Leverage LinkedIn To Learn Tips And Tricks From Big Influencers

Are you less interested in cat videos and photos of your friend’s food that you see on other Social Media networks and more interested in professional topics that can help you develop your professional career? If so, maybe it’s time to start investing in LinkedIn as your new social media platform of choice for news updates.

What many people don’t realise is that LinkedIn is a vast source of knowledge for professionals who are looking to learn from some of the best minds in the world for absolutely nothing. This is done through LinkedIn Pulse, which is LinkedIn’s publishing platform.

What this allows you to do is firstly post your own content so that you can start sharing your knowledge with your network. And secondly you can follow big influencers in your industry so you can read their content, learn from the posts they publish as well as consume their status updates.

Therefore in this article we’re going to show you how to start following the influencers and how you start to leverage their knowledge to help fulfil your professional learning objectives. If you are interested in finding out how to publish your very own LinkedIn pulse so you can start sharing your thought leadership with your network read our article here on writing killer LinkedIn content.

Step 1: Make a list of influencers

The first step of taking advantage of the knowledge that’s available through LinkedIn from influential people is to start writing down some influential people in your industry and who you admire. Make a list of 10 – 15 people you would like to follow and consume their content. For example, you might be in the Entrepreneurial space so you might write down people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Richard Branson, and Bill Gates for example.

Step 2: Find them on LinkedIn

The second step is finding them on LinkedIn, head to this link here and this will bring up a list of recommended people you should follow first. Some of the people you had written down might already be there, however, if there are other people that interest you in the recommended area, we suggest following them as they will be the most active and you are likely to get a lot of value out of them.

Don’t go overboard as you don’t want to end up filling your newsfeed with too much information. We suggest following a maximum of 50 people on LinkedIn. Next get the names on your list and search for the people you admire in the search box located here:

Once you have found the influencer, click on their name to open up their profile and click on ‘follow’ as shown in the screenshot below:

Now their posts will appear in your newsfeed like the example below and you will get a notification every time they post up something new.

Note: Not all the people you have listed may be active on LinkedIn so have a look if they have created any posts (discussed in the next step) and if they haven’t maybe reconsider following them.

Step 3: Consume and Contribute

The final step is important as the influential person you admire may have posted some content a year ago that is still very relevant today and something you can learn from. So when you go to the influencers profile as shown in the screenshots in Step 2, you can scroll down on their profile and visit their previous posts as shown below:

Once you click ‘see more’ that will open up all the LinkedIn pulse post that particular influencer has written.

From here you can go through read the article, like and also contribute a comment. Commenting on an influencers post is a great way to start to build a relationship with them online.

Now you can use your LinkedIn profile as a professional news feed from influencers so you can get high value news from influential people daily. This is a fantastic way to leverage LinkedIn as a learning platform as much as it is a platform for generating new business.

But building your personal brand is something that takes time and consistency to achieve results. If you think you’re not going to have the time to stay consistent then you need to either find the time or find someone who can implement on your behalf so you can begin investing in your most important asset – you.