We all want our research to be read and widely recognised. Don’t miss out and learn what is LinkedIn about and how it can help you grow as an academic!

Last week I shared the main reasons why I think LinkedIn is a great place to disseminate research. I trust this encouraged you to try and test it yourself! If you haven’t done so, connect with Magda and me and engage with us. 

Today I want to answer your questions about LinkedIn and share my experience with actually using this platform over the past couple of years. I also always get asked why do you really need to use LinkedIn, why do you need to use another platform to actually share your research? Is LinkedIn that effective to actually share research? And if it is, why it is so effective?

I’m going to share the insights from my reflections on how I’m using LinkedIn and why I see value in it. Hopefully, this will encourage you to actually build your profile and your expert brand on LinkedIn – so let’s get started! 

Why to use LinkedIn?

The first question I want to answer is why do you actually use LinkedIn? What’s the main reason for using this specific social platform compared to Twitter or Facebook that are known by so many other people?

Well, the first thing is LinkedIn is a social network with a very specific audience.  I say that because LinkedIn has about 760 million users spread across the world, from around 200 countries right now. But the main benefit of using LinkedIn is that 40% of that 760 million people is actually active on a daily basis. So they use LinkedIn on a daily basis and that tells you something right? Ask yourself why do they use it on a daily basis? This is mostly because LinkedIn is focused on professionals who want to build their brand and who want to learn something new every day for the rest of their lives.

So it’s all about building community, building relationships, but also building your expertise and showing your expertise to those people who might actually want to use it. So being on LinkedIn and having very engaged network, well-designed profile, sharing content that’s engaging and interesting to your audiences an opportunity for you to build yourself a profile that is seen as an expert profile in your field.

And if you look at people in sales – I always try to follow what people in sales do because they tend to know this stuff – they say that LinkedIn gets you two to three times more engagement compared to any other platform. This is because of its specific focus on learning on development and on new knowledge.  so that’s one of the main reasons why I personally decided to use LinkedIn – mostly because it’s focused mostly on learning. That’s why I encourage others to actually use it.

But there is a problem with LinkedIn. This is mostly because people don’t know what LinkedIn is supposed to be used for. That’s the main problem because they see it as yet another social media and they try to treat it like Facebook or Twitter and they don’t understand the benefits.

I’ve just told you a little bit about the benefits, such as high engagement, professional focus, focus on learning, but there are many other benefits that I will mention later in this article.

Also people don’t know how to make the most out of this platform and to build an expert brand. It’s because they just think about it as as yet another social network – so it doesn’t really matter what you publish right? But the truth is that it matters what you publish! It matters when you publish it! And it matters what’s the value that you give to your audience. And i’m going to talk about value a bit later when

I’m going to share my insights and my practice that actually helped me to build a very engaged network.  What do I mean by the engaged network? As of April 2021, my network is about to reach 10k followers –  that’s quite big I would say! And each of my posts attracts between 5-15k or even 20 000 views, 300 likes – it’s important because it actually tells me that the content that I produce adds value to my network and it helps me to build relationships with them. So i’m going to share some of my insights some of my reflections on how you can do this and how you can build an engaged network yourself.

The most common mistakes of using LinkedIn

Before I start talking about how you can use LinkedIn, I want to tell you what mistakes you have to avoid. I really want to be honest about this and I want you to understand that you know although the main purpose of using LinkedIn is to build your professional profile and become recognised in your research area, you can share your achievements, you can share your experience, you can share your educational background,  but there is one specific mistake that people make when using LinkedIn. 

The most common mistake is that people forget that LinkedIn is not your CV! it’s not something that you know you prepare once and submit for a job application, although you can apply for jobs on LinkedIn, but that’s a completely different story.  So how do LinkedIn and resume differ? Linkedin, although it has a kind of focus on professional brand, education and learning, well it’s a little bit more informal than your resume. It’s all about building relationships between your audience and yourself so that you start to talk to them and build some sort of collaborations with them as you go along with you building your network. Or even get a job! But definitely, it’s not just intended to be used for one-way communication where you just , for example, scroll through the feed.

You need to add value but you also need to engage with your audience. So it’s much more interactive than any other social media as well as much more interactive than your CV – it’s not only about your profile! In your profile you will, of course, explain who you are, what you do, what’s your background, what studies did you finish and what projects did you do. But after all, it’s all about what you add on the top of this! So it’s much more interactive as you can share a variety of different content on that platform from posts, know articles, videos – make use of it! I hope you will not make this a mistake that you won’t use your LinkedIn profile CV only and that you indulge in it and that you engage with your audience!

