Today, LinkedIn has become the largest business-oriented search engine. With its advanced search features, you can find great employees to hire, find the perfect company to work for, find highly targeted leads to sell to, and network with the thought leaders of your industry—not to mention establish yourself as a thought leader, too.
You can mine deeply into the LinkedIn database and find a treasure trove of information that will change the way you do business. You’ll know so much about a prospect, their company, their competitors, their industry, and their products before you ever meet the person. LinkedIn is making it easier than ever to find targeted prospects for your business.
BUSINESS PROFESSIONAL SEARCH ENGINE
Not many people consider LinkedIn a search engine, but I invite you to consider the possibility. You know the power of appearing at the top of Google search results. You get free, high-quality, targeted traffic to your website, which generates more business for your company.
What if your profile or company appeared when someone did a people search on LinkedIn? What if your personal LinkedIn profile or company profile appeared when a prospect searched Google for keywords related to your product or service? What would that do for your career or company? What would your bottom line look like if you could identify highly targeted prospects just by searching on LinkedIn and Google?
If you still don’t believe LinkedIn is a powerful search engine, then why do LinkedIn search results so often appear on Google? If Google understands the power of LinkedIn, you should, too.
Throughout this book, I’ll be sharing my view of LinkedIn from the keyword and search engine ranking perspective. I’ll also share tips to help you get maximum exposure for your personal profile and your company using your professional network.
HIGH-VALUE PROFESSIONAL NETWORK
So what can that professional network look like on LinkedIn? As you can see in Figure 1–1 below, according to online statistics portal Statista, 54 percent of household members in the United States who use LinkedIn are high-income and medium-income earners. There are approximately 150 million users in the United States or 26 percent of LinkedIn’s total membership according to Statista.
FIGURE 1–1. Income Level of LinkedIn Members in United States
Source: Surveys by Statista
LinkedIn’s sweet spot by age is in the 25 to 44 age group, according to a 2018 study by Statista of internet users in the United States who use LinkedIn. Figure 1–2 on page 4 breaks down internet users in the United States who use LinkedIn by their age.
LinkedIn members are also well-educated. In a November 2016 Pew Research survey, 50 percent of internet users in the United States who have a college degree or advanced college degree use LinkedIn. See Figure 1–3 on page 4 to see the education level of LinkedIn users from the United States. These numbers are very similar to the education levels of European LinkedIn users.
If you are a consultant, executive coach, or professional service provider, you have an unlimited source of potential clients on LinkedIn who earn enough to hire you or have a corporate budget to hire you for their projects. This sure beats the old days of picking up the telephone book and cold calling people all day long.
FIGURE 1–2. U.S. Internet Users Who Use LinkedIn by Age Group
FIGURE 1–3. Education Level of U.S. Internet Users by Education Level
CONCLUSION
You now know that LinkedIn consists of well-educated, high-income members in the United States.
You can see the benefits of joining and participating in the networking Groups and demonstrating your expertise by helping others. In the next chapter, I’ll show you how to get started on LinkedIn so you can begin growing your professional network and becoming a recognized thought leader in your industry.
For additional updates and how-to videos, visit https://tedprodromou.com/UltimateGuideUpdates/.
Chapter 2
Getting Started on LinkedIn
When did you sign up for LinkedIn, and what persuaded you to complete your registration? My guess is you registered years ago after a friend or colleague forwarded you an invitation to connect. If you’re just starting your career, you were probably referred to LinkedIn by a friend, mentor, or even one of your professors from college or grad school.
Whatever your reason, you are now a member of the largest professional business networking community in the world. Today, LinkedIn is much more than just a networking website. It has become the largest job-related website with thousands of job postings. Recruiters and job seekers are finding LinkedIn to be the perfect place to connect. In fact, I recently heard an ad for LinkedIn on my local radio station that said a person is hired every ten seconds from a LinkedIn job posting. Not bad!
Many people ask me if LinkedIn is better than Facebook or other social media giants like Twitter and Instagram for connecting with people. A couple of years ago, I preferred to use LinkedIn to build my professional network and Facebook to connect with my personal network. Of course, I’m friends with some people on Facebook who are also connected with me on LinkedIn, which is fine. But I posted personal comments and pictures on Facebook and posted business-oriented information on LinkedIn. I still don’t like to see people’s business-oriented status updates on Facebook unless they’re also sharing posts about their personal life. When I was on Facebook, I wanted to turn off my business brain and have fun, and when I was on LinkedIn, I preferred to see only business-related information.
