by Caroline Leach | Mar 25, 2017 | Social Media
What simple action will dramatically enhance your LinkedIn profile? Adding a compelling cover photo.
Looking for examples of great cover photos in LinkedIn, it was surprising to see how few profiles take advantage of this feature.
You’ll stand out more in LinkedIn if you ditch the default techno-connection look for something that tells your story.
As Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick say in The Art of Social Media, the purpose of your cover picture is “to tell a story and communicate information about what is important to you.”
Start by thinking about your personal brand and the story you want to tell about yourself.
Ask yourself a few questions:
- What field are you in?
- What industry are you in?
- Where have you spoken?
- What awards you have won?
- What books have you written?
- Where do you work?
- What accomplishments are you proud of?
- What are you passionate about in your career?
- What best represents YOU?
You can also check out How to Brand Your LinkedIn Cover Photo, by Hannah Morgan, a contributor to U.S. News and World Report.
If you don’t already take pictures at work and of work events, start doing that. Over time, you’ll build a set of your own visual assets that you can use for a variety of social media purposes.
Of course, be sure to represent your employer, and yourself, in a positive light and don’t share pictures of confidential information.
A great example I saw this week was Matt Warren’s Instagram post of a big event he produced. It was a dramatic, visually compelling way of showcasing his work. It gave me a window into his world and made me feel like I was there.
In my career I’m passionate about telling stories, leading teams and making a difference for my employer and the world.
That’s why my LinkedIn cover photo is from a corporate citizenship event my colleague Tina Morefield held at a Los Angeles elementary school. After speaking as a then-VP of Communications, I snapped a pictures of our City Year partner rallying our volunteers.
The story in this photo is about the power of people and teams and unity. We were giving back to the community. I felt great pride in my employer (opinions are my own in this blog), and the strength in the diversity of our colleagues.
Take a look through your own camera roll. See what story you could tell about your professional work.
And take some new pictures this week. You can change your LinkedIn cover photo as often as you like to reflect your evolving and growing career.
by Caroline Leach | Mar 5, 2017 | Social Media
When your LinkedIn app fills up with connection invitations, what’s your strategy for deciding yes or no?
If you set a general framework for which you’ll accept, it will save time and result in a better network.
LinkedIn’s Catherine Fisher recommends in Business Insider connecting only with people you know and trust.
If you want an even higher bar, try Alexandra Samuel‘s “favor test.” She recommends only connecting with people whom you’d be willing to ask a favor of or do a favor for. Check out more in Harvard Business Review.
If someone takes the time to personalize an invitation to me with a well-articulated reason for wanting to connect, however, I will generally accept it.
But what about the ones with no personal note? The majority of these come from people I don’t know. Short of simply deleting all of them, sight unseen (which is certainly an efficient option), here’s my strategy:
ACCEPT
- People who are fellow colleagues at my current or former employers (opinions expressed in this blog are my own)
- People from my alma maters – students, alums, professors or staff members
- People who belong to the same professional, community or civic groups that I do
- People I attended a conference with, such as MAKERS or TED
- People who add to the diversity of my network on various dimensions, including industry, geography, career stage, functional area and so on
Personal branding expert William Arruda recommends diversity in a LinkedIn network, which links to a great perspective on its value.
- People with an interesting background that catches my eye. It’s hard to articulate this one, but I know it when I see it.
CONSIDER
- People who have common connections. This comes with a big caveat. An underlying rationale for the connections has to be evident.
Recently I declined invitations from people who had a high number of shared connections, but for which I couldn’t discern a compelling reason why. Often it was because they didn’t work in the same industry or even one that could be considered in some way related.
DECLINE
- People with no clear connection to any areas of my work
- Lack of clarity about what the person or their company does
- A suspicious-looking profile, such as no last name listed or little information included in the profile
- Anything appearing the slightest bit sales related. If I’m looking for a new vendor partner, I’ll go to my trusted network first for recommendations, not to random connections in LinkedIn.
