Whether you’re trying to win new clients or get on a LinkedIn recruiter’s radar, standing out doesn’t just happen. But if you work at it, LinkedIn benefits you with leads and opportunities every single day.

Andrew McWhirter, LinkedIn mentor and co-founder of The Influencer Project, works with professionals to create LinkedIn profiles that drive exponential business growth. He shares his top LinkedIn tips for building a standout profile below.

Growing your network on LinkedIn

Growing your LinkedIn network doesn’t happen overnight. My co-founder, Rana Saini, and myself have taken steps to make it happen. Daily activity over a period of years has built our business. 

Engaging status updates are an important part of this. However, we’ve discovered a few home truths about them along the way.

Firstly, status updates should account for only about 20% percent of your activity until you have built a sizable community. Most of your activity should focus around commenting, liking, and sharing other people’s content.

On top of this, you need to mix your content up to provide a 360-degree view of who you are and what you do. Finally, it’s important to create a plan and stick to it or things will inevitably slide.

Creating your status activity plan

Status updates may initially only take up 20% percent of your time on LinkedIn but they’re still a primary way to connect with your network. One of my main LinkedIn profile tips is to treat updates as a priority rather than tucking them away into a corner of the to-do list and promptly forgetting about them.

We set aside time weekly for status updates, knowing that every time we post something we appear in news feeds of our contacts.

And guess what? That helps us stay top of mind with them.

How to build engaging content on LinkedIn

People do business with people. Many LinkedIn professionals seem to forget this. Being a professional to professional network doesn’t mean that everything you post needs to be about your position or your business.

Your status updates should engage your audience. So, while there is an important place for professional content and what you do, it also needs to be balanced with demonstrations of who you are.

Use a combination of video, text and images to really connect with them. This provides more substance for people connecting with you. They get more of a glimpse of who you are.

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Balancing personal and professional posts on your LinkedIn profile

Broadly speaking, we include three types of personal posts on LinkedIn. These centre around three key elements:

1. What do you stand for and value personally? We certainly value including our families in everything we do.

2. Personal experiences. We share life experiences that happen to us so that other people can start to relate to us emotionally.

3. Personal lifestyle stories. We like to show other professionals that we are real and relevant to their lives by sharing stories others can relate to.

Similarly, for professional posts, we use three major types of content that we’ve found to work well with our audience. These are:

1. Real client stories or proof of results. These are great for demonstrating the promise you deliver – and that it works.

2. FAQs. By answering the questions that come up most, we show that we understand our audience’s pain points and specialise in providing solutions for them.

3. Asking relevant questions and offering a next step. We invite opinion about important topics to encourage engagement. It also allows us to offer potential solutions for problems we’re asking about.

Integrating your personality into LinkedIn posts

Whether it’s through your LinkedIn headline or LinkedIn cover photo, showing a little personality on LinkedIn will help people understand you. Just because it’s a professional network, don’t stay in your suit and tie. 

Here are some thought-starters:

  • You can be a little controversial in posts, as long as you are always respectful of others.

  • Ask questions – people love to talk about themselves, and offer opinions.

  • Try including a powerful opening line that grabs attention. Something surprising, amusing or challenging works well.

  • Keep status updates brief – people won’t read long essays.

  • Include a key takeaway at the end.

Once you’ve nailed this, simply rinse and repeat. But, most importantly, get active and stay active.

Last words of advice

Your status update plan is there for a reason, so make sure you stick to it. Only then will you start getting your face, your personality, and your business out there to be appreciated by others.