Maximize your LinkedIn impact

LinkedIn is the word's largest professional networking site with over 610 million members as of June 2019 of which 303 million are active monthly users, 40% of which visit the site daily. It is also the 28th most popular website in the world according to Alexa internet rankings. 92% of Fortune 500 companies use LinkedIn and 77% recruiters are on LinkedIn making it a popular destination for job seekers and recruiters.

Follow these steps to maximize your impact on LinkedIn:

• 1. All-star profile - Achieving an all-star status is a no brainer, LinkedIn displays your status and the steps you need to take to be an all-star on your dashboard accessed through your profile page.

          Becoming an all-star should be your number one goal since according to LinkedIn

Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn.
 

• 2. Maintain an up to date profile - Update changes in your job and education status through the headline, summary and experience. Make sure your profile stays current regular updates. You don't want a professional to land on your profile and realize it is a dead profile. For example, if you accepted an internship you can add a headline that says "Incoming xxxx intern @ abc company".

 

• 3. Set up job alerts - LinkedIn is growing to become one of the top job sites. LinkedIn allows you to see who posted the job and allow you to immediately connect with people working at that company. A job alert helps you stay ahead of the competition in knowing immediately when a job is posted so you can be an early applicant. Also, saves you time from having to search and use filters every time to meet your search criteria. https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/

 

• 4. Increase your network - If you are new to LinkedIn or if you have fewer connections, start connecting with your friends, family, classmates, peers, colleagues and people who are within your immediate reach. Starting with your immediate circle of connections will give you access to their network and when you connect with someone outside your network you might already have a mutual connection. For example, you want to connect with someone who is a senior manager at Microsoft. If you don't have any connections with people at Microsoft, you can connect with friends, classmates who have interned or worked at Microsoft before sending connection requests someone outside my network. Conversely, you can look for alumni who work in Microsoft and connect with them first. Be sure to add a short personalized message when connecting with people you don't know!

 

• 5. Use the alumni page - You can use the alumni page to find alumni based on different filters and also connect with them based on what you find. The boolean logic that you use on a search engine will work just fine even for the alumni search; meaning on your alumni page you can search "Mechanical AND Autocad" to find people who have both Mechanical and Autocad on their profile. Alumni page is a great place to find people who have something in common with you and start connecting. The Texas A&M Alumni page has over 290,000 aggies listed. Type Texas A&M University on the search bar and click on Alumni. Here is a quick link https://www.linkedin.com/school/texas-a&m-university/people/

 

• 6. Follow companies - Following a company allows to keep up with news and updates from the companies of interest. You can follow multiple companies to understand the industry trend as a whole. Once a recruiter told me " When I receive a connection request I check their profile to see if they are following my company before accepting".

 

• 7. Join groups & discussions- Another great way to keep with industry trends and stay up to date is to join the groups on LinkedIn specific to your areas of interest. You can also follow hashtags to see more relevant content on your newsfeed.

 

• 8. Like, comment, share- Want to increase your profile views on LinkedIn? Start by engaging with the content on LinkedIn by reacting to content and commenting. If you want to take one step further start sharing content written by someone else by adding your thoughts on the post. Only 3 million LinkedIn users share content every week and that's just 0.5% of all members on LinkedIn. If you want to be on the top 0.5% of LinkedIn start sharing content every week!9. Post your own content - If you are feeling more confident about sharing your thoughts on LinkedIn start posting on a weekly basis. Posts with the right keywords, hashtags and an image will significantly increase the number of views of your post. I had over 275 reactions and 18000 views on a recent post. You can also write an article on LinkedIn such as this :)

 

• 10. Repeat steps 2 to 9 - Remember, consistency is key. If you are starting to share content on LinkedIn, you need to be consistent in order to reap the benefits. In the last month and a half, I received over 400 connection requests because I was posting occasionally. Also, take one step at a time and network the right way.