LinkedIn is a site that nearly every professional in the world has heard of. It is one of the best places to be if you’re a jobseeker or a recruiter. Of course you can always try to make professional connections on the other major social media platforms but none of them will compare to LinkedIn. My friend Paul Hurdsfield first showed me what the site was all about and since then I haven’t looked back – it is essential for me now!

The reason that LinkedIn is better than the other social media platforms is because if you work at it a little you will reap great rewards. You really do have to put in the effort and some simple steps must be followed.

Here are 3 things that you should do to network better on LinkedIn, it’s what I learnt from my buddy Paul Hurdsfield:

Status Updates

You know if you keep quiet in a room no one knows that you’re there right? That’s pretty much the same for LinkedIn – so you need to be posting regular status updates so that people remember you and always have you on their mind. You may have a huge network but that will be useless if people forget about you.

The updates need to show that you’re a super professional person and know your craft. You should save all the funny and political views for your other social media platforms. Keep it relevant to your field and it will let everyone know that you have good knowledge of the industry.

Connection Requests

I guarantee that you will get loads of requests to join networks of other people. If you don’t take care of these each day then they will sound pile up and become a real pain. So instead of leaving you with a headache, take ten minutes every day to go through the requests.

You don’t have to confirm them all and you could just leave them sitting there. I advise you to confirm requests from people who you already have a connection with and also those work with in your industry – plus people that you think may be useful in the future. If you start receiving some random requests from people who are in a completely different industry – those are the ones you should just leave and ignore because it’s more likely than not they will be of zero use.