But Facebook is now trying hard to become both a personal and professional network, and it’s succeeding in a big way. A few years ago, something interesting happened that changed my view of Facebook for business. My virtual assistant accidentally scheduled some automated posts in Hootsuite to post on my Facebook personal feed. I post excerpts from my Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business and Ultimate Guide to Twitter for Business books on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media sites that link to landing pages where people can download free chapters of my books. I’m okay with posting these excerpts on my Facebook business page, which you can see at https://www.facebook.com/linkedincoach, but I felt embarrassed to share them on my personal Facebook page.
When I first saw the excerpts on my personal Facebook feed, I wasn’t happy. But then I started seeing more downloads of my free chapters from Facebook than from Twitter and LinkedIn. After experimenting, I discovered Facebook is very effective at generating business leads. Now I use Facebook for personal and business while keeping my LinkedIn activity purely business. Posting content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter generates most of the traffic to my website, where people can subscribe to my email list. Many eventually become clients.
Do you have a preference? I’d love to hear what you think. Send me an email at [email protected] and let me know whether you keep your business and personal networks separate.
WHY CHOOSE LINKEDIN?
As the largest B2B lead-generation website where businesses can connect with their ideal customers and potential business partners, LinkedIn is the best place for you to reconnect with colleagues. LinkedIn has become so much more than a job-hunting website, which most people mistakenly think is its only function. Here is just a small sampling of its possibilities:
■ Keeping up with news and trends in your industry
■ Establishing your personal brand
■ Demonstrating your particular expertise
■ Finding great professional referrals
■ Promoting your in-person and virtual events
■ Introducing people to others in your network
LinkedIn has become the one-stop portal for you to connect with like-minded people. There is hardly anyone who doesn’t benefit in some way from its network and tools. It’s perfect for:
■ An employee for a company
■ Marketing and sales professionals
■ Job seekers, HR personnel, and recruiters
■ Entrepreneurs and business owners
You can do more than
just advertise your resume. Through LinkedIn Groups, you can demonstrate your expertise to attract new clients and connect with other industry experts. You can share your knowledge, or you can keep up with the latest industry news by subscribing to specific industry-related content, which will appear right in your newsfeed. LinkedIn is expanding its tools and services to attract the best business professionals, so the quality of the community continues to improve and exceeds all other business networking communities.
Know Your “Why”
Unfortunately, many people become LinkedIn members and don’t take advantage of the incredible opportunities and tools in the community. They create their account, partially fill out their profile, connect with a few close friends and only occasionally come back. They mistakenly think there is no reason for them to log in to LinkedIn because they haven’t taken time to explore the “new” LinkedIn.
The real reason they are unimpressed with the site is because they don’t have a reason to be an active member of the LinkedIn community. Like any community, you have to have a reason to join it if you want to take full advantage of all the opportunities it has to offer.
Think about why you joined other social networking platforms. For example, when people join Facebook, they expect to connect with past and current friends in a casual environment. Facebook is all about taking a break from our busy lives by viewing our friends’ vacation pictures, chatting, and playing games. Your expectations are very clear when you join Facebook, and the level of engagement is incredibly high.
When people join LinkedIn today, they can expect to connect with hundreds if not thousands of like-minded business professionals. As LinkedIn provides more networking tools and ways to engage with others, the level of engagement increases proportionally. I spend much of my day logged in to LinkedIn, checking status updates from my connections, and learning about industry news. When I leave work (by walking from my home office to my living room!), I spend my personal time engaging with friends on Facebook. My expectations of both websites are very clear, so I have no problem engaging with people on both networks. In other words, I know my overall “why” (engaging with a professional community), which allows me to pinpoint my strategic objective.
DETERMINE YOUR LINKEDIN OBJECTIVE
What is your objective in joining LinkedIn? Most people don’t have a specific reason to join unless they’re looking to improve their career, which explains why many profiles are incomplete and show little or no activity. They signed up because they were invited to connect with a co-worker or colleague, but they weren’t looking for a job or to network, so they think they have no reason to return.
I think most businesspeople don’t understand the importance of building and nurturing a professional network. When you’re working full time, you are usually overwhelmed with tasks and not thinking about networking. Most business professionals don’t have a long-term career strategy and aren’t preparing for “what’s next.”
If you lose your job (which happens frequently in today’s work environment), you may not have a network to support you when you’re looking for your next position. When you build and nurture your professional network with short, periodic updates, it will be much easier to reach out to them for help when the need arises because you are already on their radar. LinkedIn’s networking tools (which I will show you in Chapter 14) make this very easy to do.
Even if you’re gainfully employed and not looking for a job, it’s still important to complete your LinkedIn profile. Your profile is a dynamic electronic billboard displaying your skills and expertise to millions of potential readers. By keeping your profile up-to-date, connecting with others, engaging in Groups, and demonstrating your expertise, you are showing the business world you are in touch with the latest trends and technologies. The more you participate on LinkedIn, the more your name will pop up in the LinkedIn sidebar and on search engines like Google, creating unexpected opportunities for potential customers, partners, and employers to find you.
