Social media is supposed to be “social”. That means engaging and building relationships with real people. Simply having a profile on LinkedIn is not going to bring you a load of new prospects. Without consistent engagement, your time and space on LinkedIn will be wasted.
Engagement also means having a dialog. Posting links and pushing updates that don’t solicit feedback and conversation are not engaging. In fact, too many updates of this nature can disinterest your connections.
So, many ask “What are appropriate and engaging status updates that can be used on LinkedIn?”
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Post an update or photo of a project that you are working on and solicit feedback for which direction the project should take. For example, should you use a color or B&W image? Which conference location would be preferred? Should you hire or outsource for the next phase of the project? These types of updates help others show their expertise in a particular area and can offer you some free advice. Whether you take the advice or not is up to you.
- Ask your network for referrals to a service provider. Need a photographer, architect, tax preparer? Ask your network who they’d recommend.
- Announce the addition of a key employee to your company. Provide a link to his or her LinkedIn profile and encourage your connections to reach out to welcome and/or connect with him or her.
- Comment on the status update of someone in your network. Ask a question to something they post to encourage the dialog to build.
- Mention a book that you’re reading that you found insightful and ask for other reading recommendations on a similar topic.
- Mention an upcoming conference you’ll be attending and ask for recommendations for hotels and restaurants.
- Post a link to your most recent blog post and ask your connections to share their point of view. Even better, encourage them to play “devil’s advocate” and really get the conversation started.
For other ideas on what make for an engaging status update, scroll through the update stream on your LinkedIn home page. Look for posts that have received “likes” or comments. Read through to find out what it was about the post that made others want to chime in. Use this as a template for your next LinkedIn status update.
Please share with us your best status update that worked to engage your audience…