Linkedin Guide: How It Works, Strategies & Sales

LinkedIn is the perfect social network for all those professionals and that is why today I want to make you this guide to everything you need to know about LinkedIn to get the most out of it. This platform unites absolutely all the professionals worldwide that are referents in different areas and niches for the purpose of networking, creating alliances and promoting professional work.

What are we going to see in this guide?

From what LinkedIn is and how it works, the metrics and data so that you can take firm steps and how to design a strategy that will lead you to success, all based on experience and not on trends, showing you a real case of success and how I have managed to enhance my profile.

1. What is LinkedIn and what is it for?

LinkedIn is the world's largest network of contacts of professionals and entrepreneurs, all in order to establish strategic relationships that can be of contribution to each business model and also to facilitate employment opportunities.

It was founded in 2002 by experts such as Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant.

With LinkedIn we orient ourselves to all the relationships that may arise in the commercial and professional market in a strategic way.

Important facts about LinkedIn

LinkedIn has data and metrics that are interesting to analyze what audience we can find on the platform and find out if it will be a suitable space to develop ourselves. Now we will comment on the most important ones:

Level of use (Statistics for Febraury 2020)

a) 47.6% of users use LinkedIn 0-2 hours per week.

b) 26% use it between 3 and 4 hours.

c) And 12.2% use it between 5-6 hours per week, that is, approximately 20-25 hours per month.

Favorite LinkedIn Features for Users

a) LinkedIn groups (79.6%)

b) The search for people (70.6%)

c) Suggestions from people you might know (66.8%)

More Helpful LinkedIn Features for Troubleshooting Users

a) Investigate user and company information (76.9%)

b) Recover old contacts (68.8%)

c) Create a new contact list of people who are able to influence potential customers (49.7%)

Other LinkedIn features

a) Improve your brand

b) You gain visibility

c) Attract traffic

2. How does LinkedIn work?

At first, many tend to see LinkedIn as a difficult social network to understand, but you have to understand that LinkedIn is your cv but alive, that is, instead of capturing all your personal information in a PDF, you can do it through an application that It will give you different functions, tools and options so that you can grow in the business and professional field.

The first step to identify the potential that LinkedIn has is to collect all the professional information, from professional titles, data about your education, the positions you have held, highlighting the skills and abilities ... You can even include some works as a portfolio.

What can we do to start optimizing our profile on LinkedIn?

Open an account (either personal or business) in which to create your own profile / CV and add all the relevant information.

Explore all the professional contacts that benefit you, since when you attach companies in which you have worked or work, LinkedIn will automatically start looking for professionals who are also related to that company. Nowadays, many people come to recover old important contacts that today are great alliances.

What functions LinkedIn provides us

1. CV online.

Both companies and large organizations will have the opportunity to see your professional profile always updated.

It is important that you take into account all the information you need when improving your LinkedIn profile.

2. Virtual contact book.

Since I began to experience the change that LinkedIn brought to my professional life, I have been able to understand that it is an extensive and useful contact list with professionals with whom I can have direct contact.

3. Contact with LinkedIn groups.

This is one of my favorite LinkedIn tools because they focus on key topics that interest you and where you will be up to date with news and trends. No fillers, just the information on the topic you requested.

4. Featured.

LinkedIn is also a very useful social network so you can get a lot more views if you have a website. It even gives you the option of being able to publish your professional presentations and articles on its same platform, what's more, you can put them in the featured section so that those who view your profile have the first references about you.

5. Networking.

LinkedIn from the beginning is characterized by the purpose of helping entrepreneurs and professionals to more easily establish contacts that may be of interest.

6. Visibility.

When you open a profile on LinkedIn, you will have the possibility that people from the same niche or sector can learn more about your work and career, I have always said that when two or more people from the same sector join forces to create valuable content , its results are surprising. Will you get clients thanks to LinkedIn?

What metrics do we have to take into account for our profile?

To know if we are doing things well, we need to take into account the most relevant metrics:

A. Social selling index.

This is the metric that manages to measure the effectiveness with which you establish your personal or commercial brand and in turn find the right people, interact with information and create relationships with other influential contacts from your online agenda on LinkedIn.

