Active on LinkedIn is “the perfect game plan” from a job search standpoint. 92% of the recruiters reported using social media to look for potential fit candidates & 87% use LinkedIn to search talent. If you wish to generate incremental job leads & want your profile appear at the epicentre of people’s mind, then LinkedIn is the best professional platform to leverage.
By actively engaging on LinkedIn, your network gets to hear & learn from the content you share. The more you engage, the more chances are your posts appearing on the feeds of your connections & followers. This will help you stay among the top searches on LinkedIn & remain active within & outside your network.
The question arises how active should you be? If you are on active job-seeker mode, target to post two updates/articles on a daily basis. However, if you are a passive job seeker one post a day would suffice your purpose to engage. You would be surprised to learn that posting once a day enables you to reach out to 60% of followers on LinkedIn. Job-seekers with one update on a weekly basis are 10 times more likely to be contacted by recruiters & headhunters compared to those having inactive LinkedIn profile.
Such activity/updates can include posts, blog, comment, like or sharing an article. Unless you are writing a blog, such activities do not require more than 10 minutes of invested time daily.
I can vet that ROI from this activity is pretty good given that 70% of my clients contacted me through LinkedIn.
The million dollar question: What kind of content should you share?
As a job seeker, you should never post where you discuss your aspiration to land with your next job. You should never directly solicit a potential role aligning with your competencies. Instead focus on sharing industry insights, company news & information related to products/services related to your sector. Besides, you can be interactive, posing questions related to particular trends in industry, CSR or commercial practices & even about new technology which may provide impetus to growth of your target/related industry. Here, the kind of content you share should be a function of who your target audience is: target industry, company, influencer, decision makers, hiring managers & recruiters.
How to structure a strategy around content sharing?
Start with sharing industry news. You can either subscribe to google updates & setting up google alerts or sign up for free content with aggregators such as Scoop.it or Flipboard.
You can also search by content on LinkedIn &/or choose to follow frequent & famous contributors such as CEO, founders to leading & serial entrepreneurs. LinkedIn groups are another potential source of initiating a dialogue. Whatever you share in groups has a two fold networking effect. First, It can be easily viewed & read by other members of the group. Secondly, it appears on your activity feed.
If you are hard pressed for time to share content/engage through comments sharing & likes, consider opening a free account with social media content sharing websites such as Buffer. These websites allow you to schedule a certain number of posts per week ahead of time. However if you want to share more than the allotted post, you have to subscribe to the paid version.
You should check out your LinkedIn first thing in the morning & last thing in the evening while wrapping up the day. Devoting just 5 to 10 minutes of your time can ensure a consistent online presence.
If you are looking for a quick job search & want your profile’s reach extend to maximum number of people/headhunters, being active on LinkedIn would turn out to be a winning proposition.
