LinkedIn Best Practices: Mentorship for Career Elevation Series

Hello and welcome to our next session on mentorship for career elevation. As you might know, Mentor Cloud is our sponsor for these sessions. And these sessions are being conducted to help people basically elevate their careers. So far we've gotten into self awareness, we've looked at optimizing job search, and today we have a very, very special topic because this is all about optimizing your LinkedIn profile. This is a very often requested topic and we have an expert, none other than Wes Lamos joining us. And Wes is an authority on LinkedIn. He's the CEO of Roll Digital and he is a LinkedIn subject matter expert. So why don't we go over to Wes. Wes, welcome to the program. Please introduce yourself and take us through the session.

Thank you so much. Yeah, I really appreciate that. Yep. I am the CEO of rolld Digital. We are a marketing agency. I've been a serial entrepreneur prior to this. And LinkedIn is a heavy part of what we focus on with our clients and for ourselves, my internal team and even friends and family, everybody, I try to push them to use LinkedIn more because in many ways it's still untapped. There's so much more potential that can be achieved through using LinkedIn better on behalf of clients.

My background has taken me through many different seasons of marketing, go way back to my first company, use dial up modems, and all the way through the beginning stages of the Internet, before blogs. And so now it's neat to see how things have progressed and how professional networks have also become a really part of this social networking that's happening. And I feel like LinkedIn is kind of at this point prime spot right now. Especially in the new environment with COVID and all that, it's harder to meet people face to face. Using some virtual networks like LinkedIn has really opened up a lot of doors for a lot of businesses to create new opportunities and so forth. So today I'm going to be focusing a lot on what you can do to optimize your LinkedIn profile. And that's a key part of everything here on LinkedIn is really having that great first impression. A friend of mine once said that it's important even to have a zeroth impression. And I didn't quite understand what that meant when he mentioned that to me. And that's kind of the idea that somebody will, even before they talk to you, before they actually step into that first conversation, because during that first conversation they make a first impression of you. But if you have a good profile, if you have some good credibility, if they search on the web and they find some interesting things about you. They're actually going to walk into that meeting not at zero. They'll have that 0th impression that's already positive in your favor. And that opens the door to that warm conversation starting already at two steps up versus at the bottom floor kind of into that situation. So that's what I'm going to talk to you guys a little bit about today. I'll just share my screen. I'm actually going to be sharing just primarily pages inside of LinkedIn itself. I think that's probably the easiest way for us to see it. And a little bit about the authority that I have on this topic. I stumbled into this, but it's something that we've been focusing on for about two and a half years now. We have about 400 clients right now that we work with inside of LinkedIn and we've been pulling lots of data over this time. My background is engineering and so I also like to do marketing with engineering coupled on top of it. So we can track all the different nuances of what makes something good, what makes something effective, what makes something work versus what makes, you know, something doesn't work quite as well. And a lot of times what we think will work well sometimes doesn't. And sometimes things that that do work really well kind of surprise us. So I'll walk through what I've learned over these years and I'm continuously learning too. And if anybody has any feedbacks or comments to add to this as your suggestions too, I'm always open to learn more and see what we can do to best work out for our clients. But all right, I'm going to go ahead and open up a LinkedIn page here for us to look at.

I believe my screen is being shared. Fine. Now, standard LinkedIn, we're all familiar with it. It's just the powerful network that's out there now. I'm going to go through some just basics just due to the time frame that we have today. I won't be able to cover everything, but I'll go through quite a bit and hopefully we'll get some questions and answers done as well during this time.

So I'm going to pull up a couple different things. When you're looking at your own profile, I'll pull up my own profile here.

