LinkedIn is a very different social media site than most and there are plenty of practices used on Facebook and Twitter that don’t come across so well on a professional site like LinkedIn. Here’s six tips on what not to do on LinkedIn and how you can take the extra step to stand out on the site:
1. Don’t send the standard connection request, always personalize. When you’re on LinkedIn on your desktop, you’re given the option to send a personalized connection request when you add a connection. Utilize that feature! If you’re connecting to someone that you maybe saw speak at a conference or even someone you went to highschool with, let them know how you know who they are.
2. Don’t spam your groups. Make sure you’re providing value, commenting on other people’s posts, engaging in discussions. It’s a great way to share the different blogs and sales you have but you’ll get way more of a response from people if you have also been commenting on their posts. Then, when you post about your business or the different things that you do, people will see your name, remember it, and be way more interested in what you have to say. About 70% of the time you spend in those groups should be adding value to others’ posts, not just about you!
3. Don’t selfie. Your LinkedIn profile picture has such a different standard than any other social media site holds. Set aside your selfies, pictures of your cat or your kids, and nature photos for Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. LinkedIn is about your business and you as a professional, so you really want to come across that way. Maybe it’s time to get together with a group of your friends and have a headshot party! They can be SO much fun and you will acquire a photo much more suitable for your LinkedIn! This is your personal brand that you’re selling, make it count 🙂
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4. Don’t skip over the summary! This is where you can tell your story, where you can intrigue your followers, where you can share a call to action. All these words you use in your summary are searchable by google. Make sure you are throwing in some keywords that really summarize you and your business so that when people search it, you’re the first to come up! This is a way for your LinkedIn to work for you while you’re sleeping, it’s way too simple to skip over it. Keep it clean, relatively short, and feel free to keep a lot of white space in your summary so it’s easily read and skimmed.
5. Don’t forget to check your privacy settings! This is such a simple fix that can easily slip by you. If your profile is private, that is not helping you be seen by the masses. Make sure you set your profile to public. Go right now and just double check, this is another incredibly simple way to increase the traffic on your page!
6. Don’t ignore recommendations! Of course it’s great to write a review for your hairdresser or your personal trainer, but don’t be afraid to write recommendations for people who can write one back for you! So if you collaborated with someone and you think that partnership went really well, write them a LinkedIn recommendation and more than likely they will write one back for you. Recommendations are gold on LinkedIn and they really make you stand out from your competition. Customers are much more likely to trust a professional that has been recommended by plenty of people that they have worked for or with. If I speak at an event and someone running it comes up and says “Hey, thank you so much you really did a great job and everyone seemed to love it!” I’ll come right back and say “Of course! Thank you and would you mind writing me a recommendation on LinkedIn?” and 9 out of 10 times it I come out with not only another speaking gig under my belt but a glowing LinkedIn recommendation as well.
And that’s about it! Six easy tips that I swear by that can totally turn around your LinkedIn game. Do you have any other LinkedIn tips you swear by? Let us know! I’d love to hear your thoughts!!
Building a strong, personal connection with your contacts can be much easier than you think! Social Media can be your best friend for getting to know your contacts. Stalk them, carefully, I know that sounds crazy but it works.
Look at their Facebook, peruse their LinkedIn, and check out their Twitter. It’s so important to get to know the people you could potentially be doing business with!
Maybe you notice a potential client is skiing in Vermont. THEY posted about it. Reach out and tell them “You’re right near my favorite coffee shop on earth! You’ve got to try the chai latte. Tell Mario that Karen says hello!” Building that connection with your contacts is pure gold, and providing them with advice outside of the business world let’s them know you’re interested in them personally. Find something you have in common and start the conversation.
Maybe they’ve checked in to a hot yoga class and you have a funny hot yoga story.
Maybe they wrote a blog post that you can share with YOUR tribe.
Maybe they’re speaking at a conference you’ve been dying to attend.
