Wayne State Graduate School Director of Marketing Nick Mattar shares an overview of LinkedIn and why it is a powerful networking and career development tool. Nick talks about setting up a strong LinkedIn profile, the importance of engaging with others, and developing your own content strategy.

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to Getting Started with LinkedIn. This is Nick Mattar. I'm the director of marketing and communications at the Graduate School here at Wayne State University and thanks for checking out this first video here in the Professional Development Series.

LinkedIn has always been probably my social network of choice, at least since starting at the Graduate School, and also as a part-time faculty member at the Ilitch School of Business. My thing has been utilizing social media for professional gain and also a place to show multidimensional elements of my professional personality. And today, we're going to talk a little bit about how you can get started on LinkedIn. This is really something that is applicable for people of all levels of familiarity on LinkedIn, whether this is you starting a new profile or if you have one and you're just looking to brush up a little bit on your skills.

So to begin, let's talk a little bit about LinkedIn usage. First, we're approaching a billion users on the platform with 200 million of them in the US. That ranks at about fourth or fifth in terms of social networks. I would say if you look at traditional social networks, especially those that are commonly used by Americans, it probably ranks after Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and after that, here we are. The number one professional platform for networking and connections, this is really a big hub for people between the ages of 25 and 34. So we're looking at Millennials, Gen Z, people that have been in the workforce for a little bit, but also people that are looking to grow within their careers but then also grow in terms of the skill set that they have in whatever the work it is that they do.

It's also the number one social network among executives, and when I say, "Number one," this is based off of a survey from last year that looked at people that are actually active. It's not just having a profile because you think about a lot of people that have profiles don't really utilize them. If you look at a platform like X or Twitter, more than half of people on Twitter don't post. They don't tweet, they don't X, whatever it is that you call it these days. They're just there to look at the other content. But executives, they're on LinkedIn, and a lot of them, they're actively posting material, which is pretty interesting if we look at it from a networking and professional point of view.

If we look at the demographic data, it's not just people in the 25 to 34-year-old age group. You do have people that are younger and people that are older, and this has remained pretty fluid, I would say, over the last decade or so. I would say 10 years ago, it was a little bit more evenly distributed across the groups, but as more users get on the platform in general, you're going to see some changes and some different trends in terms of the generations that have been a little bit more active on a platform. If you saw this for any social network, you'd see something similar, although you might see some different spikes for different age groups.

Now, why are people using it? I look at it really there's five main reasons. One, networking, two, finding a job, but then you get into some new things. There's a whole learning world on LinkedIn, so if you're looking to learn something new, whether that's a skill, maybe it's something that you're able to do online, even if it's something as simple as Excel, that's something where you can access a lot of free courses on LinkedIn, but also if you have your own business, it's a great place to prospect and find new customers, but this is also where you can connect with colleagues and classmates.

So I know for myself, when I was a graduate student, the number one thing that I did when I was connecting with people in my classes is we got together on LinkedIn and I still see what they're up to today. I see a lot of really good content that everybody is sharing, and it's a great way just to see where people are in their lives professionally, and you could also utilize that to your advantage and capitalize on it later on. If you realize, if you're applying for a job there or you're looking from a research perspective, if you're looking for any sort of funding and the organizations that you're working with, you can see, "Hey, who do I know there?" You might know somebody from back in the day. This is more of a long-term play, or at least I see it that way when it comes to connecting with colleagues.

So how about setting up your profile? If this is your first time on LinkedIn or maybe you have a profile that you just set up once in five minutes, never looked back, let's take a look at what a profile looks like. You have a lot of basic elements. You have a header image, you have your profile picture, your name, you have a headline, your location, and your connections. You also have your company and your school, and for me, I have my own business as well as the Graduate School here, so I have that there, and I went to the University of Michigan for undergrad, so that's what I have there.

