EWTS Certified Guide Beth Granger knows the world of LinkedIn inside and out. Her business focuses on teaching others about every aspect of using the platform as a networking tool, from individual training to group training to going into organizations.
Reaching out and saying the right thing on a networking site is essential in today’s market, but only some know exactly how to do this, and this is where Beth can help.
Read this blog to learn exactly how to unleash the power of LinkedIn and take your offline conversations online.
Three Key Features
The LinkedIn landscape is constantly changing and evolving, so it is advisable to keep up to date with the best new features.
Before we delve into Beth’s top three, you must know about a new privacy settings change.
Under the updated settings, your content and profile information can be used to train LinkedIn’s internal generative AI. These new privacy settings are turned on by default in many countries, including the US, so if you want more control over your writing and content, switch them off.
Once you’ve got your settings as you want them, try out these key features:
1. Features Section
Your features section lives below the top part of your profile. It allows you to highlight or pin the most important things you want people to see towards the top of your profile. On a mobile device, it can become what Beth calls a ‘scroll stopper’ because it takes up your phone’s entire screen, and when somebody’s scrolling through, it grabs their attention.
You can feature videos, PDFs, images, and any posts you want to pin to the top. It can be changed as often as you’d like and feature upcoming events or articles about yourself.
2. LinkedIn Newsletter
These are great when you want to say more than what can typically fit into a post or short video.
The first time you do a newsletter, it will invite your entire network, including connections and followers, to subscribe. There is also a place on your profile where all your newsletters live, meaning that future visitors can see them, read previous editions and subscribe.
Subscribers will receive a notification every time something gets sent out, and you don’t have to do it too often to see a massive spike in visitors.
You can create a newsletter from your company page, but most people will send it to them as individuals rather than the company page. This is because individual profiles have more visibility than a company page, and your profile is your most effective marketing tool.
Beth’s top tip: Don’t duplicate your email and LinkedIn newsletter. Keep them different, but be clever. Some strategically try to get people to go from one to the other. For example, they’ll do an excerpt or a list of topics on one of them, pointing people to the other, adopting a simple phrase such as: if you wanna read the full thing or wanna get more or more frequently, go over here.
3. LinkedIn Live
Don’t be afraid of going live! It doesn’t matter if you don’t get many people joining; your videos become content. You can chop it up and use it for other purposes or send people to the video post-event, just like a webinar.
The audio is interesting as you typically get more people joining, even those you don’t know. These are just some things you can consider trying; you don’t have to commit to regular events; it might just be worth trialling it during a new topic you want to discuss, but these are all features that could bolster your LinkedIn presence.
Exactly What NOT To Do On LinkedIn
Alongside the do’s of LinkedIn, there are some essential ‘don’ts’.
Follow this list to ensure you get things right (and don’t have to learn the hard way!!)
- Don’t use automation. LinkedIn is strengthening its terms of service, which will become effective in November 2024. But even now, anyone who uses tools that scrape data, such as tools that attempt to pull your list of connections or other information, is being penalized. Ignoring this could result in you getting locked out, and it is hard to get back in once that happens.
- Don’t share your login. Multiple logins simultaneously from two different locations can become a huge problem. People have had their accounts disabled, so strive to do all your LinkedIn activities yourself.
- Behave appropriately. Conversing online shouldn’t be any different from talking face-to-face. Don’t go for the hard sell as soon as you connect. Receiving a pitch in the connection invite is an absolute no-no!
- Don’t hard sell. Getting to that sales conversation too quickly is not advisable. LinkedIn is a networking tool. Yes, you can make social sales, etc., but it’s a networking tool at its heart. You should get to know people and extend relationships. These relationships might eventually become a sales conversation, but initiating that too soon is not good etiquette.
Final Health Check
After reading this, you’ll undoubtedly be fully invested in LinkedIn mode, ready to start networking with purpose. But, before diving in, you should implement the following super simple, three-minute health check:
- Check all of the settings - they constantly change and add things, so make sure you are happy with all of your settings. Tick list
- Take a look at your profile - have you updated it? It needs to be up-to-date and current. Also, please ensure your ‘About’ section is in the first person!
- Beth’s Top tip - put the most important things about you in the first two lines.
