When you encounter new competitors, peers, or unknowns on Twitter, one of the first thing to do is to check out their list of followers to see who they are attracting. Too often, a bad first impression is made because their follower list is full of junk and spammers. This is an obvious sign they bought their followers and are tweeting into an empty room. Gus Wagner discusses the topic at length in this video and blog.

Finished up the 31 Days on the road, click the video to see where I broadcasted from!

The main goal of this #31DaysOfLinkedIn project was to learn how to use the platform better for ourselves and our clients. We decided to do this in an open and sharing way through live stream broadcasts and daily blogposts so you could come along on the journey as well. This words below and the video above won’t go into a lot of technical strategy ideas, those are in the links at the bottom, and they can best be summed up in a, “Why the heck aren’t we all doing better at this thing?!?” statement. Read on…

The major steps to success on LinkedIn

Be active. It should go without saying that no one can be successful at anything if they aren’t active at it. If you “set and forget” your LinkedIn profile, you only have yourself to blame when it comes to inactivity. Since few folks, including your peers and competition, are active on a daily basis on LinkedIn, it is a wide open field of potential for you. If you want to lead your industry, your geographic region, or groups, you can easily do so. The opportunity is there and waiting for you to take it!

Stay active. Say you have spent, I don’t know, 31 days being active on LinkedIn and you haven’t landed a million-dollar deal or a dozen new leads from your activity. What should you do? Keep at it. Because of the inactive audiences of LinkedIn you will have to put in some time and frame your content around education, information, or entertainment to carve out your niche and attract legitimate attention from connections. Stick with it for 62 or 93 or however may days it takes to build your successes…and then keep at it after the fact.

Be consistent. When we say you need to be active, you need to be active. Set a schedule for your LinkedIn activity and stick to it. Make Monday the day you post and interact with your Groups and Thursday the day you publish to Pulse if it works for you. We would never advise you to do something on all of the tools of LinkedIn every day, but do something with all of them as often as you can. If you aren’t consistent with you activity, your connections will start not seeing your content in their newsfeeds and you will be back to where you are now.

Be professional. As we discussed early in the 31 Days, LinkedIn is not the place for your family photos, your #MotivationMonday posts, or your “funny” memes. Stick to content which your professional audience of connections will want to see. They are all on Facebook and Instagram and Tumblr as well and have already seen your jokes. If they are on Reddit, they actually saw it a week before you did.

A big secret to success on LinkedIn

Interact with others. The four points above will get your further down the road of LinkedIn success than the sitting around and doing nothing with the platform you are probably doing at this moment. A point to take your success to the next level is to interact with the posts, Blogs, Groups, and other content you encounter on the platform (all platforms actually). Share then Like content you encounter and comment on pieces to which you can add your unique perspective. Doing so will help you build your reputation, will help you to make more connections, and help those connections to be encouraged to interact with your content when you publish it.

I’ll have to say 31 days is not nearly enough time to become any sort of (alleged) expert at LinkedIn. Heck, it’s only 7.4{1ccf3f7051f621f207bf0b5abe66fecd9fcbebd6ccca57cd81eaf6422f6a0a70} of the 10,000 hours Gladwell says you need to have to become and expert in anything.

Now that I have said that, I do feel, at the very least, more committed to the LinkedIn platform and look forward to connecting with you there, helping you if I can, and seeing you launch your own success story with it. If there are any remaining questions or challenges you have with LinkedIn, or any other marketing platform, reach out and let’s talk about them together.

If you missed any of the #31DaysOfLinkedIn posts, they are all linked at the bottom of this page. Please feel free to hit the share buttons to the side of this content to share any of these pages with your own fans, followers, and connections, so they might find the help they are looking for as well!

I appreciate you checking out this effort. What do you want to talk about next?!?

The #31DaysOfLinkedIn Posts from @RocketGroup

#31DaysOfLinkedIn – Introduction and Recap

A Look at LinkedIn Endorsements and Recommendations

Add Project Details to Your LinkedIn

Advertising on LinkedIn

Building Relationships on LinkedIn

Comparing LinkedIn Audiences to Other Social Platforms through @GaryVee

Educate, Inform, and Entertain Yourself with LinkedIn Groups

Job Seeking on LinkedIn

Kids, LinkedIn is for Professional Stuff

LinkedIn Premium: How Do They Work?

