There have been some excellent posts here regarding connecting on LinkedIn and building networks with appropriate contacts. What I'll be talking about is how to use content to engage your network.
A bit of background, in April of 2007 I received a LinkedInvitation from a colleague of mine, which I accepted. I thought, "This is a cute site, I wonder if it will amount to anything?" Five years and several thousand carefully selected connections later I've found a few things that you might deem valuable.
Schedule 15 - 30 minutes per day to work with LinkedIn. Perhaps a 50/50 split between researching/connecting and "What's on your mind?" posts.
Use a URL shortening service and put those links into your posts so that you can get tell how many clicks you get.
Be sure and see who has viewed your profile. It can give you an idea of how engaged your network is with your content. It can also give you a list of prospective clients who might appreciate a tasteful follow-up.
With regard to content, I find that 1/3 personal, 1/3 business-related and 1/3 my-company related works pretty well. For example, our daughter competed in a marathon and I posted that information along with a link to the race results. Next, I posted a link to a marketing-related article. In addition, I posted a link to original content on my blog. Finally, I added a post about a video project that we were shooting out-of-state.
You've probably guessed which posts were the most engaging to my network:
1) Our daughter's race results
2) Original blog content
3) Out-of-state video project
4) Marketing-related article
Your experience may be different from mine, and here's the crassly-commercial payoff: 1 - 2 times per month I am contacted by a potential client who says something like "I've been seeing your LinkedIn posts for --- months and my partner and I would like to talk to you about marketing our ----.
The cool thing about that is they have qualified and closed themselves.
Another bonus derived from posting what we are doing professionally is that our clients probably don't know everything that we can do for them. They might not want to sit and listen to it, either. LinkedIn posts give a means by which we can let them know a bit at a time.
I'm interested in hearing your feedback - I'm sure that I can learn something...
