Growth Hacking LinkedIn™ E-Book

Björn Radde

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 167

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

More connections, more followers, more engagement and more visibility on LinkedIn. The professional social media network LinkedIn™ is growing steadily and is becoming increasingly important as a platform for personal branding. This book is about how growth hacking can be used to give a personal brand a substantial and sustainable boost. In total 111 growth hacks for LinkedIn will help you to establish your personal brand and expand your own network. Many other tips and tricks explain how to share the right content and which software can help you to work effectively.

Leseprobe

Growth Hacking LinkedIn™

Opportunities to expand your personal network and increase your professional visibility on LinkedIn.

Björn Radde

English edition

All information and details in this book have been compiled with the utmost care. However, no guarantee can be given for the accuracy of the information. The author accepts no liability for any incorrect information that may remain and its consequences.

© 2022 Björn Radde

Publisher & Print (on behalf of the author):

tredition GmbH, An der Strusbek 10, 22926 Ahrensburg, Germany

ISBN Softcover: 978-3-347-78649-3

ISBN E-Book: 978-3-347-78658-5

ISBN Großschrift: 978-3-347-78662-2

The work, including its parts, is protected by copyright. Any exploitation is prohibited without the consent of the publisher and the author. This applies to electronic or other reproduction, translation, distribution and making available to the public.

Bibliographic information of the German National Library: The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data can be accessed on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

"The only work that is really worthwhile in the long run is working on yourself. "

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgement

1 Introduction

1.1 Objective

1.2 Structure

2 The Growth Hacking Principle

2.1 Phases of growth hacking

2.1.1 Ideate phase

2.1.2 Prioritization phase

2.1.3 Test phase

2.1.4 Analysis phase

2.2 Growth Hacking LinkedIn

3 LinkedIn Growth Hacks

3.1 Personal profile

3.1.1 Profile entry

3.1.2 Creator Mode

3.1.3 Featured section

3.1.4 Professional experience and training

3.1.5 Knowledge and skills

3.1.6 Recommendations

3.1.7 Languages

3.1.8 Publications

3.1.9 Profile strengths

3.2 Contact

3.2.1 Personalized invitations

3.2.2 Active and passive contacting

3.2.3 Contacting personalities

3.2.4 Refuse to contact

3.3 Contact search

3.3.1 Search function and filter

3.3.2 Newsfeed

3.3.3 Profile visits

3.3.4 Groups

3.3.5 Job advertisements

3.3.6 Content creation

3.3.7 Software support

3.3.8 Buying followers

3.4 Contributions

3.4.1 Posts

3.4.2 Stories

3.4.3 Article

3.4.4 Comments

3.4.5 Newsletter

3.4.6 Live streams

3.4.7 Audio Rooms

3.4.8 Power Engagement

3.4.9 Engagement-purchase

3.5 LinkedIn app

3.5.1 Contact

3.5.2 Communication

3.5.3 Cover Story

3.5.4 Other functions

3.6 LinkedIn advertising

3.7 Social Selling Index

4 Growth Hacking Software

4.1 LinkedIn analysis tools

4.1.1 Shield

4.1.2 InLytics

4.1.3 Klipfolio

4.2 LinkedIn Automation Tools

4.2.1 Linked Helper

4.2.2 Dux Soup

4.2.3 Alfred

4.3 LinkedIn Productivity Tools

4.3.1 LinkedIn Sales Navigator

4.3.2 Zapier

4.4 LinkedIn profile data tools

4.4.1 Crystal Knows

4.4.2 Chartloop

4.5 LinkedIn publishing tools

4.5.1 Buffer

4.5.2 Hootsuite

4.5.3 Planable

4.5.4 Social Pilot

4.5.5 Drumup

4.6 LinkedIn content tools

4.6.1 Answer The Public

4.6.2 Quora

4.6.3 Twitter

4.6.4 AuthoredIn

4.6.5 Remove.bg

5 Conclusion and outlook

About the author

Bibliography

List of figures

List of abbreviations

Foreword

I had my first contact with social networks in 2004: I had created an account at OpenBC. Today, this network is called Xing. This was followed by Facebook in 2007 and Twitter in 2009. Then, in 2012, Instagram was added and, shortly after that, the business network LinkedIn.

My reach on LinkedIn grew very quickly because I was able to present my passion for digital marketing in the best possible way here. A topic that seems rather boring on Facebook and is almost impossible to present on Instagram. As a digital marketer, I can also use many of LinkedIn's options and I try to optimize my LinkedIn presence on a daily basis.

