ARYZE sat down with Kotryna Kurt of Linkedist, a startup that helps other businesses expand their reach via LinkedIn. Linkedist helps those companies create targeted content and advertisements, as well as running workshops about LinkedIn.
Kotryna Kurt is more passionate about LinkedIn than I knew it was possible to be. Our conversation changed my perspective on the platform; where I had simply seen a means to an end, she sees an opportunity – a place to exchange information, to start conversations, and to maximise the potential of ideas. Smiley and warm yet highly professional, Kurt clearly cares about using the platform to showcase the person or business behind the profile. She was drawn to LinkedIn out of interest:
“My LinkedIn Journey started four years ago, where I started posting and I could see that this was really a platform. I was reading a lot of books and articles and I wanted to have some really knowledgeable discussions. I could not post on Facebook because that’s for family and friends, and Instagram is more about the visuals. So I found LinkedIn and I found my place; I started posting about marketing and I could see people started to engage, and that was it.”
To learn more, connect with Kotryna Kurt on LinkedIn, or visit Linkedist’s website.
Kurt did that for a little over two years, until she really started ramping up, to the point where people and companies started asking for her help on the platform. She began advising them on the side whilst still working as a Digital Marketing Specialist at TimeXTender, overworking herself until she reached a breaking point. She decided to do something about it, and quit her job to focus solely on Linkedist with her co-founder, Giedre Pociute. From there,
“It’s been really a wonderful journey and like a rollercoaster. We’ve learned so much and I think we both have a really big passion for LinkedIn.”
Kurt’s top 5 tips to improve your LinkedIn profile in an hour:
- Focus on your summary section: it’s a great place to introduce yourself and your values, and to be personal and creative.
- Make your experience section neat and succinct, without any long paragraphs. Instead, it should neatly list your various experiences and projects in bullet point form.
- Ensure that your top three skills in the endorsement section are those that represent you best. Despite common misconception, your top three skills are manually chosen, rather than voted to the top.
- Engage with your recommendation section; having references shows that you are trustworthy and boosts partnerships and clients.
- Embed your contact information into your profile. The easier it is to contact you, the more potential partners and clients will reach out.
For businesses, Kurt has a few added pieces of advice:
- Make sure to put in your top three hashtags to create more traffic to your page
- Check your analytics to see which posts are performing the best, and then focus on producing targeted content.
- Make sure that each admin invites at least twenty-five people per day to follow your company’s page. Leveraging your network will get you far!
Kurt believes the biggest mistake made by companies on LinkedIn is not having a strategy:
“It is frustrating when people just post without thinking about their audience, and then complain that their followers aren’t increasing”.
Another common mistake is adding too many hashtags and writing too many paragraphs, which she finds annoying and difficult to read.
Kurt believes it is important to use the creative spaces on LinkedIn to showcase your values and individuality. To do so, she believes content creation and the summary section are key, and that one should not be afraid to use emojis to highlight key concepts.
Linkedist’s ideal type of client is small to mid sized tech companies, because LinkedIn is a perfect ecosystem for them to grow. That said, Kurt believes any type of company can use LinkedIn to their advantage, so long as they approach it from the right angle. Take an ice cream company, for example:
“You can’t take the same content as you put on Instagram or Facebook where you are telling people about discounted ice cream. People are not going to enjoy reading that. Instead, you could make a post about your company culture – how are your employees doing at this ice cream company. You could make a post about the new ice cream line that you are producing and how it is different, and what it means for your customers. So it’s a lot about how you look at the content and which kind of angle you take.”
Although Kurt sees LinkedIn as being the ultimate B2B professionals network for social selling, she believes that LinkedIn has and will continue to change.
“I think it will be much more of a people platform than ever before. In the beginning it was a lot more about companies and recruiters, and finding people who don’t have a job. Now, it’s a platform where you come to get some knowledge and to learn something new, and that’s where it’s going in the future too. Maybe one day people will go to LinkedIn instead of various news portals; already now, every day you get a notification with top, fact-based world news.”
Indeed, Kurt believes LinkedIn is increasingly a forum for spreading and receiving information – about fact based news and business development, and as a free forum to publish articles, and as a place where you can sell and advertise.
As for the future of Linkedist, they are still in the start-up stage, with plans and hopes to grow with the platform. Kurt believes that LinkedIn usage will increase in the next two years, and wants to be there to help companies and professionals manoeuvre and utilise that boom. For more insights into entrepreneurship and tech, please visit ARYZE’s blog.