This is my decision matrix, and it may give you some ideas for creating your own. This lets you quickly go through incoming invitations.
It frees up time to proactively create and cultivate your network by sending personalized invitations to a focused group of people.
What’s your strategy?
by Caroline Leach | Mar 4, 2017 | Careers, Social Media
“In growing your network, you want it to be both diverse and concentrated,” personal branding expert William Arruda wrote recently in Forbes about how to cultivate a powerful LinkedIn network.
First, begin with why you’re on LinkedIn. What do you want to accomplish? How can growing your network help you do that?
Second, ask yourself this question: Who did you meet this week, who will you be meeting soon and who do you want to meet?
Third, take a few minutes every week to add to your LinkedIn network. Always send a personalized invitation, explaining how you know each other and why you’d like to connect.
As you build your network, make sure your profile presents you in the best light. Here are great profile tips from LinkedIn career expert Catherine Fisher and Landit CEO Lisa Skeete Tatum. They spoke this winter at the MAKERS Conference for women’s leadership.
Who did you meet this week? Did you start working with any new colleagues? How about vendors? Invite them to join your network.
What professional, civic and charitable organizations are you involved with? Invite key people from those groups to be part of your network.
Look at your email contact list, your Facebook friend list, your Twitter followers and so on. Identify the ones you want to invite to your LinkedIn network. The “grow your network” feature on LinkedIn will see who you already know based on your email address book.
At the airport recently, I ran into someone I met a few years ago at an event at my son’s school. We struck up a conversation and caught up on what was going on at our respective employers (opinions expressed in this blog are my own). To keep the connection going, I followed up with a LinkedIn invitation.
One of my professional associations, a roundtable for senior communicators, also had its quarterly meeting this week. At the end of each day, I sent personalized invitations to people I’d met. An even better strategy – one colleague sent invitations in real time during our roundtable discussion of timely issues.
Who will you be meeting soon? What’s on your calendar for the coming week or month? Will you be meeting new people? Send them an invitation in advance of the event.
When you meet in person, you’ll already be acquainted with each other’s LinkedIn profiles and you may find a great conversation starter. For example, maybe you know interesting people in common or your new connection is working on a project you want to learn more about.
Who would you like to meet? Are you working in a new area and want to learn from the luminaries in the field? Are there companies of interest you want to know more about? Are there second-level contacts you’d like to add to your network?
This is where the personalized invitation is especially important. Explain in a compelling and brief way why you’d like to connect.
Take advantage of the “people you may know” algorithm in LinkedIn. Is there anyone you’ve missed connecting with? Invite them to your network.
Lucas Buck recommends looking at alumni groups and people who have similar college degrees. He’s an area sales manager at Farmers Insurance who uses LinkedIn highly successfully to achieve his business objectives.
He spoke last fall at a networking group affiliated with my son’s school. What did I do the same day as the event? I sent personalized LinkedIn invitations to the people I met at the event, along with Lucas.
Here’s a sidenote about conference speakers. Introduce yourself and chat with the speaker briefly before they speak, if they aren’t too busy with final presentation preparation. Fewer people line up to talk with them before their presentation, as opposed to the larger group that tends to gather after the talk.
Back to LinkedIn, what strategies do you use to grow your network?
by Caroline Leach | Feb 12, 2017 | Careers, Social Media
What’s one action you can take today to kick-start your career?
Tell a bold story in your LinkedIn profile.
Here are powerful strategies from this month’s MAKERS Conference. LinkedIn career expert Catherine Fisher and Landit CEO Lisa Skeete Tatum led a standing-room-only session on managing your personal brand.
What is a personal brand? The presenters cited Jeff Bezos, who says “your brand is what people say about you when you leave the room.”
To define your brand they asked a key question: what do people want you in the room for? Put another way: what is the best of you?
How you answer these questions will shape the story you tell about yourself in social media and in real life. (And if you’re looking to reinvent your brand, there are great ideas from bestselling author Dorie Clark.)
While a brand – for a corporation, a product or a professional – is built over time, here are actions you can take today for a bolder LinkedIn profile.