How LinkedIn can help you grow your career? 

Now that you know what LinkedIn is, and what LinkedIn isn’t, let me talk about how LinkedIn can help you grow your career and grow your professional brand.

The main benefit of using LinkedIn compared to social media other social media like Twitter or Facebook is that most of the recruiters or hiring managers actually use LinkedIn. So we have statistics that says that about 93% of recruiters use LinkedIn almost on a daily basis. It’s the best way to actually get into positions that aren’t advertised elsewhere.

LinkedIn is also great to actually showcase your expertise via your profile. You can present what projects you did, what publications you published, what achievements you achieved in your career. Also you can showcase your skills, the projects that you delivered in a way that you actually share the content of the projects in the form of blogs, articles, videos so you can talk about what’s exciting about your project and you can educate your audience about it. 

Then as you go along and as you start building your network, you will start to gain social recognition for your skills so you get a number of recommendations and endorsements that will actually show that other people value what you do and they recognize your achievements in this specific research area.

Remember that you can use LinkedIn to actually grow your professional network and if I knew what I know right now, I would start doing it from the very beginning of my PhD! unfortunately,, I didn’t and I started a little bit later but I’d strongly encourage you to start building your professional network from the very beginning. It’s mostly because you can talk to so many people from many organizations that you can potentially work with or you can work for. You can also directly speak to the decision-makers, CEOs, technical managers, sustainability managers just to name a few. And they will either collaborate with you on your projects or they might actually indicate the opening for your future career. So make sure you engage with those people!

Another benefit of using LinkedIn and how you can use LinkedIn to advance your career is to join focus groups. So similarly to Facebook, LinkedIn has specific kind of groups that collects people with the same interests. For example, there are a number of groups in my research area, which is carbon capture storage. So I am a member of some of those groups where I regularly engage with people via discussions about developing new ideas and collaborative bids.  This is again an opportunity to share your research and get more people to view your published paper or insights from your project. But also it’s all about getting to know your collaborators,  getting to know other people who might be interested in working together in solving the problem that you’re trying to solve.

The main benefit of actually being on LinkedIn is that, as I already mentioned, the most of the hiring managers are there which means that most of the jobs available on the market are being advertised over there.  Make sure that you use these specific features of LinkedIn to your benefit and to advance your career.

Finally, the main benefit of using LinkedIn is the ability to share your work. I will talk about sharing work in a different video (I’ll share a link once it’s available!). In summary, when you publish your work in an academic journal or when you present at the conference, you can share the document with your network and they will be very happy to get access to it. It’s mostly because most of the papers are behind paywalls, unless you pay APC charges. So by sharing your documents on LinkedIn is how you can get people to actually read the work that you already published.

But that’s not the only thing you can share. You can also share news and insights from your research area and become a thought leader in that area. This means that people will actually understand better that area because of you as you educate them and help them understand what are current trends and challenges in your research area. You also raise awareness and that’s one of the most important things that we have to do! If you’re solving, for example, climate change, you really have to educate people about this especially people from outside of your research area because they might not be aware of those issues. So use LinkedIn to share your work, reflect on your work and on your research area, but also help others is the key part of LinkedIn.

It’s all about building an engaged community. All the content that you produce needs to add value. But also if you can recommend someone for a job or if you can recommend someone for collaboration – do it! Be a good person and support others! 

What is LinkedIn all about then?

To answer the main question of this article – what is LinkedIn all about – well there are three main important things you need to know about LinkedIn and that will help you advance your career and will help you grow your network.

The first thing I want to mention about LinkedIn is that you need to give lots of value.  What it means is before you post anything, think about whether that will add value to your network.  Think about whether that content would add value to you if someone else would post it. And just posting pretty pictures of cats it’s not something you would be posting on LinkedIn! It’s because it simply doesn’t add value! Yeah you can have a little bit of fun with it but if you look at the main principle of LinkedIn, which is adding value educating people, you really have to have some quality content to actually help people and so that they will engage with.

Another thing is that it’s not only about posting, so you shouldn’t just post and forget about your LinkedIn profile. Ince you post on LinkedIn, it’s a good practice to actually engage with others as well. It doesn’t need to be hours! It will be enough to spend 10-15 minutes a day during which you actually read, comment on posts by other people in your network. 

