How to increase your power on LinkedIn

Increase the surface area of luck with a powerful network.

Overview

Here are strategies for increasing your network and influencing stakeholders in organizations you seek to work for or want to increase your brand.

• Developing relationships require deposits over time to accrue value and trust.

• Exceptional relationships require a mutual exchange of value. You can consider these “strong ties.”

• Invest in relationships well in advance before asking for any help.

• Get curious about the person you seek to meet and identify how to add value to them first.

• Tailor your networking to specific people who can help you. A broad-brush approach will not deliver results.

• Develop a relationship plan to invest in strong-tie relationships weekly.

• Weak-tie relationships represent people with whom there is mutual recognition or whom you know tangentially. Research has shown that weak ties are more likely to have information or connections that are useful and relevant for a job search.

1. Engage in other authors’ posts and articles

This strategy increases your name and thought leadership with specific people at a specific organization.

Desired outcomes include:

• Influence hiring managers and HR professionals to land an interview.

• Increase brand recognition with an organization you want to do business with.

• Increase your network with influential people related to your domain, project, etc.

Here are the steps for influencing people to land an interview:

1. Prepare a list of the target companies you want to work for.

2. Prepare a list of keywords related to the target job (e.g., data scientist”) or topic (e.g., “machine learning”).

3. Add keywords to the search box and hit return to retrieve the results.

4. Click the “Posts” filter.

5. Click “All Filters.”

6. Scroll down on the right-hand menu to Author company and click + Add a company.

7. Paste the target company name from your list or type in, then select it so the company name appears with a green check mark. Repeat this to add each target company to the filter.

8. Review the search results to identify people who could influence the interview and hiring process. These include the leaders, potential team members, and HR professionals. Your target person should also be actively sharing posts and articles.

9. Click on the name to go to their LinkedIn profile.

10. Scroll to the “Activity” section and click “Show all activity.”

11. Click on “Posts.”

12. Bookmark the page in your browser. You may want to create a bookmark folder to find the posts easily for the target profiles you want to monitor.

13. When a target person shares a new post, engage with the content to gain attention from the person and their audience, and likely increase your network size as people follow or connect with you.

    1. Click “Like” and then “Comment”

    2. Tag the author at the beginning of your comment text (e.g., This is an intriguing perspective @James Gray).

    3. Reinforce the key point that resonated with you in the author’s post.

    4. Build upon the idea by adding your unique value.

2. Express interest in working for a company

1. Search for the company and click to view the company profile.

2. Click About.

3. Click I’m interested.

3. Leverage your connections in target organizations

1. Search for the company.

2. Click on People on the header.

3. Click on All filters.

4. Click on the company name in the Current Company section of all filters pane.

5. Filter with Connections

   1. 1^st – these are people you can reach out to directly as they are in your network.

   2. 2^nd – these are people who share a mutual person. Click on their profile or “x other mutual connections” to view whom you can use as a bridge to that person. Ask your mutual connection for an introduction and your intent.