You may not use LinkedIn on a regular basis, but other businesspeople do. It’s become a common business practice to view LinkedIn profiles before meeting so you can learn something about each other. In fact, according to a study by Hubspot in their “State of Inbound” report, people will view your LinkedIn profile 83 percent of the time before they meet with you for the first time. Your LinkedIn profile is often their first impression of you, and as Will Rogers famously said, “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”
With the uncertain job market and corporate instability, you never know when your company will be acquired or go out of business. It’s also impossible to predict when you’ll be restructured or downsized out of a job. Whether the economy is booming or declining, there is very little job security in today’s marketplace.
My parents’ generation got a job after they finished school, worked for the same company for 40 years, and retired. There was complete job security, and they never worried about being laid off or their company being bought. If a company was acquired, it usually kept all employees, whether they were needed or not. Layoffs were rare.
Unfortunately, those days are long gone; today we have to be prepared to change jobs, or even careers, in an instant. If your LinkedIn profile is active and current, there’s a good chance you will land on your feet quickly if the worst happens. If you wait until you’re unemployed to update your LinkedIn profile and build your connections, it will take much longer to find your next job. Take a few minutes every day and complete your profile, get the minimum ten recommendations, connect with some colleagues, and participate in Groups. Take it one step at a time, and soon you will be logging in to LinkedIn every day to participate in the vibrant community discussions or to catch up on the latest news in your industry.
How LinkedIn Can Help You
Once you are on LinkedIn and have completed your profile, you should determine how the site can best serve you. LinkedIn has four basic functions:
1. Establishing your professional profile
2. Staying in touch with colleagues and friends
3. Exploring opportunities
4. Finding experts and answers to your business-related questions
Your objective could be one, all, or any combination of these functions. But you should always work to establish your professional profile even if you aren’t actively looking for work. Remember, LinkedIn is an electronic business card that can be seen by more than 500 million professionals, so you want a complete, up-to-date profile. You never know when a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity might arise because the right person spotted your profile in a search, watched one of the videos posted in your feed, read one of your articles, or noticed your comments in a group discussion.
It’s also good practice to keep in touch with colleagues and friends, even just by commenting on one of their status updates. By “pinging” your network on a regular basis, you keep your name in front of them, and they’ll be more likely to consider you for an opportunity when it arises. Many great career opportunities present themselves when you least expect it. Since I completed my profile and optimized it to appear when people search for popular search terms, I have received numerous opportunities even when I am not looking for them. LinkedIn is a powerful tool, and I will never have to worry about finding a new job if something unforeseen suddenly happens to my current role.
Using Interactive Content to Your Advantage
One way you can help achieve your objective is to use the power of LinkedIn’s content platform. LinkedIn has been working hard to make its site more interactive so its users have a reason to log in every day. More than 50 percent of Facebook’s 2 billion-plus members log in every day and spend at least one hour on the site. This is what LinkedIn is attempting to do.
Here’s how: LinkedIn allows you to subscribe to content so it appears right in your newsfeed. You can subscribe to industry-related content, articles posted by Influencers, and content posted by members of your network. The pla
tform is also experimenting with letting you see posts from your Groups in your feed.
LinkedIn has recently redesigned the desktop interface to make it easier to view content and interact with your network. The mobile app has been completely redesigned as well to encourage logging in more frequently. According to LinkedIn, engagement via LinkedIn Messaging increased 83 percent after the new app was released.
For example, LinkedIn now prompts you to wish connections a happy birthday or congratulate people when they have a work anniversary or start a new position in the Notifications link on the main menu. These new tools make it very easy to “ping” your connections to remain top of mind with them. One of my students recently reached out to wish an old colleague happy birthday, and it turned into a $3 million opportunity for him.
You can also use the content features of LinkedIn to research or look for expertise in an unfamiliar area. You will receive great advice from many experts in a matter of minutes by posting a question in one of LinkedIn’s Groups. In the past, you would have to hire a consultant to help you navigate unfamiliar areas of expertise. Today, you have access to thousands of subject matter experts at your fingertips who will gladly answer your question for free in the Answers section. Many times, you will end up hiring the consultant who provides quality recommendations or advice—I know because I was hired many times after I answered questions—so it’s a win-win for you and the expert. So think of how you can harness the power of this platform to help you achieve your goals, no matter what they are.
WHAT ABOUT OTHER NETWORKING WEBSITES?
There are other business communities online, but none is as vibrant and dynamic as LinkedIn. Many social media sites like Friendster and Myspace (talk about old school!) have come and gone and weren’t focused on business networking.
Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business Page 3
