If you’re an executive on LinkedIn, you may be wondering how to get more out of your efforts on it. Here are 10 tips to make you more effective and make your experience using LinkedIn more meaningful. Or at least gain more positive results from your efforts.

LinkedIn is simply a tool that helps you find others so they can add value to you or so you can add value to them. Whether you are getting enough value from LinkedIn depends on what you’re attempting to do. Other professionals, job seekers, hiring managers and business owners are using LinkedIn to grow their business. In 2013, when LinkedIn interviewed over 3000 business owners, consultants, and career salespeople, 84% of users said they generated several business opportunities from using LinkedIn. Business leaders use LinkedIn to sell, get a job, meet the right new contacts, post a job to fill, network, and even do research on their competitors.

In case you’re on the fence as to whether your investment in LinkedIn is still worth it, consider the following facts:
• LinkedIn has more than 900 million members in 200+ countries worldwide, with 220 million in the United States.

• LinkedIn, founded in 2002, is the main social media business tool. It has been supporting its users longer than Facebook. Microsoft, recognizing the value of LinkedIn, acquired the company for $26.2 billion in 2016.

• Over 59 million companies have LinkedIn pages and 52 million people use LinkedIn to search for jobs each week.

• 16.2% of US LinkedIn users log in every day; 48.5% use it at least once a month.

LinkedIn works best when you focus your efforts in an area that makes sense to you personally. When you have a vision in mind for what successful participation in LinkedIn looks like, it’s a lot easier pick the activities that match.

Our advice is to pick an activity or two from the list below that you can personally commit to doing over the long term. Believe in the strategy and be prepared to sustain your efforts over months, not days. Therefore, it must make sense within your area of responsibility and your daily schedule. When things get busy for you, enlist support from a person or two who can carry out the tasks for you. But keep the momentum going once you start.

Here are our top 10 techniques for getting more from your LinkedIn efforts (in no particular order).

1. Attract better employees

LinkedIn allows you to showcase the value of your company. A great company presence on LinkedIn, when reflected across the whole organization, will attract a higher caliber of job candidates. Since you are looking to hire the best individuals who align with your company’s purpose, a strong LinkedIn presence can provide more personal insight to your company than your company website. Your leaders’ and employees’ LinkedIn presence can provide a consistent message, increase the authenticity of your organization, and make your company seem more human.

If you are seeking degreed professionals, over 50% of adults with college degrees are LinkedIn users. Only 10% of those without a college education use LinkedIn.

2. Connect with meaningful contacts

Make some personal policy decisions to guide your activity. For example, decide on your philosophy about who you will connect with and who you will follow. Do you link with everyone or will you be very selective? Our suggestion? Connect with those you do business with or intend to do business with in the future.

3. Create some meaningful content to share with customers

Meaningful content is valuable, relevant, and consistent. It attracts and retains a clearly defined audience (your target customer). Using your LinkedIn Company Page, you’ll be able to create quality posts and share content from your website that your viewers will see themselves, but can also share with others.

On LinkedIn, you can use infographics, slideshows, photos, videos, artwork, or any other visual media that tells your unique story and helps connect you to your audience. Include links to your website to boost your SEO.

And, LinkedIn is the only social platform that allows you to publish long-form articles. A study found that how-to and list posts performed best. It also revealed that long-form content (1,900 to 2,000 words) performed the best.

4. Develop some short video content

At one point, LinkedIn users could only embed video content from other sources. However, LinkedIn now allows native videos to be uploaded through the mobile app. This allows LinkedIn users to see a more “human” side of the businesses, making the brands behind them more approachable.

Videos will continue to be powerful tools in the hands of marketers. Try video in various ways—sharing product and quality information, and creating brief “how-to” educational videos. Video is also great for distributing customer testimonials.

Blendtec is a perfect example of video that’s convincing, while being entertaining. Blenders might not sound interesting but are when you put weird stuff in them.  Blendtec’s videos have gone viral, proving that there’s no such thing as a boring industry if you can tap into what hooks your audience.

5. Participate in a group discussion

LinkedIn Groups provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share their insights and experiences, ask for guidance, and build valuable connections. You can find and share information on resources and events, discover job opportunities, answer questions, post articles, and communicate with new members. Join groups from your areas of interest related to: school/alumni, religion, hobbies, industry, LinkedIn, or regional groups. You can join up to 100 groups; so, take advantage of it. You can find groups to join by searching at the top of your homepage or viewing the groups you’ve already joined.

6. Repost meaningful content

If you’ve created a company page in addition to your personal account, you can directly repost existing public posts in your feed from other LinkedIn members on your Company LinkedIn Page and add your own ideas or questions to the post you want to share.

Tell your audience why you reposted something: what stood out to you, what is a key takeaway you had, why it is relevant to your company?

Not only does reposting content save you time, but lets your contacts know what content had an effect on you and that it is worth sharing. Reposting gives credit to the original creator and helps draw a new audience to your page.

7. Check up on your competitors

LinkedIn can assist you to monitor your competition and work to differentiate your content from theirs. You can track their accomplishments, their new product development, and anticipate their next step in your marketplace.

8. Inspire your employees

As the leader of your organization, your people are looking to you as the example of what is expected. If your profile is not up to best practices’ standards, it shows to the outside world that you don’t take the time to manage it properly. How can you expect others to do so? If you don’t lead, who will inspire your team? Get your people on the same page with you; take the first step and show them the way it should be done.

9. Improve your own profile

Most leaders who aren’t in search for a job often stop putting their best profile forward. If you have a poor profile image, a missing or weak background image, or an inadequate “About” section it can be a subconscious turn off to both clients and prospects. Since you set the standard for your company to follow, make sure your current position is up to date and list at least five relevant skills to increase the chance your profile will be discovered.

10. Solidify your Company Page

Your Company Page provides the opportunity to tell your company story, share career opportunities, and engage with followers and prospects. If used wisely, it can be an effective tool for generating new business leads and nurturing referral relationships.

These 10 tips offer a lot of tactics to choose from. Pick the one that will give you the quickest result. Then try some others. If you need help, just call on us. We’d be glad to help you get more effective. We have lots more Fresh Ideas like this in our blog archive.