by Caroline Leach | Feb 25, 2018 | Social Media
How often do you make a desirable discovery by accident?
If you’re me, not as often as I’d like.
It’s like finding $20 in your pocket. It doesn’t happen frequently, but it’s always a happy discovery to meet up with serendipity.
Three times in the last 6 months I’ve posted a conversation in the The Official USC Alumni Association Group, and it’s shown up the next day as the lead item in the monthly digest email for the group.
There are more than 46,000 members in the group. And some portion of them probably opt in to get the group’s email digest. So my posts are landing front and center in the inboxes of many fellow alums.
It wasn’t something I planned. It’s part of my volunteer role on the USC Alumni Association Board of Governors. I’m proud to represent the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where I got my master’s degree.
Each of us on the Communications & Marketing Committee led by Tom Henkenius and Mary Ann Brennan regularly post content in the group and engage in conversations with fellow alums in the group. Madeline Lindsay from the Alumni Association also keeps us on track.
It just so happened, a few of my posts were on Sunday nights as I was wrapping up my weekend to-do lists.
And on Monday morning when I saw my post featured in an email, I paused for a moment.
Wait.
What?
Why was my post being featured?
Then I realized I must have been the last person to post before the monthly digest email went out.
The learning?
If you want your posts in a group to get pushed to a larger audience, identify the timing of the monthly or weekly digest emails, and do your post shortly before then.
Now, I don’t want to take the limelight from my fellow alums. I don’t want to be the featured post every time. But once in a while is kind of fun.
The other learning?
It’s imperative to customize your headline in your LinkedIn profile. Don’t use the default of your current title. Personalize it to tell your story. Why? Because it displays when you comment on content … and appear in search results … and when your group post is featured in the digest email.
The recommendations?
Join groups that are relevant your interests. Be an active participant. Post content that the group can benefit from. Engage with the posts of others, by liking and commenting on the content.
Social media is all about reciprocity.
And maybe every once in while, you’ll have the featured post. That’s what serendipity taught me.
What have you learned in social media about serendipity?
by Caroline Leach | Feb 24, 2018 | Social Media
Are you making the most of your LinkedIn presence?
Don’t overlook these seven often-missed opportunities to increase your effectiveness on LinkedIn.
1. Not completing your profile
The first thing to do in LinkedIn is create a complete profile. Here are great tips on being bold in your LinkedIn profile from the MAKERS Conference.
Be sure to complete every field, until LinkedIn identifies your profile as “all-star.” You don’t have do it all at once. You can set aside time each week to work on one section at a time. Start from the top and work down:
2. Not keeping your profile up to date
Each month, add something new to your profile. Did you start a new job? Take on a new project? Complete a course or a certification? Publish a paper?
If you finished a work project that can be shared publicly, add it to your profile. Maybe it’s a multimedia presentation or a video or a podcast. Just make sure it doesn’t include any company confidential information and that it can be made public.
It was a thrill to see my employer, AT&T, included again on Fortune’s 2018 list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. As a proud member of our Employee Engagement Advisory Board to make the company a great place to work for all, I added the company news release to my LinkedIn profile. (Note: opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
3. Not customizing your public profile URL
Not personalizing your URL is like using an aol.com email address. It marks you as out of touch and not current.
Customizing your URL gives you a personally branded link to include in event apps where participants share their social media handles, your email signature, your bio if you’re giving a speech, and your resume if you still maintain a separate document from LinkedIn.
This feature uses your name in your LinkedIn URL, rather than a random string of numbers. It will appear like this: linkedin.com/in/yourname or in my case as linkedin.com/in/leachcaroline.
If someone else already has your name, try putting your last name first or adding your middle initial. Make your URL as similar to your other social media handles as you can.
In my case, based on what was available, I use leachcaroline for LinkedIn and Facebook and @caroline_leach for Instagram and Twitter.
4. Not personalizing your professional headline
Right under your name in your LinkedIn profile is your professional headline. It defaults to your current job title. But you can and should change it. Here’s why.
Your headline appears frequently throughout LinkedIn. It’s displayed in search results and when you comment on others’ content.
If you don’t personalize your headline, you’re missing a big opportunity to personally brand yourself.