LinkedIn Pulse on LinkedIn

LinkedIn: Connect with the Right People, the Right Way

Manage Your LinkedIn Activities

Optimize Your LinkedIn Headline

Pay Attention on LinkedIn

Professionally Mingling on LinkedIn

Recruiting and Hiring on LinkedIn

Say No to the Default on LinkedIn

Setting a Schedule for LinkedIn Activity

Share (Professional) Stuff on LinkedIn

Sharing and Getting Shared on LinkedIn

Sharing Content on LinkedIn Effectively

Should LinkedIn Be Fun?

Spread Out Your LinkedIn Posts

Taking LinkedIn to the Real World

To Pay or Not to Pay for LinkedIn

Use the LinkedIn Daily

Want to Get Found on LinkedIn?

What We Learned During #31DaysOfLinkedIn

Who Viewed My LinkedIn Profile?

Your LinkedIn Likes/Dislikes/Challenges

As we have gone through these #31DaysOfLinkedIn, there has been a lot of conversation about sharing. Sharing is something we know a thing or two about.

The secret to getting your content shared on LinkedIn, or any platform for that matter, is to have content your connections (fans, followers, subscribers, etc,) actually find shareable. Your content, also discussed before, must educate, inform, or entertain your audience so they will find it critical enough to take the extra step to share with their own audience.

This is one of the goals of social media: reaching the audiences of audiences of audiences. This is also how news, job opportunities, and cat videos go viral.

How to share content on LinkedIn

Sure, this might sound a bit simple but why aren’t more people doing it? Sharing on LinkedIn is 1) almost the same function as on Facebook and 2) a continuation of the most powerful action you can take on social media.

As you can see in the image above, sharing Scott’s post allows us to offer our own comments on the content and share it with all of our connections, with all or some of the Groups we belong to, or with certain individuals only through a message. Scott will also be notified of the share and will possibly reach out to say, “Thanks!” or, “What’s up with you sharing that?”

Those comments you add are your own implicit endorsement (or condemnation) of content created by other individuals, companies, or groups. 

When you like something, as seen below, it still goes out into the newsfeed of LinkedIn but no other action is indicated. If you didn’t comment on the original post, there isn’t really any indication of why you liked the content to begin with. The share button is right there next to the like button on LinkedIn and clicking it takes the same amount of energy as clicking the like button. Take the extra step and use the share button next time.

Sharing content to LinkedIn when you aren’t on LinkedIn

This one is a little more difficult, but the internet is your friend and tools have been developed to ease your burden. Many websites, including this one, have installed sharing tools for users to share to various social media platforms or even to email.

The tools which we use, as do many others, are from a company called SumoMe. This free, yes, a free set of tools includes the sharing system which you see on the side of this page. If you click any of the logos there a window will open which will allow you to add your comments to the post link, just as happens on LinkedIn and Facebook. You then hit the publish button and you have shared content to LinkedIn from outside of LinkedIn. Go ahead and click one of those buttons and see what happens!

If you do not have this tool on your own website, I can’t recommend it enough that you do so right now. Well, right after you share this blog post to your connections, fans, and/or followers so they can learn the benefits of sharing content on LinkedIn!

Thanks for reading this far down the page and let’s talk if we can help you with any questions or challenges in your own marketing world.

The #31DaysOfLinkedIn Posts from @RocketGroup

#31DaysOfLinkedIn – Introduction and Recap

A Look at LinkedIn Endorsements and Recommendations

Add Project Details to Your LinkedIn

Advertising on LinkedIn

Building Relationships on LinkedIn

Comparing LinkedIn Audiences to Other Social Platforms through @GaryVee

Educate, Inform, and Entertain Yourself with LinkedIn Groups

Job Seeking on LinkedIn

Kids, LinkedIn is for Professional Stuff

LinkedIn Premium: How Do They Work?

LinkedIn Pulse on LinkedIn

LinkedIn: Connect with the Right People, the Right Way

Manage Your LinkedIn Activities

Optimize Your LinkedIn Headline

Pay Attention on LinkedIn

Professionally Mingling on LinkedIn

Recruiting and Hiring on LinkedIn

Say No to the Default on LinkedIn

Setting a Schedule for LinkedIn Activity

Share (Professional) Stuff on LinkedIn

Sharing and Getting Shared on LinkedIn

Sharing Content on LinkedIn Effectively

Should LinkedIn Be Fun?

Spread Out Your LinkedIn Posts

Taking LinkedIn to the Real World

To Pay or Not to Pay for LinkedIn

Use the LinkedIn Daily

Want to Get Found on LinkedIn?

