People use LinkedIn for a wide variety of reasons – to post job listings, share company updates, and even advertise services to other businesses and business consumers. However, without a strong network, your posts won’t have a strong reach, making it difficult to share your messaging with fellow business owners or business travelers.

However, if you haven’t been on LinkedIn for very long, you may wonder – what is the best way to build up a professional network? Curating a network in an online space is not always easy. By following some simple guidelines, you can build and maintain a strong network of colleagues and partners on LinkedIn.

Start With Your Contacts

The “social” element of LinkedIn is straightforward in that it revolves entirely around making connections. When you’re working on building up your network, the best place to start is with people you already know! LinkedIn has a “find nearby” function that may allow you to see whether your coworkers or employees have profiles on the platform yet. LinkedIn also has the option to easily import your email contacts, after which they’ll run a search for you and pull up a list of suggestions for who to add to your network.

Connections on LinkedIn are like friend requests on Facebook – the other person has to accept your request before you can be connected. To encourage your connections to become a part of your circle, including a brief personal message will help whoever you’re connecting with remember who you are. This is especially helpful if some of your contacts are other hoteliers you’ve met at past conferences, but don’t keep up with regularly.

Join Groups

LinkedIn hosts hundreds of unique groups geared toward various industries. Within each, members can share relevant posts that generate discussion and encourage sharing. They serve as micro-communities that are designed to help you connect with other members of your industry in a meaningful way.

Engaging in groups on LinkedIn is vital in a time where conferences are entirely virtual. Speakers at virtual conferences now have a one-way relationship with their listeners. Often, virtual conferences are only able to offer a few breakout sessions with chat rooms, making connecting with other members more difficult and dependent on internet connectivity.

Post Often (Using Images!)

Posting frequently on social media is a critical way to grow your network, but also a good way to maintain the network you already developed. When your connections engage with your content online – whether it’s with a reaction or a share – it’s more likely that the post will appear on the feed of individuals connected to your connection. Social media platforms share what other people’s friends and connections are interested in as a way to organically spread content among more interested parties than if they only showed the post to your original connections. Using images is important when you post, as well, as social media platforms highly favor visual content, and users are much more likely to engage with a post if there’s an image attached.

The benefit of LinkedIn showing your posts to related connections is that those people might be interested in connecting with you – whether it’s because they’re interested in what you or your hotel has to offer or just because they agree with the topic of your post. It encourages them to take the leap and make the connection with you, and when you’re building a network on LinkedIn, the more individuals in your industry you can connect with, the better!

Add Value to Your Network

Choosing quality over quantity with LinkedIn connections is important, as well. Just because you build a large network quickly doesn’t mean you’ve built a strong network. Beyond your initial circle, connecting with the right people is important to ensure your content is reaching the proper audience. You can connect with industry thought leaders, fellow hoteliers, and other employees in hospitality to build up your network.

While our team at Travel Media Group can’t find and make connection requests for you, we can help you develop and curate content to post on your hotel’s social media, including your LinkedIn business page. Scheduling content to share to your own page is simple, and you can efficiently track progress and receive alerts to @mentions and DMs through TMG OneView®. For more information on how we can help you grow your profile, visit our social media page.