but then your hard work will pay off over time while you can get on with other things and avoid having your day derailed. It’s a small example of how automation is transforming LinkedIn at the moment.
The one thing to note is that scheduled posts can come back to bite you in times of local, national or international crisis; there’s nothing worse than a pre-prepared post going live an hour or so after a major disaster. This means you do need to be on the ball to an extent, or hire a social media manager to shoulder the burden instead.
Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment and Be Creative
One reason that your LinkedIn presence isn’t going the way you’d like might be that you’re playing it too safe.
People tend to be more engaged with content that’s interesting, unusual, and something that they’ve not seen before. If you’re just staying in your lane and sticking to what you think is expected of you in your industry, you won’t change the game. Thus a little experimentation and creativity can go a long way to addressing this. Just be sure to check how your bolder, leftfield efforts fare in terms of engagement.
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to let LinkedIn take over your life to get more out of it; small tweaks that take just a few minutes can lead to benefits down the line.
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