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So, what is LinkedIn? At its core, LinkedIn is a professional networking site. There is a lot of additional functionality to enable all sorts of things, however, it all boils down to having a profile and using it to make connections with people.
Registration in LinkedIn is free and you can participate in the LinkedIn community without paying anything for as long as you want.
Free registration is a big positive difference compared to many other professional and business networks out there like the Chamber of Commerce, BNI, Industry organisations and others. The trade-off of course is that LinkedIn doesn’t really offer any benefits proactively like these organisations can. In effect, you will only get what you put into it. If you don’t use the platform, then your benefits will be lacking as well.
Of course, there are paid memberships called LinkedIn Premium, Sales Navigator, and Recruiter. Each of these has different levels of accounts and offers different benefits. These range from online classes, extra inMail credits, special sales insights, and more.
It’s really easy to start a LinkedIn account because it’s all information that you know off the top of your head! All you need to fill out is:
- Your Email
- Your Password Choice for LinkedIn
- Your First & Last Name
- Country, Region, Post Code & then it will ask for your location within this area.
- Your most recent job title (or your current job title) or if you’re a student.
- More information about your most recent jobs (title, employment type, company)
- The Industry of your most recent job.
If you want to start bulking out your profile, LinkedIn will prompt you to also add more information to set up your profile, but of course, you can skip these parts:
- Let LinkedIn know if you’re currently in a job search
- Connecting with people who have similar job titles or in the same industry
- Provide your previous work experience
- Add a photo of yourself
- Add more contact information
- Follow Companies, people (high profile like Bill Gates) & hashtags.
These snippets of information will essentially fill out the basic areas of your profile on LinkedIn. If you’re still not sure how to set up your profile, check out our article.
Why Join LinkedIn When You're in Business?
There are lots of reasons why you may want, or even need, to use LinkedIn.
Most people use LinkedIn for one of these key reasons.
When you own a business, you may want to participate and use LinkedIn in order to:
- Stay in touch with professional and business connections you already have
- Connect with others in your industry
- Find people with the expertise that you need for your company
- Find new staff members through job postings
- Find prospects so that you can grow your business
- Do targeted market research and PR
As an employee, you may want to use LinkedIn in order to:
- Connect with others from a professional development view
- Understand the job market
- Claim your authority and expertise so that you become a known expert in the field
- Find new employment
As a marketer or a sales professional, having a LinkedIn account allows you to:
- Do market research
- Gauge feedback
- Do lead generation
- Promote your products and services
- Do PR
- Join groups
- Advertise
- Post job
- Benefit from endorsement
- Showcase products & services you promote and sell
When you want to know more why your business should employ LinkedIn as one of your marketing channels, read 14 reasons why your business should be on LinkedIn.
OK, I'm on LinkedIn, What is Next?
Once you’ve joined there are three important steps you will benefit from. These can be done immediately or shortly after you’ve joined.
Just because it’s a digital network and all your connections are remote, rather than in one room, does not mean regular networking principles should be voided. In fact, if you apply time-tested networking principles to LinkedIn when you build your network, you will do exceptionally well. At the very least you will stand out from the crowd because most people ignore them.
Step 1. Connect With People Who Know You Already
Imagine you step into a room at a conference or social gathering. Would you make sure to meet and greet those you know first or complete strangers? What if you know all 100 people gathered there, say at a wedding? You would do your best to say “Hello” to as many as possible, right?
The same rule applies to LinkedIn.
Suppose you just started using LinkedIn. No one knows yet, which is because no one can see you and that can make it seem as if no one cares. But that’s only because they don’t know you’ve arrived.
The logical way to announce your arrival on LinkedIn is known as ‘sending a connection request’. You do this every time you want to connect with someone on LinkedIn. Think of it as the electronic equivalent to a handshake. Just like in real life, there are slightly different emotions and words used when you shake hands with someone you know well, versus a stranger you’ve just met.