What We Learned During #31DaysOfLinkedIn

Who Viewed My LinkedIn Profile?

Your LinkedIn Likes/Dislikes/Challenges

If there is any one secret to success on LinkedIn, it is to avoid the “set and forget” trap which  many of your peers and competitors fall into. Set yourself a schedule and adhere to it for greater success.

What a LinkedIn content and interaction schedule looks like

Any journey begins by looking at a map and quickly tossing it away, right? Wrong.

Any successful journey begins by creating a map which defines the twists and turns and steps you will take to reach your goal successfully. A journey of content creation and interaction on LinkedIn is no different.

Let’s look at various steps you can towards greater success on LinkedIn in a day, a week, a month, and a year:

Daily activities for LinkedIn success

Review the LinkedIn Newsfeed. What content from your connections who actually post to LinkedIn can you interact with. Like stuff which deserves a Like, comment on posts which you can add value to, and share posts which more of your connections can find value in. This is how networking is done.

Check Connection requests. You never know when the next $1000 or $1,000,000 million connection is in your inbox. The more days which go by between you checking for requests reduce the value of those future connections. I used to be in the habit of only checking these on Monday mornings. That was dumb. I can’t say I missed out on any business but I doubt any connection would tell me that.

Post to the Newsfeed. Be one of the proactive connections who actually post content to LinkedIn. Stick to content that educates, informs, or entertains your connections. Go easy on the entertaining as well. And leave the selly-selly crap for a real world interaction. Also: use images if you can in these posts. Images get much higher interaction that words on a screen.

LinkedIn isn’t the place for your motivational quote posters. Trust me on this.

Answer your In-Mail. Connections, and some folks who would like to be your connections, will send you messages through your LinkedIn In-Mail. Check for this and reply promptly to messages which deserve to be responded to. Delete the sales stuff and spam stuff.

Watch your Groups. By now you’ve joined a few targeted LinkedIn Groups. Be active in them so others will continue to be as well. Share your content sporadically and take the time to comment, like, and share others content more frequently. They will do unto you as you have done unto them.

Weekly activities for LinkedIn success

Post to Pulse. Or Publisher or whatever you want to call it. Use the blogging tool on LinkedIn to get your evergreen content from your website or other media sources out in front of all of your connections. They will all get a red flag, depending on their settings, saying you published something. You’ll get a notification of who actually went and read, or, at least, looked at, the piece. It’s a winning combination.

Review connections: Check to make sure you haven’t connected with some hucksters selling flim-flam, connections who have gone on that great networking party in the sky, or, even worse, committed crimes or made career decisions which you don’t want to be associated with. Your connections and their level of closeness to you are highly public and can possibly create bad first impressions to those meeting you online for the first time.

Endorse others. My mind has been changed here, and I no longer dismiss the prompts to endorse whomever for whatever. Yes, it is a simple click and there are stronger actions to take but it does help in the search to have skills and profiles connected. Again, they may do the same for you.

Listen to competition. What are they up to? Nothing? Make sure you don’t inspire them with your actions to get busy and start copying you. Remember: Defense is more important in the game than offense.

Use your Brand Page. Another thing you played “set and forget” with, right? Same here. Get out there and upload some content and keep it fresh. These pages are great in real world SEO outside of LinkedIn.

Monthly activities for LinkedIn success

Updates needed. Check your personal profile and company page for any updates which may need to be made. Change your phone number, website, or Twitter handle? Change it here as well. Having everything up to date here will help you when that one big connection comes through!

Project status. Use the project feature here to tout projects, of any size, which show what you do and who you worked with to succeed. It’s even better if you have images, links, or videos to add to the project details.

Tout others. We mentioned endorsements above but I am talking about making out of the blue LinkedIn recommendations here. Know a connection you worked with years, months, or weeks ago? Give them a heartfelt and professional recommendation. It will go a long way further than some random endorsement for their spelling or math skills. Plus, it’s an awesome and right thing to do!

Yearly activities for LinkedIn success

New Pic(s). Your LinkedIn profile photo should reflect what you actually professionally look like. If it is years out of date, doesn’t reflect the profession you are in, or isn’t something someone can use to find you in real life, well, it is time for a change. Stay away from the standard driver’s license photo with the bland backdrop and go outside and have someone take a couple great pics of you. Use them and repeat the cycle next year.

Top, down. Start at the top of your personal profile and your company page and update, delete, or edit what needs to be changed. Add achievements, change your employee size, and/or your leadership roles. Whatever changed or occurred in the previous year which you didn’t already cover, update it now.

