LinkedIn Hacks To Grow Your Business And Career This Year

LinkedIn has more than half a billion users you can connect with to discover career opportunities, expand your sales channel and even leverage to become a thought leader. In fact, there are several testimonies of how people  got their big breaks on the social network.

So, if you are active on LinkedIn, below are 3 ways you can use it to grow your career and business.

1. Get personal email of people you want to connect with

Imagine there is someone you need to discuss an opportunity with, but you do not have the contact. How will you go about it? With LinkedIn, you can search the profile of the person and send a connection request. When the person accepts the invite, LinkedIn makes it possible for you to get the email of your contacts. 

Why do I love the hack ? 

This is one of the best ways to get the primary contacts of anyone. Usually, when most people sign up to LinkedIn, they use their primary email account and some users even add their phone number or other means of contact.

You can even do this at scale by exporting the contacts of all your connections at once into an excel spreadsheet and start emailing them about my products and services. Here is a simple guide to download contacts on LinkedIn

2. Build your expert status as a thought leader.

Many people want to be recognized as an expert, the challenge is lack of platform. Today, platforms like LinkedIn makes it possible to amplify your expert opinions. Some of my favourite connections are influencers on LinkedIn.

Why I love this hack ?

You enjoy the privilege to be considered an expert in the area of your expertise. For example, Kayode Abbas is a LinkedIn expert who uses the platform to help B2B generate leads and help HR to connect with the right candidates.  By all standard, Prof Nduibisi Ekekwe is one of the leading LinkedIn experts. He even mentioned in a previous article how LinkedIn has become his lab.

If you are just starting out, you will gain exposure by writing very informed comments on articles written by experts in your space.

3. Advance your career and land your next job. 

I will share with you 5 unique ways you can use LinkedIn to advance your career and even land yourself a dream job.

• Use LinkedIn’s recruiter feature to land your next job.This feature makes it super easy to setup your profile so employers know you are available for job (without revealing it to your current employer). You can access this feature from your dashboard view
• Use LinkedIn to evaluate your career path and steps it will take to get there. I do this a lot. On LinkedIn, I might search for a job position. Like “digital business strategy”. I will use the filter to configure the results so I can get relevant profiles. Then, I view the profiles to check for academic records and previous roles the person held before “arriving” at their current position. Check out this article on how I use this knowledge to map my own career development plan.

• Building connections with people in companies you want to work at. Identify top 5 companies you want to work at, search for it on LinkedIn and connect with some of the senior people working in those organizations (including HR). Then engage with them politely via direct messages to learn about their culture and job opportunities. 

• Improve yourself with professional courses. Take courses on LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) and other online learning platforms. When you complete such courses, add them to your LinkedIn profile to showcase your knowledge.

• Ask colleagues and friends to write recommendations about you. Sometimes, these recommendations validate what you say about yourself and tend to act as recommendation about your previous works.

Now that you know how best to use LinkedIn to your advantage. Take steps to implement some of these in 2020. I will be glad to know how any of these hacks help you.

Wole Ogunlade is a business growth strategist. His experience included working with early-stage startups and ventures that have raised funding and exceeded more than $10 million monthly in revenues generated.