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 aga