Digital marketing is all about strategy. Every bit of social media space is valuable because it is your only chance to distinguish yourself from half a billion other users who are also trying hard to get noticed. Just a few tweaks can go a long way in showing how serious you are about this bizz. Try these quick ways to take your LinkedIn to the next level!
Why Should You Care?
It is easy to simply focus on the business and forget about plotting the marketing curve. You will be visible on LinkedIn or any other space you share and people will see you for who you are whether you care about the appearance or not. People like quick bites of information – just one look at your messy profile can mean you are designated to the dungeons labelled amateur. Taking some time to groom and neaten how you appear to others can be key in attracting new personas to your side, business or personal.
Here are some quick and proven ways to create a robust LinkedIn profile.
1. Optimize SEO
LinkedIn, on the cover is social media for the workforce, but undercover, it is also a search engine, which means you need to pick your words carefully. What do you want your perfect customer to be like? What words do people looking for businesses like you use when searching for products? Think hard and scatter all the discovered keywords to your dream brand following in your title, description, summary, and headlines. By putting out exactly what you want, you can get what you love, via keywords!
2.Update
Use LinkedIn as much as you use other social media platforms. We can see countless ‘I was here and I did that’ updates on Facebook and Instagram, but do we do that in LinkedIn? Make it a habit to update your LinkedIn every time you make a move, every time you get a feedback, recommendation, or are present in an event. In no time, you will have a polished brand resume with scope of multiple genuine connections and grow your network and trust.
3. Sell yourself
Most of us run away from complements and always short sell ourselves! If you don’t let people know what you are capable of, how will they know? If you are solving a problem, providing a service, or creating something, let others know, in your description, in detail. Include facts and figures, exact measures of your achievements. Highlight all the good in bold and paint your profile red. This will make you look like the industry leader rather than just another brand.
4. Profile Picture
This ought to be the first point in LinkedIn basics 101, but sadly, many brands don’t give a second thought about their profile picture. Your profile picture is yet another tiny space to prove yourself. Here are some suggestions for a great profile pic.
- Basic – do not ever use extreme closeups or completely zoomed out logo renderings. Resize or crop your logos to fit the LinkedIn profile picture format perfectly.
- Use a high quality, crystal clear, unpixellated image of your logo.
- Trim away any additional features like background mandalas or other decorations you would normally use in, say your card or flyer. Keep the logo unobscured.
- Get professional help to clean up the logo even if it is just a working logo.
5. Cover Photo
LinkedIn also lets you add a cover photo for a good measure – exploit it to your advantage! Don’t use photos of different resolutions and orientations meant for other spaces here; create something unique for LinkedIn in the exact dimension given for a perfect professional looking profile. Oh, the dimensions are 1884 x 396, by the way.
6. Custom URL
LinkedIn allows you to pick the URL of your choice to represent your brand. Ideally, your URL should be just your brand name, but since we live in a less than ideal world and most usernames are taken anyway, choose something with lots of dashes or hyphens. If your brand name is GreenParrot, and it is unavailable, go for green-parrot-the-soothsayer, rather than using underscores. The wisdom behind this tip is, google identifies dashes in URLs as spaces. So, if anybody searches for soothsayers or your own brand, your name will pop right up over the poor others! Also, you can only change the URL once a month, so think before you experiment.
7. Articles
LinkedIn also hosts an article feature that when used, sends your article to all your connections’ newsfeed. This is a chance to build an audience for your brand on the site. Either syndicate contents from your own blog, publish excerpts of your brand’s work or generate tailored content regularly specially curated for LinkedIn to resound with your followers.
8. Skills & Endorsements
The skill section is another important part of a LinkedIn profile, one that filters the right opportunities either towards you or away from you. LinkedIn lets you add about 50 skills, so pick the ones most relevant to your brand. Again, think about what your customers would ask for from a brand like you and use them to fill up the 50 spaces of skills.
9. Keep profile public
Having a private profile on LinkedIn, of all places, makes no sense. You are there, as a brand, hoping people would find you, and how exactly would they if they can’t check out your profile? If you are one of the weird CEOs who love to check out the competition privately without knowing, simply use an incognito tab on your browser to do it. Always set your profile to public.
10. Groups
We are aiming to make use of every bit of space that LinkedIn carries, and groups are a surpassingly lesser known feature. Getting into groups is a great way to meaningfully connect with others from your area of interest, which can farther down the lane, translate into sales and opportunities. Stay active in groups, leave relevant comments, initiate threads, post questions and keep surveying to establishing a good presence.
11. Connect With everyone
The rules for LinkedIn personal do not apply to brands. As a brand, always accept all connection requests right away, whether you know them or not. This will make you pop on their friend circles, and so the word will spread. The more the connections, the better.
12. Flaunt the recommendations
It is not wrong to ask for a recommendation on LinkedIn after a service par excellence. Gather recommendations from your past clients / customers with a polite request. Though this may seem cheeky, every recommendation is worth its weight in gold. So, venture into the uncomfortable and ask for it! Also, don’t forget the recommendation etiquette – always send a personalized heartfelt thank you note and recommend them back if the need arises.
13. Spread Positivity
LinkedIn is a representation of your work culture and what your brand stands for. Getting dirty in the shares, publishes or comments there is equivalent to mailing them personally to each of your customers and stake holders. Keep your activity on LinkedIn slick and formal and save the sith lord inside you for your personal social media followings.
14. Personalize Invitations
When you are a relatively unknown brand, you’ll need to start building connections on your own to open the doors for your very own blooming network. Taking time to personalize each invite with a unique note can triple the rates of acceptance and set you apart from the others who simply connect for the sake of connecting. For starters, you could introduce yourself and mention where you’ve met before when sending invite to acquaintances, or you could pick something nice you love about their brand when sending invites to other brands.
15. Invest
LinkedIn is a great space to sit and watch people around you and to pick those you really want on your brand team. If you are eyeing someone to partner with in the future or reach out for collaborations, start an organic engagement with their activity on LinkedIn. You could also simply set aside time to really go through your feed mindfully and encourage the ones you love with likes, shares, and comments. This is the key to building real and meaningful relationships on LinkedIn. Overtime, you could have a wonderful rapport and may be even have a person to pitch that you know well and share a history with rather than wading off into the unknown.
To summarize, LinkedIn is a tool with powerful features that you can harness by showering it with the dose of professionalism it demands. Keep you profile updated with the current contact information. Even if you don’t have all day to groom up your profile, changing just one thing each day from Monday to Sunday can help keep your profile in tip top condition!