How to Use LinkedIn Like a Boss

Hey there all you confident communicators. Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Molly McPherson. LinkedIn. When you hear the word, you think, this is my go to platform. I love LinkedIn. I love connecting with people, chatting and messaging, learning about what's going on in other categories and my friends work and what people are doing. The people that I meet, the people that I'm going to meet. Or are you someone who. Thanks, LinkedIn. I get a lump in my gut when I think about it too much to keep up with the people, the jobs, the accolades, the bragging, the ugh, LinkedIn. Well, today I will put you in the former category. I was once in the latter, but lately my LinkedIn, it seems, is buzzing. I am on it every day now. I log in and there's someone either messaging me or replying to a post or an article, or replying to my comment from someone else's post or article. So let's get you some LinkedIn buzz, shall we? How? Well, keep listening. A lot of business leaders tend to shy away from Facebook because it feels too young, young or too social for them. And I get that. So if we're being honest here, I'll tell you that millennials and Generation Z folks are staying away from Facebook because, let's face it, their parents, that's us, are on it. But there is one place you should pay attention to, because the place LinkedIn is hopping now. Now, before we get to that information, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by the Confident Leader Network. The place for learning how to be an indestructible leader when communicating in the modern age. All from the comfort of your home or office. The online network offers monthly video trainings in one of three categories, communication, how to's, social media and reputation management, along with workbooks for you non techies out there who like to print out your work, or you techies who like to work online. And it also offers monthly video calls that you can join live as a cohort or you can watch the recorded version. I created this network for all the people who I meet when I travel around the country giving talks on these subjects. The one who pulled me aside and asked the questions, they have no time to research or are too ashamed to ask from a junior staff or a family member. It's a way I can get access to all of you who need the help. So if you go Online to Molly McPherson Network or confidentleader.network and you can join the Confident Leader Network and the next month's session is on Dun, dun, dun. LinkedIn. So listen to today's podcast and then join the network to see what I'm talking about today in action. Joining me on the monthly call this month is Crystal Hicks from Job Talk. She is a recruiting expert who is also a whiz on LinkedIn. She was my guest on episode 33, getting found on LinkedIn without getting found out at work, a very popular episode. And I have a link to it in the show Notes. You can join us live this month in September, so check out the website for more details. And if you're listening to this podcast, after September of 2019, it will be in the network for you in the archives, because all the information is evergreen. Now back to business. I know many of you use social media. A lot of you are on Facebook and Facebook gives you Instagram because they play nicely together since they're both owned by Facebook. And some of you may have an Instagram account, but you never use it. I could look up your name on Instagram and go to it and there's nothing there and that's fine. Snapchat? No way. None of you are using it. Twitter? Maybe yes, maybe no. Probably a mixed bag. And so is LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is much different than other social networks because it's less social and more network. But it is a social way to network. So it is the one place where you should not shy away from at all, both for your own professional growth and for your business. As of 2019, there are more than 575 million LinkedIn users worldwide, and about 252 million of those people log in monthly. You'll also be happy to hear that more than 100 million users are senior influencers and decision makers in their organizations. So LinkedIn is truly the place to be if you want to rub elbows with quality professionals. Well, like yourself. But first, you need to know how to use it. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about on today's episode. Now, I asked one of my newest members of the Confident Leader network why he used LinkedIn, and here was his response. He said he wrote, I log into LinkedIn multiple times a day. I typically use it to expand my reputation and sphere of influence. I like that related to crisis management and business continuity. Okay, hint. It's someone who works in crisis management. I listen to your podcast about LinkedIn. Ah, he added the plug. I love that. Nice. And so I've been working lately to expand my network, adding connections, et cetera. I also use it to promote the articles I've written or webinars that I'm doing, but again, that's to generate interest in my work and grow my reputation. I'm working a lot with one main client, but that contract is ending at the end of this year. So right now I'm focusing a lot on networking to generate business for 20 years. 