Welcome to the first in a new weekly series, Social Media Quick Tips. Each week there will be a video where I’ll be showing you useful tips that will help you make better use social media networks and platforms.
This week’s tip is a general tip. I wanted you to take a look at the new interface on LinkedIn. If you log into LinkedIn or if you haven’t logged in in a while, when you log in, you’ll see that there’s a new interface. It’s kind of cool because now, when you click on your profile, you get the ability to jump in quick and edit any section you want just by looking at it. For example, to edit your profile, you can do so while you’re looking at your profile by clicking on the little pencil icon.
The improvements are cool because they it easier for you to make changes as you look at your profile on the fly as opposed to having to go in to the edit mode like we used to have to do before.
It’s a little off-putting at first because you’re trying to read something and boxes come up. You have to get used to it but once you do, it’s really kind of cool. It gives you the ability to do quick edits to any section on the fly. That’s it. That’s my social media quick tip for today. Go into LinkedIn. Take a look at the new interface and let me know what you think in the comments.
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I do a lot of speaking about LinkedIn. I love to go to conferences and speak with groups who are just ready and willing to see social media change their business. During these breakout sessions I try to make my information “real” by doing some on-the-spot mini profile reviews as I am speaking.
What I find is so interesting!
More than 50% of the time these mini reviews reveal that the LinkedIn profile is missing a summary.
Your summary section IS one of the top reasons that makes LinkedIn so powerful and so helpful for you and your business, whether you are trying to find a job or find clients.
[Tweet “Your summary section IS one of the top reasons that makes LinkedIn so powerful for your business.”]
Your summary section is what makes LinkedIn NOT a boring old resume filled with facts and dates and figures.
Your summary section is where you tell people:
Who you are
Who you help
How you help them
And you tell people all of this in YOUR voice.
It’s a way to be interviewed without being interviewed. It’s a handy way to show your personality along with all of your skills, to bring your uniqueness across the computer screen, which all leads to a 100% stronger connection with your viewers every time.
But the biggest reason the summary section is so powerful?
Every word is searchable by Google. Every word!
We all know what it means to “rank” in a random search. Being able to rank is like free advertising every minute of the day. In short, if you skip out on your LinkedIn summary you are missing out on valuable Google real estate that is just waiting to find you the career or the client of your dreams.
So let’s get crackin’ shall we!
Tips to Make Your Summary Section Shine
Use first person. You want to start the conversation with your audience whether it’s a prospect boss or a prospect customer, and the best way to start the conversation is to be natural, be normal and just be YOU engaged with the reader.
Make sure to use every character allowed. LinkedIn allows a 2000 character count for the summary section. Every time I write one for my clients I try my hardest to hit the mark, 1999 characters if I can. Again, not using this space is like leaving money on the table, so re-write until you can craft those sentences to fit the space!
Use keywords of your business niche, market, client or career. What is your target market? Who are you an expert to? What business niche do you want to stand out in? What company or client do you want to be seen by? Keywords are what Google will focus on, as well as internal LinkedIn searches, so make sure you aren’t just telling the story of that “time in life you overcame failure”. Great story to be sure, but distill it down to one sentence, and make sure the rest is filled with keywords your audience cares to read.
Take a look at my LinkedIn summary here: Look at all the keywords I have (arrows and underlines) as well as the proof that what I do works. Yet my summary still tells a story and I am still having a conversation with my customer.
Save some room for your specialties/skills section. Highlight where you are an expert in now and also where you would like to be an expert in the future! Think of at least 5-10 specialties or skills to add here. Sprinkle in some aspects of your professional character that potential clients or bosses would want to know you possess, especially if they are traits you are solidly known for in your current field. All of this adds to your personality profile and is also a keyword pot of gold.
Here is mine: See how I showcase who my client is (corporate, individual), what I want to do more of (training, speaking, workshops), and what I am really good at (marketing, webinars, LinkedIn, social media design, branding etc).
Your summary is one place you can truly brag about what you do well, and I sincerely hope you do. Your future boss and your future customers NEED to know.
If I had only one piece of advice to give you? I’d say: write your LinkedIn summary section and get it up on your profile TODAY.
As a busy business person I know you are hustling. Hustling aka working hard to connect in any way you can with those future clients and partnerships that will keep your business booming.
And though I talk mostly about connecting online, it’s a fact that I live with too: a lot of great networking is done (and has to be done) IN person.