Here are tips to make the most of your headline by using keywords and benefits statements about you and what you do.
Headlines have been limited to 120 characters. But Wayne Breitbarth shared a new tip about how recent LinkedIn changes benefit you.
If you update your headline in your mobile app (not your desktop), he says, you get 220 characters. As he notes, that 83% more space to tell your story.
5. Not using a background photo
Just as customizing your professional headline helps you better tell your story, so does adding a background photo. This is the photo that appears right above your profile photo.
If you don’t include a customized photo, your profile looks similar to everyone else’s with the standard blue background of connecting points and lines. It doesn’t stand out or attract attention.
Ideally, use a photo you’ve taken yourself that shows the essence of your professional self in an image. Here are other tips on telling your story through your background photo.
6. Not experimenting with content
If you’re not currently sharing updates and articles in LinkedIn, get started by observing what you gravitate toward in your LinkedIn “home” feed. What catches your eye? What makes you want to watch the featured video or click on an article link?
Start to “like” content that reflects your professional interests. Engage further by adding a comment that adds another perspective or asks a follow-up question. When you @mention the author, they’ll be notified of your comment and are more likely to see it and respond it.
Once you’ve done that, you can start experimenting with content of your own. Here are some ideas for sharing an idea, a photo or a video.
I did a month-long experiment to see what would happen when I posted to LinkedIn every weekday for a month. You could experiment by using video, varying types of posts, using different lengths of posts, trying out different hashtags, and so on.
You might be surprised by what you learn, as I was when I dug into my analytics. I learned that posting an inspirational leadership quote along with a striking photo on major holidays rose to the top of my content with the most engagement.
7. Not joining groups
LinkedIn expert Donna Serdoula advises joining the maximum allowed 100 groups, to enhance your visibility. You can follow groups that align with your areas of focus in your career and on LinkedIn.
Beyond that, she takes an interesting contrarian view. Don’t limit your groups to those comprised of colleagues in the same field as you, she advises.
Instead, “think in terms your target audience,” she says in her book on LinkedIn profile optimization. Who do you want to be found by? Recruiters? Colleagues? Potential customers?
Groups are an area I’ll explore in future posts. Why? Recently I posted content in a group and discovered serendipitously a great way to get that content amplified. This will be the topic of my next post, followed by a more detailed exploration of how to make the most of groups.
What other missed opportunities do you see?
by Caroline Leach | Feb 17, 2018 | Social Media
This was a post I started but decided not to write.
Why?
When I searched about things not to do in LinkedIn, the content that came up was similar to my own list. I didn’t think I’d be adding anything new.
So instead I analyzed my weekly LinkedIn articles.
Why?
It was a subject that only I could write about. It was unique to me and my experience posting a LinkedIn article every week for nearly a year.
But a comment on that post changed by mind. Jason Dunn expressed interest in the bad behavior I’d observed in LinkedIn. And whether he was serious or not, I reconsidered.
Here are 7 things NOT to do in LinkedIn, if you want to build your career and promote your network and your employer. (Note: opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
1. Spamming a new connection
Is there anything more annoying than a new connection immediately sending a direct message pitching a service, requesting a meeting or asking for a job?
Sometimes it feels like the number of messages requesting a 30-minute meeting add up to more than 50 hours a week. People on LinkedIn are professionals. They have to spend their time on their top priorities, not on meeting with people pitching something in which the recipient has no interest.
In order to have permission to make a pitch, a real relationship has to be formed first. People have share information of value over a period of time. They have to get to know each other.
And while I generally believe in responding, that only extends to an initial response. Follow-up responses asking why I can’t meet or why I’m not interested or if I can refer a colleague are not messages that I respond to. The last thing I want to do is burden a colleague with spam.
2. Posting TOO frequently
There are a few people in my news feed who post SO frequently that I sometimes wonder if their work is suffering as a result. How much is too much? Anything more than 2 posts a day.
The only exception to that is if you’re attending a big event and you have a great deal of content you want to share. But even then, a better way to share a volume of content is via Twitter, where greater frequency is more appropriate.
On LinkedIn, posting up to once each weekday is ideal. To dig into the wisdom of that and the data behind it, I did an experiment to test what would happen if I posted to LinkedIn every weekday for a month. As a result, I focused on how to make my content more compelling.
