~by Haley Lynn Gray~
A lot of people want to like LinkedIn and can’t work out how to make it useful. I understand completely — every platform has its own conventions, and they shift out from underneath you while you think you’ve learned them.
Which is why this is organised around what doesn’t change rather than which button to press. The features move. The underlying thing doesn’t.
The idea most people get backwards
Your profile is the destination. Your activity is the traffic.
Most business owners have this the wrong way round. They post occasionally, get little response, and conclude the platform doesn’t work — while the profile people land on after seeing their name reads like a CV from a job search in 2014.
That’s the whole failure. Activity sends people somewhere, and the somewhere isn’t doing its job.
So before posting anything: if a potential client landed on your profile right now, would it tell them what you do, who for, and why they should care? For most owners the honest answer is no — it tells them where you used to work.
Fixing the destination
The headline is the highest-leverage text you have. It follows you everywhere — every comment, every search result, every notification. “Owner at [Company]” tells nobody anything. What you do and who for is far more useful.
Write the top section for a client, not a recruiter. Most profiles open with a career summary. The person reading is trying to decide whether you can help them, so lead with what you actually do and what happens for people who work with you.
Recommendations do real work. This was true when I first wrote about it and it’s more true now, because it’s the one part of your profile you didn’t write. Think about it from the other side: would you rather hire the person with fifteen specific recommendations or the one with none?
Ask for them routinely, shortly after you’ve done good work, and be specific about what would help — “would you mention the turnaround time?” produces something far more useful than a general request.
Keep it current. Not constantly. But a profile that stopped being updated three years ago reads as a business that may have stopped too.
Generating the traffic
Commenting beats posting when you’re starting. This is the single most useful thing here and it’s counterintuitive. A thoughtful comment on someone else’s well-read post puts you in front of their audience. Your own post, early on, reaches almost nobody.
Ten good comments a week will do more than one polished post, and they take less time.
Post things only you could write. Specifics from your actual work — what happened, what you learned, what you’d do differently. Generic business advice performs badly because there’s an infinite supply of it.
Longer pieces still work. The branding of LinkedIn’s article feature has changed over the years, but the principle holds: something substantial, published where business people are, will be found by the right person eventually.
If you also blog, put it on your own site first and let it get indexed before republishing anywhere else.
Connect with a note. A request with one line about why is accepted far more often, and it starts an actual relationship rather than adding a number.
What’s changed since I first wrote this
Worth being straight about it, because advice that doesn’t age is advice nobody checked.
Groups aren’t what they were. When I first wrote this, LinkedIn groups were a genuine route to an audience. That declined substantially. Some niche ones still work; most are now largely promotional noise. Don’t build a strategy on them.
The feed rewards conversation. Posts that generate real discussion in the comments travel further than ones that don’t. Which means a post ending in an actual question outperforms one ending in a statement — provided the question is genuine rather than engagement bait.
And video and images moved, repeatedly, and will move again. Don’t build around a format. Build around having something worth saying, in whatever form the platform currently favours.
The honest constraint
LinkedIn works if you’re on it consistently, and it does very little if you’re not.
That’s not a platform quirk — it’s the same for all of them. Which is why the best advice remains what it was: pick one or two, use them properly, and ignore the rest.
For most business-to-business work, LinkedIn is the obvious one, because it’s the only platform where talking about your work is the expected behaviour rather than an intrusion. That’s a genuine advantage and it’s worth using.
If your clients aren’t there — and for plenty of businesses they aren’t — then none of this matters, and you should be wherever they actually are.
More on choosing where to be visible and what changes once people know you.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
