You know LinkedIn offers great personal and corporate brand growth potential and you desire the benefits that come from actively using LinkedIn.
But there’s a problem. You don’t have the time, don’t know how, or can’t get yourself to consistently engage on LinkedIn.
The fact is, engaging on LinkedIn consistently can be difficult.
Before now (when I’m more consistent on LinkedIn), my Linkedin game was like a blinking Christmas light. With longer offs than on. I tried different tactics to stay active on LinkedIn. Some I came up with by myself, others I learned from my network on LinkedIn.
Five of those tactics have shown lots of positive results in helping me and others use LinkedIn more consistently.
I share the five tactics in this post.
Before diving into the tactics, let’s be clear about what constitutes useful engagement and interaction on LinkedIn. They are:
- Thoughtfully commenting on posts
- Connecting with new people
- Posting your thoughts and sharing people’s content
- Starting and maintaining conversations in your inbox (where the real magic happens)
This is what I call the four cylinders of LinkedIn.
Note: Randomly liking people’s posts and dropping one-liners like “thanks for sharing” or “nice one” as comments wouldn’t move the needle for your personal or professional brand.
Let’s jump into the five tactics. If you’re just starting, I’d advise you to test them one after the other to see which works best for you.
Learn How to Set Up a Stellar Linkedin Profile
1: Add LinkedIn to Your Calendar
Block out a particular time on your calendar, daily, to engage on Linkedin.
This strategy works well if you have complete control over how you spend every hour and minute of the day. For example, if you’re a freelancer, a consultant or a high-level executive.
How does this help you become more consistent on LinkedIn?
Adding LinkedIn engagement to your calendar transforms it from a desire to one of your compulsory daily tasks. Every day, you get a calendar reminder at the time you’ve set for it. This increases your tendency to actually get on Linkedin.
This is the strategy I currently use and here’s what it looks like in my calendar.
Every day, by 5:30 am, I get a reminder to engage on LinkedIn for 30 minutes. This has improved my consistency on LinkedIn. And it’s gradually becoming a habit for me.
The key is to choose a time in the day that works bests for you. And feel free to change it when it is no longer convenient. I like to get on Linkedin first thing in the morning so I don’t get carried away during the day and completely forget about it.
If you’re just starting out, blocking out 10-30 minutes every day to engage on LinkedIn is a good start.
2: Set an Engagement Goal
Here you set a daily engagement target. Lots of people use this technique to stay active on LinkedIn with positive results.
This can be a number of posts to comment on, new connection requests to send, posts to share or publish, and conversations to start or maintain in the DM. Or a combination of two or more of them.
This is the same tactic Sergiu Bungărdean, Founder of Stride recommends for anyone who wants to stay active on LinkedIn.
If you don’t have complete control of your hours during the day, this strategy will enable you to make use of any free time you can squeeze out of your day to engage on Linkedin.
Set the goal and try to hit it every day.
Since there is no particular time of the day when you’d have to do this, you can simply add it to your goal for the day.
3: Use the One-Post Strategy
This strategy involves using one post to hit the 4 cylinders of LinkedIn.
Here’s how it goes:
- Choose one post from your feed with (the potential for) lots of engagement.
- Drop a thoughtful comment on the post
- Share the posts with your network with a personal note
- Like and reply to at least one other comment on the post
- Send a connection request to the author of the comment you replied to
Learn all about the One-Post strategy.
This strategy works well if you’re a busy entrepreneur or CXO and may not have the bandwidth to count the number of interactions you’ve made in a day or carve out a particular time to come on LinkedIn.
4: Get a LinkedIn Buddy
I learned this tactic from Bojan Maric of Content Distribution. Here, you and a friend get on a video call and engage on LinkedIn together. Like you would do collaborating on a document.
This will work for you if any of the first three tactics would be difficult for you to do alone without an external push or pull. The benefit of this strategy is having someone who pulls you and who you’re accountable for.
You and your LinkedIn buddy can use any of tactics 1, 2 or 3.
5: Have a LinkedIn Content Stash
Keep a Google Docs file, Spreadsheet or note where you drop content ideas you know you can share on LinkedIn. I call it the LinkedIn content stash.
You’d agree that one of the major reasons you don’t publish content on LinkedIn consistently is because you sometimes don’t know what to talk about or post. A content stash removes this writer’s block and reduces posting on LinkedIn to a simple copy, paste, tweak and publish process.
I’ve tried the Google docs and the Spreadsheet tactics, and both work.
As your stash grows, you’d figure out better ways to organize the content so you know what to post next and when.
Get Your LinkedIn Engine Running
There you have it, five tactics to help you consistently stay active on LinkedIn.
Which will you start with? Would love to know in the comments
LinkedIn provides great potential to grow your personal brand, land clients and build lasting professional relationships. But you need to get on the platform to enjoy these benefits.
It can be difficult when you’re very busy or don’t know how to go about it. I hope the strategies I shared in this post help you.
If you’re just starting out, I’d advise you to test all of them to see which works best for you.
If you’re a (busy) entrepreneur or CXO who want to explore LinkedIn then this article was written for you 👉How CXOs & Busy Entrepreneurs Can Stay Top of Mind on LinkedIn Without Spending Long Hours.
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