Remember the movie The Incredibles? It’s a highly entertaining animated film about a family of superheroes who attempt to hide their powers and live a quiet suburban life, in accordance with a government mandate. Each family member has their own unique superpower, which assist them in their adventures fighting evil. In their mundane alter-ego lives, however, their superhero skills get rusty and need some tweaking when getting back into action.
Regrettably, becoming a LinkedIn superpower isn’t just a matter of stepping into the suit. There’s some prep work to be done here too. Flex your muscles and let’s get started.
Optimize your personal profile first
Creating a personal profile on LinkedIn is a pretty straightforward process. Truly optimizing it involves taking advantage of optional fields that make it stand out — highlighting key accomplishments, lead-gen resources and client testimonials, for example. Mr. Incredible’s super-strength required some heavy lifting; invest time to develop your profile fully.
The LinkedIn platform is continually being tweaked, providing new capabilities and downplaying or eliminating others. Consider how the following items might be valuable for you specifically.
- Open To – This field (originally open to work) was initially created for those seeking new positions, but has been expanded to highlight areas you’re open to, such as hiring or providing services
- Featured – Use this section to call attention to work samples, videos, blog articles, case studies or external media like press releases
- Background image – Help your profile to pop by utilizing this visual real estate in a way that reinforces your value — and update it periodically
- Accomplishments – Embrace use of credibility signals such as certifications, patents, awards and organizational involvement, to convey authority and illustrate expertise
- Recommendations – This functionality streamlines the process of requesting and securing testimonials, and serves as a repository that can be shared with prospective clients. Many recruiters will not consider job applicants who do not have LinkedIn recommendations.
- Contact info – Follow the lead of Elastigirl, whose flexibility paved the way to her success. Make it easy for connections to contact you directly, or to connect on social platforms, by maximizing use of this section.
Don’t neglect your LinkedIn Settings. Remember that a key purpose of social profiles is to generate interaction and improve visibility. Charming as The Incredibles’ Violet is, you don’t want to emulate her invisibility and protective force-fields. Edit your Settings to ensure that your profile is visible to both connections and non-connections.
Participate and engage intentionally
Once you’ve established a strong profile and reviewed your Settings, it’s time for active and meaningful participation. One of little Jack-Jack’s superpowers is teleportation. Follow the youngest superpower and be where your customers are. Actively network to expand your connections, and then develop the relationships with grace. Engage with their status updates (on their profile) and participate in groups, commenting on posts from others and offering value (while minimizing flagrant self-promotion). Remember to engage authentically, give to get and vary the types of content that you post.
Expand your footprint with a Company page
A LinkedIn Company page can serve as a starter website for a new business. Once you have an actual website, a well-developed LinkedIn Company page amplifies your branded presence in search results and helps your site to gain authority. For both emerging and established businesses, a LinkedIn Company page provides an authoritative inbound link to your company, as well as a platform to engage with potential customers and colleagues.
Apply the same discipline to your Company page that you use for your personal profile. Post updates consistently. Ensure your employees’ profiles on LinkedIn are formatted to correctly link to your company, and capitalize on your people resources to extend the reach of your content to their networks, connections and groups.
Become a Superpower: Publish and share articles
LinkedIn offers an embedded publishing platform to publish articles (essentially, blog posts with a LinkedIn web address). This functionality is underutilized and offers a unique advantage to those who opt to embrace it. Whether you have a blog on your website or not, LinkedIn’s Publisher platform offers an opportunity to amplify your online presence. Here’s how.
From your personal profile, utilize the Publisher platform to create new articles or repurpose blog posts, videos, white papers, press releases and other content you’ve previously developed. After publishing, share your articles in status updates, within your groups or on your Company page. Also consider utilizing LinkedIn’s messaging functionality to share with relevant connections.
From the top of the Home page, select Write article to open the blog platform
Once you access the platform, you’ll be presented with a Publishing template that resembles a Word document or blog platform. It includes a header image, headline, copy and formatting tools. Navigating the platform is very straightforward; you can even save and share a draft of your article with others prior to publishing. When you’re about to publish, LinkedIn will prompt you for hashtags and teaser copy to introduce the article. Each article will have a unique URL which is formatted as follows:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/post title–your name
You can share your articles within or outside of LinkedIn, by capturing their unique links. Previously published articles can be accessed via the Activity section of your profile.
