You must have heard LinkedIn as one of the most preferred social platforms among entrepreneurs and startups for networking and brand building. Despite hearing many good things about brand building and interesting leads via LinkedIn platform, most of the aspirants couldn’t even get closer and give up the idea of cherishing the idea of LinkedIn.
In the past 2-3 years, the entire world is literally shifted to online platforms and the social media is now even more close to people than their family members and friends. Further, marketing and business proposals are now being pitched in via social media platforms. Thus, every startup must hone the skills of doing business, as well as marketing on these huge platforms.
It is submitted that LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly known as the Twitter), Threads, etc., are the giant social media platforms and each platform offers different opportunities and requires different skill sets. In this piece of writing, we are going to discuss about LinkedIn only in order to grab the better understanding of the platform.
Understanding LinkedIn
LinkedIn is primarily a platform where people want to discuss work. Unlike other platforms, where the major element is entertainment, the LinkedIn may appear as slightly dry and largely formal. Further, LinkedIn is more popular among corporates, and formal businesses as compare to individuals. Moreover, foreign players take LinkedIn profile quite seriously in order to asses the work and standing of a startup.
LinkedIn provides a platform for the users to post their views in terms of posts and articles. Posts give a unique opportunity to the startups to reach out to people at large by simply sharing their views or/ and expertise in their relevant fields. Once your business post starts becoming useful to others, people will start interacting with the posts in the forms of comments, likes, reposts, etc. Such posts get help from the AI of the LinkedIn, which may turn up as viral posts and people from across the globe may start getting to know about your good or services.
In addition to the feature of posts and articles, LinkedIn also gives an opportunity to interact with other people and businesses with its chat features. Often, it’s a good pitch that fetches good business in no time as compare to other conventional modes of the platform.
Now with this fundamental understanding of the platform, we are now in a settled position to discuss and ponder over some practical and proven ways to utilize LinkedIn to our use.
5 Point Strategy
1. Don’t do Window Shopping: – Surfing and sending requests to people mindlessly merely to increase connections and followers is a red mark. In early days at LinkedIn, various businesses and startups get entangled with the web of surfing and sending requests to wrong people generate nothing but frustration and ultimately push them to quit. Since many people have done it and many others are still doing the same, so if you are one of those, so just stop doing it right now and utilize the platform of LinkedIn smartly.
2. Mastery of 2 Kinds of posts – Writing on LinkedIn is a nice way to attract leads and generate more clients. But often we missed the bus and despite writing good, we don’t get it. So, the catch is not just mere typing and posting a lot, but to maintain a nice balance of these 2 different kinds of posts.
2A. Contributory post – Such posts provide some knowledge and you, therefore, contribute something. However, many active people members don’t put contribution-oriented content, resultantly they are treated as desperate seekers and hence didn’t see success despite being active.
2B. Brand oriented – If you won’t boost your brand, then who will? Thus, it’s extremely important to write and highlight the achievements of your startup. But the same must not be too loud. One of the effective ways is to put the achievement and branding in a form of a story; true story. Stories are being loved and remembered.
3. Connections requests – To increase the number of connections we keep sending and accepting requests mindlessly. This is a counterproductive step. Merely having connections in 5 or 6 digits doesn’t serve the purpose. The aim at LinkedIn is to increase the business and not to increase the no. of followers and connections. Further, quantity of connections and followers is not the best criteria to weigh anyone’s success at LinkedIn. To put is simply: – what would you prefer: – 1) LinkedIn profile having thousands of connections and followers with hardly any business; or 2” LinkedIn profile having 3-4k of connections with tons of business leads. No sane person will miss the later, yet we all judge through the first set as the same is easy and prima facie makes the profile interesting.
And not to miss, if the connections aren’t your related audience, then it’d be a daunting task to master the skill of fruitful networking and brand building at LinkedIn. Your connections are the deciding factor behind the success of your posts. Haven’t we ever noticed that a few seemingly ordinary posts get a huge response, but some masterpieces remain a matter of attempt? The reason is that the successful posts get immediate and strong response from the connections of an author, and once the connections get involved with the posts, the LinkedIn automatically blossoms the reach of the post and consequently help ones to reach more people.
4. How Frequently should You Post? – The perusal of the records and activity of influencers at LinkedIn show no straight jacket formulae. Some are daily contributors, some follow 3-4 times a week policy and some focus on the need of posting twice or thrice a day. So, the aspirant needs to take his/her own call. But the boiling point is that no one should miss consistent habit to click.
In addition to the aforesaid, you must atleast post 3 times a week, if your posts are gathering sound response then even 2-3 times a day is not a bad call to make.
5. Test Match – It’s not a T-20 game, nor is it a 50 over match. The LinkedIn is a Test Match. Ergo, consistency at LinkedIn is the sine qua non to receive something good from this platform. And yes, it is the consistency that can fetch the results faster and maybe even before the final day of the Test Match.
Conclusion: While there are many other potentially helpful strategies, you don’t need to employ all of them to achieve success. A few carefully chosen techniques, applied consistently in the right direction, can work wonders. LinkedIn provides an invaluable platform for startups looking for growth and success. By implementing these strategies and maintaining consistency, you can unlock LinkedIn’s potential and harness it as a powerful tool for your startup journey.
*****
Author: Lalit Ajmani, Advocate, and Founding & Managing Partner at Ajmani & Law Partners, can be reached at [email protected].