I’m sure you are connecting with people at:
Chamber of Commerce events
Business meet-ups
Local city events
Regional conferences
And hopefully collecting a pile of business cards at each event.
In fact, even though I’m a social media gal, I love connecting face-to-face whenever I can! (connect with me if you’re ever in New Jersey!)
But there is a strategy to take your in-person networking to online connecting, where it is vastly easier to stay in touch, stay top of mind, and stay relevant in busy lives.
[Tweet “How to take your in-person networking to online connecting to stay in touch.”]
Today I want to share some tips with you on how to stay in touch after an in-person event in order to forge powerful relationships online.
Tips On Staying in Touch with People After Events
First: Make sure you have your LinkedIn URL on your business card. This immediately tells people that you love to connect on LinkedIn. A small addition that frees you up to actually enjoy the event (which makes you 100 times easier to talk to) and leaves the heavy lifting of selling “how great you are at x,y,z” to your professional and polished LinkedIn profile.
Second: Use Evernote (my favorite) to take a photo note of each business card or scan the cards into your computer right away. Type in a quick note as to how you met and possible follow-up potential from your conversation at the event. Do not, I repeat, do not toss these cards into your inbox to do “tomorrow” or later in the week. You will forget valuable information that will have fled your memory after a busy week running your business.
Third: The very next day go through this list and connect with each person who is on LinkedIn. Give them a TAG. You can create specific tags that will jog your memory of how you met such as: Chamber of Commerce. Save that tag to add others to it from the same list of business cards. When you send the connect request make sure your it is personal. Please don’t use the generic LinkedIn connect request form email. While the generic request does serve it’s purpose – you have actually connected with this person in person. So adding a note as to how you met and possibly what you chatted about goes a long way to building trust and forging a potential relationship.
Finally: Go to their profile and add the note about how you met and set a reminder to follow up in a week or a month. You can find this underneath their profile picture in the white box marked Relationship.
Now all of this valuable information is stored on LinkedIn and visible only to you. This is a fantastic way to keep your CRM up to date, organized, and ultimately helpful to you as you forge new business relationships and keep old ones fresh from online to off.
Do you have a question about tags and notes and reminders on LinkedIn? I’d be glad to answer! Join me in my LinkedIn group where I answer questions like this and more. You never have to navigate LinkedIn alone again.
A glass ceiling is a political term used to describe “the unseen, yet unbreachable barrier that keeps minorities and women from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements.” Well that’s the definition according to Wikipedia.
My glass ceiling consists of a hell of a lot more than that.
After 30 years in the corporate world I have bumped into my fair share of glass ceilings, fought through some of them, and helped colleagues shatter their own. It’s challenging, it’s rewarding, and it’s exhausting.
It wasn’t until I started dreaming of my own entrepreneurial debut that I realized… it didn’t have to be that way at all.
I could just walk right around that barrier like it didn’t even exist.
It’s true! I could walk around it like I was strolling down the lane. Well ok… maybe not strolling exactly, but walk around it while building my new business, learning how to become a successful entrepreneur and finally stepping away from my corporate gig to focus on KarenYankovich.com full time.
More importantly, what I realized through this entire process: if working in someone else’s world is making you bump up against glass ceiling then create your own world!
[Tweet “If working in someone else’s world has you bumping up against glass ceiling, create your own world!”]
Create your own world and your own experience.
Completely ignore any glass ceiling that appears to pop up.
Build your business to go around, over or above any “version” of what people believe your business should look like.
Most of all, position yourself like the rockstar you are using the tools I talk about every week on this blog and basically every day of my life!
5 Areas You Can Build To Rocket Yourself Past Any Ceiling
My dear entrepreneurs, here are 5 areas you can build upon using your passion to rocket yourself past any ceiling, glass or otherwise, in your way!
Your own website: Showcase your passion here. Be authentic and build content through blogging, testimonials, videos, and online resources that are valuable and full of your business WHY. Tell us who you are and how you came to be, remind us that you are a real person passionate about this one great thing in life, and why you are the one we should trust. Bumping up against another barrier here? Nah, just save the money and hire someone to help. Money for someone whose passion IS website building is money well spent and you will zoom past any learning curve obstacle in record time.
