LinkedIn, the essential tool for developing your professional influence
In an ultra-connected world, we have the gift of professional ubiquity, enabling us to stay in conversation with our entire business ecosystem 24 hours a day. In fact, every professional, whether a manager, a member of the Executive Board, a sales representative or an employee, now has a digital tool with which to keep in touch with their contacts. That tool is LinkedIn.
Still too often considered as a social network dedicated to recruitment or job hunting, it is now advantageous to consider it first and foremost as a genuine work tool.
With LinkedIn, you have the opportunity to connect, subscribe and interact with all the professionals who make up your business environment. Prospects, customers, employees, investors, shareholders, suppliers, partners, private and public institutions, journalists, politicians, opinion leaders, influencers, competitors, associations, trade unions... That's your business ecosystem, and you can no longer afford to be absent from this crossroads of professional audiences.
Define your professional objectives
To harness the full power and potential of the tool, you need to start by defining your professional objectives in the short, medium and long term.
We don't all have the same challenges, or the same agenda. An executive will share his vision and express his digital leadership, a sales manager will lead his team, a salesperson will develop his customer portfolio and build customer loyalty, while an employee will be identified on the basis of the value he brings to his colleagues and the company.
These objectives can be envisaged both individually for the individual's career and collectively for the company.
Once you have established this roadmap, you can build a profile tailored to achieving your objectives.
Thinking of LinkedIn as a tool is exactly like choosing a hammer when you have nails to hammer in or a screwdriver when you have screws to screw in. It's a simple tool.
If you don't do this exercise of setting your professional objectives beforehand, you're setting off on an adventure without a compass in unfamiliar territory and running the risk of getting lost. In other words, hammering in screws with a hammer.
Build your profile
A profile is built around a professional identity, an editorial line and a network.
Your professional identity
The aim is to have an online presentation that is coherent and totally in tune with who you are in real life. There must be no cognitive dissonance between the way you behave in person and what your profile says about you from a distance, online.
Whether you're preparing for a meeting or following one, your LinkedIn profile contributes to your professional reputation (reputation, not e-reputation) and to building a relationship of trust that is essential in the professional world.
This digital double is your professional digital identity card. And trust is the foundation on which human relationships are built.
Your editorial line
Through your own publications and by commenting on the publications of network members, you enter into asynchronous conversation with your entire business ecosystem.
When you speak, you should focus on subjects that enable you to be clearly identified in terms of the added value you bring to your contacts and that enable you to achieve your objectives. LinkedIn is a wonderful tool for human conversation.
Speaking out means using your intelligence to share your points of view, your insights, anything that enables you to demonstrate that you are a relevant player in your sector of activity. It also means sharing your vision, your advice and your achievements directly, to show that you are a trusted resource to contact or that you have a project to follow.
Your editorial line allows you to express yourself and thus make yourself visible to your professional ecosystem.
Your network
Most of the recommendations you can read for mastering LinkedIn focus solely on content production, forgetting the importance of the network component. The way LinkedIn works makes this part inseparable.
In fact, every time you publish, LinkedIn only shows your words to a tiny proportion of your network. Its objective is to assess the value of your content to your network before giving it visibility.
This assumes that your network of contacts is built on the basis of their interest in the subjects you cover.
The algorithm constantly analyses the relevance of this triptych: profile - content - network. And its analysis criterion is your audience's engagement with your content. This is materialised by a muscle that acts on a keyboard to write a comment, to write the argument for a share and that acts on a mouse for a simple like.
You can have the best message on LinkedIn, but if you address members who have absolutely no interest in it, they won't react. Without comments, likes or shares, you are simply irrelevant to LinkedIn. This isn't a value judgement, it's a judgement about the match between you (your profile), your message (your content) and your network (the members you're talking to).
A place that is always open to all company stakeholders
Once your digital professional identity card has been built and structured to achieve your professional objectives, you can develop your gift of ubiquity.
Everything you do on LinkedIn is accessible at any time. You never sleep on this network. Finally, your digital double never sleeps. Your profile and what you say can be consulted 24/7. And because LinkedIn is as much a tool for internal communication as for external communication, everyone can use it to develop their professional influence.
Managers
Executives need to weigh up the risks of not being on LinkedIn against the benefits.
By reaching out to their entire business ecosystem, they can share their vision and get closer to their company's stakeholders. They make their brand human by taking part in conversations. They also have a role to play in setting an example, especially if LinkedIn is a tool that their employees need to develop the company's business.
Just as we talk about employee advocacy, which managers want to implement within their company, it seems necessary to make them aware that they have a role as advocacy leaders to embrace in order to create a dynamic and virtuous circle of online presence.
Salespeople
A salesperson will build their professional credibility by becoming an opinion leader for their audience and their industry by sharing information: decipherings, new technical solutions, case studies, economic information, etc.
He or she will be identified as a reliable and credible resource to be contacted when a need arises or a call for tenders is issued.
LinkedIn becomes as much a prospecting tool as a loyalty-building tool. They can be in continuous conversation with all their customers and prospects, independently of physical meetings. The tool multiplies the opportunities for conversation. It's a fantastic forum for staying top of mind with your contacts.
Employees
Every employee plays an active part in creating value for the company. Just because they are not salespeople does not mean they are not involved in sales. For example, an expert can share his knowledge of a process, a technology or a method on LinkedIn. This expertise, which is visible to all customers, reinforces the credibility and confidence of the company and therefore of the sales person, whose job it is to meet the needs of their customers.
All employees are also involved in recruitment, even if they are not part of the HR department. By being present on LinkedIn and taking part in conversations, they represent the company and help to make the employer brand more attractive to future candidates.
I can go into detail about the benefits of having an online presence on a platform like LinkedIn for every employee, whatever their position or function. Every professional, whether in a managerial or executive position or as an employee, whatever the department or sector of activity, will benefit from building a digital professional identity card to do their job and develop their career.
Professional influence and digital leadership are now part of the job. So master LinkedIn and get in on the conversation.
Article translated from French