Most people aren’t utilizing social media – particularly LinkedIn – for promoting their brand or growing their business.

In fact just one percent of people who use LinkedIn actually post updates on the platform.

And of that one percent who post content, most of them aren’t posting effective updates.

Here are some ways you can strategically use LinkedIn to achieve your business and branding goals.

• Tip 1: Post consistently and create your content pillars (your areas of focus that align with your strengths and opportunities). Consistent will mean different things to different people. This does not mean that you need to post every single day. But this does mean you need to have some regularity and cadence to your posting. And this is so that people don’t forget you. It’s also because the algorithm favors people who are active on the platform. You want to start being known as a subject matter expert in your field so you need to pick certain areas on which to focus. That’s where your content pillars will help.

• Tip 2: Only post helpful and educational content (no self-promotional posts). If you follow me you know I feel really strongly about this. I don’t think it’s worth wasting a touchpoint to promote yourself. And I think people feel obligated to like your post when you do this. Instead of posting why you’re so great or when you win an award, tell a story. Let your company post the news on their company page instead and you can like it.

• Tip 3: Answer all comments and build a community to help your posts go “viral.” Answering comments enables your post to be seen by more people as part of the algorithm. And it’s also a great way to build relationships with those people who took the time to engage with your post. I will go a step further and engage with the content of those people as well in the future.

• Tip 4: Structure your posts strategically to get people to “stop the scroll” (use white space, capture their attention in the first three lines before the post is truncated and end with a strong call to action)

• Tip 5: Use strong visuals to help viewers “stop the scroll” – show your face in most of these posts so people get to know YOU. You should invest in several headshots so you have multiple photo options to use on social media and in other marketing efforts.

• Tip 6: Strategically use (the right) hashtags. It’s important to use hashtags on LinkedIn so that your content is more discoverable but more important is using the right hashtags and not using too many of them. Don’t use more than 5 and don’t use hashtags with too many or too few followers. Use the main search bar to help you find the right ones and keep a master list of them. Put all hashtags at the end of the post.

• Tip 7: Tell stories so people get to know you, which makes them remember and like you more. Storytelling is the key to content marketing success today.

• Tip 8: Reuse and repurpose your content (track past content in a master spreadsheet) – you don’t need to do extra work – you should repost content that performed well multiple times. You can easily do this by keeping track of your content in a master content calendar/spreadsheet.

• Tip 9: Share content at the optimal time when your audience is on social (mornings and during the workweek but sometimes on weekends too).

• Tip 10: Be YOU! There is no one else who else your specific experience from your vantage point, so use it to your advantage. Don’t be afraid to be you.

Take some time to map out your strategy and come up with your content pillars – the topics on which you’ll write about.

It’s important to make sure your content is focused on those pillars.