The decisive factor for the decision to write a book about self-marketing and the possibilities of personal growth on LinkedIn was then the following fact:

Through my regular posts on LinkedIn, I generated a certain amount of attention, so colleagues and friends gradually contacted me to ask if I could give them some tips. Some asked for specific training. Gradually, I was also asked to give talks on "LinkedIn Growth Hacking" and booked for corporate training on "Optimal Presentation on LinkedIn". I was asked if my presentations were recorded and available online. Whether I could possibly share the material so that it could be read. I was also approached by contacts of mine asking if I could do something to help them build their own personal brand on LinkedIn. But also, completely unknown people who felt inspired by my activities on LinkedIn contacted me.

Since I myself work in digital marketing for a company and my daily work keeps me busy, it was difficult for me to handle the number of requests in parallel. Therefore, it initially occurred to me to make my lectures available as videos. But then I had the idea to write down the trainings I gave in detail and the idea for this book was born.

I hope that I can give every interested networker helpful tips for their own presentation on LinkedIn. In my book, I would like to focus in particular on the possibility of growing one's own network through small measures, so-called hacks.

I am convinced that self-marketing will become increasingly important in professional life in the future. Social media offer a good opportunity to present oneself in the best possible way and to occupy certain terms.

Finally, I would like to note that the statements in this book represent my own opinion and my own experience. Of course, I have tried to support the statements with literature, studies or interviews. For this purpose, both German- and English-language sources were consulted.

My opinion does not necessarily reflect the opinion of LinkedIn or the attitude of my employer. I received no compensation from my employer, LinkedIn or any other company mentioned in this book for writing this book or for merely mentioning it.

I also made a conscious decision to publish the book in self-publishing format. Even though I have contact with well-known publishers who would certainly have guaranteed me a much better distribution performance, what counts for me is speed. A book on LinkedIn has to be on the market quickly so that the content is not already outdated by the time it is published.

And at the very end of the preface, a note: I will address the readers of this book as "du". On the one hand, this is simply my basic attitude, and on the other, I think that my tips and hacks are then more personal. Thus, my explanations will hopefully be better remembered and encourage people to start implementing them immediately.

Königstein / Taunus, November 2022

Björn Radde

Acknowledgement

Even though this book was written in my spare time, I would like to thank Katharyn White (former Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at T-Systems) for her trust and support during my time in marketing at T-Systems International GmbH. I would also like to thank the other members of the marketing senior leadership team at T-Systems: Annette Brugger, Christian Andersen, and Uwe Klose.

Special thanks also go to the LinkedIn team: Dominik Axer, Human Jorjani, Alexandra Kolleth, Grace McDonald, Christina Wanner, Henrik Ihlo, David Risa, Shankho Mukherjee, Heike Burr, Sophie Walker, and Myriam van Alphen-Schrade. I was always able to discuss features on the LinkedIn platform with each of them. The aforementioned LinkedIn employees accompanied me during the creation of this book and regularly provided me with new information, contributed innovative ideas, and gave me valuable insights. In this context, I would also like to express my gratitude to the team for allowing me to release the book cover while complying with LinkedIn requirements!

I would also like to thank the Thought Horizon team. Starting with the founders Sander Biehn and Milan Ruzicka for the constructive discussions on the topic of social media for sales and personal branding. Big thanks also go to Monika Ruzicka-Kenter for her inspiring trainings on social selling.

And I would like to thank Richard von der Blom. Even if we don't know each other personally (yet), his many activities on LinkedIn and his regular LinkedIn algorithm reports have helped me to write this book.

In a book about growth hacking, thanks must of course go to Hendrik Lennarz. He is one of the best-known growth hacking trainers in Germany, author of the first German-language book on growth hacking, and his credo "Only implemented ideas are good ideas" prompted me to actually write this book. I also thank him for the always very good exchange. I would also like to thank him for allowing me to use his photos. In this context, I would also like to thank Gert-Jan Bruinsma for allowing me to use his LinkedIn profile photo.

I would also like to thank Jens Polomski. For me, he is the tool expert in my LinkedIn network. Much of the structure of chapter four came from his thoughts, and I've adopted many of his tool tips. Thank you also for the personal conversation that we had on the topic of LinkedIn tools and for the support with the second edition of this book.

I would also like to thank all the team members of the T-Systems digital marketing community (namely Ramona Qualitz, Pamela Buchwald, Bernhard Osewold, Gerald Weskamm, Annkatrin Weber, Fredi Zohar, Annika Bansal, Marcel Henrich, Thomas Malnati, Katja Schneidereit, Dushynat Verma, Sagar Karle, Faisal Kahn, Lopa Mohanty, Nouran Elsherbiny and Vivek Rengaraj) who discussed technical issues with me. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank them for their exceptionally good and always pleasant collaboration.

A big thank you also goes to all the proofreaders and to all those who supported me with this book and whom I have not mentioned here personally.