So this is me. And one of the things that people often take for granted is the fact that you can the three main things on this page that I want everybody to focus on. If you have a LinkedIn profile I really want you to focus on three things. There's a lot more that goes below the fold. But if you just do these three things and make them as good as you can, your connection rates can go up from somewhere from we've seen from 10% to 40% to 50% to. And some of our highest performers are getting 70 to 80% connection rates inside of LinkedIn. And it really comes down to below the fold is important, but it probably only has a 5 to 10% impact on overall. The significance of getting the higher connections above the fold is really where most of the people are going to spend their quick glance and decide if they want to connect with you or not. And it breaks down to three things. The three things on this page would be your background image, it's your profile photo and it's your headline here. And those three things and you can add a little bit more like your university that you studied at and your current company. Those are good to have in there as well. But those are the three things I want to focus on. I want to tell you some tips that might help you as you optimize your profile for this. So one, it's a little subjective, but having a good profile photo is important. Now there's not. I don't have as much data to say what profile photo work better, but I would always recommend, you know, asking your friends, asking family, asking peers if they like your photo if you have multiple ones. Test things AB test all the time. And so when we have a client that maybe for one month during January, we'll run one photo and then during February we'll run another photo and we'll go back and we'll track the stats of those two and see which one performed better. Even if you like one better than the other one, let's let the stats kind of dictate that at the end of the day. So a professional photo goes a long ways. If you have a photo that looks like you took it with your own phone at your house, that stands out as looking like you took it at home with your, you know, with your own phone at your own house. So a professionally taken photo that's a little bit stylized is good to do. And even if you don't have that, if you go to a service, even something simple like Fiverr, if you're not familiar, fiverr f I-E-R r.com there's people on there for $5, $10, $15 can take just a picture that you took at home and they can stylize it to make it feel like it's much more professional. That looks like it was like a portrait mode that was taken in a studio, just with a couple filters and layers that they can do on top of that. So your photo always a B, test it, see if you can come up with something better there. The background image. It's almost like when you go for a job interview somewhere. And I've been to these before on both sides of the table for this, there's a stack of resumes that ends up piling up on the desk for the person who's actually giving out those jobs. And if your resume is on nice cardstock paper that's kind of thick and maybe has some really good fiber count to it, like that will stand out. And I feel like that's what your background image does for you. So in the midst of all the noise on LinkedIn, if you have a background image that's already done and it's intentional for LinkedIn, it's going to get you a little bit more visibility, a little bit more, a higher connection rate. People will understand more who you are with a good background image. And then lastly, your headline. I think sometimes people mistake this one and they assume that your headline is supposed to be just your job title. And I see that happen time and time again where people in their headline will just say like, oh, I am, you know, the sales manager at XYZ company and your actual job title actually supposed to be down here on the page, but you're here. It's a headline just to share a little bit more who you are. Now you can have your current position in your headline, but it doesn't need to be exclusively that. I would take this space here and we always recommend kind of stuffing it with lots of interesting key facts about who you are and what you're interested in and some different aspects of what you've done in your life. Because like any other network, people want to connect with you for multiple reasons. And you never know exactly what reason is going to ring the bell for them or get them to be interested in accepting that connection request. And that conversation started with you. So if you can think through some ones that describe who you are and I'll show you some examples. I have lots of pages here open to people that have been really successful that we've worked with and you can kind of get some ideas for what people do. But some small words here like investor, entrepreneur, owner, those ones go well, they help me get searched for highly on LinkedIn. Those are all high value keywords. And they do represent who I am.