B. Profile views.

Professionals who have visited your online space.

C. Appearances in searches.

Number of people who were interested in knowing who you are and what you do

D. Content.

All the information you share and the positive and negative actions you receive from professionals on LinkedIn

- Visualizations

- Reactions

- Comments

- Shared

E. Contacts.

Number of professionals you have added to your LinkedIn profile.

3. Design a successful strategy

The first thing we have to be clear about is that we need a goal. We can use LinkedIn not only to make contacts, but also to gain leads and conversions. Of course, we have to be aware that either to gain visibility or sales, we need a strategy.

Keep in mind that activity, perseverance and patience are key in any aspect, but even more so if you are creating a strategy and you are going to implement it.

Important: remember the importance of omnichannel marketing and incorporate LinkedIn into your sales strategy

3.1 Contents

Once we have in mind what objectives we want to achieve (increase sales, visibility, contacts, interaction ...) we have to think about what content can be part of that strategy.

The formats that we can use are text (they are usually the ones that work the most), video, image, PDF or surveys. I give you as an example the ones that I use in my own LinkedIn profile.

I'm going to give you a trick so that you never run out of ideas: the divide and multiply methodology will help you get dozens of content starting from a single idea.

But it is not only important to take into account what formats we can use on LinkedIn and find out which one works best for you, there is a factor that we have to bear in mind and that we mentioned at the beginning of this point: perseverance.

Try to update your profile regularly with quality content. But be careful, have a common sense publication guideline taking into account that you should not publish two days in a row, since one of the posts would be penalized and you would not generate the expected result.

I would also like to add that it is not only about sharing your own content but also about participating in groups related to your business sector. It is important to bear in mind that contributing your experience will help your potential clients to consider you as a benchmark and value your professionalism and, in relation to this, one of the novelties that are not available to everyone is live. Yes! LinkedIn has joined the live stream fever and participating in them (individually or by sharing it with another user) can be a win-win for visibility and positioning.

3.2 Promote yourself

Like the usual social networks, LinkedIn provides us with several options to create an ad campaign. 

In fact, in the latest updates to its interface, the main novelty (in the field of campaigns and ads) is that now the definition of a campaign objective is a mandatory step, being able to choose between:

- Brand awareness

- Website visits

- Interaction

- Video views

- Lead generation

- Conversions on the website

- Job application

Do you want to know how to do an advertising campaign on LinkedIn step by step ?

3.3 Analytics and metrics / Tools

I always seek to use official tools and with LinkedIn it was not going to be less. I bet to use the ones it has internally.

But this time I'm also going to tell you about an external one that I've used to measure my profile: ShieldApp

Thanks to ShieldApp you can track, measure and report to amplify our brand through organic content activity on LinkedIn.

Among the options provided by this tool are:

Breaking down audience demographics: This will help us understand whether our intended audience is consuming our content and will help us adjust our content strategy and growth activities accordingly.

Know what works and what does not: We will be able to search, sort, filter and tag the content of the different accounts that allows you to monitor, in order to discover what the target audience wants and needs and with what type of content and conversation topics they have a greater involvement.

Do you want more information on how to design a successful LinkedIn strategy? Then you can't miss this video:

4. Why use LinkedIn in your sales process?

When we start on LinkedIn we see it as a way to help or boost our active job search, but we have to realize that it has to be much more. LinkedIn can be part of our sales process for many reasons, among which I want to highlight you:

Leads are more qualified, plus you can segment and reach a suitable audience for what you are looking for.

You can see the relationships of your potential clients (contacts, recommendations, etc.)

Recommendations are a very valuable weapon to understand the strength of your potential client (with whom they have worked and in which areas they have moved)

There are niches in content in which you can look for people from your sector or others who may need your help (you have the solution to a problem, it is time for you to look for someone to help)

It is a great help to avoid going to a cold door (you can search / locate people faster by their company and their position)

And also, no one ever lies on LinkedIn because it is a professional environment and with more adult users.

