How many LinkedIn connections do you have?

If you are mid- to senior-level in your career, you should have more than 500 LinkedIn followers/connections. If you don’t, you aren’t truly maximizing your network or using LinkedIn effectively. I know you know more than 500 people who are on LinkedIn when over 800 million people are on LinkedIn today.

Also once you reach 501 onnections, your profile will no longer display the actual number of connections but rather say “500+.” This makes it look like your network is robust.

While the number of connections you have shouldn’t be focused on the quantity and instead the quality of relationships, my guess is that you aren’t thinking strategically or broadly enough about who you know – former colleagues and classmates, those with whom you worked during the early part of your career=, people with whom you served on an industry committee even family and friends.

Remember every single person you meet will be important down the line as either a source of business, a referral source, a job prospect or a colleague. 

While there are different techniques/tools for increasing your personal LinkedIn network and your company followers, the same major rules apply – provide content of value, stay top of mind, be helpful, use visuals to bring your posts to life, use the right hashtags so your content can be found and repurpose your content assets.

Here are a few other ideas for how to effectively use LinkedIn:

1. Complete all areas of your profile (this is how you obtain All Star status, which increases the visibility of your posts).

2. Customize your headline and summary sections

3. Look through the “People You May Know” list to find new connections.

4. Look at your colleagues and competitors connections for new people to add to your network as well as competitive intelligence.

5. Follow 5-10 of your competitors LinkedIn company pages for ideas and inspiration for your own page. Then do what they do better.

6. Reuse and repurpose your own content. Write a strong headline (important because it appears in Google searches)

7. Help others without the expectation of getting anything in return.