A big thank you goes to Steven Collings who took on the task of translating this book into English. I am delighted that I can now share my knowledge with an English-speaking audience as well.

My thanks to all the friends, former and current colleagues, and LinkedIn members who have contacted me about LinkedIn training. Also, to each and every one of my LinkedIn followers and LinkedIn contacts. That's what made this book possible in the first place.

By far the deepest gratitude, however, I feel towards my wife Sarah for putting up with my passion for the subject of digital marketing and social media. She has thus made this book possible. She has always supported me, believed in me, given me the necessary freedom to write and often made me revise individual passages or entire chapters with critical questions. She was also very critical in choosing the cover. Thank you very much!

I would also like to thank my parents and my siblings who are always behind me. I would like to dedicate this book to my great children Julie and Léonie!

Chapter 1

Introduction

1 Introduction

The fact is that the internet has become an integral part of our private and business lives.1 It has brought about completely new patterns of behavior and communication and will influence our behavior in the future far more than we can currently imagine. In the last decades, the World Wide Web has developed faster than any other medium before. Social media have a rather recent but equally relevant history in this development process.2

As much as social networks such as Facebook or Instagram have come to dominate all our lives, for me the social media age began in December 2002 with the founding of the business network LinkedIn. And in May 2003, almost 18 years ago, the service that now belongs to Microsoft began - making it the oldest social network still active. LinkedIn reached the break-even point as early as April 2006. 3

Today's industry leader Facebook, on the other hand, only began in February 2004, when founder Mark Zuckerberg still limited the service to universities. The first major innovations, such as Facebook Chat, followed in April 2008 and the "Like" button with the familiar "thumbs up" in February 2009, which has since become a prototype for Facebook.4

In October 2012, Facebook became the first social media service ever to reach the magic threshold of one billion users worldwide.5 In the meantime, Facebook includes various platforms and messenger services: In addition to the social network itself, the two messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger as well as the social network Instagram.

The short message service Twitter was founded in March 2006 under the name "twttr" and quickly gained popularity worldwide. As early as June 2007, the platform reached a volume of 400,000 tweets sent per quarter. In February 2016, Twitter reported declining user numbers for the first time.6 In the meantime, the social network is growing again - but with currently 337 million active users worldwide, it cannot keep up with Facebook, Instagram & Co.7 Also what Elon Musk might do with Twitter after his takeover might impact the social network.

The youngest and currently fastest growing network with 1 billion active members is TikTok. The Chinese platform was founded at the end of September 2016. Users can record short, self-made videos, which are then accompanied by music from well-known songs or film scenes. Users usually use TikTok to make creative and funny videos, often dancing or moving their lips in sync with songs and scenes. The videos are limited to a length of 10 seconds. However, TikTok, or DouYin as it is called in China, is more than just a video platform: because users can share their videos with others, it is also a social network.8 TikTok is so successful that Instagram copied the TikTok function with Instagram Reels in summer 2020 and integrated it into its app.

Back to LinkedIn: LinkedIn now has over 875 million users in 200 different countries and regions. The USA has the largest user base with 194 million users. This is followed by Europe with 149 million users, India with 96 million and mainland China with 57 million users. In the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), more than 19 million people are now on the LinkedIn platform (see also figure 1).9

Figure 1: "LinkedIn user figures 2022", source: Firsching, Jan: "LinkedIn statistics 2022: 875 million users worldwide & 19 million in the DACH", https://www.futurebiz.de/artikel/linkedin-statistiken/, retrieval date: 01.11.2022

LinkedIn is currently the fastest growing social media network alongside TikTok. Due to the professional and business context, LinkedIn is an excellent platform for building one's own professional brand and more and more people worldwide are taking advantage of this opportunity.

1.1 Objective

This book does not focus on the basics of LinkedIn. This means, for example, that it does not describe the need for a professional profile picture. Rather, it is about how you have to design a profile picture or your cover picture so that your profile attracts a certain amount of attention from visitors.

This book offers tips and tricks to people active on LinkedIn on how to present themselves even better. How to expand their network and how to actively, but also reactively or passively, get a new job or business opportunity. It is designed to help you establish your themes and build thought leadership. Even if you don't become a thought leader, this book will at least help you become a good thought contributor.

The publication is intended to be more of a practical book than a textbook. In particular, it is intended to address the target group of all those who know the relevance of self-marketing or personal branding. It is secondary whether you are a junior manager in marketing, an experienced accountant in controlling, a coach for agile project methods, a lawyer in a small law firm or a CEO of a large company.

The book is intended to stimulate reflection, provide new directions, and convey concrete approaches for implementation. However, the contents and explanations are not to be understood as instructions to implement all hacks immediately. The implementation of the growth hacks and the sense they make differ from person to person. Therefore, please always consider which growth hack suits you best.