20. Does that explanation sound familiar? Does it sound like you? I think it perfectly captures the Persona of the person who I see on LinkedIn nowadays. In my opinion, LinkedIn is nowhere near its saturation point. I'd say on the innovation adoption life cycle, we're still at the early majority phase. Innovators and early adopters have been there for a while, but it's still growing. So now is a fertile time to use the site. And I feel like LinkedIn is heating up a lot today. I'm on it more because I post a link about the podcast each week that generates conversations, some more than others. People who comment on my posts will come up more frequently in my NewsFeed. That's the AI behind the site, which all social media sites have. The site knows who you engage with most often and they predict who you are more comfortable chatting with. And then it grows from there. It's kind of like real life. But here's another reason why I noticed the uptick. I've been working on my business cards now for about, oh, let's see, nine or ten months. I give Chelsea, my graphic designer from Blush House Media. She's wonderful. I give her like a new logo or a blurb or a new photo or something added to my job like once a month. And the result is an ever changing business card that I never get around to printing. So when I meet people, I tell them that they can Find me on LinkedIn. In fact, someone gave me their business card yesterday at lunch and I said I got nothing because I'm a social media networking whiz. You can find me on LinkedIn, but the truth is I just don't have my business cards finished yet. But it does make me look like a bit of an early adopter when the truth is I'm just too lazy to get my cards finished. And it's another way that you can network with people to drive them to your LinkedIn profile. Case in point, recently I was on a flight after speaking in Kansas City and I was seated in 1B. Yes, first class, but only because of my platinum status on Delta. I buy Coach and they upgrade me and seated next to me was a person in 1A who started to chat. Now I'M not typically a chatterer on flights. I use my flights to chill, watch binge worthy television, work or nap, which I started to do on this particular flight. But 1A was up for a chat and I was talking all day anyway, so we chat, chatted and we got to chatting. What do you do, what do I do, blah blah blah, so on and so forth. And then I unveil my superpower which is to get anyone to tell me anything about their life. And if only if that was an endorsed skill on LinkedIn, I'd be a super influencer. But anyway, we land in Atlanta, 1A goes off and I head off to my Boston flight and as I sit down in 5C, yes, another first class seat, I get a LinkedIn message about doing business together just from a chat about what we do for work and all of this from my first name. I don't even think I gave my last name, but just talked about what I did and it was so simple I think just by keywords to find me. That's the power of this social network or the power of my charming personality on flights. Either way, social media is a great way to connect and LinkedIn is a great social media tool for connecting about business. The social part only buoys the business, but you can make magic happen for you on LinkedIn. If you need a new job, you need to find another job, or if you're like me and you need to network locally when you work nationally or vice versa, you need to connect and build your business or you want to engage professionally. This is the place. And it all starts with the profile. Okay, let's dive into some tips you can implement right away on your LinkedIn profile. First, customize your profile with your name as the URL and with a professional photo. What does it mean with the URL? It means if you sign up to LinkedIn and you have a profile, they're going to give you a default URL with a bunch of nonsense letters in there. You can customize it to your name and get it as close to your name as possible. If someone else has your name, put your maiden name there, put your middle name in there, but some identifier that they know that it's you. Simply go to your profile, click Edit Public Profile and select Edit URL. And again, make sure the URL is a name that you want to appear when people search you and click Save. Next, you do want a professional quality photo on your profile. No, no, no selfies. Anyone can tell it's a selfie because there'll be a little angle. Your arm will be out. Your first shoulder, you know, one shoulder will be in front. No selfies, no vacation pics, no wedding pics where you know where you're cut in the middle because you looked really good that day. Take the time to hire a photographer. A photo allows people to see who you are. And that human touch goes a long way. People notice the photos. I always notice who takes the time to take a nice photo or to upload a nice photo. Next, get endorsements for your skills. And this is a nice to have. It's not necessary, you don't have to have it, but it is a nice to have. People will see the endorsements. Now me, I have to admit, I never look at them. I mean, hardly ever. It's just if I happen to be scrolling down. But the more endorsements you get, if someone endorses you, that's going to show up you if in your newsfeed. And if you have a lot of skills, if someone's looking at your profile, especially if you want to be hired either in a job or as a contractor or for work, people will want to see what kind of skills you have. So it's a good idea to add some of those skills to your LinkedIn profile and then people will naturally endorse you for those skills, especially if you're looking to make a shift within your own organizations. Now, endorsements fall under the skills section of your profile. So add the skills you possess and some that you think you possess and ask a few key people to endorse you for those skills and you can do a back scratcher on that. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. And as you grow your network of connections, new connections can endorse you. Now, as I said, I'm not really big into endorsements. I just don't have the time for it. But sometimes your posts can be even more powerful than an endorsement. Because if you are sharing your own content or someone is commenting on your post or your writing, you know what folks, that's an endorsement. And those are the endorsements that I notice. Next, connect with other users. You can't network on LinkedIn without a network of people to actually talk to. Now, I don't recommend connecting with every single contact that you have in your email account and LinkedIn. They will try to get you to do just that. You won't even notice it. They'll have one page that comes up that just says click here. But really what you're clicking is they are going to send an Email to every one of your contacts to say that you're now on LinkedIn. And I get that a lot from people. One of the objections to using it is they say I always get