Digital development, marketing, those are things that I also care about a lot. And so when people are searching for something or wanting to connect with me, the fact that I'm an investor, even though I'm not a big investor, I do invest in some startups. I have some, you know, in my portfolio now that are, that are doing pretty well. It's not something that I do all the time, but another small business that might open the door for them to want to have that first conversation with me. And really where LinkedIn, what you're trying to get out of LinkedIn is just using it to get your foot in the door for that first conversation, in my opinion. And I've been doing this for a long time, we've helped people book upwards of, I think at this point, 50,000 meetings just using LinkedIn connections. So there's something to be said there. You don't necessarily want to use LinkedIn to explain everything that you do. You kind of want to use LinkedIn just to create enough curiosity, establish rapport and allow someone an opportunity to see what you're doing and then accept that conversation with you and possibly engage in a zoom meeting or a phone call with you. I feel like that once you get them face to face and you're in real time with them or voice on a phone, that's a good opportunity for you explain even more. So one thing I don't necessarily like that people do, other than putting their job title in their headline, is that people often will put a long description of what they do. I help business coaches get two to three times more clients, you know, year over year reach out to me and here's my phone number. It's very, very targeted what they do. Now some people recommend that, but based on the stats that I've seen, you get a much lower connection rate, much lower engagement rate. People I've heard it said everybody wants to buy something, but no one wants to be sold to. And I think that's an important aspect in here. So if you're looking at what I do, for example here, there's nothing that says that I'm trying to sell you anything. So when I try to connect to somebody, my intention is never just to walk into this meeting and come across as I'm selling them a service, I'm trying to sell them on something that I own or that I want them to buy. But it's much more a peer to peer relationship that you're going for another expression that can kind of stick with you guys is birds of a feather flock together. If you're trying to connect to CFOs and companies, if you happen to have something like a CFO title yourself, it just makes it so much easier for you to have that connection. If you're trying to connect to CEOs and you say that you're a serial entrepreneur, that you've exited three companies that you founded, something like that in there will open that door very easily for those companies to be interested in connecting with you. So all that to say this is kind of just the premise and I'll go through some specific examples of clients that have been really successful inside of LinkedIn and, and we can kind of go through that. So I'll focus a little bit for starters on this background image here. I call this one here for myself, a more corporate background image. I'm going to put them in categories and that's kind of important for you guys to understand. There's categories for these and once you kind of do that, it'll make a little bit more sense. So here I'm going to show you some examples of. This is a category which we call social proof. A social proof one is one where it shows you kind of in front of a crowd, you talking at an event, you shaking hands with somebody important. Those are great social proof images, I would say are their second highest performing background image that I've seen based on the numbers that we've come up with. In this guy's case, Bruno, he went from a 10% connection rate to a 40 to 44% connection rate after making some of the adjustments we told him to make here on his, on his thing, on his profile. So here, you know, having some words on top of that, stylizing that picture takes it one step further. Maybe you had that picture at the event and you just want to throw it on there without doing anything to it. I would say just spend another five minutes, go back to Fiverr, or find your friend that does a little bit of graphic design to throw a logo on there, to throw a little bit of a meaningful phrase to you on there. Remember, we're not trying to be silly or pitchy. We're just trying to say something that expresses who you are. We changed a couple of these words on here and all these are kind of interesting ones for people to kind of be interested in connecting with. Another one, I'm going to pull up here from my good friend Ravi. We worked with him a little bit on his background image too.

And this is a great example of social proof. This is a phrase, this is a sentence that he cares about that means something to him. And I think that's done wonders for him to get some amazing connections therefore too. So those are examples of social proof images, right? Another background image that I want to show to you guys are ones that we call personality background images. Ones that showcase a little bit of who you are. Now, it doesn't take too much for you to see something like this. You see with a diverse crowd, you're not even too sure what's going on in there, but it's enough for you to get a feel for somebody's personality. And that tends to be honestly, as the highest performing background image that you can find. Based on my stats of all the different ones that I've tested, Maureen, for example, gets a 70% connection rate and you know, just, just reaching out to random people on LinkedIn that she doesn't know. And there's multiple factors to that, but the background image makes a big difference. I'll show you one. Another example of a great background image. Good friend of mine, Chris Johnson, that picture there just, you know, they say a picture says a thousand words. Well, that picture kind of does that right there for you. You see him and you just go like, man, he's a good guy. Look, just, he's a community advocate. He says community impact here in the bottom. Keynote speaker, family man, like. And you see that picture, it all makes sense to that story. So when Chris Johnson decides that he reaches out to you on LinkedIn and says, hey, you know, I'd love to spend 15 minutes, see if there's anything we can do to collaborate with a background image like that and a profile like this. It opens up the doors for many people to say, sure, I'd love to take that 15 minute call with you. I'd be honored to have that 15 minute call. And when they get on there, they're already almost getting on that phone with a smile on their face with kind of like a warm heart towards Chris. And honestly, this is his true personality. And a little bit to brag like, the deals and the connections that we've been able to help Chris have through LinkedIn have been just amazing. Some big ones and even to the likes of Kevin Hart and him now are in a business proposal together just based on using LinkedIn in an efficient fashion. So putting that one out there, the highest performing ones, again just for you to remember, are personality based background images. It's not a big gut jump over. But also then social proof is just slightly lower. Both of those are at the top tier of the ones you can go for. Another one I would call is location based ones that kind of just showcase something in your area and that's also important to your personality, but it performs a little bit less on those other two. Again, anytime you have an image, if you can stylize it just even in the slightest, it lets people know that you put a little bit more effort into it. It's like the resume example. Again, everyone can print out on a regular piece of paper, but if you went and swapped the paper and put something expensive in there and you printed it on that, it makes you stand out. And you can see instead of just having San Francisco bridge here we have like a meaningful quote too. So it shows that she put a little bit of effort into this. And then the last one I put in the corporate category, which is what I use on mine. This is example two of just something basic there that represents them.