Now, when I am looking at a profile, you want to make sure that your profile picture is professional. It doesn't have to be a fancy headshot, but you also don't want it to be something that you might put as your profile picture on Instagram, for example. And your header image is also a good opportunity to say something more about you. This is just a graphic of Downtown Detroit, Aaron Hart Plaza from a couple years back. You can have it be whatever. I don't recommend text-heavy images here, but also remember that this banner image is only seen when people are on your profile. Your profile photo is seen everywhere. If you leave a comment, if people search and you pop up in the search results, that's what people see. They just see this and your name. Everything else here is largely just on your profile, but you want to make sure that your profile is optimized so that whenever anybody stumbles upon it or searches for it, that you are putting your best proverbial foot forward.

Now, there's a lot of other sections in the profile that I'm not going to have time to go through today, but there's an About section. If you think about your profile as a resume, which a lot of people do, the About section is that first introductory sentence or two sentences. I used to have just a couple words. Now I have more of a paragraph. The About section's also where whatever you're using LinkedIn for, this is where you really want to hone in on that. So for me, I'm really just looking to connect with colleagues and see what other people are doing in the marketing world, and so my About section is pretty straightforward.

However, if you are there looking to, say, find a job and you're clearly open to work, as they like to say, you should say that in your About section, say what your top skills are, what you're looking for, and what your qualifications are. On the flip side, if you do have your own business or you're looking for funding or something, put the salient points that are going to make people want to keep reading, something that will make people a little bit more interested in what you have to offer as a professional.

Now, you also have a featured section, that's for content that you've posted on LinkedIn, which we'll talk about later; Activity, which is the content that you're posting or if you like something or you share something; your Experience, so that's work; and Education, of course; and then you have your Skills, which are self-listed so you can put what those skills are and people can endorse you for skills. The endorsing doesn't happen quite as often now as it used to. About 10 years ago was the peak endorsement time when people would go in and, "Oh, I'm going to endorse somebody for a skill that they have for data analysis," but we've hit a point where there are so many different skills and so many different ways that people talk about skills that it's faded into the background of LinkedIn. You can still do that and you can still leave a recommendation. Those are always going to be important, but LinkedIn has become more of a content platform, more so than just a resume. It can be a resume, if you want it to be that, but you can make it so much more.

Now, I've gotten questions in the past about why I would get LinkedIn Premium. Anytime that you get on LinkedIn, you're going to be offered a free month of Premium to get started, and if you've been on LinkedIn before, you're constantly going to be peppered with the, "Oh, you should try Sales Navigator. You should try whatever, Premium for job seekers," they have a couple different types of Premium, and I will say unless you are really, really, really trying to get something out of this, you're really trying to get some sales or you're really trying to find a job immediately, I don't know if Premium's worth it.
The big advantage though to Premium is you see everybody who visits your profile. Normally, you, as somebody who's not Premium, you only see other people that aren't Premium who see your profile, which is still a good amount of people. However, having Premium does help when you see like, oh, a CEO from X company looked at your profile. That is where you get that fear of missing out and you're like, "Oh, who was looking at my profile?" That is something that doesn't usually happen, but it is something that is possible, and so I did want to put that out there, why it would be worth it.
But also, I mean, it's a sales, it's an upsell. If you're a job seeker, it just puts you at the top of the pile, which can help if you're looking at really, really popular jobs, but it doesn't really help you grow your network. I'm going to just be really honest about that. It's not like your profile doesn't show up. The Premium profiles will probably show up first if someone's searching, but if someone's searching for your name, chances are your name, you're going to show up towards the top. Also, there's no data that's not available to the rest of us. It's all there. It's just really about how LinkedIn packages it and how that material is disseminated to the appropriate parties. And so for Sales Navigator, you can just do more data analysis. You still get all the same stuff. It just isn't put into nice, pretty filters as if you actually had it.

But let's talk about making connections. So every profile you have, you're probably not on Premium, but how do you now go about making connections? There's two types. One, there are connections. These are people you know that you connect with. You go to their profile and you click connect. That's it. It's people that maybe you know professionally, personally, all sorts of different ways that you could know them. You can also add a little note, like, "Hey, it was great meeting you at XYZ event," or maybe perhaps you're at the Graduate Research Symposium and you are presenting your research and somebody comes up and you talk to them for a little bit and you decide to add them on LinkedIn afterwards. You could then say, "Hey, it was great to meet you at the GRS yesterday." That way, it's a nice reminder to these people who you are, where you saw them, and why they should accept your request.

