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 an executive, a member of the Codir, a salesperson 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 real 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, influencers, competitors, associations, unions... This is your business ecosystem, and you can no longer be absent from this professional crossroads.
Define your professional objectives
To harness the full power and potential of the tool, you need to start by defining your short-term, medium-term and long-term professional objectives.
After all, we don't all have the same challenges, or the same agenda. A manager shares his vision and expresses his digital leadership, a sales manager leads his team, a salesperson develops his customer portfolio and builds loyalty, while an employee is identified on the basis of the value he brings to his colleagues and the company.
These objectives can be envisaged both individually for one's career and collectively for the company.
Once you've established this roadmap, you'll be able to build a profile tailored to achieving your goals.
Thinking of LinkedIn as a tool is exactly like choosing a hammer when you've got nails to hammer, or a screwdriver when you've got screws to screw in. It's just a tool.
If you don't set your professional goals beforehand, you'll be venturing into unknown territory without a compass, 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 ultimate goal is to have an online presentation that is coherent and totally in tune with who you are in real life. There should be no cognitive dissonance between the way you behave in person and what your profile says about you 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 indispensable 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.
You should focus on topics that clearly identify the added value you bring to your contacts, and that enable you to achieve your objectives. LinkedIn is a formidable tool for human conversation.
Speaking out means leveraging your intelligence to share your points of view, your decipherings, 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're a trusted resource to be contacted or that you're behind a project to be followed.
Your editorial line allows you to express yourself, making you visible to your professional ecosystem.
Your network
Most recommendations for mastering LinkedIn focus solely on content production, forgetting the importance of networking. Because of the way LinkedIn works, this component is inseparable.
In fact, every time you publish, LinkedIn only shows your words to a tiny proportion of your network. Its aim is to assess the value of your content to your network before giving it visibility.
This assumes that your network of contacts is built around their interest in the topics you cover.
The algorithm constantly analyzes the relevance of this triptych: profile - content - network. And its analysis criterion is your audience's engagement with your content. This is materialized 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 voice on LinkedIn, but if you address members who have absolutely no interest in it, they won't react. Without comments, likes or shares, you're simply irrelevant to LinkedIn. This isn't a value judgement, it's a judgement of the match between you (your profile), your speech (your content) and your network (the members you're addressing).
A place that's always open to all company stakeholders
Once you've built your digital professional identity and structured it to achieve your professional goals, you can develop your gift of ubiquity.
Everything you do on LinkedIn is accessible at any time. You never sleep on this network. At last, 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.
The executive
Executives need to weigh up the risks of being absent from LinkedIn against the benefits they can derive from it.
By reaching out to his entire business ecosystem, he shares his vision and gets closer to his company's stakeholders. He makes his brand human by participating in conversations. They also have an exemplary role to play, all the more so if LinkedIn is a tool that their employees need to develop the company's business.
Just as we talk about employee advocacy, which managers wish to implement within their company, it seems necessary to make them aware that they have a role of advocacy leader to embrace in order to create a dynamic and virtuous circle of online presence.
Salespeople
A salesperson will build his or her professional credibility by becoming an opinion leader within his or her audience and industry, by sharing information: decrypts, new technical solutions, case studies, economic information...
He or she will be identified as a reliable and credible resource to be contacted when a need or tender is issued.
LinkedIn becomes as much a prospecting tool as a loyalty-building one. He can be in continuous conversation with all his customers and prospects, independently of physical meetings. The tool multiplies opportunities for conversation. It's a formidable platform for staying present in the minds of your contacts.
Employees
Every employee plays an active role in creating value for the company. Just because they're not salespeople doesn't mean they're not involved in sales. For example, an expert can share his or her knowledge of a process, technology or method on LinkedIn. This expertise, visible to all customers, reinforces the credibility and confidence of the company, and therefore of the salesperson, whose mission is to meet the challenges of his or her 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 contribute to the attractiveness of the employer brand to future candidates.
I'll be able to detail the benefits of an online presence on a platform like LinkedIn for every employee, whatever their position or function. Every professional, whether executive, manager or employee, whatever the department or sector of activity, will benefit from building a digital professional identity card to do his or her job and develop his or her 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