Since its inception, LinkedIn has developed into an online network for professionals looking to make connections with their peers for relationship building purposes. These relationships can develop in several ways including as rich referral networks for prospecting and sales. If you are a member of LinkedIn but feel that you have not realized as many leads as you would like from the site, then these tips will help improve your LinkedIn traffic.
1. Profile Listing
LinkedIn has several key fields for searching, and your profile title is one of them. While many companies get creative with job titles, for the purposes of your LinkedIn profile, you should use a standard title. So in essence, the title Content Coordinator might change to Marketing Coordinator instead. Normalizing your title makes it easier on the internal search engine on the site to compare like profiles.
2. Optimize Profile Description
You can use your job title and description as areas to insert keywords such as your job functions, your typical clients, your specialties and who your clients are. Additionally, make the description easy to read with a lot of white space and simple, scannable language.
3. Keep Skills Updated
As you develop in your career, you will add skills to your repertoire. Your skills are the meat and potatoes of why people want to hire you, therefore updating them every six months will give people a realistic picture of what you can do for them.
4. Make Yourself Easy to Find
Set your profile to public so that people can access it readily, and list your LinkedIn profile in your signature on emails and letters. You can also add it to other social media sites that you have profiles on.
5. Add a Call-to-Action
Like any marketing endeavor, your profile needs to tell people where to find out more information. You can add a call-to-action in your summary so that readers can find your site and get a bigger picture of how you can help them.
6. Connect with Current Clients
There are several great reasons to connect with your current clients, but the biggest one is to get them to give you a recommendation and review on LinkedIn. Reviews from actual clients are always impressive to see on a profile, and give your business social proof that future customers can see.
7. Join Relevant Groups
Groups are where a lot of networking takes place on LinkedIn. They offer networking and connections with your peer group, people with like-minded work philosophies and local groups of business people. You can learn about new jobs, help other people and spread your influence in groups. It doesn't take a lot of time to be in a group and you can try them out and leave them if the group is not a good fit for you. Eventually, you will find a few groups that are your favorites and give you the most information, business or referrals.
8. Adding Content
LinkedIn now allows many members to add content to the site. You can syndicate previous posts on other sites or write original posts for LinkedIn. Either activity is beneficial for your followers, and will help people get to know you better for networking and influence.
