Academics on LinkedIn

JenniferEWC

Academics on LinkedIn

Have you been told you or your research centre needs more of a presence on LinkedIn? Has this left you wondering how you’ll find the time to learn how to do that, let alone do it? I’ve had conversations about this issue with several academics lately – both clients and attendees at the Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference in July – so it seems to be a concern for many.

Being active and findable on LinkedIn doesn’t have to become your new unwanted part-time job. It’s something that you can do efficiently if you take a little time to plan.

If you’re doing this for your own profile as a researcher, take yourself out for a nice coffee and a think. If you’re trying to get a team of researchers involved, have a working lunch so you can discuss who will do what and when.

The main pieces of this puzzle are creating a strong profile that clearly tells both the humans who find you on LinkedIn and the algorithm who you are and what you do, creating a simple posting schedule, and committing to regular, targeted engagement.

Your profile

Your LinkedIn profile is where you show people who you are and give them a reason to interact with you. After you finish and publish your profile, make a note to refresh it in six months or so.

Headline

It starts with your basic info and headline. The basic info is, well, basic. Use your professional title (Dr, Professor, etc.) if you’re positioning yourself as an academic/expert in your field; use the pronouns section for your pronouns. That should go without saying, but you’ll see people who use that space for ‘professional’ information – all they really succeed in doing is making themselves look silly or rude. If you live somewhere that makes listing your pronouns dangerous, leave that field blank.

Your headline needs to succinctly state what you do and why. You get 220 characters (including spaces and punctuation); use them wisely. If there’s a chance you might post things your institution disapproves of, this is a good place to say that your views are not those of your employers. It’s also a good place to signal what your research and/or teaching interests are.

About section

This section can be uncomfortable to write, but it really helps new and potential connections learn more about you. Write a few paragraphs about your research interests and weave in a story or two, if you have them, about why you’re interested in your topic. Write it as though you’re introducing yourself to someone you expect to like who’s genuinely interested in you and your research – because that’s what you’re doing.

Featured posts

If you’re looking at your profile and thinking I missed out the services section, you’re right. I assume that’s not relevant for most of you. If it is relevant for you (so if you do some freelance work, for example), describe your services there.

Now, on to the featured posts section. When you post something big, like a call for papers, an announcement about your forthcoming or recently published book or article pin it to your featured section. These posts get far more views than any of your others because everyone who views your profile sees them. Make a note in your diary to refresh your featured posts about once a quarter.

The activity section populates on its own as you post things on LinkedIn, so you don’t need to worry about that one.

Experience and Education

For each of these you can add your whole CV or only your most recent or relevant roles and degrees/qualifications. If you want to give a comprehensive view of your experience without retyping the whole thing, you do have the option to upload files, like a PDF (do not upload a Word document) of your CV; if possible, make this a PDF that’s been locked for editing so no one can alter it.

The other sections, recommendations and interests, are not things you can populate. If someone gives you a recommendation on LinkedIn, it will appear in that section after you approve it. The interests are automatically populated, and looking at mine just now, I have no idea what the platform is drawing on to populate it. For now, don’t worry about it; I don’t see that section becoming hugely important to your visibility on LinkedIn.

Your posting schedule

If you’ve asked a search engine how often you need to post, you’ve likely seen a variety of answers. That’s because the answer changes and really no one knows the ‘right’ one, or even if such a thing even exists.

I’ll share what I’ve seen working for me and other experts on the platform this year:

Post once or twice a week, most weeks
Write your posts as though you’re talking to a person
Be consistent about the topics you write about

Hopefully the post frequency is lower than you feared. Years ago, it was different. When LinkedIn first started growing it needed people to post a lot so users didn’t run out of news feed before they ran out of interest in scrolling through it. That’s changed.

Now, LinkedIn is privileging quality over quantity. This is excellent news for researchers.

Tone

In social media terms, LinkedIn is a little more formal/professional than Facebook, but not much. You don’t need to write in polished, academic prose. Instead, write the way you’d speak to a friendly colleague. If you struggle with that, use the voice to text option in Word or Google Docs to draft your posts.

Also, if you struggle to write in more colloquial language, don’t feel weird about it. You spend your entire professional life writing in academic prose, the shift in register to what’s expected on social media takes some getting used to. For this reason, I’d highly recommend batch creating your posts so you don’t have to make this shift more than once a month or so.

Topics

Be as consistent as you can. Don’t post about historical research one day and microbiology the next (unless, of course, you work in History of Science). The algorithm wants to know who to show your posts to – if you jump from topic to topic, it won’t know who might be interested in them, so it might not show them to many people.

If you’re wondering what people would be interested in, remember, you’re not writing for the whole of LinkedIn. You’re writing for the people you’re trying to connect with. That means your audience is already interested in your primary topics.

