by Caroline Leach | Jul 5, 2018 | Social Media
What does organizing guru Marie Kondo have to do with LinkedIn profiles?
Starting with The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie is the author of four best-selling books. She “helps people transform their cluttered homes into spaces of serenity and inspiration.”
Many of her clients say she changed their lives for the better … gaining clarity about their life’s mission, improving relationships and accomplishing long-languishing goals.
If decluttering your surroundings can change your life, think what decluttering your LinkedIn profile can do for your career.
By focusing on the essential and eliminating the non-essential on your profile, your best attributes will stand out. People don’t have to spend precious time figuring out who you are, what you do and where you’re heading in your career.
As you establish an all-star profile, fixing these three mistakes can clean up and bring clarity to your LinkedIn profile.
- Keeping content more than 10 to 15 years old
Most content that’s not from 2000 or later is likely irrelevant. It can safely be removed from your profile. This makes more room for your recent accomplishments to stand out and point the way toward your future.
There’s no need to keep positions more than 15 years old. If the experience was formative to your worldview today, you can mention it (briefly) in your summary.
There’s no need to keep graduation years from college. If it’s been more than a decade or so since you graduated, you can take off the dates.
As the world continues to changes more and more quickly, removing dated information will become even more important. This keeps the focus on what you’re learning and doing now.
- Including content not relevant to your future
What do you want your next job to be?
You can use that question as a lens to decide what content is relevant to your future and what can be deleted. Look at all the sections of your profile and remove the extraneous.
Here’s an example. Recently I deleted that I’m a senior professional in human resources, or SPHR. At one time I reported to a Chief Human Resources Officer (one of many awesome bosses, BTW) and the credential was valuable to my work.
It wasn’t an easy test to pass. There were prep books and flash cards and practice exams. That’s why it was slightly painful to take it off my LinkedIn profile.
But my current work in marketing and communications is my future. The SPHR designation is now extraneous. I comfort myself knowing I’m well schooled in HR, which is ever valuable in leading teams and coaching people. But it’s no longer a credential that needs to be highlighted.
Another place to pare down is your endorsements. Choose the skills that most strongly support your current and future professional direction. Delete the ones that don’t.
Although I appreciate the people who endorsed me for “project management” and I like to believe my skills are strong in that area, it’s not something I want to be known for.
By removing the endorsements for non-essential skills, you’re making your most relevant skills stand out.
- Sharing anything too personal
LinkedIn isn’t Facebook. There’s no need to share your birthday in your contact information. Do you really want to get happy birthday messages in your LinkedIn feed?
While some could make the case that wishing people a happy birthday in LinkedIn is a good way to touch base with your connections on an annual basis, there are better ways to do that.
The best ways are to comment on people’s LinkedIn content, share information that will be of interest to individuals in your network, and offer to introduce people in your network who could benefit from knowing each other. On introductions, be sure to ask first if both people are open to it.
What other mistakes do you see in LinkedIn profiles?
by Caroline Leach | Jun 25, 2018 | Social Media
Jessica Sterling at Dodger Stadium
What do you want more of in your professional life?
Let that guide what you share in social media. It works as its own magnet and its own law of attraction, bringing into your life what you’re focusing on.
That was one of several gems I heard from Los Angeles-based photographer Jessica Sterling. We chatted recently about her social media strategy for her business.
Jessica shoots extraordinary portraits, epic events and awe-inspiring architecture – helping people and businesses share their stories. Here are a few samples of how she draws out the essence of people in her portraits …
She’s photographed many notable people, including Serena Williams, Justin Timberlake and Michelle Branch, to name just a few.
Jessica and I met through work in my DIRECTV days, when she photographed several events for us. (Note: opinions expressed in this blog are my own).
Later, I booked her services personally when it was time for a new headshot. That experience turned into one of my top 10 articles in 12 Ways to a Great LinkedIn Profile Photo.
When I did a study about how people are using social media to build their careers, it surfaced several people who are doing it well. Some of them will be profiled in future posts.
Jessica was a natural to be the first profile. She makes me smile every time her images and videos pop up in my Instagram feed. Here’s what she told me about how social media helps build her business …
Why are you active in social media?
Social media keeps me in touch with my clients – past, present and future. It keeps me connected to people and top of mind. It gives me a fresh presence and a reason why people should care about me and my work.
What platforms are you on?
Instagram is perfect for photographers, so I’m there. Facebook too. And LinkedIn. Once in a while I’ll do a blog post on my website.
What type of content do you share?
Shoots I’ve booked lately, and what I’d like to book more of in the future. Portraits are big. People are passionate about what they do. I love capturing that in images. Events are fantastic. A recent one was at the Mayor’s office – for Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.
What content gets the most engagement?
Selfies! People love them. They want to connect with your story. You can tell your continuing story through selfies.
How has social media changed photography?
It’s been huge. People are used to seeing beautiful images. People want and demand them. They don’t always know what it takes to create them. That’s what I’m passionate about doing in my work.
What’s your personal brand?
