What should I be doing on LinkedIn to get noticed?
"I don't have time Mary, I just don't have an extra 5 minutes in my day", says almost every client I work with. Look I'm not asking you to spend hours on the platform like I do, although if you follow my 30-minute-a-day plan you might just want to spend more time here!
I’m suggesting you be strategic in how you spend your time on LinkedIn. I’m suggesting you’re not another “LL” LinkedIn Lurker who scans profiles and content but doesn’t do much more than an occasional “like” on a post.
I’m suggesting you start with 30 minutes a day on LinkedIn.
Do I have your attention now?
In this episode I will share what you need to do:
👉🏻 Daily
👉🏻 Weekly
👉🏻 Monthly
👉🏻 Annually
And I even have a fun PDF checklist for you!
See below the show’s transcription:
What's up everyone? Happy Tuesday or should I say, I hope it's a FAINtastic day. Hi, I'm Mary Fain Brandt, host of 15 Minutes of Fain. And as you can guess, I'm the Fain, you can find me here every Tuesday at 12 pm Pacific Daylight Time with a really quick show on a business tip, LinkedIn tip, or career tip.
So today, we're going to be talking about what you should be doing on LinkedIn and where you should spend your time. And how much time do you really need to spend on LinkedIn to get the biggest ROI. So depending if you're just starting out, if you've been on LinkedIn for a couple of years, I'm going to share with you my LinkedIn Success Checklist at the end of this broadcast, and you can grab this little PDF checklist to help you stay on track.
The biggest thing that I hear from my clients over and over is, “I don't have time, Mary, I just don't have time to be on LinkedIn. I know it's a great platform, and I can find a new job. I can get new business, find new referral partners or people to collaborate with, but I really just don't have time. What am I going to do? I don't have five minutes a day.”
Well, you probably do. We all waste time during the day, right? From Netflix binging to Facebook scrolling and the rabbit holes of Instagram reels, tick tock, whatever that is, I'm sure that you can find 30 minutes a day to invest in your time on LinkedIn. And that's what I'm telling you. You don't need to spend hours on the platform as I do. I happen to love it. It's what I teach. So of course, I'm on this platform, you know, a few hours a day, you can master LinkedIn and become a rock star yourself in 30 minutes a day. And I'm going to show you step by step what you should be doing to get the biggest ROI on LinkedIn. Do I have your attention now? I can't hear you. What was that? Yes.
Hey, I want to say hi to Shelly, Laura, Cassandra, and Tim, for joining us. Go ahead and drop in the comments where you're watching from. And also, you know, drop in the comments. What would you like to see on the next 15 Minutes of Fain? I'd love to hear from you. What topic or trend would you like me to discuss?
So let's dive into today's session on what you should be doing on LinkedIn. Let's start with a daily checklist.
1. Check your InMail messages every day. I almost missed out on a big opportunity to contract with a business because I didn't reply to the message. So every morning make sure that you're checking your InMail messages and applying to those urgent ones or important ones. Of course, we all get some that are salesy and spammy, and maybe really not worth our time. But mark those later you can mark them unread if you've read them and go back and answer them or delete them. But at least go through it every day. Don't let the InMail box, become like your email box, right? Don't let it get overwhelming and crowded. So that's tip number one. That takes maybe a minute.
2. Go to notifications, check your notifications, what's going on in the LinkedIn world, what's going on in your network? Is there anything that you need to put your two cents on anything that you need to share your thoughts on? Or join a conversation that's happening? Okay, so we're gonna do our notifications, and then we're going to do our InMail. Check our messages. And we're going to look at notifications, anything that I need to reply to, you know, did somebody tag you in a post, and you need to go engage? You need to say thank you for the shout-out, or hey, yes, my upcoming course is coming, or, Hey, yeah, that's right. LinkedIn locals coming on October 4, you need to go in and engage. If someone took the time to tag you, you're not there's usually is a good reason for that. Okay.