I can say with confidence, I probably get about five to six requests a day and most of them are Salespeople, so I have to deny them. Unfortunately, when this happens, sometimes I do accidentally deny, or they call it "ignore," people that I do know because they don't put a note or they put a note that's so bland and boring and generic that I think that it's a salesperson. And so for me, it definitely helps if you specify how you know me from a certain time or instance or whatever it is that you want to call it.

Then you also have followers. Followers are the people who probably don't know you, but they follow you because they love your stuff. It's similar to following somebody on Instagram, on TikTok, on Twitter, on anything else. They are fundamentally different, but at the same time, if you connect with somebody, you are also by default following them, so an interesting little two-for-one there.

Now, when you look at a profile, you're going to see followers here with a number, and then you're going to see a 500-plus connections if they have that many. For some reason, connections has never changed from this, so if you have under 500 connections, it'll say, but if you have more than 500, even if it's like 850, it's just going to stay right there. Fun fact, if you scroll down on somebody's profile, you can see how many people that you are actually connected to. So, interesting.

Now, there's also Pages. Now, if you just created a page or created a profile and you're engaging, go and follow some of your favorite pages. Here's the Wayne State University proper page. We look at this, there's 220,000 followers, 167,000 alumni, and you have your About section by default. Now, I work for Wayne State, so it says, "My Employer," but also you'll see on a little horizontal row here, that little sub-menu. You have Home, My Employer, About, Posts, so companies can post content just like people, but then you see Jobs. If you were to apply for a job on LinkedIn, this is where you could go. You could also just go to the Jobs tab, but if you wanted to look at a company specifically to see what open jobs they have, this is where you could go to see them.

A company like Wayne State, a major university with thousands of employees, probably always has dozens if not hundreds of jobs open, so I don't usually recommend going this route if you are looking for a job. I would recommend just going to the Jobs tab from the homepage of LinkedIn and searching whatever your title or requirements are for the job that you want. Having said that, say you do apply for a job at a place like Wayne State or another institution. Take a look at the alumni or take a look and see where it says the people that you're connected with, and how many, which connections work there. You might be surprised, one, at how many people you are connected to that have or do work at an institution, but then two, these are the people that you should connect with and get to know a little bit if you're looking for a position there.

In a university setting, it can be a little bit more challenging because there's so many different departments and colleges and a lot of different administration, but it's always worth getting to know somebody because you never know when that person or somebody that they know could be the reference or recommendation that you need to get your name at the top of a pile. This applies to a lot of different roles. Obviously, I'm in marketing, so of course that's a big piece, but even if you're somebody, if you're applying for a faculty job, if you're interviewing to be a postdoc, even if you're applying for the next level up of graduate school, if you're a master's student, if you're going somewhere for a doctorate, you want to connect with these people because no matter what it is, if there's a selection process involved, if somebody recognizes your name, that will almost always benefit you, especially if they know you through something like LinkedIn.

So how do we engage with others? This is the age-old question on LinkedIn because it has fundamentally shifted over the last 10 years or so. Ten years ago, it was all about being professional and just saying, "Oh, I have published this paper," or, "I'm starting a new job," or, "I'm leaving my old job." Today, it is a lot more open. There's a lot more going on and a lot more content that is considered socially acceptable on the platform, but the core tenets of social media engagement remain. One, just posting content and updating your profile is not going to be enough. You got to put yourself out there and engage with other users.

Engagements include comments, include liking a post, they include sharing a post, but hey, the way to really stand out from the noise because LinkedIn is getting really busy, there's 200 million active users in the United States, that's pretty hefty, that's a lot of action going on, and really, if you're looking to connect with somebody, if you're looking to meet or get to know somebody, you really need to get to know them on LinkedIn. That doesn't mean liking a post, that doesn't mean commenting on a post. That means taking it one step further and, hey, you can direct message them. You can direct message them and say, "Hey, I really liked what you said about XYZ," whatever the content is. You want to build a relationship with somebody that is not just done through the public forum. It's good to comment. It's good to like stuff, and according to the algorithm, if you do comment or if you message somebody, you will see each other's content more often in the home feed than if you didn't.