5. Real case - AIMagnus

You know that I do not like to tell you things by trend, I always rely on experience and I will be honest with you. I love Instagram and I know it perfectly, but when I wanted to start on LinkedIn, what I did was take the posts from other social networks to this more professional platform, trusting that they worked that well. And surprise: it was not.

So I turned to an expert consultant on LinkedIn who was also a student at Academia de Consultores and a great success story for us: Guillermo González Pimiento.

The first thing we did was analyze and audit my profile and, together with my team, we decided what changes we would make and what strategy we would follow: enhance real conversations.

To see the success of the actions we would take, we made before, during and after comparisons with analysis tools from LinkedIn and Shielapp.

These are the actions that I have carried out in my profile:

1. Choose another profile photo.

2. Modify profile banner.

3. Change the headline by including multiple keywords (divided with separators).

4. Update the "about me" to tell a story that invites you to continue reading, with a CTA to the email and including rich media of the video of my story. It is important that you know that this video helps to increase the views on the profile, since the algorithm rewards this type of content.

5. Creation and publication of content in different formats, days and hours of the week. But for this we have not created new content 100% of the time, we use the content curation technique to adapt the different formats we have to the essence of LinkedIn.

6. Use of surveys to generate interaction (this is a very recent action, since it is a novelty).

7. Constant measurement of results.

8. Translation and publication of the profile in a second language (English).

9. Using highlights for stories with important values ​​and best Convert More courses.

10. Creation of an exclusive podcast for LinkedIn (AIMagnus).

This is what I have achieved with these changes. As you can see in the infographic, the progress has been remarkable and very satisfactory.

What have I learned from this?

1. Photography, despite what we may think, has enormous importance.

2. The change in profile and strategy helped increase views, search appearances, and invites to connect.

3. The constant generation of content helps generate greater views to the profile.

4. Publication schedules pose a challenge, since my contacts are in America and Spain.

5. LinkedIn rewards content that generates conversation reaching organic views that are difficult to achieve in other networks.

6. The content that generates the best results is that of text over content with more production such as videos, images or PDF (Illustrations). It is important to always publish quality and relevant content for the audience.

7. Responding to comments helps build trust and improve the results of a post.

8. LinkedIn punishes external links published within posts (it is better to put it in the comments).

9. Artwork must be uploaded as a PDF to be viewed as a carousel.

10. Articles that are posted on the profile and are indexed by Google.

Have you already made the most of your LinkedIn profile ? In this post I will tell you step by step how you can do it and what changes you have to make and take into account. You can have this LinkedIn guide as a reference to optimize your profile.

6. Tips: What to do so that your profile does not look like just a cv

LinkedIn is to share your strengths, your training and your experience, effectively. Your CV is to share your strengths, your training and your experience as well. However, we have to make a difference: LinkedIn is a very powerful platform for creating contacts with other professionals and that can be a boost for your personal brand or for your business.

Therefore, the more you differ from other users, the better . Without going any further, the other day I read the following: “LinkedIn is the perfect place to stand out in front of an audience of 600 million professionals. Thanks to multimedia publications you will be able to achieve different objectives such as new jobs, clients and opportunities ”.

As we saw reflected in my personal case, on LinkedIn there is a very great opportunity: there are no content creators (or at least not as much as in the rest of social networks) so it is the perfect place to differentiate yourself and get visibility.

Therefore, the first step to getting started on LinkedIn is to take advantage of the opportunity to know that it is not exploited and that you have a much higher chance that your content will be consumed. What does this mean? That you shouldn't start by highlighting everything you know or have done, you have to empower and communicate who you really are.

That is, LinkedIn cannot be just a cv, you have to show yourself more human, since it is an important characteristic for a professional and is often left neglected.

You can highlight and highlight the professional and business side to a large digital audience through large publications, creating interaction with other users or participating in debates or even in groups.

In summary, the three objectives of LinkedIn are: to get jobs for professionals, to get clients to companies, and to generate new opportunities for entrepreneurs.