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It’s a funny time of year right now. There’s the temptation to slow down because it’s all about Christmas events and nobody’s answering your calls. Decisions are being pushed back into January. But there’s still quite a number of working days left before we can officially break for Christmas. If things are a bit quiet for you, why not put some of these great Linked IN tactics in place? Not only will it pass the time, you’ll be able to gain useful insights about your connections and potentially generate some new business ready for the new year!
We spoke to Rachel Allen from 13Ten Marketing for her top 3 tips, to spruce up your LinkedIn profile in the Christmas down-time:
Make sure your profile is All Star!
Linked IN will grade your profile and will prompt you to complete any missing sections. But a few great tips are:
- Make sure your profile picture is professional, ideally showing just your head and shoulders. People want to see who they will be doing business with. This is also in Linked IN’s terms of service.
- Edit your username to something more memorable. If you send your Linked IN profile to people regularly then an easy-to-remember username will help.
- Many personal profiles don’t have a background image (so it defaults to a standard template). Download an image from www.linkedinbackground.com
- In the section for Headline, don’t put your job title in, instead make sure that it has a keyword in. For example, my headline says “Social media management for busy recruiters. I can help you to do your social media in just 30 minutes each week.” By using the words ‘social media’ in my headline, I’ve got keywords in there so that I’ll come up if people search for me.
Take a look at your target customers
Is there a customer you’ve been trying to win for ages, but something isn’t quite working? You can find out what they’re doing by looking at their profile in Private Mode. They will get a notification that an Anonymous Linked IN Member has viewed their profile, but they won’t know it’s you.
How to do this:
1. Go to Settings and Privacy
2. Scroll down to ‘How others see your Linked IN Activity’
3. In the Profile Viewing Options, click on Change on the right-hand side and select Private Mode
You can then search for your competitor’s Linked IN profile and look at their activity and posts, which might help you to see what issues or services they are interested in. This valuable insight about a potential client might make all the difference when you make your next sales call.
And don’t forget, you can find out what your competitors are doing using this trick as well!
Expand your network – quickly and easily!
If you’ve got lots of email addresses in your email account, then you can add people quickly and easily to your network from your email provider.
Head over to My Network and select Manage My Network. There are options on the right-hand side to connect your data to Linked IN, using Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail and others. There is also the option to upload email addresses via a spreadsheet.
Once you’ve done this, your email contacts will all get an invitation to connect with you on Linked IN.
We hope this blog post has helped you with some ideas to keep you productive during Crimbo Limbo. Let me know how you get on and feel free to connect with me on Linked IN https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelemilyallen/
While you're updating your LinkedIn profile, why not make sure you're a member of the Bucks Biz facebook Group too - every little helps when you're online networking!
