5 Habits to Finally Get Something Out of LinkedIn in 2016

A new year, new resolutions. LinkedIn keeps growing, now more than 400 Million users and if you haven’t realized that it’s THE tool for the B2B sector, then 2016 will be the year you finally get something out of LinkedIn.

Maybe you have participated in the LinkedIn Challenge in December and have decided to make LinkedIn a priority in 2016. Congratulations! But even if you have missed my signature event, this post will give you 5 ideas for new habits to pick up on LinkedIn in 2016! 

5 Habits to Finally Get Something Out of LinkedIn in 2016

1. Always personalize invitations

If you haven’t done this yet in 2015, please make the effort in 2016. I know, LinkedIn doesn’t exactly make it easy for us, since the only place you can do this from is directly from the profile. Any other button you find on the platform will send the automatic invitation with the very impersonal message ‘I’d like to add you to my personal network on LinkedIn’. LinkedIn is about professional relationships and just like you wouldn’t be rude at a real-life networking event, a polite message in the virtual world that is LinkedIn is of key importance.

2. Be active and visible in your networks newsfeed

It’s one thing to build your network, it’s another thing to be pro-active and position yourself as an expert. A simple profile, even if optimized, will not achieve that goal. You need to regularly share relevant and valuable content that might be interest to your connections and that at the same time positions you as the go-to person in your area of expertise. If you don’t create your own content you should consider creating your own content aggregation strategy so this task becomes a regular part of your personal branding. I use Feedly as my content aggregator.

3. Notice people so they start noticing you

The easiest way to get people to notice you is to flatter them. LinkedIn provides a great tool for this: the tagging feature. If you are looking for someone’s attention, share some of their content with your network and tag them so they receive a notification and are made aware that you’re talking about them.

4. Start organizing your contacts

Did you know you can organize your contacts into different groups? Whenever I attend a conference or a big networking event, I make sure I add a tag with the name of the conference to these contacts. As I’m really bad with names, I can then simply filter my contacts and only display those who attended the conference and therefore easily find the guy I was looking for. Job seekers can organize their contacts by industry, company, networking events or whatever else makes sense to their job searching strategy. To do this you need to apply a tag to the contact. Look for the relationship tab underneath the contact’s photo, and then select the ‘tag’ tab. There you can either apply an already created tag, or add a new one according to your personal organization. 

5. Use the LinkedIn Publisher

Another way to position yourself as an expert in your field and to improve your Personal Branding is to publish your thoughts via the LinkedIn Publisher. The Publisher is LinkedIn’s very own publishing platform that every user can use to publish quality content and share it with their network. It’s very user friendly and resembles a simple WordPress website. Read this post if you have never written an article on LinkedIn before. Word of caution: with so many publishers it is now much more difficult to get traction for your post. Don’t forget to cross-promote it on your other social platforms (Twitter, Facebook etc).