3. Sharing inappropriate content
Keep it professional and positive on LinkedIn. Don’t disparage other people or companies. Make sure your content is suitable for a work environment. Don’t ever share content that is confidential information about your employer.
And ignore the birthday notification feature – Facebook is the place to wish people a happy birthday, not LinkedIn. Don’t include your own birthday in your contact and personal information on your profile.
4. Making it all about you
When you scroll through your LinkedIn “home” feed, what catches your eye? In all likelihood, news and information that helps you be better in your career.
Don’t make it all about you. A constant stream of posts about you won’t resonate with your connections. Of course, it’s fine to post on occasion about an award you won or an honor you were given or somewhere you are speaking.
Just make sure that the majority of your posts are about offering up news, info and tips that will help others on their career journeys.
Social media is about reciprocity. Be generous with your network. Read their posts and articles. Engage with those that are particularly resonant.
Beyond liking the content, leave a thoughtful comment that adds new information. Consider sharing it with your network if it adds to the topics you generally post about.
5. Misspelling names
Three direct messages I received recently spelled my name wrong.. They opened with Carolyn. My name is Caroline. It’s clearly stated on my profile.
There’s no excuse for misspelling someone’s name. It shows a lack of attention to detail. It gets the whole communication off on the wrong foot.
As the American writer Dale Carnegie said, “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
Spell it right. Check it against how the name is spelled in the person’s profile. And check it again, before you hit “send.”
6. Ignoring analytics
LinkedIn offers data on each post and article. If you don’t look at the analytics, you won’t know which content is performing well and engaging your network.
Spend some time each week or month reviewing how each one performed. Come up with a hypothesis as to why posts did particularly well or not. Increase the frequency of content types that get the most engagement, as measured by clicks, likes, comments and shares.
7. Sending the default invitation to connect
How many invitations do you receive from people you don’t know with the standard, “I’d like to add you to my professional network in LinkedIn”?
If you don’t know why they want to connect, why would you accept? Given my strategy for accepting invitations, it makes me work harder to decide yes or no.
And even if you’re inviting someone you know to connect, it makes for a much stronger connection if you articulate why you’d like to connect.
Always personalize.
And if you’re scrolling through the people you may know feature, you should know that you cannot currently customize your invitation. Instead, go to the person’s profile and personalize an invitation by clicking on “connect.”
What would you add to things NOT to do in LinkedIn?
by Caroline Leach | Feb 11, 2018 | Learning, Marketing & Analytics, Social Media
Coming up on nearly a year of posting a weekly LinkedIn article, what have I learned? What can you learn?
What articles are getting the most engagement?
Are there patterns among those top articles?
And how can this help you on your journey to build your career through social media?
It’s time to turn to another trusty spreadsheet, similar to my experiment on posting to LinkedIn every weekday for a month.
What’s in it?
- 35 articles, from May 2017 to January 2018
- Posting date and day of the week
- Engagement measures of clicks, likes, comments and shares
- Headline scores, characters, words, sentiment and type (thanks to CoSchedule, the content calendar company)
- Network reached, e.g., first- or second-degree network
After creating and populating my spreadsheet, I identified the best performing articles. What determined those? I looked at a general measure of engagement, a combination of the highest number of clicks to an article, along with likes, comments and shares. Then I sorted the data in a variety of ways and began looking for trends and patterns.
WHAT DIDN’T MATTER TO ENGAGEMENT?
A number of variables could be ruled out right away. They didn’t seem to matter to engagement.
Day of the week. About 70% of my articles were posted on a Wednesday, because I strive for consistency. What about the 30% posted on other weekdays? How did they do? The data says the day of the week doesn’t really matter. Articles on other days of the week didn’t do noticeably better or worse than others.
My conclusion? Continue the consistency with Wednesdays, experimenting with other days of the week on occasion.
Headline score. Could better headlines attract more engagement? I experimented with headline analyzers from CoSchedule and the Advanced Marketing Institute and wrote about the experience in a few of my blog posts.
Looking at my top 10 LinkedIn articles, half had “strong” headline scores of 70+, about half had “average” scores between 55 and 69, and one had a “poor” score below 54.
