Linkedin

• Introduction

Over the course of years, LinkedIn has proven to be the industry standard for industry professionals. Bestowed with the honorary title of ‘The social network for working professionals’, this professional social networking site is your one-stop-shop, not just for people looking for jobs but also fellow entrepreneurs who seek to gain glory for themselves and their business. LinkedIn has been there for the rescue since 2002 and has evolved and adapted to suit the needs for today’s dynamic requirements of job personnel as well as clients.

So, in this article, we will study and ponder over the thought of using LinkedIn to gain business opportunities that will help you gain perks to transform you from an amateur to a professional. A professional session over a professional platform deserves a professional environment for perceiving. Organise your workplace, take a pen or paper should you find it necessary and with all your senses high on alert, let’s begin the session.

• Facebook for kids, Instagram for boys, LinkedIn for men

We are well aware of the fact that there are multiple sites that fellow jobbers as well as entrepreneurs can use to grab opportunities they seek. But we must also be vary of the fact that each site aims to provide services to a specific type of community. Generalisation and Specialisation are two aspects of the sites that may look as separate individual entities but they’re somewhat co-dependent on each other due to the perks provided by them.

Since we mentioned both the terms, we need to consider the examples for them so that we can understand what we’re exactly talking about. Let’s take the top three contenders in this category, namely: Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Now Facebook is a site that started with the motive of becoming the trendsetter in the social networking industry and hell it did! In fact, as time progressed, it integrated many other services to cater various kinds of users like gamers, content creators, marketing professionals, freelancers and what not. Facebook evolved itself and survived to become one of the strongest contenders in advertisements, online marketing and community development.

Instagram started as a social media network just oriented towards photos. As it evolved, so did its available services. Instagram began to provide options for posting short videos, carousels and filters and effects. Everything was going good until Facebook decided to acquire it and we all know how their integration worked wonders. With the access to technological resources by Facebook, it made progress in the introduction of new features like Insta shorts, stories, stickers, AR/VR integration video clips. Nowadays, many creative professionals worldwide use it as their portfolio to showcase their work in sectors like graphic designing, photography, video editing, marketing and more. In fact, several organisations have used it to advertise job vacancies for freelancers and full-timers. In short, if you have Facebook on your side for commercial activities, you have access to Instagram automatically.

LinkedIn, however, had the vision of becoming a specialist. It was certain with its target audience, services, and the additional perks it would provide to its community and therefore had no such problems with continuing to develop itself over the course of time. Later, Microsoft acquired it and it enhanced the overall services and helped many aspiring entrepreneurs and working professionals find the job of their dreams. Now LinkedIn provides perks like job search with various filters, freelancing opportunities, ability to create content in the form of videos, articles and providing exposure towards industry knowledge via meetups and webinars and seminars. You can also use it to advertise and showcase your talent and products and services. In short, if you’re looking for a job or you plan to create jobs, LinkedIn is your destination.

• LinkedIn for entrepreneurs and business orgs

Using LinkedIn for entrepreneurial and commercial activities is an act of great power and you don’t need anyone to remind you that with great power comes great responsibility. Moreover, merely the thought of power may blind you from observing the fact that using LinkedIn the professional way requires a series of planned steps for smooth execution. Let’s first discuss how you as an entrepreneur can use LinkedIn in the most professional ways possible.

As an entrepreneur, we can expect that you may be using LinkedIn to promote your company, agency, online course, content (any type) or even your profile and portfolio to lure potential organisations and professionals to take a sneak-peek into your profile and contact you regarding any work, but let us have the honour of breaking it you, THIS ISN’T EXACTLY HOW IT ALL WORKS!! You have to be constantly active on LinkedIn and that too with sheer level of dedication and consistency.

As a business organisation that handles its major affairs through LinkedIn, oh boy, you have a lot of constants and variables to compute in. You have to make sure that your company’s profile is constantly maintained and updated in accordance to its activities such as new employment, achievements, extra co-curricular activities. You also have to update any kind of job vacancies or events that will help build your workforce and generate output. Last but not least, you have to make sure that you mention the active staff in the company profile as a means to improve credibility and reliability.

Be it any of the above cases, we can assure you that there’s a lot involved that you can possibly imagine. You have to deploy several techniques like cold-messaging, active participation in meet-ups, helping other job-seekers in getting the job they need, promotions and what not. Trust the fact that when you’ve deployed them successfully, the results won’t be disappointing.

• Professional practices and LinkedIn

LinkedIn has now become the most used service by professionals from almost every domain and therefore gaining stronghold over the market through jobs or customers requires various hacks which has also given birth to coaches that specialise in resumes, LinkedIn and exploitation of its algorithm to score clients and jobs. Even as an entrepreneur or a job seeker, you must know and implement some of the most prominent professional practices to receive the desired outcome.

As discussed earlier, practices like cold-messaging, posting your content on LinkedIn, tagging industry professionals and trying to network with them and having conversations would be it for starters. Coming to the main course, posting content and sharing your views and opinions is good but also refining your existing skills or adding new ones to your skillset is a must. LinkedIn provides quizzes and courses on various topics and since the course material is being prepared by current working professionals who possess years of experience and expertise, they’re just the stuff you should be focussing on.

As for desserts, suffice to say, but since you have it handled till here, the only things you have to take into consideration is consistency with baby steps like constantly updating your LinkedIn profile and portfolio with considerations to the latest trends. Here’s where the professional resume, portfolio and LinkedIn coaches will come and guide you with the best of their knowledge and expertise.

• Plus and Minus with LinkedIn

Like we all know, everything in life comes as a package deal, you get some pros but you get some cons as well and LinkedIn is no exception at all. LinkedIn has gained popularity among professionals from various domains that nowadays we face a requirement of account managers that could handle all the aspects of a LinkedIn page or profile through content generation, lead generation, message handling, meetup scheduling and so much more.

Let’s talk about the advantages. LinkedIn provides a platform that is specialised for working professionals to cater their needs for aspects such as job searches by application of various search filters. You also get to network with some of the most reputed industry professionals that possess years of experience within a domain. You can ask them for minor favours, expert advice and cold message them for lead generations. You can even learn through the quizzes and courses provided by LinkedIn which make you industry level ready and certified. You can post content and most importantly generate job opportunities for someone in distress.

Now let’s talk of the disadvantages. Since we’re dealing with a social networking site for working professionals, some of them which are highly reputed, you have to be vary of the words you choose. Plus, keep in mind that there are many people who have different views and opinions so you have to watch your step. Finding the desirable outcome on LinkedIn is also a journey which involves patience, struggle, dedication and consistency and the lack of either of the qualities may not deliver the results you expect.

• The Final Verdict

Despite the fact that LinkedIn possesses its own set of pros and cons, there should remain no scope of scepticism whether you as a jobber or an entrepreneur should go with it or not. There are certain features which make anything stand out of the crowd and the same can be considered for LinkedIn.

Since we said something about ‘standing out of the crowd’, let’s give you the secret recipe to do so flawlessly. It’s composed of two words, wisdom and visuals. Okay, jokes apart, we at team Wisdom Visuals deliver you the smartest social networking strategies to help you obtain results that you desire. And yes, we’re just a visit away.