But I am a big proponent of using the messaging option when it comes to creating meaningful conversations. It's not just saying, "Hey, I applied for your job. I'd love if you gave me an interview." It's going a little step further and talking about something that they're going to remember because if you think about it, especially in the job hiring world, if I'm hiring somebody and I get 100 applicants and let's say 10 of them message me on LinkedIn, like, "Hey, I just applied. Just wanted you to know," I might remember those 10 people, but they weren't doing anything that set them apart from the others, other than they know how to use direct messaging. But if they had started a dialogue with me and talked about something that was at least tangentially related to the job, then I'm going to be a lot more likely to listen and recognize that name when I'm going through all of the resumes and the cover letters, and the same applies to a lot of different functions that graduate students would need would we be doing on LinkedIn.

If you're applying for a job, if you're looking for funding, talk to the people that have the power, people that are the decision-makers. Those are the people that you want to get to know. And it might be a fruitless endeavor, you might not get anything out of it, but there's also a good chance that you might get something out of it. I don't want to make any empty promises here. I've seen successes and failures on both sides of this, but when it comes to engaging with others, make sure to go the extra step and try to do what most other people don't do. Stand out from the crowd.

Now, we have about 10 minutes left here. I'm going to wrap up with my expertise, and this is content strategy. So if there's one thesis statement, if there's one hack that you can apply to be successful on LinkedIn, it's this: publish compelling and valuable content that informs, entertains, or motivates. That's what you want to do. If you're writing something, if you're writing a post, I encourage you to post, don't post more than once a day, but if you're putting out a post, you want it to be something exciting, something interesting, you want something that people will engage with. If you write a post and you go to publish, and you're like, "I don't really... This is pretty boring, but I'll put it out there anyways," then nobody's going to like it. If you don't like it, how can you expect anybody else to like it instead?

We have a couple of different fundamental types of posts. Text, obviously. Type, type, type, text, text, text. Photos, upload photo, pretty easy, especially when you're on your mobile device. Videos, same thing. LinkedIn has taken a liking recently to the 9x16 vertical video. Think TikTok videos, think Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts. They have also started their own video feed and they don't put all the videos in there, but if you upload a 9x16 video, that gets a high number, high, I would say, engagement rate, there's a good chance that it might end up there and really take off, but I'd like to look at these other ones.

Let's jump to the bottom. Career updates is really interesting because that is something that will always appear in the feed. LinkedIn loves showing that stuff because you can't really flub it, you can't really lie, and if you get to start a new job or if you're celebrating X number of years at a company, those are the things that will get some really strong engagements. But then in between, you have documents, presentations, and carousels. Those are all done through the ad or upload document button, and those do pretty well because you can upload. If you gave a presentation and you presented your research somewhere, why not upload the presentation as a PDF to LinkedIn? You can share it with the people there. That's always a good way to do it, or if you have, I mean, I don't recommend just a Word Doc, it's something textual, but anything that is visually stimulating or informational, that's the kind of stuff that people want to see. That's why they are on LinkedIn more now than ever before.

For example, I put out a presentation here where I showed how to create content, save a lot of time creating content with AI. That's what you're seeing on the screen as a post, and you can scroll left to right and see all the different slides that I presented with. Nothing really... I mean, this, I had to block out the name and the title, so you lose some of this, but you might have seen on LinkedIn one of these graphics. "Oh, someone's starting a new position." These things always do really well.

Highly recommend if you are ever starting something new, or whatever your career update is, definitely post it to LinkedIn, and the way to do that is you go in, you edit your profile, you add experience, like a new job, for example, new company, starting date, and then LinkedIn will ask you, it'll prompt you and say, "Hey, do you want to publish this as a new post?" And then you do, you press okay, and then it's up there, and it will probably do some really nice numbers for you. You'll get some good engagements, get people coming out of the woodwork that you haven't talked to in years commenting and mentioning you in your post, just saying, "Congrats." And it's really probably the best part about LinkedIn where people tend to celebrate others' accomplishments. It's definitely a positive community in that sense.

