How can you use LinkedIn to Grow your Professional Network?

To know how it works, it’s important to know the environment of the medium. LinkedIn is the online virtual experience similar to that of a work conference, career expo or an industrial meet-and-greet from the comfort of your own home, if you will. Over 65 million professionals use LinkedIn to foster their careers and businesses.

About LinkedIn

It’s a widely connected platform where one builds their own online profile similar to that of Facebook, only in a professional capacity. Your bio would, in reality, be a traditional resumé or CV.  At the top of your profile you have a picture, formal as how you would be representing a company/ organisation/employer. You would include details of your location and occupation. Your posts would be dedicated to promoting your recent accomplishments or events in your industry that you’ve attended. In addition, LinkedIn allows you to broadcast pictures about the influential people you might’ve met.

It’s easy to get in touch with other professionals as you would at a traditional networking event. It’s easy to add professionals as ‘connections’ as you would send friend requests on Facebook. LinkedIn also offers a range of job listings published by employers and have specific recommended jobs that feature elements of your updated information, including your location and optional job preferences that can be applied to properly tailored job results.

Anyone can follow various interests on LinkedIn, like community/company pages or groups that are filtered results based on your location and interests. It also offers a powerful search engine that caters to your particular customised fields. This can be done by choosing the “Advanced” option next to the search bar that filters down more favourable results to relevant professionals, groups, jobs, etc.

How LinkedIn can boost your business

Joining various groups with relevant interests that coincide with your line of business can help you get more connections, in terms of producers, partners and clients. In addition, it provides an environment where you can share your expertise and expose your business’ strong points to gain more client trust and market legitimacy.

Helpful LinkedIn Hacks

• Blog posts that are compiled by your brand regarding expert advice in your field, good content about new features in your product or service, or whether it’s anything interesting that’s even remotely relevant to your business will direct more traffic to your profile, and even your website (presuming you have one).
• Top trending stories of the day normally feature when users do searches on content. If you can use hashtags tied to trendy subjects wisely, you can write witty content that’s on topic. This will help you gain contact with a range of other subcultures of people who have yet to see your content/profile/page.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

The Digital School of Marketing’s Social Media Marketing Course is a unique educational offering in the digital marketing space. It provides the most comprehensive tuition on social media and will allow you to use this exciting medium for your own business. For more information about this and our other online digital marketing courses, visit our website.