Since its launch in 2003, LinkedIn has grown into the go-to networking social media site that it is today. The site boasts over 1 billion users and represents 67 million businesses. With two decades of honing its open-source machine-learning library and expanding its user base, LinkedIn has become a powerful source of employment and market information for small business owners to leverage for their own marketing and research. 

For small business owners, freelancers, or heads of small teams, LinkedIn offers you the opportunity to:

• Establish your credibility as a provider of expertise
• Generate awareness about your services
• Develop a professional network
• Generate quality leads with quality content

But, like any tool, its effectiveness and value hinges on having a strategy (a LinkedIn strategy).

What Is a LinkedIn Strategy and Why Do You Need One?

All social media is an extension of your sales and marketing efforts.

Like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tiktok, and Snapchat, LinkedIn requires consistent engagement and an understanding of its ecosystem to deliver content that will rank well and be recommended to others. Before you even create a profile, be sure you have a LinkedIn strategy in place. 

What does a LinkedIn Strategy look like? A brief example: 

“To support my business goal of expanding my customer base to include the lifestyle coaching market, I will adopt LinkedIn as part of my social media marketing efforts. 

My market research indicates that my target audience is active on LinkedIn. Over the next six months, my approach will include creating and optimizing a LinkedIn profile, generating new connections and followers, spending five hours a week creating content relevant to my target market, and leveraging LinkedIn solutions that help to market my services on the site. 

To keep aligned with my overall marketing plan, which relies on competitive research and benchmarking, I will target my competitors’ connections and followers on LinkedIn, and publish content similar to the accounts they follow. 

My marketing goal for LinkedIn is to generate at least two qualified leads by the end of the six-month timeline.”

Remember that a strategy is a vision for your business to succeed in an environment or under circumstances for which it hasn’t operated yet. Strategy is based on research and a plan to move forward. Your strategy should have goals to help you understand how to measure the effectiveness of your plan, which translates your vision into a tangible and actionable form. 

How LinkedIn Works: Decoding Its Algorithm

LinkedIn’s open-sourced machine learning library plays a pivotal role in connecting professionals with businesses. Understanding how it functions will help you position yourself and your services in a good light. 

1. Recommendations Based on Similar Profiles

According to LinkedIn’s Help Center, the social media site will share profiles with commonalities, like similar skills, mutual connections, or shared groups. This means optimizing your profile with frequently searched keywords and up-to-date contact information is essential.

When your profile aligns with what your target audience is searching for, you’re more likely to show up in their recommendations. 

2. People You May Know (PYMK)

The PYMK feature leverages LinkedIn’s machine learning to suggest potential connections. As outlined in an article on LinkedIn Engineering, two factors that help determine the user experience on the site include proximity to your professional network and relevance to your interests.

For example, if you engage with profiles in your industry, LinkedIn will prioritize showing you similar profiles, ensuring you expand your network in the right direction. 

Ultimately, you should aspire to publish content and engage with profiles that are likely to be connected to a prospective client so you can show up as a similar profile within their LinkedIn feed. 

3. Engagement Determines Visibility

The quality of your interactions influences how your content appears in others’ feeds. Profiles with frequent, meaningful activity, like thoughtful comments, consistent posting, and profile updates, are rewarded with better visibility. LinkedIn’s Help Center outlines the different ways users can connect with people on the platform. 

Building a professional network on LinkedIn equates to fostering meaningful relationships that align with your business goals. As long as you spend time engaging and interacting with people who comprise your prospective client base, LinkedIn’s algorithm will help recognize and amplify those connections in meaningful ways. 

Psychology-First: How to Engage Authentically on LinkedIn

Effective LinkedIn marketing isn’t about simply having a complete profile or publishing content; you want to understand how people use the platform. Users come to LinkedIn to learn, network, and solve problems, so your approach should focus on providing value.

1. Post Consistently with Purpose

Regularly posting content signals to your audience that you’re active on LinkedIn. This is important because you will signal to the social media site that you, and by association your business, can provide the expert knowledge you profess to have. 

Coming up with content to post consistently takes time. This is why researching what your competitors are doing is an important first step to help you get started. 

2. Engage Before Connecting

Rather than sending out cold connection requests, spend time engaging with a person’s posts or commenting on their updates. This will build a rapport that increases the likelihood that your connection request will be accepted. In the end, this will garner you a meaningful professional relationship and connection on LinkedIn.

3. The Reciprocity Rule

Social media operates on an unspoken reciprocity principle: you provide value through your content and in return, receive attention and engagement. To offer the most value, provide answers to common questions, give some knowledge away for free, and offer free consultations with a clear way for people to contact you. 

As Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, explains, “The rule [of reciprocity] says that favors are to be met with favors; it does not require that tricks be met with favors.” The key here is to provide genuine value rather than push for an immediate sale.

To learn more, read LinkedIn’s Professional Community Policies to avoid getting your account flagged, resulting in account restrictions or pulled content.

