⚜Have you ever come across someone’s LinkedIn profile that catches your eye?⚜
What grabs your attention? Sometimes it is something so simple and fun we almost forget that a profile is not all about what you say or the words you use. While words and SEO is of great importance, there is more to this story of what caught your eye. LinkedIn gives us a chance to add some creativity due to a little secret – that is rapidly becoming not a secret anymore.
LinkedIn profiles use a simple formatting style, meaning basically they don’t. Your profile is an unformatted document on LinkedIn which while some may say this might be boring, actually allows the user to get creative and add whatever formatting they like! (*almost)
And the formatting that we want to add to instantly upgrade your profile in order to give it some “pop”, and catch a readers eye, not to mention making it more organized and reading friendly is …some interesting symbols!
I often get asked about this from my group members because adding symbols is one of the easiest things you can do tor your profile yourself that has the most bang for your buck.
Symbols can be used:
To separate ideas or skills in your headline ▣
To add character and personality ⛅
To create a more creative bullet list that matches throughout your profile ☀
To separate long text sections for ease of reading ☑
To emphasize important sentences or skills without missing the ability to underline or bold ★
⚡For one of my favorite sites that has all the symbols you could want: go here
Or create your own word document filled with symbols from wingdings and weddings font or others you copy and paste onto the page for future reference. (scroll to the bottom of this post to get you started)
So let’s get started shall we? It takes 3 easy steps:
Login to your profile and go to Edit Profile
Pull up the symbols, website or page of symbols, highlight the symbol by clicking over it (right click or double click) then copy (control or command + V) the symbol.
Go back to your LinkedIn profile and paste it exactly where you want it to go. (control or command + P)
Here’s an example of my headline with two different symbols in it to separate the main ideas:
And here is a fun list of characters and symbols to try:
I often get asked about whether people should have a LinkedIn company page.
Your personal profile is about you, it’s about what makes you an expert, what makes you influential. Of course you can mention your company and products and services, but it’s really not the place to market.
So you’ll want a company page. Go to interests and companies, you’ll see that a company will come up, the company pages that you’re following.
When you want to create a company page you just literally click the button shown in the video. That’s how easy this is. Then you just need to name your company page.
What you do need to know is that you must have an email for the company. It doesn’t have to be an email with the name of your company but it shouldn’t be at gmail.com. It should be a private email address. Put the company name, the email address at the company, you verify it, you click continue.
All you really need to do for a company page is upload maybe the banner for your website. If you’ve already created a banner for your website you can probably edit it to fit on your page. You can see I’ve got the same banner that’s on my website, and then a dd a little bit about the company pulled off your own page. This is not something you need to hire me or anybody else to do, it’s really easy to do.
Once you do this you can create ads and showcase pages in LinkedIn. In the video, I show some examples of showcase pages I have that are specific to products that I offer. If I wanted to I could market then to those specific products. It’s pretty cool stuff and really, really easy to do.
Then on your profile, people can link right to your page. It’s not as easy to grow this page as it is to grow your personal profile, but it is beneficial to have, especially if you want to do some LinkedIn sponsored posts or advertising.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel to see more videos!
Ok there are many strategies to LinkedIn. But there is one really easy strategy that I immediately do after researching a new client’s level of “social proof”. I research this throughout their social media presence and this can take some time. Which is of course why they hire me. But not everyone has the means to hire a social media strategist for themselves and their business.
[Tweet “A quick + easy way to increase your social proof quotient on LinkedIn.”]
So I want to share a quick and easy way to increase your social proof quotient on LinkedIn.
Two areas on LinkedIn that scream social proof are your profile recommendations and endorsements.
Recommendations should be interspersed throughout all of your experiences, but most heavily weighted under your most recent experience – the one that tells your readers the direction you are going and how you are going to get there.
Often my clients who come to me for LinkedIn assistance are in transition. Transition possibly from a corporate job to entrepreneurship, or from a small idea to a bigger business evolution. And it is through your experience (and summary) sections that we showcase how your skills translate to your newly choose field or niche. This new field or evolution needs to be represented by proof that you are still an expert.
Endorsements should also showcase your new niche requirements. This section is where you can grab the profile readers who I call the “skimmers.” Those readers who just want to get to the nitty gritty: what do you do, how do you do it, and who thinks you are good at it. When they see that 99+ strangers (to them) agree that you are very good at Public Speaking, or Sales Copy, or Social Media Strategy, it makes an impact.
As humans we are wired to believe in what the “herd” believes in. There is safety in numbers and if those numbers show us that we can trust you to be what you say you are, then we most likely will. As will your next business prospect, future client, future partner or sale.
Think of Yelp. I use Yelp a handful of times a week. To find a restaurant, to find a good dry cleaner, or to find a gym with good customer service. LinkedIn endorsements and recommendations are your version of a Yelp review and you can’t afford to ignore their power.
Steps to creating your plan of action on how to build in hefty social proof to your LinkedIn profile.
1.Make sure your endorsements are using your keywords. Don’t let people who haven’t worked with you for 5 years endorse you for those skills they vaguely remember you doing well. Create your own list chock full of keywords that exemplify your new market. Go into “edit profile” mode and cruise down to your endorsements section. Click on “add new skills” and go to town. There is a limit of course, but try to think of the top 10 skills that are keywords in your business niche and add those in.
2. Move your endorsements around to highlight your top skills. Yep you can re-order those skills to your hearts content. Make sure the skills that you want noticed the most are up at the top. The first 10 skills are usually the ones that get the most clicks, so even if those skills are newer – that’s ok! Soon they will be full up.
