💻 LinkedIn – a powerful tool or necessary evil?!

We’re going to go straight in with an answer to the subject line, it’s a powerful tool.

LinkedIn claims to have over 830 million members in more than 200 countries worldwide, and more than 34m in the UK alone!

The vision of LinkedIn is to “create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” and their mission is to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.”. With powerful statements like this being top of the list for LinkedIn’s ‘About’ page, it is hard not to see it as a tool to be embraced and utilised.

Today we are hoping to give you a few suggestions to put your LinkedIn profile to good use.

📷 Pictures – as with marketing property visuals are so important! They attract people to your profile and engage them to find out more. The big two are your profile picture and background. You don’t have to be a Mona Lisa, but ensure you have a picture of you in there. There’s nothing worse than a grey circle. Also, if you're feeling adventurous add a video to your profile picture, this will add a bright ring around your picture and make it stand out.

With your background, make it relevant to you and what you do. It doesn’t have to be all about your branding, but make it bright and be conscious of where your profile picture will sit over it.

📄 About – profile viewers will likely skip over your ‘About’ section if it looks like a GCSE English exam answer paper. Make it interesting by bullet pointing, spacing out the interesting things about you and use emojis! 🤔

🦸‍♀️ Skills – add your skills to show viewers what you can do. Ask current or previous colleagues for an endorsement to make these stand out.

➡️ Sharing – engagement in shared posts is low compared to creating originals. Your own engagement in the original post will be better, like and comment. If you feel the uncontrollable urge to share, repost instead adding further insight to the original post and use different hashtags.

👫 Connections – who you connect with is important. It doesn’t have to be people who you personally know, but make them relevant to your business and who you want to be. There are a few influencers and top industry people who are great sources of advice or information, but sometimes it’s also good to ‘meet’ new like-minded people. It’s also great to personalise your connection request with a short message (go to their profile, click connect and add a personal message).

✉️ Post – posting can be daunting, but the more you do the bigger your profile will become and your confidence will grow. You’re not going to become an influencer overnight and get 100s of likes on your posts so manage your expectations, but you can build your personal brand. Keep it business related and post pictures and (short) videos to increase the impressions of your posts.

If you’re not ready to post, try commenting on others’ posts. You’ll soon see it’s not Facebook, users will not criticise you for posting or commenting something they disagree with, they’ll just scroll past that one.

There are many, many more hints and tips you can get for improving your profile or posts from following or connecting with influencers like Daniel Disney. If you’re already a strong user of LinkedIn, what do you find works best?

If you’re not so interested in utilising LinkedIn to boost your personal brand, it’s still a really positive way of connecting with people who can offer a mutual benefit like referrals or other business-related opportunities.

If you’re interested in automating maintenance to free up time for your property managers and save money for your landlords, you can book a demo of the Help me Fix video triage service here.