As is everything in the digital world, LinkedIn has the power to help you connect with people you know straight away. This is how it’s done.
Immediately after joining, you’ll be prompted to connect with other LinkedIn users from your email contacts list.
You can decline and connect with people now or later on in your LinkedIn journey.
You can also choose whom to connect with because LinkedIn will show you a long list of your email connections. So, if don’t want to be connected with your dentist or insurance agent on LinkedIn, you don’t have to.
The bottom line is, sending a connection request on LinkedIn is like a digital handshake to say: “Hey, I’m here”.
Step 2. Introduce Yourself
In our physical world, when we catch up with the people we know, one of the first questions everyone asks is: “How are you? What have you been up to?”
And when you meet someone new, shortly after the initial chit-chat, there is a moment when you are asked, or you ask: “What do you do?”
Sounds about right?
LinkedIn also helps you to answer questions, like the above, 24/7 by offering you a dedicated web page, known as your LinkedIn Profile.
This is where you can ‘show your face’ (with a photo), introduce yourself, share your achievements, etc.
Why?
Well, you don’t cover your face when you come to a social gathering, do you?
You don’t stay silent when a fellow professional asks you “How are you?”
You don’t ignore people asking “What do you do for a living” when you’re face to face with them.
So why do this digitally?
When your profile on LinkedIn is poor and only has limited information, it’s like saying “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to connect with anyone. Don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me. Leave me alone”. And nobody wants to talk to that person.
When you are joining any network, you do this for a reason: you want to connect with others. The way to succeed in any social network is to participate. LinkedIn’s participation formula comes in three steps: Connect + Profile + Engage.
So far, we have covered the Connect and Profile parts of LinkedIn’s Formula.
Have you been on LinkedIn for a while? Are you curious to know how your Profile stacks against some of the known best practices? Take this Quiz to find out immediately.
Step 3. Communicate
Let’s relate LinkedIn to a physical social or professional gathering again as its easy.
Imagine you step into a room full of strangers along with some people you know. You greet those whom you are familiar with and meet a few strangers. You shared some news and conversed with a few people.
What’s next?
Let’s say you attend the same gathering once a week, or maybe even once a day.
And every time you visit this community, you get a chance to say something. It can be an opinion, some news, a piece of education, or clarification about you, your business, or anything else in life.
Some of us are fortunate and can talk ‘off the cuff’, whereas others require preparation before speaking – even in front of a small group. Sometimes you need to do research before sharing certain information. Finally, every time you have to dress up for the occasion.
Sounds familiar? I’m sure you can vividly picture the scene.
Now, let’s look at LinkedIn where everything seems to be different. The reality is that this is actually very much the same. Once you ‘translate’ the digital world into the networking events you’ve been to so many times in your life, you can see just how easy it is to use.
Why and How Do You Share Your Message?
You can make a statement or share your views about anything on this site. The mechanism to do it this called a post – just like Facebook. Remember to keep things professional, and as a rule of thumb avoid the big three – money, politics & religion.
What Is a Post?
A post can be a combination of text and an optional image or video to support the message you’re sharing. Everyone can type in what they think and attach an image or video to help with the message. You can do this on your Home page and this activity is known as posting.
Who Will See Your Post in LinkedIn?
The good news is that everyone connected to you can see your post, and they are able to respond by adding a comment which you can later see and reply to, creating dialogue that is seen by everyone.
The bad news is that only people you are connected with will see it first. They have to be on LinkedIn within a few hours after you post because otherwise, your post will become less visible behind newer posts.
Why is this bad news you may ask? Because if you want to tell everyone about your big accomplishment or new product or anything else, i.e. when you want the whole world to know, it is truly limited to people connected to you and only If they happen to be active around the same time.
LinkedIn also has some algorithms to determine how often to show your posts to your connections. If your posts get more engagement, a larger portion of your connections is likely to view them.
SAD? WHY BOTHER?
I beg your pardon, why frown upon the situation?