3. Endorse other people routinely. This is a no brainer because LinkedIn makes it so easy to do this by giving suggestions on who to endorse for what every time you log into your profile. And my hope is you are logging in at least a couple times a week. As you endorse others it is usually a quick response as they return the favor.
4. Once a week log in and take a look at your connections. While you are working on steps 1 through 3 I want you to be thinking of recommendations too. Each time write down a few people who you would be able to write a thoughtful and genuine recommendation of their work experience. Or maybe you have connections in which are very enthusiastic about their work – that is a great thing too! Plan on once a week, investing in about 15-20 minutes, to craft a recommendation for them. That can go a long way to getting organic recommendations of your own.
5. Finally – please just ask! People love to be asked to help out, and I always love to write a recommendation for someone who deserves it, so don’t be afraid to be honest and just ask someone. Take that same time each week and look for 2 people in your contacts list to ask if they would write you a recommendation. Be clear and specific to save them time. Let them know exactly which skills you are looking to highlight and which experience to attach the recommendation to. One word of warning: you can’t transfer existing recommendations to new experiences so make sure you are editing current experiences to enhance the specific experiences you want to keep if there are recommendations there you don’t want to lose. Or make sure you are happy to create a new experience knowing you will be able to get new recommendations when you are finished.
LinkedIn is a platform designed to enhance your social proof. Endorsements lay a good foundation and recommendations are this version of social proof on steroids! So let’s get you out there showing the world you are an expert in your field, start with these 5 steps today.
Need to meet some people who are happy to endorse and recommend as we get to know each other? Join my LinkedIn group! We always try to help where we can whether that be through advice, encouragement, endorsements of skills we know you have and more. I hope to see you there.
There are two main reasons people are afraid of LinkedIn.
They don’t want people to know who their customers (connections) are.
They don’t want to lose employees.
Are you still afraid of LinkedIn?
Let me address these two main concerns to show you that LinkedIn is a valuable, profitable, and useful tool to have in your social media and marketing game.
First: This fear basically comes down to fear of competition. But having an Non-Abundance attitude (aka there are not enough customers, success and wealth to go around) does not serve you at all. In fact this fear of competition does you a huge disservice because knowing, understanding and connecting with competitors has many valuable benefits in the long run.
When you connect with other experts in your industry, share advice, and even refer clients you build:
Huge trust. You build trust with your current customers, who now believe you have their best interests at heart.
Potential successful partnerships. You very well may partner with someone completely outside of your niche, but more than likely you will find someone like you, doing something like you’re doing and realize there is a way you can do it better, together.
A vast quantity of research material. Being on LinkedIn and seeing what your others post, what your connections and customers say and do, what other business owners talk about and need, can bring you a whole slew of answers to questions such as: How can I best serve my client? How can I run my business better than Sally Competition? Why are they successful and I’m barely hanging on?
These are answers that equate to profits and profitability in the long run.
Fear Number Two: This fear comes from a fear of “if I invest in my employees online brand they will find new jobs or take all my customers to a new job.” I call BS on this. Imagine if a prospective client goes to your LinkedIn company page, and every single employee they click on has a polished, professional profile? That helps YOU my friend, the business owner. It shows that you are investing in the people that are an integral part of your business. There’s nothing but good in that. Will people leave? Of course, they do now! Let’s not focus on that, lets focus on the good it’s doing for your business image to have such rockstar employees. The biggest and best asset you can grow is employee loyalty. Your employees are the ones who can talk about their fantastic job to friends and on social networks to gain you more clients and more profits.
I am an advocate of always empowering your employee to do more, to make more decisions, and to think more about “us” as a team. The minute your employees become invested in the growth and wellbeing of your company or business is the minute you truly succeed. And this has a very funny way of translating into profits as well.
So create a company page on LinkedIn and have your employees link to it. Give them the responsibility of posting about activities, company values, and products. Let them be genuine and honest!
When you allow employees to do this you create:
Individual success that leads to group success
An additional way for social networks to learn about you and your brand.
A portfolio for prospect clients to see the amazing work your employees can do for them.
A way for your employees to get kudos and recognition for a job well done, which goes far in keeping those valuable employees right where they are needed most – working for you!
A unified brand that builds trust among potential customers who are “looking around.”
One caution: please make sure your employees on LinkedIn have a professional and polished profile, as polished as yours. Refer to my blog post here to know exactly what to look for and what to do in regards to your employee’s profiles on LinkedIn.
So I ask you now, are you still afraid of LinkedIn? If so, that’s ok. Come on over to my LinkedIn group and tell us why. Tell us so we can help answer any questions and allay any fears.
Today’s social media quick tip is about how to save your LinkedIn profile as a PDF.
There are many uses for this feature. As an example I look at my friend Christina Dave’s profile. Let’s say Christina and I don’t know each other and I’m about to go and meet her or go to a workshop and she’s going to be there, and I want to know more about Christina. I’m going to review her profile, but would like to print it and bring it with me so that I can review it before I get out of my car. Maybe I want to keep a file of PDFs of different connections for different purposes.
In the video I show you where you can do this. There’s a drop down list where you can click save to PDF. Another box will pop up, and you’ll be able to save. You may just want to keep a file for referral partners, or potential employees, or on your competitors.
It’s a good way to help you organize this information. You can organize it within LinkedIn, but if for whatever reason you’re going to be somewhere that you want a hard copy, or you want to keep a hard copy on a computer file somewhere, it’s really, really easy to save your contact’s information as a PDF.
You don’t even have to actually be connected to people for this to work. Give it a try and see if you find it helpful to have these PDFs handy for your reference.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel to see more videos!
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