Hi there. My name is Sue Ellson. I'm an independent LinkedIn specialist and I've been running workshops for LinkedIn for Business for the City of Boroondara for a number of years and in the workshop we go through a variety of things and in this video I'm going to show you a sample of them and if you're quick enough to copy the links you can do a lot of stuff on your own as well. So let's get started on our LinkedIn for Business Workshop Summary.
So, for those of you who don't know, LinkedIn started out in the living room of the Co-Founder Reid Hoffman in 2002 and was launched on the 5th of May 2003. It's currently the world's largest professional network with over six hundred and ten million members in 200 countries with over 10 million of those being in Australia and their mission is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. LinkedIn makes money in a whole lot of different ways and over time they've also acquired extra features like Pulse which is the newsfeed, SlideShare for your PowerPoint presentations, Lynda which is for
online training, Connectifier and in 2016 were acquired by Microsoft. And although they started off as a network, they've moved into publishing and the next incarnation will be a B2B platform.
So, if you're wondering whether you really should consider LinkedIn well let's face it over five and a half million Australians are active monthly users. That compares to Facebook and YouTube with 15 million active monthly users, Instagram fast catching up on 9 million Twitter on 5 million Pinterest on 290 thousand and Snapchat on 6 million. So if you want to get to the under 24's, you definitely need to be on Snapchat. You're going to be four times more likely to be viewed on LinkedIn if you have a profile photo and seven times more likely to be viewed if your profile has been completed.
So, I believe that your network is your net worth. None of us can guarantee job or business security and I see LinkedIn as a pull strategy rather than a push strategy. So, it's really important that you have your contact information in the Summary section and I will be going through and showing you these pieces shortly. But there's more reasons. It's also a word-of-mouth referral verification tool so if somebody Google's your name I can show you how to make it appear on the first page of search results, unless your name's John Smith that could be a bit tricky.
And it's definitely not what you know or who you know, in my view, in the world of business now, it's who refers you. And people are going to want to verify that you are who you say you are and the value of your network is also going to be important so LinkedIn is a place where you can keep all those connections coming in and not rely on just having one major client. The rate of change of technology is also impacting us and I believe that this is one of the essential platforms you really need to have and if you've already got a website you already know about the importance of keywords both in-house and online to make sure that people can find you in their search results.
The size of your digital footprint, what you've got in Google needs to be more than just your website or your Facebook page or whatever else, other social media you have, but you also need to showcase your digital literacy, build up your digital asset and showcase your digital competency. After all, most business owners, it's all about you. People want to know who's behind the business and 95 percent of decision makers, including people at parties. are going to secretly Google you and so you definitely want to make sure that when you come up, you can tell your story. So, on the journey of helping people with LinkedIn profiles I've come across a few hangups and one of them is about the idea of no privacy, but the reality is, if you're in business, you need to be found and it's all your past history so you shouldn't be too anxious about that it's not what you had for breakfast.
So yeah, by all means, put in your details of yourself your background and your business on LinkedIn. If you don't know who to connect to, this is really going to depend on your purpose and one of the biggest challenges that most people face is the fact that they get all these invitations from people they don't know and they don't know what to do with them. Well you know, accept them if you want to and don't accept if you don't want to, it's that easy.
It's also you know, how much time I'm already spending a lot of time another social well I think you need to do a cost-benefit analysis and and I'll show you some good reasons for having it and also if it's too costly well I'm still using a free account, you can't write, well I use dot points, you're scared of computers, again, there's that digital competency word back again and you do need to have some business rules around social media guidelines, so keep that in mind as and if you need some help ask a friend, an expert, or come along to the workshop, and we'll give you some extra tips and tricks.
