Understanding and avoiding the three biggest mistakes professionals make on LinkedIn is key to your success.

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool when it is used in a professional way. Like all powerful tools, it can significantly help you or cause you harm, depending on your skill level when using the platform.

This blog helps you identify and avoid the biggest single mistakes that professionals make on their own individual profiles and when they are using LinkedIn.
These are the three big things you need to avoid:
1. Having a profile focused on your own recruitment, not on engaging clients
2. Being pushy and salesy
3. Focusing on your needs and not your client’s needs

Let’s look at each one in a little more detail.

Having a profile focused on your recruitment, not on engaging clients.

If you pause and think about it, did you build your profile to help your professional career development? Was your profile designed to help you find a new role or be promoted within your firm? If so, this is a useful and productive way of using LinkedIn. Where this becomes a problem is when you start to use this same profile (focused on career development) and start to look at engaging existing and new potential clients on LinkedIn. The problem comes from the profile you built for career development rarely speaks to or engages clients in the way you want. In the simplest terms, it’s like attending a face-to-face networking event and handing out your CV rather than engaging clients in a discussion about how you can help them and their business.

Being pushy and salesy

I hopefully don’t need to say too much in this space. You need to act like a magnet and attract a network towards you by being warm, engaging, and having a professional profile that speaks to them. Beyond this, sharing content that educates and informs them is the exact opposite of being pushy. Pushy sales messages may generate a response. Our experience tells us this response is usually very negative, and if it is positive, it is very often a very short-term opportunity rather than a long-term strategic relationship. So, for every client you might win, you risk damaging relationships with so many others that this approach will actually have a negative effect on you growing your clients. The simple approach here is to think about using LinkedIn to build relationships and to build trust.

Focusing on your needs and not your client’s needs

You know that warm feeling you get when someone knows you, understands you and really helps you? We want you to create the start of that feeling on LinkedIn. You can only do this when you see your LinkedIn profile, the content you share on the platform and the presence you create from your client’s perspective (not from your own). Are you; engaging and warm, sharing content that is relevant to them, educating and informing them, signposting useful content and articles, and connecting them to your own network? All these activities show that you are focusing on their needs and not your own.

Understanding and avoiding the three biggest mistakes professionals make on LinkedIn. These are three simple things you can do right now to really improve your own approach on LinkedIn. LinkedIn isn’t a complex tool to use, but like any tool, you need to know the fundamentals of how to use it, and how to keep that tool sharp. Like all powerful tools regularly refreshing your knowledge is key. Purposeful practice on LinkedIn helps you achieve your client relationship goals.