My conclusion? While I believe there’s value in writing the most compelling headline possible, it’s not necessary to find or use the highest-scoring headline. I do believe using headline analyzers has improved the quality of my headlines over time, however, which has helped enhance my articles.
Headline sentiment. Would headlines with stronger sentiment, either positive or negative, perform better? The analysis of my own articles didn’t really bear that out. Of the top 10 headlines, 2 were positive and 8 were neutral.
My conclusion? It’s not necessary to focus on headline sentiment and making them more positive.
Headline type. In the top 10 articles, 4 headlines were generic, 2 were questions, 2 were lists, 1 was how to, and 1 was time based, using categories from CoSchedule. Again, no real pattern.
My conclusion? Variety and appropriateness to the particular topic are more important than finding a single most resonant type of headline.
WHAT WERE THE BIGGEST SURPRISES?
For each article I discovered I can click into a list of who has shared the article. What I can’t fully identify is whether this is a newly available feature, or if somehow I missed it before.
Previously, I was aware of shares if the sharer @mentioned me, or if it was included in a summary email from LinkedIn.
But clicking into these shares opened up a whole new perspective for me. With each new article I post, I’ll now check the shares daily. That way I can like and comment on those shares, along with any comments they’ve received. This may even highlight people I’d like to add to my LinkedIn network.
One of my articles, A Top 2018 PR Trend: Growth in Employee Advocacy, was shared by people beyond my network in Denmark, Italy and Mexico.
The shares in Denmark each had accompanying messages. But I don’t speak Danish. What to do? Enter Google Translate.
With this I had to take a leap of faith. I assumed the translation of “burn” had an alternate meaning of “promote” or “build.”
I discovered that 7 people in Denmark were promoting a workshop on employee advocacy and strategic branding through social media. It appeared that my article helped in underscoring the importance of employee advocacy programs.
So I keyed my own response into Google Translate from English to Danish and posted a reply to the first sharer, Gert Juhl. What fun to hear back a day later!
WHAT DID MATTER TO ENGAGEMENT?
To understand what really did matter to engagement, I identified my top performing articles, by a combination of clicks, likes, comments and shares.
Here they are:
1. What Happens When You Post to LinkedIn Every Day for a Month? (911 clicks, 75 likes, 17 comments, 22 shares, 77 strong headline score, neutral headline sentiment)
2. 2018 Trends to Build Your Career through Social Media (895 clicks, 49 likes, 5 comments, 80 shares, 66 average headline score, neutral headline sentiment)
3. 12 Ways to a Great LinkedIn Photo (500 clicks, 44 likes, 14 comments, 4 shares, 66 average headline score, positive headline sentiment)
4. How to Boost Engagement with LinkedIn Articles (301 clicks, 70 likes, 13 comments, 2 shares, 76 strong headline score, neutral headline sentiment)
5. Be Bold in Your LinkedIn Profile (292 clicks, 41 likes, 3 comments, 9 shares, 67 average headline score, positive headline sentiment)
My hypotheses as to why these articles got the highest engagement?
First, they answered important questions for people. What are the social media trends that could affect how to build a career? How to take a great LinkedIn photo? How to create a great profile? How to encourage engagement with articles? What happens by experimenting with daily content?
Second, they combined personal knowledge and experience and existing knowledge in unique ways. They shared my personal experiences (those that are non-confidential) with the intent of helping people in my network and beyond. They are unique, with my own perspective and insights. They are things only I could write. What are things only you could write about?
Third, it helps to have a post boosted by an employee advocacy program (note: opinions expressed in this article are my own.) The 2018 trends article was featured in my employer’s program, thanks to Nolan Carleton and Claire Mitzner. That’s the likely reason there were 80 shares, when shares for other articles were much lower. If your employee advocacy program has a feature where you can submit your articles for consideration, do it!
WHAT OTHER DATA WOULD HELP?
As I thought more about why certain articles performed better than others, I realized I need to add some new data fields to my spreadsheet for future analysis.
First, I’m now noting how people mentioned in an article relate to article engagement. I strive to mention and link to people in every article and @mention people in every post. That rounds out my perspective and boosts people in my network. When I promote articles, I mention them in LinkedIn and Twitter, and sometimes send them a DM, direct message, with a link to the article.
