LinkedIn is a social network filled with opportunities for your professional life. Whether it concerns your business or yourself, it is absolutely necessary to have an active presence on this platform. Discover how to build an effective digital strategy on LinkedIn in 10 tips.

Tip#1: Complete your profile

The first step to being visible, whether for your business or your personal account, is to properly complete your profile. The more you meet the conditions requested by LinkedIn, the more it will promote you. You will therefore need to provide a profile photo. For your personal account, consider choosing a shot that looks relatively “serious”. While you can be creative, the main thing is to stay professional. For your business, simply choose your logo. For your banner, however, you can be more creative. You have to show the personality of your brand! Also remember to choose the right formats. Nothing looks less professional than a badly cut banner. For your personal profile, complete all the requested information such as your university background as well as your professional experiences. For your skills, ask your colleagues or superiors to validate them, this will strengthen your legitimacy. A linkedIn account is the showcase for your business or professional expertise, so it needs to be taken care of.

Tip#2: Work on your catchphrase

You have the option of choosing a catchphrase that will appear at the top of your profile. It is important to choose it well. Indeed, it must present your personality, but also your profession to the other members of the network. In short, it constitutes your base line. For a business page, you can choose to feature your slogan. It is often this catchphrase that will define whether your profile will be viewed or not. You can also mention some key terms that will make it easier for you to be found on LinkedIn. For people looking to recruit or be recruited, you can also mention it here.

Tip#3: Share great stories

One of the secrets to building great relationships on LinkedIn and producing engaging content is telling great stories. Users love inspiring success stories. The aim is to show how much success matters to you, but also the well-being of fellow flights or employees. You need to show yourself in your best light, but not overdo it. If you do not keep your commitments, it will always end up being known and that is why you should not go outside your area of ​​expertise and your commitments. On this social network, your relationships should see you as an expert in your community. You can highlight your successes, but also individual initiatives. The goal is to generate as many comments as possible. This is what will get you up in the search results. IF someone likes or comments on one of your posts, then the rest of their network will see it too. You can never know how many people are going to see your post, so you need to be professional and engaging. 

Tip#4: Comment as much as possible

As explained in the previous point, comments are extremely important. They allow you to give more visibility to your publications. But it is also necessary to take the time to comment on the posts of other companies or people who are in the same area of ​​expertise. Comments allow you to gain visibility, but also to build good relationships with those who will perhaps be your future partners, whether on the financial or human level. Always remember that LinkedIn is the perfect network for building new working relationships. Your comments should remain positive even if they can spark debate. A simple “Very good post” will not suffice. You have to show that you are interested in what the post is saying. 

Tip#5: Use reaction emojis

LinkedIn, like Facebook, offers several post reaction emojis. You can choose from five emojis: Like, Celebrate, Love, Inspirational, and Curious. Responding with something other than a simple “like” will show that you really care about what is said in a post. But you can also choose to use these reactions to increase your visibility. For example, it is very popular to ask relationships to choose from one of these emojis to react to a situation. It takes less “effort” from your community, but still improves your visibility. Indeed, LinkedIn's algorithm will enhance the fact of having multiple reactions to a post. It is therefore very interesting to play with this functionality and include it in your digital strategy.

Tip#6: Encourage your community to interact

As we have seen, LinkedIn will value reactions and comments. For this, you will have to encourage your community to react and interact. It is possible to put this in place by launching a debate for example. You can start from a hot topic and ask your community a question to get your connections to comment and give their opinion. For this, it is possible to use newsjacking, that is to say to divert a topical subject to link it to your area of ​​expertise. It is therefore important to end your posts with a question to your community. This will also help show that you are interested in their opinion. Your relationships will therefore feel valued and will be better able to communicate. It is also interesting for you to respond to these comments to restart the debate, but also to study these answers to learn more about your relationships. After all, social media is the place to be for social listening.

Tip#7: Think about the words you use

Being well referenced on social networks is very complicated. Indeed, hashtags are not always enough to make you gain visibility. It is very important to place the words on which you want to be referenced. You can thus use terms that are attractive to your area of ​​expertise, but also to the market in which you operate. For example, it is very popular to put the subject of your post in square brackets at the beginning of it. Pick an eye-catching message for this part of your post, because that's what your community will see first, so it needs to catch their eye. For example, you can choose to ask a question, rhetorical or not. The important thing is to place the most relevant keywords for you or for your business. Of course, it also helps to use the right hashtags. On the other hand, try to think specific: on an overly popular hashtag, your post risks getting lost in the mass of content. 

Tip#8: Bring added value

Your community expects you to be an expert in your field; it is therefore not enough to relay information, it must be provided with added value. For example, you can offer a (brief) analysis of a news item or a problem in your news sector. There is also a need to produce content that is easy to watch. Infographics are great for this! They allow you to quickly understand a subject, but also to have several information. You can integrate numbers, but also pictograms to help better understand a subject. Infographics are one of the most popular formats on LinkedIn. Promoting an image will catch the eye of your community, especially if the colors stand out from the rest of their news feed. 

Tip#9: Stay professional

Even if giving your opinion on LinkedIn can be positive, you shouldn't forget to stay professional. This social network is the virtual showcase of your professional life, but also of your company policy. So you have to show yourself in your best light. For example, it is not appropriate to post humorous content on LinkedIn. The platform may look like Facebook, but it is not at all the same digital strategy that must be deployed. 

Tip#10: Create LinkedIn Stories

LinkedIn regularly increases the list of possibilities on the platform. For example, you can now create LinkedIn Stories, as Instagram already does. Much like Instagram Stories, it allows you to share photos and videos that can be viewed by your audience for 24 hours. Users can add text overlays, mention accounts, share a Question of the Day, and add a range of stickers to their stories. This new feature is a great way to present your knowledge in a fun and engaging way. You can also share real time events, host a corporate Q&A, announcements and product launches.