LinkedIn growth hacking steps can include pretty much any activity on the platform as long as you know how to optimize it to your benefit. Lead generation has never been easier, given the tools that are available today, but the competition has never been higher, either. That’s why we created this article – to help you get the most out of the leading B2B platform and stand out from your competitors!
Here are the 7 best ways to hack your LinkedIn growth!
Pay Attention to Profile SEO
You’ve probably heard of search engine optimization (or SEO) before. It’s the thing that makes your website get pushed by Google and appear at the top of the search result page. You can also do that for your LinkedIn profile! There are a few elements you need to pay attention to when optimizing your profile.
- Use the right keywords. These can be placed in your profile description or job title and will help your potential customers find you. Thankfully, there are tons of tools available on the market that will help you research exactly which words and phrases are the most popular among your target audience.
- Make the most out of endorsements. Endorsements on LinkedIn are a way for others to confirm that you really are good at the skills you listed on your profile. If you have lots of these, LinkedIn will recognize you as an industry professional and boost your profile. The best way to approach this is to endorse other users so they’ll be motivated to return the favor.
- Find a good photo. A profile picture is an optional part of your profile, but it’s been proven that profiles with a photo receive 21 times more views than others! This picture should be clear and with a simple background. It needs to communicate that you are a professional your customers can trust, which can be achieved through good lighting, a friendly facial expression, and a confident posture.
Expand Your Network
LinkedIn connections are similar to friends on Facebook – they’re the people who wanted to add you and who you manually accepted into your list. Once you’ve reached over 500, LinkedIn will stop displaying the number, and it will just say ‘500+ connections.’ The total limit of connections is 30.000, after which you can only gain followers.
The most trustworthy look for your profile is to have 500+ connections. However, you need to pay attention to who you’re accepting. The people you connect with will see your content, and you’ll see theirs, so make sure it’s something you’re interested in. Similarly, if you’re on there to try to generate LinkedIn sales, then accept only the people you could potentially do business with at some point.
When you realize you’re nearing the 30.000 mark, go through your connections and remove inactive users to make room for the ones you need. Be mindful of who you connect with, as your other connections will be able to see that list.
At first, if you’re unsure where to look for connections, the best place to start is in groups. If you join groups that are relevant to your niche, you’ll quickly find other industry professionals and potential customers, so don’t shy away from adding them. Then, you can go on to view their connections and check who interacts with their posts, and add them as well. This way, you’ll not only expand your network but do so in a way that will boost your engagement because you’re already sure they are very active users.
Engage with Your Current Connections
Even if you’re just starting with LinkedIn hacks and aren’t happy with the current number of your connections, it’s important to keep engaging with them. You can do this by sharing relevant content, but we’ll get to that in a later section. There are other ways to increase your profile visibility, even if you’re not feeling particularly inspired to create posts. Here’s how:
- Leave comments. Leaving a comment on other people’s posts is a great way to put yourself out there more without too much effort. Of course, be careful of what you’re commenting and under which posts, as this is all public. Leave comments that add value to the original post, and stick to posts that are relevant to your industry.
- Use reactions. Other than the basic ‘like’ reaction, LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to Celebrate, Support, Love, or deem Funny, Insightful, or Curious. Although there’s really not much of a difference in which one you choose, the non-Like options come off as much more personal and let you get your thoughts across in just a click. This is a great way to pop up in people’s notifications when you don’t have too much time to spend on LinkedIn.
- Share posts. If you’re not feeling particularly up to creating something, you can always share something someone else has posted. It’s okay to just click the share button and repost it, but it’s much better if you have something to add. Try to write a sentence or two above the original so that your connections can get to know you and your thought process a little bit better.
Invest in Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is one of the first growth hacking steps you should take. This is a paid premium feature of LinkedIn that will allow you to track and nurture leads as well as improve the number and quality of the deals you close.
Arguably, the most valuable feature of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the improved targeting system. It allows you to browse by more parameters than you would without it and has the ‘view similar’ feature. This is a button that will pop up when you’re looking at a prospects page and allow you to see other people with similar profiles, expanding your potential customer pool with no trouble.