So if you haven't already, you're going to need to create a LinkedIn profile, so to do that, just go to linkedin.com with your email address and create a password but LinkedIn is a little bit sneaky and may ask you to go through your phone or your email account to find other people that you would like to connect to so if you're starting up for the first time I do not encourage you to do that. I'm quite sure that Great Aunty Dora does not want to be invited to connect with you on LinkedIn so so skip that step but if you do accidentally sync your contacts, you can unsync it via that link.
And then what you're going to do after that is obviously complete your LinkedIn profile and I'm going to show you the number one key thing to do on the screen in a moment I also want to remind you that a good photo that's aligned with what you're trying to achieve is on there an amazing headline you'll see my dancing lady in a moment and if you would like to go through these steps one by one you can follow that LinkedIn profile updates cheat sheet and that will take you through all of these.
So, let's go over to LinkedIn and do these little updates so that you can see what you need to do. So first of all, here's my LinkedIn profile and the number one thing, if you haven't done it already, you'll see on the top my
URL is just my name and if you've created a LinkedIn account yours is most likely to be your first name dash last name dash a whole bunch of numbers and letters. Now that will not optimize you in Google search results and it will not help you be found online.
So to change it, all you have to do is go over here to the right and click on Edit Public Profile and URL and on the top right hand side of the screen, you've got a little box where you
can press in here and try and change it to your name.
Now, if that's not available, I encourage you to put a dash between your first and last name and if that's not available you might have to add a number or something like that in but please nothing to do with your date of birth. What you can also see on this particular screen is turning on your visibility or off, so if you're a little bit nervous about LinkedIn you can leave it turned off and still create an account or if something terrible happens in the media you can also come in here and turn yourself off without deleting your profile and you can also make sure that you've got some of these other settings turned on so that people can see your content online so you just tick those boxes there to turn on.
The next thing that I think is really important is making sure that you've got a photo that tells a story and in the past I've just had a head and shoulders photo. I've now updated it because I obviously want to feature my new book but that photo should represent and tell a little bit of a story about you so that when people see that they have a sense of that's really the person who it is. Now scarily enough, up to 60% of the time spent looking at a LinkedIn profile will be spent looking at that photo. By clicking is pin in the middle of the screen, you can also change your background picture and it tells you the size of that picture and I've created a picture with my book images on the right because when somebody looks at my profile on a mobile phone my face will slide across to the middle and this is also where you change your headline.
So I want to be known for LinkedIn Specialist which is what I've put in here then I put a whole bunch of keywords after that that I want to be found for and there's my little dancing lady so I put in a little emoji there so I look like I'm cool and up to date but not too much like a try-hard and obviously save that. In this section here, I can also add in my Summary details so you can see there I've put my contact details and a link to my services so that that's really quick and easy to be seen without people having to click.
So those things are really important to have so that as soon as people look at your LinkedIn profile they see all of that information up the top. Now obviously, in this brief introduction, I can't go through everything but I would like to remind you in this contact information section to add in three websites that could be your business website or your personal website your membership website may be your best social media link whatever, so definitely encourage you to put at least three websites in there and I'm going to encourage you to pop videos and pictures throughout your profile and obviously fill in what you do, so I've talked about how I can help people there and as you scroll through. And by all means, stalk me as often as you like I'm more than happy for you to check out my profile and borrow any ideas. Fill in your Education, including with your transcript of your subjects, any memberships that you have, you can put those in Licenses and Certifications, you can talk about your Volunteer Experience, you can add all of these different sections into your LinkedIn profile.
Your top three skills should try and have at least 20 votes you should have a similar number of both given and received Recommendations and then in here there's a whole lot of other sections that you can fill in - Organizations, Honors and Awards, Publications any Languages. I did French at school, so I popped that in and so on and then these are the Companies that you're following. So to add a section, you just click this add profile section on the top right hand side and you can see all the different sections that you can add in. In terms of statistics though, I don't expect you to have similar stats to me, but I keep a very close eye on this one this is how many people have viewed me in the last seven days and you want that to be over a hundred to make sure your profile is working for you and this is how many times I've appeared in search results in the last seven days and you'd want that definitely to be over 50.
