LinkedIn brand
“93% of buying decisions start with online research.”
“57% of the decision-making process is made prior to any direct interaction with a sales person.”
“People do not treat Business or Career Decisions any differently.”
- 76% of page views on LinkedIn are members viewing other members’ profiles and 40% of that traffic is mobile (write with mobile viewing in mind). Creating a strong LinkedIn brand begins with you and your fellow employees’ personal profiles.
- LinkedIn is an extremely visual medium (profiles with pictures get 7x more views) which means that you have to pay as much attention to how your page looks as to what it says.
- An effective Company page on LinkedIn will fall short if its employee profiles disappoint. After all, a potential hire will ultimately be interviewing with a hiring manager and your customer will be buying from one of your sales reps. Done right, a Company page and its employee profile images and messaging will reinforce each other.
- Be Likeable
- Differentiate You
- Provide External Validation
- Establish You or Your Company as a Thought Leader
- Gain Followers
Likeability
Likeability – In the book Enchantment, by Guy Kawasaki, the author gives a straight-forward formula for influencing others. Central to that formula is “achieving likeability”. A perfect visual LinkedIn example of likeability (in my opinion) is shown below with the full LinkedIn profile found here.
Differentiate
Differentiate – to properly differentiate yourself, your company and/or your services it is critical that you understand exactly what it is that you do better than anyone else. You will fail if you try to be everything to everyone. Studies have shown that the average online user has an attention span of 8 seconds. Yes, 8 seconds. A very clever (and short) example of what to and what not to do online when trying to gain your customer’s attention can be found here.
The company page for ConversionLab (the people who wrote the example in the link directly above) does a fantastic example of conveying exactly what it is that they do better than anyone else.
External Validation
I gave an example for the Skills section above with Sarah’s “friendly personality”. The Skills section is actually a very important component in your profile’s effectiveness as it has a second purpose beyond allowing viewers to see what Skills you’ve been recommended for. It is actually part of the algorithm that Linkedin uses when determining the order to display member profiles.
Recommendations are arguably the most important way that you can establish credibility on Linkedin. I believe it is critical to be intentional with who you ask and what strengths of yours or your company’s you ask to have endorsed. I’ll discuss this and Awards in depth in Part 3 of this series when the conversation shifts to building and/or repairing your online brand.
Thought Leadership
Followers
- 79% of Linkedin members are interested in updates on job opportunities from companies they follow. These are ideal prospects from which to find your next hire.
- Your followers are 95% more likely to respond to your sales team or recruiters’ InMail. Our own experience with this at Sales Talent has convinced us to make gaining followers a priority.
- Members are 61% more likely to share information as a result of following your company. (all 3 stats courtesy of Linkedin). From the beginning, the promise of Linkedin was access to the networks of your connections. Followers help fulfill that promise.
With over 100M members in the U.S. alone it’s hard to under-estimate the power of Linkedin. The challenge is staying relevant and in front of those members that you’re trying to reach. I hope that the three stats above show the potential of growing your follower base.
Now that you’re hopefully inspired to polish and perfect your online presence we’ll be shifting gears in next week’s blog. The topic will be Glassdoor and online company and job reviews in general. If you’re a hiring manager or HR Leader, it’s one medium that you can’t afford to ignore.
