Tag: linkedin connections

They say business is cutthroat, and I guess it is in many ways. However, most businesspeople I know share the philosophy that a rising tide lifts all boats. As such, people want to help their friends, and sometimes even their competitors.

One way to increase your visibility is to increase your presence on LinkedIn. No, the work and job focused social media platform isn’t sponsoring this post, and there are a number of issues with LinkedIn’s algorithm and what the platform promotes. You can decide what you want to do, depending on your goals.

But if you want to help out a friend, these tactics always work, and they are super easy for you to do. It won’t take you much time at all, and it can really boost your friends’ visibility.

Expand their posts – LinkedIn only shows the opening couple of lines of a post. All except the shortest posts require you to expand it to read the whole thing. You may want to just hit like without expanding, but expanding tells LinkedIn that you’re interested. So make sure you expand that post!

Comment and then like the post – LinkedIn is weird, and yes, the order matters. A comment on LinkedIn tells you that you’re invested in the content. Liking is also a good thing to do, but because LinkedIn gives more credence to comments, it helps boost the post if you do it in the right order.

Make sure your comment is meaningful – Typing “thanks!” or “good idea” is helpful, but if you really want to help your friends, make a meaningful comment. And don’t use AI to do it. AI comments are obvious and bad. Add your actual thoughts on the topic.

Keep up with the comments – If you comment on your friend’s post and someone replies to you, go back and reply to them, or at least hit a response button. 

Tag your friend (but only if they’ll comment) – Lots of people tag strangers on posts because they want that person’s audience to come over. Do not do that. First of all, if you tag someone and they don’t interact with your comment, it doesn’t help your reach. But if you tag someone and they untag themselves, it tanks your post. It tells the algorithm that you are spamming the timeline.

So, yes, you can boost your friend’s visibility by tagging them, but make sure they will comment on your post if you do. Otherwise, you’re risking damaging your own credibility and not really helping them.

Open their newsletter – If your friend has a newsletter, of course, you already subscribed. But LinkedIn, in all their wisdom, doesn’t send the newsletter to every subscriber. So if you get it in your inbox or in your notifications, or find it scrolling through your feed, open it. Make a comment or hit like to give it an extra boost.

Choose something besides “like” – While I haven’t tested the impact of this myself, it stands to reason that since hitting ‘like’ is much faster than choosing ‘support’ or ‘celebrate’, LinkedIn would perceive you as more invested in the content, and therefore boost the post. It’s absolutely worth trying to help your friend out.

Share your friend’s posts the right way -Shares are always appreciated, but they do better if you add your own commentary before hitting share. Additionally, another way to share your friend’s post is to write your own commentary about the post without sharing, tag your friend, add a picture (the algorithm loves pictures), and hit post.

Then, once it’s live, hit edit, and go back in and add the link to their post. I know this is a bit more time-consuming, but it does seem to help.

These aren’t entirely selfless actions, though. While I believe in doing things to help people just because I want them to succeed, all of these tips also boost your own visibility. It’s a win-win situation.