3. Next, you need to interact with your network, the people that you're already connected with. So again, I go to notifications for this. Were my colleagues and my friends and my biggest fans, what are they posting about? How can I support them? Can I add a comment to that? Can I share my thoughts? Can I answer a question, just do this for three to five people. And if you're just starting off three people a day, we're at about probably seven minutes, maybe eight minutes, by doing all that, the more that you do this, the habit that you create, it becomes super easy and fast. But next, you also want to expand your network, right? You want to add more savvy business professionals. So I want to encourage you to find three people that are not in your network, which means you're not connected to them. And you know, find their posts and put a comment on it. Now you can do a thumbs up a like, or a heart, or the smiley face thing, or the celebratory, you know, any of those reactions. But putting a comment really is more valuable not only to the person that posted the content but also for you. Why because every time you comment on LinkedIn, your name and title appear. So that helps other people see you in a way and see your name, right. So when you post a lot, people are gonna see your name and your title, this can help increase your visibility and credibility. So find three people that you're connected with, comment on their posts, to, you know, cultivate the relationships, and find three people that you're not connected with. So you can start growing your network, one of the great things that you can do is, if there is an organization that you want to get your foot in the door, whether as a business professional or career professional, find someone who works at that company that's posting content and start commenting on their posts. Got it. So what are we at 16, 17, 18 minutes? I mean, really, yes, creating a thoughtful comment might take a little longer, but literally, that's 30 minutes a day. That's the easiest way to get started on LinkedIn, and to really grow and nurture your network.
So that's it daily. Pretty simple, right? We can add to that, but I don't want to overwhelm you guys. I want you to get active on LinkedIn, not be overwhelmed, get a bigger ROI, and then want to do more.
So let's talk about what you should do weekly.
1. Okay, so at a minimum, you should post twice a week. Yeah, even as a career professional, or at least once a week as a career professional, showing your industry expertise, positioning yourself as a thought leader and just having some fun. Okay, don't forget to show your personality. So post once to twice a week. If you're a career professional. If you're a business owner, I say two to three times a week. That's just what I say, you know, in my honest opinion.
2. Join a live show like this, or an audio event every week. We have an audio event called the B show where we drink coffee and talk about career tips and trends on Mondays at 7am with my lovely co host, Laura Bayshore. So that's on Mondays I do this show 15 Minutes of Fain on Tuesday. And there are a ton of shows out there. But why should you attend one, the networking. So audio events, you can message anybody that's attending the audio event with you know what's so great about that you don't have to be connected to them. And there are some amazing people attending audio events, and live events. You can also network with people that are attending and commenting. It's a great way to learn about a specific industry topic and it's a great way to network.
3. Also weekly send out five new connection requests. You should always be growing your network. I was just on a show this morning with Kenneth Lang, who was in the career space and we both agree. You should always network. Network like your career depends on it. Network like your business depends on it because it does. Don't wait till you need your network to start are nurturing it to start growing it. Network every week. So send out five connection requests and make sure that you always personalize them.
4. You can also endorse the skills of someone that you know, I don't believe in endorsing skills if you're not familiar with that person and their skills.
5. You should follow a company that you're interested in, and maybe post a discussion in one of your LinkedIn groups that you're a member of, if they're active. Now, just yesterday, I did this post, or Sunday, I'm sorry, I did a post Sunday and I was talking about all the events that I'm part of this week, I think it's four or five live shows this week. And I posted it in a group that I'm really not that active in. But as you know, LinkedIn gives you a prompt, would you like to post in this group? I was like, sure, why not? Well, it got like, 1300 views. Last time I checked. That was Monday when I checked, so and I got some comments, so why not use some of those groups people are watching?
Okay, now we're gonna move on to monthly. Do you guys see how easy this is? You don't have to over be overwhelmed. And when we're talking about, you know, commenting, and replying, here's my biggest tip. My three S’s; short, sweet and simple. Don't overthink it, you're getting stuck in your own head. Nobody's critiquing you on LinkedIn. Well, maybe they are. But that doesn't matter. Just post your thoughts, and share the information that you have shared and the resources you have. But just keep your short, sweet and simple. Okay, back to monthly. What should I be doing on LinkedIn every month? Mary, Wait, you didn't know that you should be doing something monthly? Well, you should.
