Whether you’re a recent college graduate starting your professional career, a seasoned practitioner climbing the ladder to success or a C-Suite executive building your personal brand, how you manage your presence on LinkedIn is essential to maximize the benefits of being a part of the world’s largest professional platform. If you’re new to the LinkedIn Audit Series, be sure to start with nine ways to use the platform and then assess your goals and intended outcomes before you begin to evaluate and update your profile in sessions outlined in depth in parts one and two of the audit series.

After you’ve audited your profile and you’re ready to take your LinkedIn presence to the next level, follow the three steps below.

Get connected!

Expand your network by making connections. On LinkedIn 500 is the magic number, but you should prioritize quality over quantity and build your network over time based on your goals for the platform. If you have connected with professionals who are no longer in your industry or whose content no longer interests you, you can always unfollow without disconnecting from them completely. Take advantage of the ability to follow professionals and wait until you have a strong personal connection before reaching out. Example: Instead of connecting as soon as you discover someone you’d like to add to your network, follow their profile and connect once you’ve read a post that was helpful to you, registered for one of their events you plan to attend or noticed a mutual organization, interest or connection. A good rule of thumb is to follow when the user has valuable experience or content for you and connect when you can provide value or it’s mutually beneficial.

Join groups. Groups on LinkedIn are a great way to meet peers in your industry or seasoned practitioners that can offer insight, mentorship or potential opportunities as you advance in your career. Be strategic in the groups that you join and be active in checking updates, responding to prompts and comments and bringing your personality and perspectives to discussions.

Boost your engagement!

Like, comment, share and send. These are all features that allow you to show support, spread awareness for news, tips or upcoming events and boost your awareness among other users. When you complete one of these actions, the platform shows the post you engaged with on the homepage of your connections and your activity section on your profile. Diverse engagement is key. Take a break here and visit the activity section on your profile. You should see 2-3 different engagement actions. If you don’t visit your home page and like, comment, share or send a post.

Provide endorsements. Endorsements are a great way to provide feedback without the time and effort it takes to write a recommendation. You should have a minimum of five skills listed on your profile and those that are most endorsed will appear first. Giving endorsements is a great way to receive them and completing them is as easy as a click of a key. Make a plan to endorse your connections on a regular basis like twice per month. Get started by viewing my profile and endorsing me for writing, blogging, social media marketing and social networking. Thank you in advance.

Follow hashtags and interests. Choose 1-3 topics you’d like to engage with and follow them to gain access to a variety of members and content that make it easy to be engaged. Interests are built from four categories including influencers, companies, groups and schools. You can add or unfollow accounts within the categories at any time. Those that you follow will determine the content that appears on your home feed in addition to the individuals you follow and are connected to.

Publish original content!

Post to your home feed including photos, videos, events and articles. If content creation isn’t your forte, borrow from others as a native posts instead of sharing from your feed. Ex. If you’ve read an article with tips that were helpful to you (hopefully like this one), instead of sharing a post that I share on LinkedIn, copy the link to the article and write a post to share it with your audience.

Sample caption: “I enjoyed this post from Jasmine and will definitely be using her tips to maximize my presence here.”

Remember that you should be posting content based on your goals for the platform and milestones in your career. Avoid posting for the sake of posting. Be strategic with your engagement and share content that you genuinely benefited from or think will be useful to your network, whether it’s in the form of inspiration, information or any other way.

Show your writing skills with blogs, essays or articles. Even if you’re not a writer or blogger, LinkedIn gives you a platform to write long-form writing pieces unlike any other social media platform. It’s a great way to share your experience, practice your written communication skills and become published without too much extra work. It’s also a great way to position yourself as a thought-leader and connect with new audiences.

Provide recommendations to your colleagues or classmates. Completing are a great way to recognize and share appreciation to your colleagues and partners. If you're a leader in your industry, you should have given more recommendations than you've received. The exception to this rule is if you're in a position where you're speaking, facilitating  or performing often and commonly receive bulk recommendations after an appearance or event. Focus on quality over quantity and don't give recommendations out of guilt or fairness, but based on sincere value you've  witnessed or experienced. Save criticisms for when you're contacted.

Now that you’ve completed your audit, make a plan to implement the tips and strategies you’ve learned. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll add me to your LinkedIn network and engage with me there. Please let me know which tips or information from the audit were most helpful to you in the comments below and share this audit series with someone who could use it.

Hugs & Handshakes,

Jasmine C. Tate