They’re from the LinkedIn tip sheet above, along with how I’ve made them work for me. (Opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
- Include a professional photo. According to LinkedIn, your profile is 14 times more likely to be viewed if you have a photo. Here’s how to take a great headshot. If you don’t have a high-quality recent headshot, get one done this month.
- Personalize your headline. Don’t use the default of your current job title. Show what you do and what makes you unique. Look at a variety of headlines for inspiration to see what catches your eye.
- Add visuals. There are 20 million pieces of content on member profiles. Is your content among those? Post videos and pictures of your best work. Upload relevant presentations that can be shared with the public.
- Post a compelling summary. Make it 40 words or more. Include keywords for your industry. Read others’ summaries to see what appeals to you. Writing in first person is stronger and bolder than third person.
- Cover your past work experience. Your profile is 12 times more likely to be viewed if you list more than one position. If you’ve been working for several years, though, you can omit earlier positions that don’t add to your story.
- Include volunteer experience and causes. This information increases profile views 6 times. If you’re looking for areas to engage, get involved with your company’s philanthropic causes and volunteer opportunities.
- Check out LinkedIn Learning. We all get to be lifelong learners, and this feature offers hundreds of online courses. It’s a great reason to become a premium subscriber, which I did a few years ago for the analytics.
- Share your contact information. Make it easy for people to get in touch with you. Include your email address, your blog, your Twitter handle and your company’s website. However, consider omitting your cellphone number.
- Customize your public URL. Here are easy instructions. For consistent branding, use your name in the URL the same way you use it in other social profiles. Put it on your resume, business card and email signature.
- Add skills and get endorsements. Be deliberate about skills you list. Your top 3 skill endorsements display in mobile search, so reorder them to show the ones that best tell your story. Give back to your network by endorsing others’ skills.
One of my goals for the MAKERS conference was to meet new people in every session. At the end of each day, I looked them up in LinkedIn. If I only had a first name and a company, I was able to search with that and find the right profile.
Then I sent personalized invitations (don’t send the default invitation!). Now we’re connected and can easily keep in touch as we build on the conference learnings.
How have you been bold in your LinkedIn profile?
by Caroline Leach | Feb 6, 2017 | Learning, Social Media
Do you have a social savvy strategy for the next conference you’re attending?
This is top of mind for me this week. I couldn’t be more excited to attend the The 2017 MAKERS Conference for women’s leadership, which starts tonight.
With the recent film Hidden Figures, I look forward to hearing from Academy Award-winning actress Octavia Spencer, pictured above, and the other luminary women and men who will be speaking.
My employer is a sponsor of the conference, and I could not be more proud. (This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
Here are some ideas about making the most of your conference experience in social media.
PROMOTE
How can you amplify awareness of the conference and its goals?
- Check out the social media plan for the conference. For MAKERS, this came in a series of pre-event emails with sample messages and great content to share.
- Know and use the relevant hashtag(s). #BEBOLD is the MAKERS hashtag. It’s perfect because it stands out in all caps and its brevity saves characters.
- Share pre-conference information in your social networks. In the weeks leading up to the conference, I’ve shared content in Twitter and LinkedIn.
CONNECT
How can you get to know new people you can learn from?
- Check out the attendance list in advance. If anyone already in your network is attending, you can reconnect as well as identify new people you want to meet.
- Be active in the event app – or in a social media group. Add your picture and key info to your app profile. Send messages to people you want to meet in person.
- Introduce yourself to 5 to 10 new people at each session. A goal to say hello to a focused number of people makes connections meaningful and manageable.
SHARE
How can you share valuable content with your social networks?
GROW
What can you do after a conference to share the learnings, increase the impact and grow the new network connections you made?
- Share with your colleagues. Post a summary for appropriate groups in your company’s social intranet or present it in a face-to-face meeting.
- Take one new action. Commit to doing one thing that will make a difference. My #BEBOLD action will be the subject of a future post.
How do you make the most of a conference experience in social media?
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