LinkedIn: Establish your expert status here. Here you prove why you have the chops to be in business. You’ve heard me say this again and again: make sure you have a polished and pretty profile that sets you apart from others in your field, skills and endorsements that tell of your talents, groups that connect you with prospects and mine for research, and connections that expand your reach. There is no limit to who you can find on LinkedIn, so if it truly is “who you know”, you are primed for success without a barrier when you use LinkedIn to its fullest potential.
Facebook: Use Facebook to build your fan base from the loyal first crew, aka friends, family and colleagues, to a robust following made up of people who want what you’ve got. Advertising has never been cheaper nor easier to do. There is no need to have millions in revenue and an ad team standing by, you can make your own personal business ad in minutes and see results faster still. You are in control to create your own success – no longer do you have to wait for approval from a boss or teammate to create what you know will work. If it doesn’t, who cares! Just try again and test another. It’s all part of the process.
Twitter: Ahhh Twitter. That honest, real time, news feed is so valuable for us! You can reach anyone you want, no matter how famous or how unreachable, they are bound to be there. This is my favorite platform by far to engage, follow, and connect with people I never would have had the opportunity to before, and this connection often comes with business rewards that include more visibility and more clients. The invention of Twitter helped me to be able to say, “Screw the glass ceiling!” and I love this platform even more because of it.
Instagram, YouTube, Google+ (etc): Social media in general gives us a thousand more ways to adapt and overcome, to ignore any ceiling put in front of us, to build our business the way we want to build it and position ourselves as business owners who deserve to be here. Welcome to a level playing field folks, business just got interesting.
For the last few months I have been diving deep into a new side of my business called Portraits and Profits.Through P&P days at our beautiful New York venues, I’ve had the opportunity to work with strong women and each day I’ve been able to see these women really step into their power.
The more I see this happen the more I realize… we are rockstars of our own design. We DO have the ability to ignore the glass ceiling and create our own reality!
Who’s with me?
Here’s how to get started. Check out my free video series: The first three things you need to do on LinkedIn. AND, of course, comment below and tell me YOUR glass ceiling stories. I’m here to support you!
Even as much as I love LinkedIn, sometimes I too get a case of the “social media doubts”.
I catch myself thinking:
“Should I focus somewhere else more?”
“I haven’t seen much traction in a few days, should I be doing something else?”
“Is LinkedIn really for everyone?”
And then lo and behold I run across info like this…
[Tweet “6 reasons not to doubt how useful LinkedIn is for business and careers.”]
41% of millionaires use LinkedIn. Success leaves clues, and that clue is telling me that I am in the right place with the right mindset. I don’t know about you, but I want to be one of those millionaires someday so if being on LinkedIn is one way to copy the pro’s then I am glad I am here, and I am glad I am connecting.
There are over 39 million students and recent graduates on LinkedIn. This tells me LinkedIn is still the place to make the right connections for career success. It still comes down to “Who you know”, and I’m glad I know more and more people each day through LinkedIn.
There are 332 million people on LinkedIn, spread out over 200 countries and 20 languages with 2 new users joining every second. So if I ever find myself thinking, “Where, oh where, are my clients?” I know right away, undoubtedly they are just a connection away. And if they aren’t on LinkedIn yet, they will be soon.
40% of LinkedIn users check LinkedIn on a daily basis. This stat shows me my connections are active and ready to receive what I have to say, connect with grand new plans for the future, or share my stuff, which is always the hardest part of social media: getting someone, anyone to share our stuff.
Users who post long-form content on LinkedIn typically have 1,049 connections. That is huge! The power of your reach with that many connections on LinkedIn is outstanding. Knowing that my long form posts are reaching that many people makes me feel instantly better that my time is not wasted, and instantly makes me more of an expert! Because not everyone is allowed to post long-form, only those with all-star profiles are given those golden keys. (Need help transforming your profile from not-so-pretty to fully polished? Go here)
And my final piece of fun info to take you from doubting to spouting about LinkedIn like I do:
59% of LinkedIn members have never worked at a company with more than 200 people. That means that LinkedIn is for us, the little guy! It’s for the student or business just starting out, entrepreneur building and extending their reach, the small business owner adding employees, and the millionaires watching their small fortunes grow.
If you are in need of a pep talk and some good old-fashioned smart LinkedIn answers, click here to join my LinkedIn group. It’s free, it’s fast, and it will make you feel better about navigating the world of LinkedIn. Don’t go it alone – you really don’t have to.
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