The aim of this book cannot be to cover all aspects and possibilities of LinkedIn. I am aware that a printed book on social media can quickly become outdated and that some hacks may no longer work by the time the book is published. I have also had to keep adjusting chapters during the writing of what is now the second edition of this book, as LinkedIn changes so much. Also, new hacks come up that were not covered in this book.

It also does not explicitly address the importance of self-marketing or personal branding. I assume that you know what digital self-marketing is.10 You are aware of the importance of self-marketing. You know that you have to be visible to be found online.11 You need to be visible to build your personal brand.12 I'm just assuming this prerequisite, otherwise you wouldn't have bought this book.

Finally, I must also admit that one of the goals of this book is to expand my own network. Since you bought this book with the same intention, I would be happy if you follow me on LinkedIn or contact me.

1.2 Structure

After the introduction, which should once again emphasize the relevance of LinkedIn for building one's own brand and the necessity of one's own network, the second chapter explains the principle of growth hacking. Here, there is generally a misconception about what growth hacking is. It also aims to provide the relevant knowledge on how you can develop growth hacks yourself in the future.

The third chapter provides a detailed description of the various LinkedIn growth hacks. The growth hacks are sorted into different categories such as the personal profile, the newsfeed, the groups, the company profile and so on.

This book describes a total of 111 different growth hacks. No claim is made to completeness. The development in this area is so dynamic that no author can know the entirety of growth hacks and LinkedIn functions and publish this summary in a timely manner. However, I have taken care to cover as many growth hacks as possible.

The fourth chapter is then dedicated to possible software solutions to support your LinkedIn activities. The dangers of LinkedIn manipulation are also discussed.

The book concludes with a short conclusion and an outlook.

At the end of the book is the bibliography and the list of figures. Great care has been taken in the selection and citation of literature to support the statements made in this book.

As the topic is very new and, above all, subject to constant change, there is little information available from the classical secondary literature. In addition to publications, reference is increasingly made to articles and blog posts from the internet. The information found and used has been carefully checked by me for plausibility and truthfulness. I developed most of the hacks myself and am happy to share them.

1 Cf. Poleshova, Anastasia: "Statistics on internet use worldwide", https://de.statista.com/themen/42/internet/, date accessed: 29.11.2020

2 Cf. Digital Information World: "Where Do The Social Media Companies Stand In 2020", https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2020/09/the-social-media-universe-in-2020.html, date accessed: 29.11.2020

3 Cf. Kroker, Michael: "The Social Media Timeline: From LinkedIn's founding in 2002 to IGTV's launch in 2018", https://blog.wiwo.de/look-at-it/2018/07/16/die-social-media-zeitleiste-von-der-linkedin-gruendung-2002-bis-zum-igtv-start-2018/, date accessed: 29.11.2020

4 Cf. OMS AG: "Once upon a time: the history of Facebook's origins", https://www.omsag.de/online-marketing-blog/social-media/es-war-einmal-die-entstehungsgeschichte-von-facebook/, date accessed: 29.11.2020

5 Cf. FAZ: "Facebook has one billion users", https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/soziales-netzwerk-facebook-hat-eine-milliarde-nutzer-11913558.html, date accessed: 29.11.2020

6 Cf. Beiersmann, Stefan: "Twitter reports declining user numbers for the first time", 2016, https://www.zdnet.de/88259662/twitter-meldet-erstmals-ruecklaeufige-nutzerzahlen/, date accessed: 01.12.2020

7 Cf. Kroker, Michael: ibid, date accessed 29.11.2020 and Statista: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1032299/umfrage/monetarisierbare-taeglich-aktive-nutzer-von-twitter-weltweit/, 2022, date accessed: 17.11.2022

8 Cf. Möhring, Cornelia: "Was ist TikTok?", https://www.heise.de/tipps-tricks/Was-ist-TikTok-4838849.html, date accessed: 29.11.2020

9 Cf. Firsching, Jan: "LinkedIn statistics 2022: 875 million users worldwide & 19 million in the DACH region", 2022, https://www.futurebiz.de/artikel/linkedin-statistiken/, date accessed: 01.11.2022

10 Cf. Zayats, Marina: "Digital Personal Branding: On the Courage to Be Visible. A Guide for People and Companies", 2020, p. 11 ff.

11 Cf. Onaran, Tijen: "Only those who are visible also take place: Become your own brand and get the success you deserve", 2020, p. 11 ff.

12 Cf. Wiechowski, Natalia: "Personal Branding with LinkedIn: The Think Natalia Method", 2020, p. 19 ff.

Chapter 2

Growth Hacking

2 The Growth Hacking Principle