Growth Hacking LinkedIn™: English Edition - Opportunities to expand your personal network and increase your professional visibility on LinkedIn.

By Björn Radde

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: Jan 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9783347786585

Book preview

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