When is the last time you updated your LinkedIn™ profile? It’s important for business owners to keep their profiles up-to-date so prospects, referral partners and joint venture partners can see whether it’s worthwhile to connect.
If you’re an employee, it’s also important to keep your profile updated, because in today’s economy, you never know when you’re going to be out of a job.
Are you using LinkedIn to look for a new job or to recruit a new employee for your business? If so, this podcast episode is for you!
I had the great pleasure of interviewing Career Development Strategist Nickquolette Barrett recently about this very subject. Nickquolette is an expert resume writer, interview prep coach, speaker, and owner of iRock Resumes – Academy of Professional Development and her newly launched Career Development Strategy company under her own name at NickquoletteBarrett.com.
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In today’s podcast, Nickquolett explains why it’s so important to have a good professional bio and LinkedIn profile.
Did you know that a single status update on LinkedIn can reach 20 percent of your followers? Compare that to Facebook, where you’re lucky to reach 2 or 3 percent of your fans unless you pay for an ad.
Here are a few reasons why you can get more leads and sales for your business with LinkedIn:
#1 – The average household income of a LinkedIn user is $109,000.
#2 – LinkedIn sends nearly 4 times more people to your homepage than Twitter and Facebook combined!
#3 – And 68% of LinkedIn users are business decision makers.
I’ve been using LinkedIn for five years now. In that time, they’ve made quite a few changes. Some good. Some bad.
In the good column: Allowing users to add video and presentations from Slideshare to your profile.
In the bad column: Eliminating events
The latest change seemed great at first – LinkedIn streamlined its home page to make it easy to keep track of your latest activity, including who viewed your profile, and how your profile has ranked in the last 30 days. It also made it easy to share an update, upload a photo, and publish a post, as you can see below.
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of working with …
Linkedin can be a terrific lead generating tool for B2B companies, in particular. But many business professionals still have no clue how to use the social networking site properly to attract clients or find a job. Too many treat it the same as Facebook or Twitter. But there is a different vibe on LinkedIn. It’s more “professional.” Think cocktail party, not tailgating party. The tone is set right at the beginning with your profile. It carries through in the posts you share, and the conversations that take place in groups.
Top Dog Social Media put together a useful infographic that shares 20 LinkedIn Do’s and Don’ts. I’ve written about some of these in my own blog articles. Here are a few of the tips to keep in mind when using LinkedIn for business:
This post should have come out 10 days ago on Star Wars Day – You know, “May the 4th be with you! 🙂 — but I didn’t see it until this week. The clever concept by Gryffin includes some important points for using LinkedIn for your business. Here are a few that caught my eye:
►LinkedIn can send 4x as many visitors to your company website than Twitter or Facebook
►Marketers who build out additional company information on their company page tend to have 2x as many followers
►41 percent of LinkedIn users come from mobile devices.
When was the last time you visited LinkedIn? If it’s been a while, you should take another look at the social networking site, especially if you sell products or services to other businesses. I’ve been getting some good leads there lately, so I thought I’d share some LinkedIn marketing tips to help you get better results.
Create a keyword-rich profile headline – The space underneath your name on a LinkedIn profile is prime real estate. Use it to your advantage by using keywords that describe what you do and who your target audience is. If you have room, include a call-to-action!
Create a profile summary that sells – Long gone are the days of displaying your resume in the LinkedIn summary. Use this space to communicate WHY your prospects should do business with you. This can even be the “elevator speech” you give at in-person networking events.
One of my first blog posts (and one of my most popular) was called, “6 Places to Add Keywords to Your LinkedIn Profile.” It was written back in 2010, and LinkedIn has certainly changed a great deal since then. At that time, there were 187 million professional members in 200 countries. Today, there are 277 million members. Of that number, 34 percent have incomes over $100,000. There were no company pages back in 2010 either, but today, there are more than three million of them.
LinkedIn marketing expert Lewis Howes once said, “LinkedIn is the number one social networking site on the planet today. And… it’s the number one site for anyone looking to build their business.” I believe that’s certainly true today. I did some work for Scholastic Book Fairs a number of years ago. That job came about because the social media manager who was hiring found my profile on LinkedIn. I’m still getting leads from the site today.
Some good friends and former co-workers of mine learned an important lesson last week, and that is to always keep your LinkedIn profile updated. They are now out of a job, due to a buyout. They were part of the Miami production staff of Nightly Business Report, the award-winning PBS business news program that was recently purchased by CNBC. The show will continue to air on PBS stations across the country, but it will be based out of New Jersey. Last Friday was the last show co-produced out of Miami and New York, and the last day of work for the Miami staff.