It’s seamless and fun to shoot with me. I strive to make it as pleasant and as comfortable as possible. People tell me I’m quiet when I shoot. I can be inconspicuous at a big event, but I’m there when you need me. The best validation is when someone hires me and loves the experience.
What do’s and don’ts do you observe?
Two don’ts: No political stuff. No social causes. People want to have fun, and that’s where I meet them in social.
Why isn’t your young son on social media very much?
Social media is so powerful. We don’t fully understand its ultimate impact. I want my son to have control of it when he’s old enough to do so.
What’s the next big thing in social media for career building?
Instagram Stories are interesting. There’s a lot to explore here!
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Inspired by Jessica? Here’s how you can connect with her:
IG: @jessicasterlingphoto
FB: facebook.com/jessica.sterling
LI: linkedin.com/in/jessicasterlingphotography
Web: jessicasterling.com
Blog: http://jessicasterlingphoto.tumblr.com
Watch for more profiles coming soon. And if you’d like to be profiled, leave me a comment. I’d love to hear from you!
by Caroline Leach | Jun 17, 2018 | Learning, Social Media
There’s only one you in the world. No one else has traveled your exact professional path, experienced identical situations or learned the same lessons.
Of the more than 560 million LinkedIn users and counting, only you can tell your unique professional story.
That’s the big takeaway from analyzing 49 articles I posted to LinkedIn starting in May 2017. The top articles were largely inspired by my personal experience:
If you aren’t already posting LinkedIn articles, here are some reasons to consider it. And if you’re already writing articles, this may help you up your game.
Just over a year ago, I started an experiment on LinkedIn. I posted to LinkedIn every weekday for a month. Why? To test the data point that it takes 20 LinkedIn posts each month to reach 60% of your audience.
In developing an editorial calendar, one of the easy ways to share content was to repurpose my blog posts at carolineleach.com. This solved another problem – promoting my posts. Repurposing posts as LinkedIn articles reached a broader audience among my LinkedIn network.
In analyzing the data over the past year and reflecting on my experience, here’s what I learned in the form of benefits from regular article writing. By writing an article weekly, as I did, or probably even monthly, you’re likely to:
Create a sustainable writing schedule. When I began writing articles a year ago, there was a healthy backlog of blog posts. It was simply a matter of organizing the topics in a logical flow, making minor content updates to ensure timeliness, posting the articles and sharing them with my network.
Once the backlog was done, though, a weekly article needed to be written. With a busy professional position and an active family with two teens, where was the time going to come from?
Here’s one of the ways having teens can be a blessing. They generally sleep in on the weekends. That’s why early mornings on the weekends became my writing time. And the weekly article was ready to repurpose on LinkedIn during the week when more people visit it.
Committing to a weekly article pushed me to create a sustainable writing schedule every week. If you’re a lark like me, or a night owl like my teens, you can take advantage of early mornings or late nights. Or you could turn part of your lunchtime or your public transport commute into writing times.
There’s an ideal intersection. It’s between areas when you can carve out time and when your brain is operating a high level of efficiency. Look for those times.
Grow your network. My articles that attracted the most engagement have been those where I’ve done experiments and collected and analyzed related data. That made me wonder how my network grew between May 2017 and June 2018.
LinkedIn has a handy feature where you can download all of your connections into an Excel spreadsheet. BTW, this is a good practice to do every 3 to 6 months, so you always have an up-to-date record of your contacts. You never know when you might need it!
While I thought my network had grown over the last year, it was surprising to see connections were up more than 60%! There are many reasons for this, and I believe my weekly articles are a big one. Why? Because people mention them in their connection requests.
While connections went from about 1,900 to 3,160, followers also grew from zero to 440 in the same time period. The combined group is just over 3,600. That data helped me set a stretch goal for this year of 5,000.
Establish yourself as an expert and increase your influence. By sharing your professional expertise and your unique perspective, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your area of focus.
How can you measure this? The growth in your network connections and followers gives you one indication.
You can also look at the trend of your profile views. How are they increasing over time? What’s the makeup of people looking at your profile? Is it the group you want to reach, whether it’s industry leaders, peers or recruiters?
You can also look at speaking requests. Because of my LinkedIn articles, I’ve been invited to speak to …
A highlight was joining the team of social influencers at the inaugural AT&T Business Summit in 2017. John Starkweather, Michelle Smith and I along with several others shared our experiences in LinkedIn articles. (Note: opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
What’s next? This spring I did research on how people are using social media to boost their careers. That identified several people who are doing it well. I’ve begun interviewing people who are crushing it in social media and will start sharing profiles of them soon.
The ascendence of AI, artificial intelligence, and AR, augmented reality, are fascinating in how they are influencing social media. These are areas I look forward to researching and conducting experiments.
The best part about reflecting on that last year? Seeing a holistic view that added up to significant progress. Without pausing to reflect, the feeling of moving forward wouldn’t be as strong.
And having a sense of forward momentum is what creates “the best inner work lives,” according to authors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. They studied and wrote about the importance of daily action toward meaningful goals in The Progress Principle.
How are you making regular progress in sharing your expertise with the world?
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