1. Touch base with those that you're already connected with. It's been a while this is such an underutilized strategy, you can actually craft a message that you're going to send out and maybe you send it out to 10 people that you're connected with on LinkedIn, but you haven't really engaged, reintroduce yourself. Maybe you have new services in your business, maybe something has shifted in your professional career that you want to share, or you're looking to find someone who works at the ABC Company in Hawaii. I don't know. That's a company in Hawaii, though it really is. So reach back out to people that are in your network that you haven't really engaged with and don't sell them anything. Just say Hey, I'm going through my network. And I'm on a mission to reconnect with 100 people this year that are in my network, and I haven't had any interaction. So guess what? You're number 21. Hi, I'm Mary Fain, Brandt, this is what I do. Or Hi, I'm Mary Fain Brandt, you know what, just follow my page. Keep it simple.
You can go to your network. So how do you do this? Right, you go to my network on LinkedIn, click on the connections on the top left and look through the list of recently added connections. Send a message to them. Thanks for connecting. Hey, what's your biggest struggle? Thanks for connecting. I like to keep it short, sweet, and simple. Hey, thanks for connecting. What's your favorite tool to use in your business? What's the one tool you can't live without? Keep it short and sweet.
2. You know, read through your profile and update it as needed. A lot of times we set and forget it, we create this awesome profile. And then we don't do anything with it.
3. Add multimedia in your Features section. Now I have to say I sometimes forget to do this. But I never forget to tell my clients to do that. Go into your Features section and add your best content, your events, your live streams, and your audio events.
4. Check your stats, what type of posts are performing best, why keep doing the same post month after month if it's getting zero engagement? So you really do need to check your stats. And if you're interested, I have an amazing tool that can really dive into this and help you.
5. Give someone a recommendation. Again, this is adding like 30 minutes to your time on LinkedIn.
6. Check your settings. How many sessions are you signed into? What you can be signed into more than one? Yes, at one point I was signed into seven different sessions. You have to go through and close those out and you do need to have your password to do that. Just FYI. So if you don't, if you don't know what your password is or where it is find it first.
7. Update your about us section and review your headline and probably update that.
8. I want to add in that you should update your cover video story, probably quarterly. I believe that it should be updated about every three months. I need to update mine. If you're having an event, it's a great way to say hey, guess what? LinkedIn Local Phoenix is back. We're getting to gather on October 4, you can find the link to register, you know down in my about you section or wherever it's at. Or maybe you have a launch coming up or you've written a book. There are a lot of ways to use that cover video story, it doesn't have to just be your name. And what you do, sounds kind of boring to me, you have 30 seconds. So go in and do that quarterly.
9. Evaluate all the groups you're in, does it make sense for you to stay there? Or is there still engagement going on? Is there enough people in there?
10. Change your background banner folks, and I actually think changing your background banner quarterly is a good idea. I have for background banners that are designed. So we have LinkedIn Local, we have the audio show. And then I have two personal ones. And I just kind of rotate those out, depending on what I'm launching what I'm promoting and what's going on.
11. Update your current experience section if needed. So career professionals, business owners, what's going on? Do you have new services? Have you learned new skills? Make sure you go in there and update that? I can't tell you how many times I read something on an experience section. That was outdated. Once I talked to the person like oh, no, I don't work there anymore. I'm like, why didn't you update that?
12. Update your location. So truth? Truth, right here. When I moved from San Diego to Phoenix, I didn't change my city for over six months, because I wanted to make sure we were gonna stay here. And I was like, Well, I have so many connections in San Diego. I don't know that I want to put Phoenix. But you should change the city. So it reflects where you're at.
13. Record your accomplishments. You know what? What went great? So at the end of this year, I'll be hosting this goal-setting workshop. And we're actually going to do some of these exercises there. But record what went really well. And add those to your LinkedIn profile.
So I'll get that plugged in. Sorry, it takes just a minute here is the link. I'd like to know where are you spending your time on LinkedIn? What are you doing every day on LinkedIn to move the needle? Seriously, drop that in the comments.
And then the annual you know, check your settings, review everything, and do the update. So literally, it's short and sweet. You can do this for 30 minutes a day. Start using this checklist and I know that you're gonna have a much better experience on LinkedIn and a higher ROI.
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