I’ve been researching how to grow on LinkedIn since August. I think for anyone running a consultancy/freelancer business this should prove valuable, but there are a few insights to make it all more sustainable. I’m doing the following:
Posting
Post every week day (first month don’t worry about positioning too much, just do something) – but don’t post more than 1x a day. You can post weekends, but engagement is generally about 20%, so up to you if you think worthwhile, but some of my best posts about general subjects have occurred on weekends.
You can schedule 90 days in advance. I used to just whack a post in the scheduler whenever I have an idea, so my schedule was always full. Now after 90 or so days of doing that, I’m a lot more selective.
After 90 days, your impression graph should look like the below. The first month was generally under 1,000 daily impressions, in Sept I had some big hits, but now I am consistently over 2,000 impressions with every post.
Am I getting more business? Not yet, but I’m in a much better position to start going for it.
Posting tips
Break it up so there’s a gap under each para – if you post via mobile browser, it mucks up the formatting. So use desktop or mobile app
Linkedin is very sneaky about links and I believe downgrades link posts. The workaround is to screenshot the header of the article and use as the post image, then at the bottom of the post say ‘link as top comment’
Adding a first person viewpoint is useful: ‘I think this because of this / it effects this’ but don’t worry about this too much in the first month.
I think LinkedIn vertical video is going to take off, but it hasn’t really happened yet. It’s an expensive investment of time, so I’d focus mainly on being consistent to start with.
Comments
This can be exceptionally tedious, but it is probably the number 1 thing necessary to grow your profile. It creates affinity with those posting content and long term it breaks down barriers if you need to do sales outreach. It’s a pain doing this from the main newsfeed, but I’m building up a sheet of people who post regularly with direct links to their activity.
Leaving 100+ comments a week on people who create content is the easiest way to increase visibility. 20 a day is the minimum, so 140 a week.
Connections
I’m connection requesting 20 people every weekday. Linkedin has a vague max of 100 requests a week, so this works. Probably 60% of people accept requests, which add to the following. If you want to be an authority in SEO, content, social media etc, you can add people every day. The bigger their job title, the better – I don’t have any real knowledge on whether higher up people are more likely to accept.
Every two weeks, you should remove the requests that haven’t been accepted (LinkedIn has a limit of around 500 outstanding connection requests). Withdraw from here: https://www.linkedin.com/mynetwork/invitation-manager/sent. I guess if you withdraw then request again, it could look pretty spammy, but I haven’t got that far yet.
This might sound spammy, but it’s not really. People send me connection requests all the time, even when I have no idea who they are.