Another useful feature is lead lists. They make tracking easier and allow you to select which list receives which marketing material. This means you can create multiple lists and segment them based on any factor you want – age, job title, position, or whatever makes the most sense for your business – and target them with tailor-made ads to increase the chances of conversion.
After you make these lists, you’ll have taught Sales Navigator’s engine all about your ICP. The software will use pattern recognition to recommend similar users and automatically expand on the list. Then, you can accept or reject its suggestions, further feeding it information so that it improves the curation process.
Share Relevant Content
We already talked about the importance of engagement and how it goes both ways – if you want others to engage with you, you have to engage with them in return. Creating posts isn’t easy, but you need to provide users with a reason to connect with you.
When writing a LinkedIn post, the most important thing is to give the reader something of value, so don’t treat it like a Facebook or Twitter post – it’s a professional platform, after all. However, you should still adapt your tone to your industry and portray yourself in the best light. This means that your posts need to be professional and give tips, explanations, how-tos, or whatever else similar best fits your niche but still sound human. Your LinkedIn post should ideally be somewhere in between a tweet and a blog post – friendly but still with a point.
If you’re more comfortable with long-form content, LinkedIn also has the option to publish articles. You can utilize this for pieces that require more room for further explanations or examples, or you can use it as another way to build up SEO since these articles are treated the same way as blog posts by Google.
Focus on Copy
Copywriting is a field all on its own, but it’s something everyone with an online presence needs to invest in. There’s not one formula for how you can write good copy; it all depends on a multitude of factors. Firstly, you need to know your own brand – how professional/friendly you want to sound. You also need to understand your audience and cater to their preferences if you want them to want to do business with you.
That’s why you start by doing research. See what they’re interacting with on LinkedIn, which groups they’re most present in, and, most importantly, what they complain about the most. Once you can pinpoint their pain points, you can address them directly and offer your products and services as a solution. Here are a few tips and tricks to write copy that leads to conversions:
- Keep it simple. It’s recommended that you use shorter sentences to incentivize the audience to keep reading. After five lines of text, the ‘see more’ button will appear, and once they’ve clicked it, they’re much more likely to finish reading the whole post.
- Keep it focused. Writing can be very fun, and sometimes we get lost in it and want to make the text fun and full of adjectives. However, that can get distracting to the reader, so try and keep your copy focused on the action you want them to take. It’s also good to provide them with a motive for why they would want to do that.
- Adjust your words. On top of adapting the tone to the target audience, you should make use of words that best describe what you want to say. This means, for example, avoiding ‘very’ and instead trying to find a stronger word – irate instead of very angry, swift instead of very fast, etc.
Research the Best Times to Post
When it comes to maintaining your presence on any social media platform, it’s important that you know what that platform likes, so to speak. For example, you’ve noticed how Instagram promotes Reels rather than posts or how you see certain trends pushed more than others. LinkedIn is no different, so do your research before you post something.
The best practice is to post on Wednesdays and Tuesdays around 9 AM, according to research. The worst time to post is at the weekend, most likely because people associate LinkedIn with work, so engagement drops over non-working days. If you have other things to tend to at that time or simply fear you’ll forget, you can use post scheduling services to maintain a posting schedule and make sure you don’t miss that small window of time that increases your post’s visibility.
According to a study, the optimal posting frequency on LinkedIn is two to time five times a week, which adds up to around 20 posts per month. Although this practice can be beneficial, you need to take into account that posting too often might bore your readers and cause them to remove you from their feed – so it’s better to stick to the lower end of the recommended frequency.
Finally, it’s crucial to know that your audience can tell when you’re posting just to post. If you don’t feel like creating three posts in a given week, don’t. They’ll be able to see that your heart isn’t really in it, and engagement will drop. It’s better to maintain a higher quality of posts, even if that means posting less frequently.
Summary
There are a lot of steps you can take to hack your growth on LinkedIn. Thanks to the platform’s popularity, many of the features have already been extensively tested and researched by other users, so now you can learn from proven best practices. This article outlined the most popular among them, including profile SEO, expanding and nurturing connections, Sales Navigator, sharing content, copywriting, and doing your research.
If all of this seems like it would take up too much time and effort, there are agencies you can hire to take care of your LinkedIn! NextPilots offers you network-growing services on top of CRM maintenance and lead generation, so give us a call if that’s something you need!