Last couple of slides here. What should you expect? So first off, when you post something, you write a post, only 10 to 20% of your connections are actually going to see it. So if you have 200 connections, don't expect more than about 50 to see it off the bat. And you can see on a published post how many impressions. Now, don't confuse impressions with reach. Impressions is total views. Reach is number of people, unique people that saw it. But vertical videos or photos, those are the ones that are going to do a little bit better. They want you... LinkedIn, similar to every other social network, they want you to post more video, more content that will be inherently more interactive and engaging with an audience, but also, the more you engage with others, the more engagement you're going to get from others.

I did a little test of this myself where I posted every day for two weeks. The first day, I spent the first 30 minutes before posting anything engaging with other posts. I would like them, I would comment them, I wouldn't share them, but I'd send out a couple DMs, just showing people that I exist and putting myself out there. And then I would post, post something, whatever, a photo, texts, whatever. It did pretty well. But then the second week, I didn't do any of that. I just posted, I didn't engage with others, and I saw about a 50% drop in engagements on my posts week to week.

So that really showed me that the more I'm engaging with others beforehand, the more they're going to engage back with me. And the reason being, if you comment or DM, the more people see your profile. It's not like, "Oh, I'm going to go check this person out." The algorithm is going to set into motion a little bit higher percentage of people that are going to see your stuff. So if somebody who's connected to you who hasn't seen any of your content in years, sees that you commented on someone else's post, they are more likely to see your content now in their feed than they were before. It's just an algorithmic thing and it's something that I've been trying to master and really corner recently, but this is about as good as I can get.

Also, when you're capitalizing on the algorithm, you can post, I would recommend, up to three times per week. You don't have to, you can just start with once. Don't post more than once a day, and if you can try to actually publish your posts in the morning. People don't usually go on LinkedIn at night and they don't usually go on in the middle of the day. I mean, they do go on it. Between 2:00 and 5:00 PM, there's not as much engagement. Really, the time to go on LinkedIn is from early in the morning, probably 7:00 AM, all the way until around lunchtime. After that, the engagement tends to slip.
If you can tag people, that's great. You tag them just like you would in any other social network. But if there's one thing I can tell you not to do, it's do not put links in posts. If you put an external URL into a LinkedIn post, the algorithm is going to shut that down, and unless it's the greatest post in the world, which I've seen a couple, it's just not going to do very well. You're going to be disappointed with what you find.

But what about AI? That's the question. You can use AI, generative AI, to help you summarize longer articles, and I have definitely seen AI-generated content today on LinkedIn. They can give you good brainstorming ideas. They're good for coming up with options. However, I do not recommend using AI to write content. Today, we're seeing more AI content-checkers out there on social platforms, and so first off, using AI to write a piece of content for you takes away the authenticity and the human element of it, but also, there's a chance that eventually the algorithm is going to catch up with us and it's going to stop posts that are clearly generated by artificial intelligence.

When you're looking at this, just to wrap up here, this is what your posting page looks like. You pull up the little dialog box and you can do anything here. You can add an emoji, you can add an image, you can add an event, celebrate something, all this stuff, and the little plus sign is where you would add a document. This is really where the magic happens, and when it comes to content and when it comes to LinkedIn, you can do all those things that I've talked about, but really, to harken back to my statement from earlier in the section, you want to publish something that people are going to get value from, something that will resonate with your audience, with your connections.

A lot of people on a lot of social networks have lost their way in this world of noise and trying to go viral, and people just think, "Oh, I just need to post." But you need to post with a purpose and you need to post something that matters, but still matters to you, but also matters to the people who are going to see it. That is how you can really capitalize, take advantage of LinkedIn. No matter what you use it for, no matter what area of business or education or research that you're in, LinkedIn has something for everybody as long as it's more professional. It's becoming one of the most popular social networks in the USA, and for me, it's certainly opened a lot of doors and opportunities.

I hope that this presentation will help you get a little bit closer to that as well, and I thank you today for checking out this quick, half-hour video, and always feel free to reach out to me with any questions you might have. So thank you very much and have a good rest of your day.