And here we have, oh, this is a little bit different on that last one. But so here that. That corporate one or my own profile, which you guys saw earlier. But again, I want you to pay attention to see all the people that I just showed you how many interesting keywords are in there that would help you feel really interested in actually having this meeting with this person. And I really try to tell people all the more, especially now on LinkedIn, stop trying to use LinkedIn as a heavy sales area and use it more as a relationship building area. The importance of that is LinkedIn, starting in 2021, they've done more to make sure that people are using LinkedIn in a uplifting fashion. And so they're tracking more if people are responding positively to you or negatively to you. I don't have the exact numbers on this. This is just kind of based on hunches and best guesses and trying to speculate how it works. But if approximately 10 people or so click ignore or disconnect from you or say something that you wrote to them is considered spam, LinkedIn will put on a restriction on your account that's usually temporary, but it's kind of just showing you that it's important for you to kind of have messages that don't get perceived or don't get marked with any negative ramifications by the end user. So that's just important. So having a positive profile, having messages that say things like I'd love to collaborate, learn more about you, see if there's things we can do to help each other out. Those messages are almost always well received and they don't have any implications and end users like them and it's a value add to LinkedIn there too. So this last profile that I wanted to pull up quickly for you, I thought this was interesting having this word combat vet and his profile specifically was an amazing eye opener for me to see how many people really resonated strongly with that kind of statement in there. And almost all the messages that we got on behalf of Todd were extremely positive and said it's an honor to connect with you, Todd. Thank you so much for your service. It's a delight to as a connection of mine and I wasn't too sure that that would even happen but seeing that in there. So if you do happen to have some fun facts about who you are, we have like some former like professional hockey players, things of that sort. You can always add that in there. Even one of our clients that I work with, he walked across I think the whole Appalachian trail, something like 5,000, 6,000 miles and he puts that in there.

It's neat. I always recommend too and I'm kind of rabbit trailing down lots of directions. Hopefully there's enough nuggets in here for you guys to take some of this home with you.

If you can add one personal fact about yourself, I think that's recommended. So sports enthusiast mma, those things don't have anything to do with his professional network. They have nothing to do with that. But it makes him feel much more like a well rounded person person and it gives you much more of a desire to reach out and you know, have that initial conversation with him. So as far as optimizing your profile, I feel like that kind of covers the main gamut obviously if you can go through and update your career. But I really feel like there's only a few percentage of people that will actually take the time to go that far into it. It's almost like a book. You got the COVID you got the back page to it and that's kind of really going to do bulk of your sales. The content in the middle is important, but this content in the middle, honestly is probably going to come out more after you get that phone call. You'll be able to discuss things about things you've done in the past, places you've been to too.

A small thing that matters too. I'm seeing here the number of followers and that's just how many connections you have on LinkedIn. It's almost the same for most of us, unless you're a celebrity, then followers becomes much bigger number than your connections. But the more people you're connected to, the higher connection rate goes. For example, myself, I'm connected to, I think approximately about 12,000 people now. Yeah, 12,300. My connection rate has gone from a 25% to 30% to 40 to 50 to 55%. And really the biggest change in here is the number of followers that I have. The more followers you get, it's kind of like the popular kid at recess that has like 10 people hanging out with him and he invites somebody else to come hang out with him. The other person goes, sure, but the person that's kind of all alone and invites somebody to hang out with them, they kind of like, I'm not too sure I want to hang out with you. And it really doesn't have to do with the difference of them, but more just the fact that I have more people following me. So usually when I try to connect to somebody on LinkedIn at this point, I'll probably have 60, 70, 80 common connections with them.