What would you add to these daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly activities which have brought you success on LinkedIn? Feel free to share them in the comments below or on social media with the #31DaysOfLinkedIn #!

I greatly appreciate you reading this far down the page and look forward to seeing all of your updates and increased activity on LinkedIn!

The #31DaysOfLinkedIn Posts from @RocketGroup

#31DaysOfLinkedIn – Introduction and Recap

A Look at LinkedIn Endorsements and Recommendations

Add Project Details to Your LinkedIn

Advertising on LinkedIn

Building Relationships on LinkedIn

Comparing LinkedIn Audiences to Other Social Platforms through @GaryVee

Educate, Inform, and Entertain Yourself with LinkedIn Groups

Job Seeking on LinkedIn

Kids, LinkedIn is for Professional Stuff

LinkedIn Premium: How Do They Work?

LinkedIn Pulse on LinkedIn

LinkedIn: Connect with the Right People, the Right Way

Manage Your LinkedIn Activities

Optimize Your LinkedIn Headline

Pay Attention on LinkedIn

Professionally Mingling on LinkedIn

Recruiting and Hiring on LinkedIn

Say No to the Default on LinkedIn

Setting a Schedule for LinkedIn Activity

Share (Professional) Stuff on LinkedIn

Sharing and Getting Shared on LinkedIn

Sharing Content on LinkedIn Effectively

Should LinkedIn Be Fun?

Spread Out Your LinkedIn Posts

Taking LinkedIn to the Real World

To Pay or Not to Pay for LinkedIn

Use the LinkedIn Daily

Want to Get Found on LinkedIn?

What We Learned During #31DaysOfLinkedIn

Who Viewed My LinkedIn Profile?

Your LinkedIn Likes/Dislikes/Challenges

Throughout these #31DaysOfLinkedIn we have been asking you to send in your questions about and challenges with LinkedIn as we might be able to solve them together. 

Several folks responded and then we had a lively Periscope conversation about those points and additional ones brought forward by the viewers of that ‘scope. Above is the video recording of the live stream discussion and below are the time-stamped links to individual questions and observations. 

1:50: No one sent in any “likes’ about LinkedIn

2:10: The LinkedIn mobile app is difficult and ridiculous

6:00: I get too many emails from LinkedIn

See also: Managing the types and frequency of email from LinkedIn

8:40: LinkedIn needs more of the paid options in the basic membership

See also: LinkedIn Premium: How Do They Work?

11:30 LinkedIn seems like some exclusive club for established users

See also: Two new users sign up on LinkedIn every second (and more amazing facts to astound you)

14:15 I am lazy and LinkedIn is overwhelming

15:45 What profile pics should I use on LinkedIn

See also: What is the purpose of a social media profile image?

18:00 What do I really need to do succeed on LinkedIn?

20:00 What does The Rocket Group/Gus Wagner use LinkedIn for?

21:15 Can I get around those relationship prompts when making connections requests?

23:00 How should I ask someone to make a connection on LinkedIn?

See also: Say No to the Default on LinkedIn

25:00 What’s the best way to notify someone they have been mentioned in a LinkedIn Page post?

27:00 I have 4000 LinkedIn connections, how do I get more views on my content?

28:00 The best ways to use images on LinkedIn

30:30 How much of the LinkedIn audience are lurkers 

32:40 More people need to post more original content to LinkedIn

34:30 Should I use motivational quotes on LinkedIn

37:20 Avoiding the digital trails of LinkedIn

39:40 Take proactive action on LinkedIn

40:45 Send Derek Jeter a LinkedIn recommendation

42:40 Austin Kleon’s “Steal Like An Artist”

43:15 Watch out for third-party platforms integrating your LinkedIn information

46:10 …and I close

This was a great hour or so of lively discussion and I appreciate everyone who chimed in before and during it. If you have more questions or obstacles with LinkedIn (or marketing in general) leave them in the comments below or reach out privately. 

Also, if you found this to be educational, informative, or entertaining, please use the share buttons to the side of this post and let your connections benefit from it as well.

Thanks for reading and watching this far!

The #31DaysOfLinkedIn Posts from @RocketGroup

#31DaysOfLinkedIn – Introduction and Recap

A Look at LinkedIn Endorsements and Recommendations

Add Project Details to Your LinkedIn

Advertising on LinkedIn

Building Relationships on LinkedIn

Comparing LinkedIn Audiences to Other Social Platforms through @GaryVee

Educate, Inform, and Entertain Yourself with LinkedIn Groups

Job Seeking on LinkedIn

Kids, LinkedIn is for Professional Stuff

LinkedIn Premium: How Do They Work?