spam, I always get these emails. And it's true, LinkedIn doesn't and it's very annoying. But you can skip over that page if you don't want to do it. So be selective from the start. Connect with like minded executives and leaders and people who, who you have had contact with before. So you may know them personally, they may be in your community, they may be in your business, they may be in your business category. You may be on a board with them, you may have hired them, you may go to school with them. I had someone reach out to me today from high school and she, she wrote a big note. She said, molly, my goodness, you look great and you are such a big deal. I thought that was just like a great endorsement. Would that be a great endorsement? But it wasn't, it was on a private message. But anyway. But here I was connecting with that I haven't seen in over 30 years because she refuses to go to the, to the reunions. But at any rate, I thought how great. I haven't known anything that she's doing and now I have her entire profile and what she's doing. It was a great way to connect, but also connecting with people like I said that you just met that you want to do business with. Do not randomly connect with anyone because those are the people that are going to muck up your newsfeed. Because again, if you connect with someone, that is the person that you're going to get information about. So if you have all these randos in there, you're going to get rando posts on your newsfeed. But if you collect it and gather people with just people that you know, that newsfeed is going to be customized to the people that you know like and trust. Now also decide why do you want to connect with these people? Did something they do or something they said in the, in the note that they sent resonate with you? What do you like about something that they've published recently? Giving people a reason to connect with you, to make them want to connect with you makes it more likely that they will accept and it gives you a jumping off point to start off a conversation. And this is another reason why you want to fill out your profile. Because as soon as you connect with a person, the first thing they're going to do is connect or click on your profile and find out. Well, who the heck is this person? Now for me, when I do it, I will look and it will automatically tell me who I have a shared connection with. Now, sometimes I won't have any idea who that person is, but there's something about that shared connection that helps. If it's someone that's random, it's more likely than not it's a salesperson. But if it is someone that you've maybe been in an area or a field that you work in, you'll want to make that connection because it will be a nice starting off point because you know a mutual person. Now, LinkedIn will also help you build out your profile. Your profile should be free of any gaping holes, like gaps in your work history or an empty bio section. Now, if you've had time off from work and a lot of moms out there, a lot of people have been stay at home taking care of kids, taking care of family or for other reasons. And it's okay because people have to do the math to notice when you aren't working. And some people will just put the highlights in there. It's perfectly acceptable. So don't let your gaps in experience be a barrier to you jumping on to LinkedIn. Now, LinkedIn will also allow you to customize the look of your profile, but only to a point. So you can remove or rearrange sections as needed to help make it look good and make it work for you. Now here's the next thing that you must must do if you are a business owner. If you run a business, an organization, a board, an enterprise, no matter what it is, you must create a company page. Or if it's way beneath you or you don't know how to do it, get someone on your staff or hire someone to do it for you. Because if you're a business owner and executive at a large organization, you need to have that company page. Page. Why? To rid yourself and your employees of the dreaded gray box on the profile section. It looks like a tombstone or a gray building. It's a meta message that says you don't have credibility on LinkedIn because you don't know what you're doing on LinkedIn. And we don't want that, do we? Of course not. Everybody who is on LinkedIn needs to have a company that they're attached to. So if you run the company or if you work for the company, make sure that there is a logo that people can seize onto and use. If you have the gray box, you can't build any type of community because it's onto itself. But if you attach yourself to that logo, then it brings everyone together in that community. Now, you may have a company page, but you might think, I don't have the time to put anything on a company page. You know what, I may be the only person that says this, but I say, you know what, it's okay. It's okay not to put anything on a company page. I don't have anything on a company page because I don't have time to put anything on a company page because everything's on my LinkedIn page. The reason why I have the company page is so I can have my logo. Now if you do have a bigger company, you do have an enterprise, you have multiple employees, then you do want to have a robust company page that you can build out with articles and post job notices, accolades, promotions, you know, whatever it is. But if you don't have a logo on LinkedIn, then it doesn't give your employees a sense of ownership or pride and ownership of being a part of your business. And if you want to know how to do that, I'm going to show you how to create a company profile page in next month. Training on the company Confident Leader Network Next Publish relevant content so just like any social platform, you need to publish content frequently so you will show up in other people's feeds. Now, relevant content includes articles you or your organization has written responses to, industry specific content conversation starters that relate to what you do. Relevant content is not the latest political scandals or puppy pictures. Although I love puppy pictures. You want to save those