Baseball fever can inspire the outlandish.
(This was originally published on LinkedIn.)
By Dan Pecchia
To a professional baseball player, the rewards for getting to the major leagues are huge, ranging from blockbuster earning potential to the end of long bus rides and cheap motels.
Yet some LinkedIn subscribers with clear major league potential are limiting their success by following a minor league approach to the increasingly beloved networking pastime.
Here are four ways you can swing for the fences on LinkedIn to inspire a call-up to the majors.
1. Curate valuable content
Even if you’re not writing a lot of original material, you can engage effectively with your connections by sharing valuable content from other authors. Square up on articles that address the interests of your most important audiences and also reflect the value you provide as a professional. In whatever system you use to locate and read material to stay sharp in your work, factor in a way to find content you can share.
2. Write and share your own content
This is the best path to not only the Major Leagues but All-Star Game contention, especially if you’re in any type of advisory business. Most prospects who consider hiring you will go online to research you and your competitors. That research will be influenced by what they can infer from the blogs, success stories, presentations and other content you provide (or don’t provide) via your website, LinkedIn and other channels relevant in your industry. More and more, professionals for whom enough information exists online to convey expertise will be the ones who get the good calls.
3. Engage with content posted by your clients and prospects
By liking, sharing and commenting on items they post, you not only reward them but demonstrate that you’re thinking about them. You would favor them in a similar way if you see them at an event. And as you would also in a live situation avoid robotically complimenting everything they say, you would also want to avoid any annoying auto-like behavior online.
4. Make recommendations (and ask for them)
Done right, a LinkedIn recommendation (the longer kind on LinkedIn, not the ubiquitous “endorsement”) can be a valuable piece of content. It can reveal almost as much about the recommender as about the recommended person if it’s written carefully and conveys attributes the writer values. By being a person who makes recommendations when appropriate, you’re more likely to attract appropriate recommendations from others.
LinkedIn as a delineator
In the early years of LinkedIn (it’s been around since 2003), a presence on the networking site was widely seen as a step up from a lower level. In the years since, many business professionals have informally kept score based on how many connections they’ve amassed.
But the evolution of LinkedIn over the past year has established another level of delineation — one between those who share good content and those who do not. A series of design upgrades, the improving functionality of the phone aps and last year’s rollout of LinkedIn Posts have all brought better visibility to those with expertise to share.
Those evolutions have also made it easier for LinkedIn members to observe and make inferences based on which professionals are sharing good content and which ones are not.
As genuine thought leaders start swinging their bats and scoring runs in the content game, look for them to widen the gap between how their contacts view them and how they view those satisfied with roles in the minors.
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Dan Pecchia is an Ohio public relations consultant and president of Pecchia Communications. He likes LinkedIn (and baseball).