LinkedIn Pulse on LinkedIn

LinkedIn: Connect with the Right People, the Right Way

Manage Your LinkedIn Activities

Optimize Your LinkedIn Headline

Pay Attention on LinkedIn

Professionally Mingling on LinkedIn

Recruiting and Hiring on LinkedIn

Say No to the Default on LinkedIn

Setting a Schedule for LinkedIn Activity

Share (Professional) Stuff on LinkedIn

Sharing and Getting Shared on LinkedIn

Sharing Content on LinkedIn Effectively

Should LinkedIn Be Fun?

Spread Out Your LinkedIn Posts

Taking LinkedIn to the Real World

To Pay or Not to Pay for LinkedIn

Use the LinkedIn Daily

Want to Get Found on LinkedIn?

What We Learned During #31DaysOfLinkedIn

Who Viewed My LinkedIn Profile?

Your LinkedIn Likes/Dislikes/Challenges

You may also like these articles if you are truly interested in LinkedIn advertising:

Ah, the old allusion to a years-old strange song lyric in a blog post title. If we can’t have some fun during the #31DaysOfLinkedIn, when can you?

Earlier this month, we looked at if you should pay for increased LinkedIn services. Let’s look at what you get for the mid-range LinkedIn Premium Services for a monthly investment of $79.99.

LinkedIn Premium Services and Benefits

Advanced Search. You can use the basic search function to look for people, companies, jobs, groups, and even posts. With Advanced Search you get to, well, let’s let a video explain it.

Who Viewed Me? As a basic member, which you are probably are right now, you get to see the last five people who viewed your profile. If they have their settings open to allow you to see who they are. By paying the monthly service fee, you can now see all the open profiles who have viewed your profile. If you aren’t going to follow up with them, will this be a worthwhile investment?

InMail. The biggest difference here is you now get to email people on LinkedIn who are not in your connections network. This way you can send them introductory messages, informational messages, or salesy messages which may have a good success rate, but what do you really think will happen with cold emails received on a network they are most likely not active with anyway?

As we have mentioned before, we paid for a month of Premium Service some time ago and didn’t really see much benefit out of it as our network at the time was not that active. After ending the service, LinkedIn did offer some additional free service time to explore the product. I passed.

If you are truly going to be active and not be trying to sell all the possible connections on LinkedIn right out of the gate, I can see the investment being a wise one. If you are going to be another inactive lurker on LinkedIn, it will only serve as a possible write-off for you and have no real world benefit to you.

What has your experience been with LinkedIn Premium? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below or on social media with the share tools to the side of this post. I’d like to hear some good, bad, or indifferent comments about paying for LinkedIn!

Thanks for reading and watching this far! Keep those comments and direct messages coming!

The #31DaysOfLinkedIn Posts from @RocketGroup

#31DaysOfLinkedIn – Introduction and Recap

A Look at LinkedIn Endorsements and Recommendations

Add Project Details to Your LinkedIn

Advertising on LinkedIn

Building Relationships on LinkedIn

Comparing LinkedIn Audiences to Other Social Platforms through @GaryVee

Educate, Inform, and Entertain Yourself with LinkedIn Groups

Job Seeking on LinkedIn

Kids, LinkedIn is for Professional Stuff

LinkedIn Premium: How Do They Work?

LinkedIn Pulse on LinkedIn

LinkedIn: Connect with the Right People, the Right Way

Manage Your LinkedIn Activities

Optimize Your LinkedIn Headline

Pay Attention on LinkedIn

Professionally Mingling on LinkedIn

Recruiting and Hiring on LinkedIn

Say No to the Default on LinkedIn

Setting a Schedule for LinkedIn Activity

Share (Professional) Stuff on LinkedIn

Sharing and Getting Shared on LinkedIn

Sharing Content on LinkedIn Effectively

Should LinkedIn Be Fun?

Spread Out Your LinkedIn Posts

Taking LinkedIn to the Real World

To Pay or Not to Pay for LinkedIn

Use the LinkedIn Daily

Want to Get Found on LinkedIn?

What We Learned During #31DaysOfLinkedIn

Who Viewed My LinkedIn Profile?

Your LinkedIn Likes/Dislikes/Challenges