How to use LinkedIn to succeed in your work life?

LinkedIn is one of the most popular professional networking tools of our times. LinkedIn gives working professional the power to network with other professionals of their field or other domains as well. In addition to this, you can also find Jobs which are relevant to your profile and your interests on LinkedIn. These are the two most popular reasons that working professionals use LinkedIn for.

But, as a platform built solely for working people, the platform has several other uses and advantages that exploit it for. Want to know what are these other unique ways in which LinkedIn can help you advance your career and help you build a successful professional life? Read on to find out the answer.

1. Promote Your Profile

Your LinkedIn profile is the primary selling point when it comes to marketing yourself and your work on the platform is concerned. Therefore, it is very important to have a good personal profile on LinkedIn. But what is even more important than just having a great LinkedIn Profile is to promote it to reach a larger audience.

Promoting your LinkedIn Profile is very important if you want to build a brand. Therefore, in order to get the attention of the right people towards your LinkedIn Profile, start promoting. It will being more engagement to your posts, win you more recommendations and enrich your profile to make it more effective.

Few simple ways to promote your LinkedIn Profile would be:

• Include them in Email signatures

• Mention them in Author boxes

• Cross promotion on other social networks

• Share your Profile Link with other Leads

• Get it printed on your Business card

Once you start promoting your LinkedIn profile, you will soon realize that it will become the primary way to contact you and pay you dividends soon.

2. Use LinkedIn Recommendations

One of the best features of LinkedIn as a social network designed for professional would be recommendations. LinkedIn allows you to validate everything you say about yourself and your professional skills by seeking support from your network and all this is done by the means of recommendations.

Your connections or people who are part of your network on LinkedIn can leave recommendations about your skills, capabilities and professional achievement to help you market yourself better. The LinkedIn recommendations work as social proof of your abilities and helps in winning trust of your clients and building a reliable brand for future. Many LinkedIn users vouch by the effectiveness of recommendations and how they help in closing deals and expanding your business and building an effective network.

While LinkedIn user wants recommendations, they are not as willing to give it to others. Therefore, you will have to ask people in your network to start giving your recommendations to help you grow your brand. So, don’t be shy when it comes to asking others for LinkedIn recommendations.

3. Network Well

This one goes without saying; LinkedIn is a networking tool and therefore the primary objective of your presence on LinkedIn must be to build a wide and well-organized network. The more people you are connected with on LinkedIn, the better it would be for your brand and business.

Once people start knowing you on LinkedIn for the skills you possess; they will surely connect with you when some work in that particular domain comes up. Apart from this, a vast network of professionals from your own domain would also help you share knowledge and experiences and inturn expand your creative and professional horizons further.

So, networking should hold the primary role when it comes to using LinkedIn for professional success.

How to use LinkedIn To Advance Your Career?

4. Build Your Community

Very similar to your network, LinkedIn also allows you to build communities and be part of a few of the existing ones that interest you. Finding communities that are related to your work are and connecting with other professionals from same field will help you advance your career further.

Be it finding another job or getting a creative insight from a fellow office goer; LinkedIn communities are a great way to gather knowledge of your field. Along with this, the knowledge and experience you share on these communities will also help you establish yourself as the figure of authority in that domain.

In addition to this, even if there are other communities on LinkedIn, you can always create a new one and start sharing your personal insights and experience on them. It will add more value to your community and help you connect with new people who are working in your domain.

5. Be Active on LinkedIn

Let’s admit it, when it comes to LinkedIn, very few working professionals actually pay attention to this platform. Be it pressing deadlines or challenging targets; we always find one way or another in order to avoid being on LinkedIn. This is a wrong strategy when it comes to professional social network.

In order to extract the maximum potential out of LinkedIn for your professional life; you have to active on LinkedIn. This means more than just spending time connecting with others or merely hunting for jobs. You have to share your knowledge and experience through posts and make sure that they add value to others.

So, always make sure that you post content on your LinkedIn profile regularly, engage with other people and reply to the comments regularly without missing any single day. What would help further, if you create a precise schedule for LinkedIn activities; this will make sure that your network knows exactly when to expect new content or posts from your side on LinkedIn.

How to Build an effective LinkedIn Profile?

6. Add Value to the Platform

Drawing from the theme of being active on LinkedIn; another important aspect related to this is quality content. In order to get the right attention and appreciation, you must make sure that the content that you share on LinkedIn is unique and adds value to the life, skills and career of the reader.

Sharing quality content and helping others develop their professional skills is one way you can win the trust of your community and network. So, while you are active on LinkedIn, make sure that you share all the right content, solve problems or queries being put forth by people within your network and share insights that can inspire others to be successful.

This will help you build trustworthy relationships with others within your network and establish you as an authority in your respective domain or field.

7. Keep the Content Fresh

This point again follows from the theme of Content on LinkedIn. In order to establish yourself as a brand and authority in your respective domain; make sure that you post fresh content on LinkedIn. Digital platforms like LinkedIn respect unique content and push them to more audience as compared to a copied blog post. There are enough people who act as content syndicate on LinkedIn, if you want to stand out and apart from them, try to push original and new content; it will add value to your posts.

How to change your career using LinkedIn?

8. Use SlideShare

SlideShare is one of the most interesting features of LinkedIn where the platform allows you to create and share PPT or presentations on different platforms. SlideShare also allows you to repurpose the same content that you shared in a blog post format in the form of a presentation. Making presentations out of your existing content will not only add more value to your content but also give you a change to experiment with another content format type that you can use to your advantage.

To sum up…

LinkedIn is one platform that offers immense opportunities to connect with other professionals working in your own field and find people from other fields and domains as well. However, there are many other ways in which you can use LinkedIn for your professional success and some of them are mentioned above. If you know any other unique features or ways in which professionals can use LinkedIn to advance their careers, do let us know through your comments below.

Please share this article among your friends and colleagues to improve their LinkedIn presence as well. For more interesting article related to CorporteGyaan, please visit www.jagranjosh.com/jobs.