Every business professional should have more than 500 LinkedIn connections. If you don’t, you aren’t maximizing your network or using LinkedIn effectively.
While the number of connections you have shouldn’t be focused on the quantity and instead the quality of relationships, my guess is that you aren’t thinking strategically or broadly enough about who you know – former colleagues and classmates, those with whom you worked during the early part of your career, even family friends.
Remember every single person you meet will be important down the line as either a source of business, a referral source, a job prospect or a colleague.
While there are different techniques/tools for increasing your personal LinkedIn network and your company followers, the same major rules apply – provide content of value, stay top of mind, be helpful, use visuals to bring your posts to life, use the right hashtags so your content can be found and repurpose your content assets.
A few other ideas for how to effectively use LinkedIn:
- Complete all areas of your profile, especially the headline and summary section
- Look through the “People You May Know” list to find new connections.
- Look at your colleagues’ and competitors’ connections for new people to add to your network as well as competitive intelligence.
- Follow 5-10 of your competitors’ LinkedIn company pages for ideas and inspiration for your own page. Then do what they do better.
- Reuse and repurpose your own content. Write a strong headline (important because it appears in Google searches)
- Help others without the expectation of getting anything in return.
For more on these topics, see my JD Supra articles and reach out to me to talk about your social/content strategy.
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