How to Manage Your LinkedIn Presence in 10 Minutes a Day

Sometimes staying on top of your social media account can seem overwhelming, especially when you have more than one and rely on it for personal and business networking and resources. This article from Social Media Examiner discusses how you can manage your LinkedIn presence in 10 minutes a day.

Want a better return for the time you spend on LinkedIn? Looking for a LinkedIn engagement plan to follow?

In this article, you’ll find a plan for making the most of your time on LinkedIn to stay visible, build your network, nurture contacts, and find new opportunities.

#1: Define Your End Goal for Using LinkedIn

Having a plan before you dive into using any social media platform is the key to effective time management. If you don’t know what you’re looking to achieve, you’re going to waste time and think that it doesn’t work when you don’t get any results.

Start by defining your objectives for using LinkedIn. Work out who you might find on this platform, what you want them to know about you and your business, and what information and insights you want to discover.

Traditionally seen as a tool for recruitment, LinkedIn presents many more opportunities and benefits to the business professional. You can

Showcase your experience, skills, and career achievements.
Create and maintain awareness of your brand.
Promote content you’ve created or curated.
Find new business opportunities.
Find suppliers and partners.
Gain referrals and recommendations.
Drive traffic to your website.
Identify and monitor the competition.
Keep up to date with business news, trends, and opinion.
Undertake market research.
Learn new skills.

Once you know what you want to achieve, do some research to confirm that LinkedIn is the best platform to help you. If you’re looking to develop new business, ask your existing customers if they’re active on LinkedIn (assuming that potential new customers will have similar usage patterns). If you want to find out what’s happening in your industry, search to find relevant companies and key contacts and check out how active they are on LinkedIn.

#2: Make Sure Your LinkedIn Profile Is Business-Ready

Before you can consider using the LinkedIn platform properly, make sure you’re ready to do business. By that, I mean having your LinkedIn profile set up and fully optimized to be informative and relevant to the audiences you want to speak to. Often, LinkedIn profiles are incomplete and a cut-and-paste of a CV or résumé.

A CV/résumé is a historical career document, which is perfect if you’re job seeking. It’s not so relevant if you’re in a current role with a business development objective. Potential customers don’t want to know that you’re the top salesperson and an accomplished new business hunter. They want to know how you and your business can help them so make sure your LinkedIn profile conveys that.

Getting found and then making the right first impression is the first step to achieving any objective with LinkedIn so ensure that your LinkedIn profile is All-Star strength and up to date with information relevant to your intended viewers.

A LinkedIn All-Star profile includes:

A professional photograph (headshot)
A headline
An About section letting people know your career story and how you can help them now
A populated Experience section with descriptions for each role
A completed Skills section with a listing of up to 50 skills relevant to your job role, soft skills, and industry knowledge
Education details

#3: Prioritize Regularly Engaging on LinkedIn

If you can log into LinkedIn daily, great. If it’s just once or twice a week, that’s just fine too.

LinkedIn is not as fast-moving as other social media platforms so you’re unlikely to miss too much if you’re not logged in 24/7. Plus, if your activity is focused, you’ll be able to head straight to what you need to achieve your objectives when you do log in.

A huge mistake many business professionals make—with both online and offline networking—is to be highly active when they’re not so busy and disappear into work as soon as a project appears. This yo-yo activity will make everything harder. Make using LinkedIn a regular habit and stay visible for when your network might need to use or refer details of you and your services.

There are a few priority tasks for LinkedIn, starting with your existing contacts. If you see a message notification on your desktop or mobile app, check it out and respond as required.

The notifications tab is the best place to see updates from your network that can help trigger conversations, whether it’s a “happy birthday,” congratulations on a new job, or comments on a post. Spotting ways to start meaningful conversations with contacts is the key to social selling, the process of developing relationships as part of the sales process.

#4: Share Your Content on LinkedIn

The added benefit of sharing your own content on LinkedIn is the data that becomes available.

When you create your own posts, you’ll be able to see the number of views it receives in the feed. And when you click on the graph icon, you’ll see the companies that those viewers work for, their job titles, and locations. This is valuable insight into whether you’re achieving your objectives by reaching the right people with your content.

Some people will share content daily and others weekly or perhaps frequently. This is where it’s important to be consistent and have a content plan that works for you and your business. Post when you have something relevant and interesting for your audience. Don’t post just because you think you want to cross the task off your to-do list.

Here are some ideas for short updates you could post on LinkedIn:

What’s happening behind the scenes of your business
What you’re looking forward to such as an event you’re hosting or attending
What you’re celebrating in your business such as a milestone, an award, or a new team member
A top tip to share with your peers
What you’ve read or watched (for example, a TED Talk) that’s inspired you
What you’re supporting such as an awareness day or a community initiative

Don’t forget to encourage engagement by asking for feedback or comments at the end of your post. The more people react, comment, or share your content, the more visible you’ll be on LinkedIn. In turn, you’ll receive more profile views, which is another opportunity to start a conversation.

#5: Identify New People to Connect With on LinkedIn

Building your network on LinkedIn should be part of your regular activity. Whether it’s following up with people you’ve met (adding them to your LinkedIn network), searching for new people to connect with, or managing your invitations, this task is business-critical.

When you send connection requests, always personalize your invitation. Remind people how you’ve met or let them know why connecting with you is of interest. Think about what’s in it for them, not just what’s in it for you.

If you receive a connection request that doesn’t include a message, send a message to find out why they might want to connect with you.

To send a message, go to the My Network tab on a desktop device and click See All next to Invitations. On the next screen, you’ll see a blue Message link with each connection request. Click this link to send a message to that person.

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