Optimizing Your LinkedIn Experience

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Why are you on LinkedIn? Many are on LinkedIn to better connect their professional career path with opportunities, peers, and industry insight. Here are some quick tips to making sure your time spent on LinkedIn will lead to quality results.

Step 1: Define your objective (ROI vs. KPI)

Set goals. Are you looking to drive up business leads? Or are you looking for a career change? Setting up objectives will allow you to qualify success. In my case, I am making sure my personal brand and my company is seen as experts within small and medium sized marketing. To this end, my summary and groups match this objective. I qualify success (ROI of time) by connections (leads) and my performance metrics (KPI) by views in search, responses of content I produce in groups, and the unsolicited recommendations I receive. You can gain access to some of metrics through “Who’s viewed your profile” when you have a paid membership ($25/mo.)

My ROI:

Actual conversations and invitations (leads)

Actual views of my profile

My KPI:

Times my profile has appeared in random searches

Realtime results

Step 2: Optimize your profile to meet your objectives

Based on your goals, adjust your profile content to match high volume search terms. Use Google Keyword Tool to find search volume around your industry. Example, “Small Business Marketing” + “Small Business Consultant” top keywords: entrepreneur, startup, ppc, lead generation, and branding.

Adjusted my LinkedIn summary to include these keywords, resulting in high volume of discovery based on these keywords:

Personal Brand, Company Brand, and search term "Lead Generation"

Search by industry type

Step 3: Engage!

Don’t just stalk the LinkedIn groups that interest you and/or are strategic based on your goals, but chime in! Post survey’s and ask for opinions. Folks who engage with you and see your content will most likely want to find out more about you. Example:

Engaging on the topic of social media

Multiple responses lead to multiple views on my profile and one connection.

For best results, make sure that your profile is compelling enough around the content you are posting within the groups. Just like a “landing page” and a “call to action” the “click thru promise” is the same within LinkedIn. If a user clicks through to find out more about you, make sure your profile is written in a way that addresses the curiosity factor from these groups. In this above case, I spoke about leaders within the social media space in Phoenix. Think about the user experience… “Why is this guy asking this? Let’s find out more about him to gain that frame of reference.” Does my profile address these potential questions? What is the potential call to action once they click through to my profile? Is my latest status update encouraging folks to connect with me?

The point is… user experience is the same in social space as it is on Google. Think about what your profile says to attract the potential traffic you want. Ask yourself what is your objective, and how do you go out and engage with those that can help ramp up achieving your goals.

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  • Robert Starks Jr.

    Kevin,
    Great article covering some important performance indicators and articulating your marketing prespective.  I think some people use LinkedIn knowing that is is “good for networking” or can help them “find a job.”  However, it can be difficult for people to identify a strategy for their overall goal(s) and the KPI’s to monitor.  You broke this down, using yourself as an example, very well.  I can’t wait to see your articles covering Facebook or Twitter in much the same way.