3 Strategies for Networking on LinkedIn

You’ve followed my seven steps to making a marketable LinkedIn profile and you’re asking, “Taylor, why aren’t my DMs blowing up with job offers?”

Hold on, you’ve skipped a step.

LinkedIn is a great resource to get noticed, but you have to go out of your way to get noticed too. Start with these three tips for effective networking on LinkedIn.

1. Post Content

LinkedIn and Twitter are the only two platforms where you have true organic reach. What do I mean by organic reach? It means if I post something, I can have zero followers and a ton of people who see it. Cool, right? This is why LinkedIn is so important.

I don’t know why we’re so comfortable posting on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook about our families and vacations, but we don’t post about our jobs. We don’t document our career journeys.

That’s the kind of content you can post on LinkedIn. The more you post engaging content, you’ll find people in your field commenting, liking, and connecting with you.

What kind of content should you be posting?

Document your career journey. Write a blog where you post about what technologies you’re learning. Share the progress you’re making on a sweet side project. Tag someone in your network in a post to celebrate their successes.

People love other people’s stories. We are naturally nosey as human beings. It’s why we rubberneck on the side of the road, why we binge-watch Netflix documentaries, and why you should create rich, interesting content about your career on LinkedIn.

You just have to package it in a way that will add value to other people in your network.

2. Treat Likes and Comments like meet-ups and conferences.

LinkedIn tends to value comments and likes more than the actual post. The more you engage with other professionals in your network, the more visible you are to people in their network.

LinkedIn has seen so much more activity since the pandemic began. In some ways, it has filled the gap that the absence of meet-ups and conferences left. Will we go back to meet-ups and conferences?

Sure.

What I’m saying is that we’ve re-defined what engagement looks like in digital spaces. You need to engage with people by liking and commenting on their LinkedIn posts a lot. Treat them like any other opportunity to network.

I’ve built so many incredible relationships in the software industry that I’d never had the opportunity to meet in person just because of the amount of time we’ve spent commenting on each other’s posts. Comments turn into relationships which turn into opportunities. That’s networking.

3. Sliiiiide into those DMs.

“But Taylor, whose DMs should I slide into?”

Start with people you have something in common with.

Find them using LinkedIn’s advanced search filters. Here’s how I would do it:

Filter your search by people who attended your school. Then filter them to match your location and industry.

Lean on people who are already within your other networks to incorporate in your LinkedIn network, then fan-out from there.

These people will be much easier to approach because you already share something in common with them. Send them a message! Most people will respond to you.

Well, as long as you’re not weird about it.

Don’t worry though. We’ll cover the finer points of DMs in the next entry in this series.