LinkedIn Etiquette: Do’s and Don’ts

A successful LinkedIn strategy relies on professional etiquette because it’s considered a professional network. Follow these best practices to make a positive impression:

• Personalize Connection Requests: When reaching out to someone new, include a note explaining why you want to connect and where you have a mutual interest or connection. 
• Avoid Spamming: Avoid sending random connection requests or messaging people with sales pitches if you’re not a seasoned sales professional. This is a sure way to destroy your LinkedIn reputation.
• Engage Thoughtfully: Before connecting, interact with a person’s content to show genuine interest in their work. 

Additionally, aim to join LinkedIn’s “500+ connections” club. Once you exceed the 500 connections threshold, your profile displays “500+ connections,” a subtle but powerful indicator of credibility and active participation.

LinkedIn provides guidelines around genuine content vs. advertising, intellectual property rights, and more information in their Publishing Platform Guidelines.

Using LinkedIn Cost-Effectively: Start Organic Before Going Paid

A common misconception is that digital marketing requires significant ad spend. On LinkedIn, you can achieve impressive results using their free, out-of-the-box profile options, groups, and business solutions. 

1. Optimize Your Profile

Your LinkedIn profile serves as your digital resume. Be sure to complete it by providing the following: 

• Work experience
• Relevant skills 
• Industry expertise
• Services offered
• Projects or case studies
• Contact information 

Completing your profile and optimizing it for your prospective client profile is essential not just for LinkedIn’s search feature, but to be effectively recommended to others and tapped as a contributor to collaborative articles.

2. Become a Service Provider

LinkedIn’s Services Page lets professionals showcase their services. This is a great tool for freelancers and contractors. By listing your services, you enhance your visibility for users specifically searching for your type of expertise, whether it’s freelance photography, wedding videography, lifestyle, or leadership coaching.

The site’s Service Provider feature operates on a request and proposal method like Upwork. 

If you run a business, you can complement this with a dedicated Company Page to represent your entire brand. 

3. Contribute to Collaborative Articles

LinkedIn’s AI-driven collaborative article prompts let users contribute insights on industry-specific topics. Participating in these not only boosts your visibility but also establishes your authority within your niche.

LinkedIn identifies users who are likely to be experts in a specific subject matter based on the keywords in their profiles and posts and will invite them to provide their input on a prompt, according to LinkedIn’s Help Center. 

A word of caution: Individual contributions to these articles are not vetted by LinkedIn on a manual basis.

From a ranking perspective, this feature is great for qualified professionals who can speak to a particular subject, which puts your profile in front of non-connections.

4. Experiment with Content Formats

Just like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, LinkedIn has a variety of content types. Be sure to leverage each one on occasion to enhance your visibility: 

• Articles
• Short updates
• Video content
• Polls
• Infographics

Different formats appeal to different users, so experimenting will also help you determine which format best suits your target audience. 

5. Aim for Recognition

LinkedIn awards badges like Top Voices to contributors who consistently deliver valuable, original content. While this recognition and badge is by invitation only, building a strong portfolio of contributions increases your chances of earning it.

Start with a LinkedIn Strategy and Grow From There 

To make the most of LinkedIn, you’ll want to integrate it into an overall marketing strategy and plan. To begin, you can leverage the information and research you conducted when drafting a business plan when you secured financing or before you started your business. 

Your insights will change as you engage with more people, but a strategy will serve as an important starting point. 

• Know Your Target Audience: Research their behaviors, pain points, and the types of content they engage with on LinkedIn. Use competitors as a benchmark. 
• Set Measurable Goals: Whether it’s gaining followers, generating leads, or driving traffic to your website, clearly define what you hope to achieve.
• Monitor Performance: Use LinkedIn’s analytics tools to track engagement metrics and refine your strategy based on what works.

Other websites to check out are LinkedIn’s Creator Page and LinkedIn for Small Businesses which have resources, statistics, and tools for small business owners. 

Want to Get in Front of Prospective Clients on LinkedIn?

Time is your most valuable resource. If you’re ready to leverage LinkedIn but don’t have the bandwidth to do it yourself, we can help. From optimizing profiles to developing tailored strategies, we offer flexible, affordable options for businesses of all sizes.

Schedule a free consultation and we’ll discuss whether LinkedIn is the right social platform for your business. 

Sources: 

Webpages

• LinkedIn. (2024). Grow your small business. LinkedIn for Small Business. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• LinkedIn. (2024). Open for business. LinkedIn for Small Business. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• LinkedIn. (2024). People You May Know: AI-powered recommendations. LinkedIn Engineering. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• LinkedIn. (2024). About us. LinkedIn Newsroom. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• LinkedIn. (2024). Collaborative articles FAQ. LinkedIn Help. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• LinkedIn. (2024). Publishing platform guidelines. LinkedIn Help. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• LinkedIn. (2024). Other Similar Profiles feature. LinkedIn Help. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• LinkedIn. (2024). Professional community policies. LinkedIn Legal. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• LinkedIn. (2024). Various ways to connect with people on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Help. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• LinkedIn. (2024). LinkedIn Top Voices. LinkedIn Help. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• LinkedIn. (2024). LinkedIn Creators Home. LinkedIn Members. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 
• Upwork. (2024). Find work you love on Upwork. Upwork. Retrieved November 25, 2024. Link. 

Book

• Cialdini, R. B. (2001). Influence: The psychology of persuasion (Rev. ed.). Harper Business.