for Facebook if you're even going to do that. And if you're on LinkedIn a lot like I am, I don't see a lot of that, a lot of that dialogue on there at all. Thankfully. Now what is the difference between a LinkedIn article and a LinkedIn post? So a LinkedIn post has status updates that are limited to 1300 characters and again characters. Those aren't letters, those are letters, spaces, anything that you put in a space. LinkedIn articles, on the other hand, can be up to 125,000 characters in length, which gives you more opportunity to showcase any of your expertise and your knowledge. And writing articles is a great way to show your thought leadership. Start conversations, raise the visibility of you, your brand, your platform and articles also give you the opportunity to post photographs, other types of imagery, GIFs, and also video. Next Interacting with others the point of social media is to be social. That means you're spending time each week on LinkedIn interacting with others and There is a flow to how you use social media. And I've noticed that my pattern of social media is that during the day it's just Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook is something I check in at the beginning of the day and end of day. And Instagram, it seems like that's just kind of like my weekend free for all type of work. But LinkedIn, that's my go to Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. So, interacting. Do you see an interesting article that a colleague wrote? Go ahead and comment on it. Share it with your own audience. People notice that and people like it and people will return the favor in kind. It does happen. Has someone commented on something that you've posted? Respond to that comment because again, it's going to create that engagement and other people are going to see the comments. The more you interact with others, the more they'll interact with you and the more your profile and content will pop up in other people's news feeds. Do not be ashamed to post. There are people out there that don't feel comfortable doing it. And if you're someone like me who posts frequently, you may work with people in your organization. In the case of my job, I work with this guy John. We're the exact same age. And he walked into my training room one day and I was typing away and he said, let me guess, you're posting something to LinkedIn. And I said, aha. It turns out, John, I am. And we had a laugh about it. But I was telling him, I said, hey, you're a consultant. There is power in LinkedIn. And sure enough, John is starting to post a little bit more. And I'm. And the reason why I know this is because I'm seeing what he's posting out there. So it's good to get that interaction. What you do not want to do, do not want to do, or just don't do it. If you connect with me is sell on other podcasts or if you read articles, you may hear all about the power of the sale on LinkedIn. But please do not connect with me and then message me if you're going to sell me. This spam has changed the way that I connect with people, I guess in a good way. I used to connect with pretty much anyone who would connect with me if they were in a shared business or we had a shared connection. But then I, all of a sudden I noticed that I was getting all this spam and I was getting spam from people that there wasn't a mutual connection. So the first thing I did is I stopped connecting with people that didn't write a note to me connecting me or telling me why we need to be connected or we didn't have a mutual connection. And in some cases we had a lot of mutual connections. But I realized it was just a salesperson going through people. Nothing drives me More crazy on LinkedIn is when you connect to someone and then the first time that they want to connect you, it's through a direct message and it's a sales pitch. The quickest way to get ghosted by me is to sell me on LinkedIn. In my world, people really, really, really do not like spam from salespeople. Sell in the newsfeed, but no bait and switch in the messages for me. Again, I just ghost those people because I feel guilty like dumping them. I don't know, it's a Catholic thing. So the solution, that's it. That's it for using LinkedIn. Really. Create a profile or add to your profile, update your profile, post, engage and publish. That's it. The benefits. You will connect with people who will help your business. You will meet people in person and you will extend that relationship online on LinkedIn. You will build your influence. I promise. Now some of the objections out there. I know I have no time. What's the use? I don't understand it. I don't need it. I hate getting all the emails. I. I've heard them all. But you know what? If you have a business card in your wallet right now, or in your bag or in your purse somewhere in your possession, that means you're already networking. But you're networking old school, present company and host not included. Since I'm too lazy to get my business cards printed. But you get the drift of what I'm saying. LinkedIn is the new business card. So get on it now. Next steps, Take the time to build your profile. Really doesn't take that long. And if you really don't want to do it, you can hand it off to someone else, give them your password and then change your password and then sit and watch. Stalk if you must, but watch what people are talking about online. Then find your opening and jump in. How do you jump in? Just like a post, then love a post. Then congratulate someone with the hand clap emoji. People will get notified and see that you are engaging with them. It's a soft shoe approach that works. The bolder steps. Post something in your newsfeed, write an article is even bigger hit. Publish and people, I promise you will be impressed that you're writing. Still no. Still no way. If you've made it this far in the episode, then I will tell you to join today's sponsor of the podcast, the Confident Leader Network, and I will walk you through the steps to get started on LinkedIn. So that's all for this week. Thank you for listening. I look forward to communicating with you next week. Bye for now. Sam.