20 Reasons to Rock LinkedIn, How It Can Help Your Job Search or Your Business - Part 1

Recent statistics from Hootsuite show that LinkedIn has an average of 675 million monthly users, with 30 million companies actively engaging on the platform. An ad on LinkedIn has the potential to reach 12% of the world's population, and overall engagement has increased by 50% year on year. get the full report here.

LinkedIn is my preferred social media platform, I have a presence on other platforms, but LinkedIn for me meets my needs, allows me to meet great people and is a very engaging and fun place to be. The above statistics are an added advantage and makes LinkedIn and ideal platform whether you are a business or an individual.

So here are the 20 reasons why I use LinkedIn, Part 1.

#Reason 1: It is the Meeting Place for Professionals

LinkedIn is the hub of activity for professionals and people working in the corporate space, whether you are an employee or an employer running your own business, LinkedIn provides a great place for networking and interaction. If you want to learn new things and meet great people with similar interests as yours, LinkedIn is the place to be.

#Reason 2: Posts have a Longer Life Span on LinkedIn

Posts on LinkedIn have a longer lifespan than posts on some of the other platforms like Instagram and Twitter. A post on LinkedIn if it is engaging can be active for up to a month in some instances, so when using the platform, write quality content, discuss interesting issues, and actively engage on other people's posts. This will help you get noticed as a credible candidate and also as a business owner.

#Reason 3: Text, Images, Videos? Choose Your Content

LinkedIn is flexible and allows you to choose your preferred format for your content, unlike Instagram that is image-driven. You can't post on IG without an image. Creating several images for posts that don't have a long lifespan can be overwhelming for some. LinkedIn does not have that challenge. If you are a writer - It's great. If you love graphics? Equally cool. Whatever your preference is, you are fine on LinkedIn.

#Reason 4: LinkedIn is Straightforward and Easy to Use.

One thing I find a bit annoying when on Instagram is that too many things are going on. You have the feed, Instagram stories and IGTV which has been replaced with reels. If you are posting on Instagram, Reels will get you much more exposure than feed posts. This is because Reels are shown to anyone on IG that has shown an interest in the topic of your content, unlike feed posts that only get shown to your followers or if you are lucky show up in explore when people search for hashtags that you used on the post/

LinkedIn introduced stories to the platform a while back but later discontinued it. But the enablement of Live Video and the ability to change your profile to "Content Creator" provides much more value and reach.

The major differences between a Content Creator and Standard LinkedIn Profile are:

• Your button will change from "connect" to "Follow" - LinkedIn will encourage people to follow you which means they may not be able to connect and if they don't have a premium account they may not be able to send you an InMail. So, it's helpful to ensure that you have other communication details on your profile like an email or link to Calendly so prospective customers can reach you.

• The Number of Followers you have is Displayed. Again, if you think you don't have enough followers you may reconsider changing to Creator Mode. In the Standard mode you can choose to hide the number of followers. Also with the standard mode, whether you have a million connections or five hundred connections, your profile would always display 500+ connections.

• Hashtags are displayed under your title - this is a useful feature as it allows anyone visiting your profile to quickly see the topics you talk about and are interested in.

• Featured activity is shown first - So unlike the standard profile, Creator mode allows you to choose a number of posts or articles to feature on your page. These could be LinkedIn posts or articles or something external like from your blog or Youtube channel. This is a great way to show your followers and visitors to your page samples of your best content.

• You can create you very own Newsletter, the good thing about this is that you can create a Newsletter for your page or your personal profile, also Newsletters are a great way to grow your followership as people who don't follow you or who are not directly connected to you can subscribe.

So, you decide whether Standard or Creator Mode is right for you.

#Reason 5: Use LinkedIn as a Blog with LinkedIn Articles

Love to write but don't have a blog? No problem, you can express your writing skill through LinkedIn Articles. LinkedIn Articles look just like blog posts, your network can engage on them just like normal posts and they are even visible to people outside LinkedIn. Whenever anybody searches for content using certain keywords your article will come up in search engines if you have used the same hashtags and keywords in your writeup.

So, these are the first 5 reasons to see the rest go here: Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Images: Pixabay, Steve Loastes

Written by Lady Shayo Imologome

Business Growth Strategist, Management Consultant, and Keynote Speaker