They’ll want to hear about:

Your latest trip to the archives
The article you just read
The chapter you’re working on
The article you just published
The conference you went to
How you find time to do research or write at all

On that last one – people love a good behind-the-scenes post; take a picture of your coffee in a café and write about how you enjoyed an hour there with the text you’re unpicking this week, or take a picture of your pet and write about how they support and/or interrupt your work when you write at home.

For posts about conferences, if you take a few notes for each paper you listen to, and can post reasonably positively about, you could have 3 or 4 posts from just one panel. That’s enough content for a month out of one panel – and you’d draft it while you’re at the conference. This is what I mean when I say it doesn’t have to take lots of time if you just do a little planning.

Your posts need to be loosely on the same topic, but they don’t all have to be incredibly serious. People are interested in getting to know the person behind the work as much as the work itself. It’s possible to do this without revealing much at all about your personal life.

If you’re doing this with a team for a research centre, if you have 4 people in your team, you each only need to post once a month. Don’t make this more complicated than it needs to be.

Scheduling posts

You can schedule posts from LinkedIn. Just type up your new post and then, instead of clicking ‘post’, click the little clock icon next to the post button. That will let you schedule the post up to 3 months in the future.

That doesn’t mean you only need to log in once every 3 months. People will stop engaging with your posts if you don’t respond to their comments, which means fewer people will see your next post. But it does mean you can write several posts, schedule them, and then spend less time on LinkedIn for a few weeks.

For more detailed help with this, see this article from LinkedIn.

Should you bother with newsletters or articles?

Maybe. Right now, of the two, newsletters get better reach. So, if you’re going to write one of them, make it a newsletter. In a lot of ways newsletter is a misnomer. LinkedIn newsletters are really just articles that get sent to all your subscribers. The first one is the most important one – it will go out to all of your connections to see if they want to subscribe.

Is it worth the bother? Again, maybe. If you’re working with a team, a monthly or quarterly newsletter could be useful (pick a publication schedule you can stick with; for academics that is not weekly, and unless you have a team of 12, fortnightly would be a push).

A newsletter would give you space to talk about what your centre is doing, upcoming/recent events, publications, etc.

That said, if you’re new to LinkedIn, put a note in your diary to come back to the question of whether you want/need a newsletter in a few months. You have enough to get used to with posting fairly regularly and engaging with others at least weekly.

Your engagement schedule

Since LinkedIn moved away from wanting lots of content, it’s been giving more visibility to people who engage with other people’s posts. That means, engaging with others is the single most important thing you’ll do to increase your visibility on LinkedIn.

That bears repeating: engaging with others is the single most important thing you’ll do to increase your visibility on LinkedIn.

This does not mean you need to waste hours every day doom scrolling. Instead, you need to do a little planning:

Make a list of 10 people who are on LinkedIn that you want to build or maintain a relationship with (it doesn’t matter if you’ve sent them a connection request or not).
Follow the instructions in this article to create a custom feed. If, like me, you struggle to get the last step in the article to work and/or know you’d never remember to go back to the link you save anyway, bookmark the feed. Just be warned, that if you change the list of people, you’ll need to resave the link/bookmark.
Make a point of looking at the custom feed once or twice a week to see what those people have posted in the last week (use the ‘date posted’ filter to limit what you see to the last week). Leave meaningful comments on their posts (not ‘great point’, but something that adds to the conversation and invites a response from them).

If you have more time, or more people in your team, you can create multiple custom feeds; I keep about half a dozen of them in a bookmarks folder in my browser (remember, I’m using this to help with my marketing; you have different goals on LinkedIn, so you probably don’t need so many lists). Here’s how to do that in Chrome, Firefox, Edge (or at least organise your favourites), and Safari. If you use a different browser, simply search for ‘Create a bookmark folder in [name of browser]’ in your favourite search engine.

Review and revise your lists roughly once per quarter.

How can I help?

You can book a 1-hour Academics on LinkedIn (£150) session with me. How it works:

You book the session on TidyCal.
One week before we meet, you’ll get an automated email asking you to send me your draft LinkedIn headline and ‘about’ section.
We’ll meet via Zoom to discuss how to improve your draft and what you need to do for the rest of your profile. We’ll also set up your first engagement list and create a manageable posting schedule. I’ll also help you identify topics for your first 3 or 4 posts.
I’ll send you a summary of what we planned in the session for you to refer to later.

For other ways I work with academics and other resources, see Writing Advice for Academics – while you’re there, be sure to sign up for my monthly newsletter.

JenniferEWC

About the Author

I help entrepreneurs get their books out of their heads and into print!

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