Another tip that I want to give you is please use hashtags and search using hashtags. That’s how you can narrow down what you actually see – you don’t really want to scroll through the feed because that will be quite a lot of information and say 70% of it might not be relevant to what you want to achieve or what you want to read about. So use hashtags or use keywords that you align with what you want to read about. And then engage with people who post in that research area.

You might also connect with them or follow them that will you know help you grow your network. As you start posting valuable stuff on a regular basis and if you start engaging with others by liking, commenting and reposting their stuff as well, you will start gaining recognition for what you do. This will lead to new opportunities!

How you create value on LinkedIn?

How you can give value? I’ve been talking about value but what value actually is? I define value as something useful to others. When I post content, I always ask myself “would that be valuable to someone else?”. What it means is will they learn something from it? I don’t really want to post something that’s just for the sake of posting it so that I keep consistency. I always ask myself –  will they learn something from it? Will they gain a new perspective? Will it introduce a discussion on some challenging topics such as climate change? You can share a broad variety of valuable content, but always actually ask yourself what value does this add to your network.

I mentioned that there are a number of types of content that you can share. And the most common one is of course a post. That’s the type that most people actually post. In your post you can talk about the recent news in your research area. industry, or worldwide. Because that’s that’s quite interesting!

But just reposting content it’s not always enough. I strongly advise you to actually add your perspective! Think about what will add value to your connections, what your thinking is, what’s your reflections are on this specific topic. Share reflections on what’s going on in your research. Share your publications and reports. And the best thing? You can share those as PDF documents and people can just scroll through them.

There’s inherent value to sharing academic content via LinkedIn. People can actually download your paper and read it – but make sure that you share the author accepted copy so that you don’t break any rules set by the publishers.

You also go for conferences, right? You attend conferences, you prepare slides that you present at the conference and then most of this content actually sits on your drive, right? You’ve got lots of slide decks that are usually used just once. So the good news is that you can use it on LinkedIn! Write a very brief description of what that is and share it with your network as a document – they will definitely appreciate it.

Moreover, you can produce videos either live or recorded videos. Video content is you know quite popular recently, so if you can prepare a couple of minutes video about what you do in your research and why you do it, what are the implications then you would really add value to your network. I can’t emphasize this enough, but giving value to your network is how you get recognised. This is because you don’t really want to ask to be recognized – you need to add value first.

What should you post on LinkedIn?

I already told you more or less what you should post on LinkedIn, but I want to get a little bit deeper into this and give you some examples of what I post personally. It’s mostly because I always get this question – so what should I post?. I know I can post a post, an article, I can record a video, but what do I really post? What’s the content that I really have to include so that it adds value and make sure that people will learn from it?

Your post should actually reflect the profession, industry and the field of research that you’re in. If you want to build an engaged profile that focuses, let’s say, on climate change or that positions yourself as the top architect in your field, then you would really need to make sure that your content reflects that! You can talk about your profession, the challenges and opportunities in that field. You can also talk about your professional interests – just tell your story, share your experience and people love that.

Importantly, make sure that you post regularly. I mentioned that couple of times and it doesn’t really matter whether you post on a daily basis or once a week or twice a week, as long as you are regular with your posting. Your followers will start recognising this. They will see that say on Thursday afternoon you will post content that’s related to climate change and they will engage with it because they will expect the content from you.

You can, for example, regularly update them on the progress of your research. If you achieve a milestone in your research you, develop a model or you finish a set of experiments, you might actually explain what you did, what you learned, and what are the implications to the wider area of research. You’ve got 1300 characters so it’s pretty short, but it’s enough to explain what you did, what you learned, and what are the implications. Also, if you can write it very concisely, then you really understand!

You can also explain what is the news in your organization that you work for. If your colleagues work on something exciting that’s kind of relevant to your research area, you might share it or even repost if they are active on your or on LinkedIn. Well. if you don’t have you know any news from your research area. the good place to find news in your survey is Google – just google your keyword, say again, “carbon capture” in my case, and “news” and you see the recent news,. That’s how you can easily get some content to actually share with your network. 

I mentioned LinkedIn is all about engagement. So it’s not about you, it’s not only about you posting stuff to your connections. It’s all about discussions! So a good way to actually engage with your audience is to ask them questions. So if you work on a specific piece of work and you kind of thinking whether it’s correct or whether you have to improve it, you can ask this kind of questions to your network and they will be eager to actually engage and help you out. Or if you’re interested in a specific field, you might ask questions about it and people would be happy to engage within this kind of discussion.

What to remember when posting on LinkedIn?