So if you can achieve those two results you're doing really well and also if you've got that little All-Star badge, that means you filled in a number of different details on your LinkedIn profile. Also, after you've done your own profile, you'll want to complete your Company Profile and if you haven't already done one, you can set it up on that link there and you really need to make sure you've got all your keywords in your Company Profile and there's some extra tips on how to maximize the Company Profile and how to encourage your employees to assist with the promotion of your business. Now they're not obligated to do that obviously, a LinkedIn profile is a personal profile, but if they'd like to get involved, you might like to make some suggestions for them.
I would also encourage you to follow some local pages and there's the City of Boroondara, I run the Camberwell Network so you'd be most welcome to follow that to keep in touch with what's happening in Camberwell and then I've also listed a whole bunch of Camberwell companies that are on LinkedIn as well that you might like to follow and in the workshop, we discuss any other pages worth following. It's also really important if you're going to be on LinkedIn to develop a social media policy for your enterprise. So you might like to recommend updates that your staff would like to consider putting on their LinkedIn profile.
You might encourage them to put a particular description of your business or add links in the Contact Info section, you might encourage them to provide content for Company Page updates, you might like to encourage them to Like, Comment or Share your posts and you may also have a policy on if they connect to somebody in their job, whether they should also add that person to your business database and also what's going to happen when they leave? That really needs to be discussed at the beginning of their employment journey or as soon as possible.
One of the best things about running the LinkedIn workshops for the City of Boroondara is discussing these particular topics - ways to engage, curate and create relevant content for your target audience, how to generate leads sales and results out of LinkedIn how to make your posts in the newsfeed go viral and how to search engine optimize your articles. So by all means, I really encourage you to have a look at those particular pieces and incorporate them in your business. When I run the workshop, I include a lot more links and a lot more resources that you can receive in both digital and hard copy format. So in summary, I would really like to encourage you from what you've seen in this video to do some edits today. I'd like to also encourage you to look at other LinkedIn profiles for some ideas, perhaps do some edits with a friend to encourage you and support you and also set a deadline for updating a profile which I normally suggest, whenever I work with someone to do within two weeks.
A few years ago I picked up an Accountability Partner and my productivity increased by about three hundred percent, so if you need to find someone to keep you accountable, by all means, consider doing that and perhaps even get a mentor to review your profile and give you some feedback but to really get maximum value from watching this session I'd really encourage you to take some action immediately. So my last little tip is to show you how to use the Find Nearby and Scan Code using your mobile phone.
Now the Find Nearby feature is really good if you are presenting to a group and you want to connect with everybody in the room. It acts a bit like a Tinder dating app and the Scan Code is when you are networking with somebody individually. Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is turn on Bluetooth so just from my settings I go to Bluetooth and turn it on and then I go back to LinkedIn, and I click on the two people on the bottom of the screen and then it will show Find Nearby.
Now I won't wait for everybody to show up on my screen today, but what will happen is people's names will appear on the screen with a little head and a little plus symbol so you just press plus plus plus on all of those and whilst everybody has that screen open everybody who's in the room who has the screen open at the same time will show up and you can connect with those people, so it's really great if you're doing a presentation. The next feature I'm going to show you is the Scan Code.
So this works much better if you are just networking with one person. So this time, you just press your finger in the search box or on those four little squares up the top and you can see that my camera is now visible so I just go over to her Scan Code and now he appears on my screen and if I'd like to connect with him I can just press connect. So they're really cool features. If I wanted to show my code to somebody else, I could just do that and they could put their camera over my phone but that works really really well if you are just networking with one person and it shows you know all that on the screen. So thanks for watching this LinkedIn workshop. I hope you've got lots of new tips that you can use.
Don't forget to sign up to the City of Boroondara enewsletter to be kept up to date with what's happening and perhaps join us at a live workshop in the future. Bye for now.