How to Use LinkedIn to Be a Rockstar at Work

Many people use LinkedIn as nothing more than an online Rolodex, a means of finding a job, or a quick daily glance through professional updates and eye-roll-inducing humblebrags. But when you look for the tips and tricks hidden away in its many nooks and corners, you can do some pretty amazing things on LinkedIn's virtual platform.

With so much uncertainty persisting today, we’re all looking for ways to go above and beyond just getting our projects done on time. It's more important than ever to really shine at work. Today we’ll talk about some strategies you can use on LinkedIn—all from the comfort of your likely-virtual office—to stand out.

With LinkedIn, you can:

• Be the bringer of industry trends and insights
• Introduce new practices to your team
• Deliver more creative and fleshed-out ideas
• Be a great ambassador for your company

Let's dive in!

Spot insights and trends

Raise your hand if your primary engagement with LinkedIn is a periodic check of whatever comes up in your organic feed. (Don’t worry; I can’t see you. Go ahead and raise it.)

This is the default behavior on LinkedIn. It means you’re seeing whatever has been posted by your connections—those in your network. What do you find there? Usually a combination of job updates and shared articles, maybe sprinkled with some promoted content.

Spending five to ten minutes seeing what’s happening in your network can be interesting and relevant. But if you really understand the power of LinkedIn, you can use those same five to ten minutes to spot industry-shifting trends and insights from leading thinkers and institutions—insights you can bring to your team to shift or challenge thinking.

Next time you’re on the platform, pull yourself away from the not-so-riveting feed and focus instead on curating the content you see. Choose people (thinkers and business leaders), institutions, and hashtags you’d like to follow. Here's a screenshot of a few thinkers I follow.

I may not have access to people like Brene Brown, Dan Pink, or Adam Grant in real life. But LinkedIn is where they share deep, insightful pieces that shape my thinking and perspective, as opposed to snippy tweets or Insta-worthy photos.

You may be completely unsurprised to hear that I follow hashtags like leadership, workplace success, communication, and podcasting, just to name a few. This ensures that heated and popular conversations on these topics will dominate my feed instead of vanilla job updates.

As a...

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