Second, I’m starting to measure the effectiveness of the LinkedIn posts and the tweets that promote the article. How much engagement are these getting? What can be learned from the highest-performing posts and tweets?
Because the functionality doesn’t seem to allow an @mention of people in the LinkedIn post that initially shares the article, I’ll start doing a separate LinkedIn post where I @mention people. Then I can compare how the two types of posts perform. Why is an @mention important? Because the person receives a notification that they were mentioned.
Third, I’ll note the impact (positive or negative change) in the week following the article being posted of my profile views, connection requests and new followers. This gives a sense of how my influence is changing as a result of publishing an article every week, along with the effectiveness of the particular article.
WHY IS DATA SO IMPORTANT?
After a recent week of observing bad behavior on LinkedIn, like new connections who immediately spammed me with a sales pitch, I decided I’d write a post about 10 things NOT to do in LinkedIn.
I jotted down my own pet peeves. Then I bounced them against a Google search of other similar articles. Not surprisingly, my list didn’t add anything new. So why write and post it?
That’s what prompted the realization it was time to return to my own data. What is it telling me about my weekly posting of articles? This is a unique and different story that only I can tell.
And that is what social media content creation is all about … sharing something new and different that can help your network … and that they aren’t going to find anywhere else.
There may be nothing new under the sun. But just as we each have unique fingerprints and unique DNA, we each have unique experiences in our careers. These are the powerful and valuable perspectives we can share with others.
by Caroline Leach | Jan 28, 2018 | Careers, Social Media
How does a two-minute chance meeting at Starbucks turn into 100+ likes and positive interactions in social media?
When your colleague asks another colleague to take a quick picture and shares it on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook with a fun caption promoting #LifeatATT.
That person is TeNita Ballard, a passionate champion for diversity and inclusion at AT&T. We both work in Southern California, and we ran into each other at the company’s headquarters in Dallas this week. (Note: opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
I’ve written about TeNita before in the secret to fitting social media into your professional life. She was the first example I held up of people who are especially good at documenting the highlights of their professional lives.
She’s always looking for ways to share the public side of her work — from Chief Diversity Officer Corey Anthony’s recent visit with employee resource groups to the Los Angeles African American Women’s Public Policy Institute at USC.
This is all part of a strategy to simply document your day, rather than attempting to create content above and beyond what you’re already working on.
Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of Vayner Media, articulates it well in his post, Document, don’t create. It’s an easy and authentic approach.
To get started, ask yourself a few questions …
- What are you working on that you can share publicly?
- What actions are you especially excited about?
- What information would benefit your network, promote your colleagues, and/or amplify your employer’s brand?
Many good examples of this appeared in my social media feed this month.
Fiona Carter, Chief Brand Officer at AT&T, shared a gathering of high-powered marketers convening to discuss big topics around gender equality. It highlights the company’s leadership in improving the representation of women and girls in advertising in the #SeeHer industry initiative.
Mo Katibeh, Chief Marketing Officer for AT&T Business, sparked advance interest in his presentation at the 2018 AT&T Business Leadership Kickoff meeting with a picture of his rehearsal, the group’s theme for the year and @mentions of key colleagues.
Karyn Spencer, VP of Hello Lab at AT&T, shared an interview clip at the Sundance Film Festival of the work she and colleagues have been doing, especially in the areas of inclusion and diversity.
It was one of several interviews Carrie Keagan conducted during the event, with Nicholas Bianchi posting the great news that “AT&T was the #1 mentioned brand on Twitter at Sundance.”
While I wasn’t at Sundance or the power marketers’ dinner, I felt like I was part of the experiences, thanks to my colleagues. I did get to see Mo Katibeh’s presentation, and it was well done. After coming across his post, I looked forward to seeing his talk.
To wrap up my own week back in Southern California, I hosted three students from USC Annenberg at AT&T’s El Segundo campus – Gina Wanless, Kaitlin Rhodes and Avalon Harder.
They are finishing graduate and undergraduate programs this spring. I’m excited to see the great things they’ll do next.
What you you doing this week that you can share in social media?
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