Doing your homework will impress your new contact, they’ll know that you’ve been paying attention, reading their blogs, and staying connected to them. It makes you stand out from the crowd of people who tell a presenter “Nice talk.” Get the courage to walk up to that presenter and say “HEY! I loved our talk, and it really reminded me of a blog post you wrote a few months back and…” you get the picture. That conversation is much more memorable.
There are so many incredibly easy ways to stand out from the crowd. Instead of writing on a contact’s Facebook wall for their birthday, take five minutes to handwrite them a birthday card! It’s so rare to receive snail mail these days and it can make someone’s day. Get their newsletters? I bet their mailing address is on it. Don’t be afraid to slide your business card in there too with your contact information.
Then check out their LinkedIn profile. Did you go to the same University? Did you both work at McDonald’s in high schoo? Find that personal connection and take advantage of it. Use it as a conversation starter to talk to a contact you may never have crossed paths with. If your contact sees how much time you’ve put into getting to know them, they will be inclined to want to get to know you.
Set aside just a half hour a few times a week and get to know your contacts. You can thank me later! Let me know if you’ve found a fun way of using social media to get to know your audience better, share in the comments below, I’d love to hear about it.
Also, CLICK HERE to check out my FREE video series and get YOUR LinkedIn ready to be seen by contacts trying to stalk YOU! 😉
Today we are in LinkedIn Pulse. LinkedIn Pulse is where we can add an actual blog post type update as opposed to a short Facebook type update.
When you click publish a post, you get this blog post type of interface. You can type in a headline, there are formatting options, and you can upload an image.
People ask me how the time “how do I get eyes on it?” If you want to get more eyes on your blog post, what I want you to do is Google “LinkedIn Pulse 2016 editorial calendar”. You will see that it gives us options. LinkedIn actually has an editorial calendar. If you want to get featured on LinkedIn Pulse, you may want to go to this editorial calendar and see what LinkedIn is looking for. Each month has a theme and an accompanying hashtag that you should use in your post(s) that month.
There is also a student editorial calendar. If you’re a student and you’re posting on LinkedIn Pulse, you totally want to use the hashtags included in the calendar because you’re more likely to get featured by LinkedIn Pulse than if you don’t use these hashtags. Even if you just create one post a month and you use their themes for each month.
Use these hashtags, focus on these themes. There’s no guarantee you’re going to get featured by LinkedIn Pulse, but you’re going to have a better chance if you use their theme than if you don’t.
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In this quick tip, we look at how to message people with whom you’re in the same group but you’re not connected to. It used to be that you could do this automatically via LinkedIn. At this point now, you really can’t.
So I’ll show you a little hack. We’re going to go to my groups. We’re going to find a group that has a lot of people in it so that we can have a lot choose from. We’ll use Social Media Today.
Let’s say you want to find entrepreneurs in Miami. Maybe you do a workshop down there. You want to find the entrepreneurs in Miami. If you just search by the members, you can’t message them.
If you search on the main group page and you enter “entrepreneur and Miami”, it will bring you up the recent posts by people who have both of those words in their profile.
Check out the results and when you find somebody we want to get to know. Then go back to the main page and open up their post. I would suggest that you read it.
We’re going to read this post and see if it’s somebody we actually want to engage with. Then, we’re going to go back over to our original post. We’re going to click on the 3 dots icon and we get the opportunity here to reply privately.
This pops up your messenger app. Very cool. Now, we can message this person privately. It’s a way to still be able to message people in groups, even without the direct messaging in the groups app.
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In this video, I show you an elusive trick. It shouldn’t be a trick, but somehow it is – how to find your posts on LinkedIn.
People ask me all the time, “How do I know what I posted?” “How do I see what I’ve done?” Well, when you go to “view profile as” and you hover over it, it says “view recent activity.” When you click that “view recent activity” button, you can see what your recent activity was. You can see the posts, what you’ve published, how many people are following you on those posts and everything.
So that’s it! Really easy. This is how you can see what your history is of what you’ve posted on LinkedIn. Hope that’s helpful!
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