What you should remember when posting on LinkedIn is to make sure that your post gets wide recognition. Similarly to Twitter, you may want to use hashtags. Hashtags categories together all the posts with this specific hashtag – I guess we all know what hashtags! Just use two to three hashtags per post and use them at the very end of your post. Don’t abuse them because your post will be kind penalised and it wouldn’t reach the audience it deserves.

It’s also useful to optimize your content for mobile devices. Most of us use mobile devices to scroll through LinkedIn and if you see a block of text then you just scroll it down. You don’t read it because you don’t really want to,  it’s difficult to read, and it’s difficult to distinguish the most important information. Instead, use short sentences, short paragraphs and actually emphasize the most important points that you make in your post.

If you are happy to, consider recording a video because it gets more engagement and it’s more authentic like the video at the beginning of this article. I believe that it’s much more engaging when I talk to you rather than when I just type it down. That’s why I encourage you to consider recording a video and engage with your audience.

How to engage with others on LinkedIn?

As I mentioned. engaging with your network is important not only because you want to show your perspective on a specific topic or add value to someone else’s career, or you know discuss with others, but it’s also a way to actually present yourself as a person that’s willing to collaborate, that’s engaging with others – this gets noticed! People notice that to engage, you post comments on or even repost others posts. I encourage you to like, comment and enjoy posts! Enjoy collaborating with others on LinkedIn!

It’s also important that you can direct message your connections. If you see someone posted something and you an idea you might develop with them together, don’t feel afraid to DM them. Don’t be worried, don’t look at the size of the network. I know people sometimes get intimidated if they are about to message someone who is higher in the organisation than them, but you don’t have to be worried. LinkedIn is all about collaboration, learning and working together. Make sure that if you have an idea that you think that person might be interested in, DM them and be very specific about why you are connecting with them. Briefly explain why you are messaging them, and don’t be pushy! Just be polite and professional.

Connect and follow other people that inspire you! That’s the best way to build your network and tailor the feed that you see. If you connect with relevant people and follow relevant people, they will become part of your network, and your network will grow in the direction you want. So if you want to focus on, let’s say, F1 racing, then you try to connect with people with the same interest. You can join the same groups, you can connect with people who are interested in F1 racing, you post content on F1 racing, and your network will start recognising this. If your content is of high quality, you will become a taught leader in that research area!

The best way to actually grow your network is by connecting with other people. But be very careful about this. Don’t send hundreds of invitations a day because your account may be banned for this and classified as spamming account. Be reasonable and send 10 requests a day if your network is small. When you send invitations, write a small note about why you want to connect and how you can add value to that person. What’s important you don’t have to connect only with people who you know personally. Connect with people within your research area, so you have a good reason why you connect with that person. But you don’t need to know them [yet!] because LinkedIn is all about building relationships.

Recognise others and add value! 

Once you have a network and start collaborating with other people, you want to appreciate them, and you will want to be appreciated by them. So what I highly recommend is to endorse and recommend others if you know feel like it. Don’t fake it, and don’t do it for the sake of doing it. But if you worked with someone on a project and admire what they did, recommend them on LinkedIn.

It’s valuable mostly because that shows that you appreciate people, their skills and collaboration in general. You can appreciate them via recommendations – you can write down a very short recommendation about their skills, performance, what they did, what’s inspired you. They will also likely have several skills on their profile and you can endorse them. 

As I already mentioned but LinkedIn provides an opportunity to share new job opportunities with others. So if you see a job opportunity that might be relevant to your colleague, share it with them or share it with your network. This will help people who are looking for jobs to use that opportunity.

Also, you can introduce others to your network where relevant. What that means is if you see that someone is looking for a job in your network, you might actually repost it, and then people from your network will see that person, and they might start to engage with them.

Some time ago, I used to have a series of posts (#featurethursday) where I promoted young researchers to my LinkedIn network. And some of them started engaging with prospective supervisors! If you want to be promoted or featured my LinkedIn, DM me on LinkedIn or using the contact form.

A final word…

To sum up, the most important message I want to present in this article is you should have fun with LinkedIn. There is no right and wrong with it in terms of the content and the type of posts. But you really have to experiment and try what works for you. As academics and as researchers, we shouldn’t have an issue with that. We like experimenting and testing stuff! So experiment, test and reflect. The main message here is that if you find that something works better for your audience and yourself, do more of it –  that’s how you grow your network, that’s how you grow your professional brand, and that’s how you become an expert in your research area!