Even the most organized and confident among us need a playbook to remind of what we should be doing daily and keep our activities on track to ensure we are using our time wisely. This becomes the set plan for efficiently maximizing your influence on a given network, in this case, LinkedIn. For a playbook to be effective, you’ll want to stick with it as much as possible, but you should also optimize it over time as you find some actions result in more business or ROI than others.
Playbooks have several different elements, but your LinkedIn playbook should focus on the following 4 elements:
Connections
Ideally, you should be able to add a few new connections to your network on a weekly basis. A very good boost can be buying LinkedIn connections. Keep in mind that its important to keep adding more connections by inviting people you already know from other places to connect with you.
At the same time, you’ll want to start cultivating future connections. As you meet new people offline and online, make sure you follow up with a LinkedIn connection request. And if you are searching for prospects and notice people with many mutual connections, don’t be afraid to consider sending them an invite.
Engagement
Every day, you should be engaging with content from within your network. Make it a policy to engage with a certain number of posts and stick with it. By engaging regularly, you’ll be making yourself more recognizable among your network as well as to your network’s connections. Over time, this should help increase the size of your network and engagement with your own content.
Publishing
Make sure that some kind of publishing happens regularly. Ideally, you should be doing a status update every day, or at least every week. People come to LinkedIn to keep track of professionals and their companies, so it’s important to make sure your profile is a happening place. Over time, you’ll learn the ideal publishing frequency for you and your company, but by publishing content you are “showing up” in the influential and potentially lucrative news feeds of your network, and should they engage with your content, your connection’s network and winning their attention over time.
Prospecting
This one’s mostly for salespeople and entrepreneurs. Without new sales prospects, our businesses would dry up fast. That’s why it is so important that we continually check in with people who might be interested in our products and services. Job hunters have a different perspective on this: the more hiring managers you come across in the course of a job search, the faster you’re likely to get hired. Name recognition is just as important for jobs as it is for corporate sales. Don’t lose sight of the people that can help you.
While you want to efficiently execute on the Connections, Engagement and Publishing aspects of your playbook, there is no limit to the amount of Prospecting you should be doing!
