With over 500 million users across 200 countries, LinkedIn is increasingly essential to professional networking, job hunting and business development.

Insights asked marketing specialist Wenee Yap for her top tips to help you make the most out of LinkedIn.

Keep your profile up to date 

Make a habit of updating your LinkedIn profile periodically, including key achievements around recently completed projects, client work, volunteering, or new roles. Be succinct and clear in terms of the value you brought to the project or role. Wherever possible, supplement your update with a LinkedIn recommendation – a formal comment posted by your manager, colleague or client praising you for your work and noting what you have achieved, in a specific project or role.

An up-to-date profile allows both potential and existing connections to see how you might work together, and, much like original content, allows your connections to better understand what you do and why you excel at what you do.

Write a long-form article

Linkedin’s long-form posts allow for further dissemination of quality content. By publishing your short responses to common client questions, or providing commentary on a trending, controversial issue, you are establishing your expertise. This helps promote you to LinkedIn connections and wider community, who can be reached by long-form posts.

Google prioritises ‘authoritative’ content. It’s essential to Google’s dominance of search; you can rely on Google to deliver you relevant results, meaningful answers to whatever questions you might have. There’s no way to ‘game’ this system – quality content, achieved by providing answers to popular questions, is the only way forward.

If you can have popular sites link to your content, such as news or industry websites, Google considers you even more relevant and authoritative. No matter how Google varies its algorithms to improve its search results, its algorithm is always intended to deliver the same outcome – the highest quality, most trusted answer to a question. That’s what content marketing needs to deliver.

Stay professional - Don’t humour your inner keyboard warrior

Regular participation in LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry means you will be in a position to find like-minded people in your field – people that could become valuable contacts. As such, when it comes to LinkedIn, the old rule applies: if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it. Positivity and optimism makes you an attractive candidate and conversely, negativity may close doors that would otherwise be open to you.