When you are in a social, real-life situation, you too only get a chance to speak to 10 out of the 100 or more participants and you don’t think there is anything wrong. The digital world is much the same, even though it looks and feels different.
By the way, just like in real life you can repeat the same story at the same gathering a few times, there is no harm in repeating your message more than once on LinkedIn either.
Can Anyone Not Connected With Me Even See My Posts?
Of course. The mechanism to make it happen called sharing.
Anyone (including you) can share your post, which will effectively mean that everyone connected to the person sharing will see it. It’s the same as if you share your story with a friend and then they tell it to others and so on.
There is no limit to sharing and a good post can be shared many times.
You might have heard about viral posts. These are posts that were shared many times, thousands or even millions of times because they are funny or relevant to a wide audience. Viral posts are a bit of a goldmine, although they can be difficult to achieve in B2B.
How and Why Share Your Opinion?
Most people have strong opinions – especially professionally. They are also usually willing to share their point of view when they hear a conversation that is about their subject matter expertise.
On LinkedIn many people share their opinions through POSTS.
You can see these messages, news and opinions from others on your news feed under the menu option: ‘Home’. When you want to contribute, you can see there is a line for a comment under every post. This is the place you can add your 2 cents worth to the conversation. If relevant, the original author will respond.
Keep in mind these conversations are public, so anyone can see them.
How to Ask a Question or Ask for Help?
Again, as in real life, when you need something, you ask.
On LinkedIn you can post a question, raise a concern, ask for help or a recommendation. The possibilities for posts are endless. Even better you can join a group relevant to the subject and ask the experts there for some advice.
Some people like to share their positive outlook on life through posts, others create attention through their posts.
To make sure you are never stuck for ideas on what to write about, check out 37 content ideas.
In Conclusion
This is a very straightforward introductory article about LinkedIn. I feel this article is long overdue because these days it seems everyone appears to know what LinkedIn *actually* is and there is a lot of attention devoted to how to post, what to post, etc.
Yet, speaking to hundreds of business owners every year, I discovered that even in 2023, there are people who are not sure or are confused about digital jargon. So much so, that they are genuinely embarrassed to ask the simple question “What Is LinkedIn?”.
In fact, let me correct myself, they don’t even know what they should be asking. They simply smile and choose not to participate in conversations around it or nicely say: “I feel too old” or “We don’t need it”, or “We are doing well without it”.
At the “Your Business Your Asset” conference in 2020, where I was one of the speakers, Bill English said something along the lines of: “Someone not being able to use computers can no longer be acceptable by businesses, because this person slows down the team more than the business can now afford.”
Bill’s statement is true.
If you are in business or if you are running a business, you have to keep up with the times. You do not need to become savvy in every aspect of technology out there, because you don’t need half of it. You do not need to be the best user of any of it because you can employ people. Yet, you can’t afford to not understand the key positions of the changing world and you have to understand enough to be able to make an educated decision when you are faced with a solution by someone way more technical. In simple terms, you need to know enough about these technologies or social platforms to make a decision if it is something you need for your business. I wrote this article with a single purpose: to answer questions that (in my estimate, many) people are too scared to ask. Your business will benefit from discovering that social networking is a lot closer to the real-life networking you know, than you may have thought 10 mins ago. I encourage you to ASK more scary questions because we are determined to help people in business, just like you, to learn more and be better equipped for 2023 and beyond. Scared to comment where others will see your question? Reach out to me at assia@smarketinglab.co.nz and I’ll send you a link to an article or a video answering your question in finer detail.Assia Salikhova
Smarketing Lab Co-Creator, developer of profitable B2B solutions to grow your business.
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Find out how well your LinkedIn profile stands by taking a special Quiz to discover how your profile on LinkedIn stacks up vs industry standards. Then ask for help when needed. Because the #teamtalent at Smarketing Lab is on standby ready to help you gain the full benefit from LinkedIn for your business. Learn More