And that makes a difference. I have a really intelligent friend of mine for a long time, he's always had this kind of feeling. This is his gut check to accept a connection request. If they don't share at least 25 common connections with me, I have no interest in connecting with them. And I didn't understand it at the time, but now the more I'm in this space, the more I understand that that actually makes sense because he is in, specifically in cybersecurity and he feels like he's already connected to enough really important people in that space. So if you're anybody that's important in the space, you also would have a lot of common connections with him. And so he uses that as his filter, decide if you should connect with you or not. So getting those connections up is really important. Getting those numbers to go up, it is. And that just takes. It's down to best practices. Trying to connect to people pretty regularly, trying to continue growing your network, which is an important thing to do there. So I'm kind of at the 20 minute mark. I don't want to go too much further. I don't know what the next phase of this is. To ask some questions to kind of see what's next. Happy to answer anything I can on my side.

Hey, Wes, this is stellar. I mean, I'm loving every minute of it. There's so many nuggets here that you've been unpacking. So thank you so much for sharing this so generously with the audience. Hey, I do have a question. I'm sure the audience has some more question and they'll chime in as well. You know, how important is sort of having a, you know, having to sort of have activity on LinkedIn? Should I be with a profile like this? Should I be commenting a lot on others or sharing content? What is your take on sort of content engagement on LinkedIn?

So there's different camps on that one. I have a lot of good friends that love doing content and they're strongly believe on always commenting on posts that they like. Always, you know, finding things, things that they can write about themselves. I personally come more from the generation of being behind the scenes. I rarely post anything on Facebook or Twitter and it doesn't serve me as well as it could. I love my one on one connections and so if I see somebody post something that they like, I'll reach out to them and say something like, hey, I really liked your comment and I go directly to the inbox and so I can have that one on one conversation instead of putting my comments in the public forums. It depends a little bit what your goal is though. If you have a brand that you're trying to grow, then posting content makes a lot of sense. If you're trying to do individual deals, then it's maybe not as important. And more important is really to build those individual relationships and that's through this LinkedIn inbox here. It's just by finding the people want to reach out to you, giving them a reason to connect with you and then starting to get a nice conversation going with them.

Awesome, thank you.

Yeah.

Good to see you too.

Abhijit.

I think we have a question on the chat.

Okay.

Ah, there's a question from Krishna and it says how about adding hobbies like photography, cooking, pet lover, et cetera. Does that provide connection or connectivity to the profile?

It does. It definitely does. Yeah. I'm a strong believer that. And you might be one of selective on the hobbies that you have. Like some hobbies are gonna. And you can probably take a hunched guess on that one. You know, I have somebody who's like a goat farmer and they put that in their profile and it's great. But there's not that many other goat farmers out there that are gonna jump on that one and be excited about that. But if you are like a foodie or if you happen to really enjoy, you know, some, some other hobbies that are maybe like cooking or photography, like you said in there, those ones are good ones. I think that that will have a larger crowd of people that will connect with that fact. And want to go after that. But for sure, I would add that at the bottom, at the end of your profile. And.

So outdoor music and even, honestly, if family is an important aspect to who you are, that's also a good one to lean into. You know, father of four, I think somebody has said that I happen to have four kids. And so if I see that in somebody's profile that they have twins or something like that, such as myself, I'll instantly like, that's a conversation starter for me. I don't even care too much about. Like, if you have twins and you have, like, kids at home like that, that to me is exciting and gives me an instant reason to want to have that first conversation with you too. So lean into that. Put some of those in there. For sure. Most of what should be in here should be kind of professional, but you're more than fine. At least add one or two facts about yourself that are necessarily not related to your career but to who you are. I'd say totally go for it.

Great.

Perfect. I just want to add to Wes, first of all, Wes, that was very brilliant. It is as fresh as it was when we first met maybe a year ago. Thank you so much. But I can vouch for it, right? I think it's all about relationships. And I just captured that quote that LinkedIn is not for selling, it's for building relationships, because people buy from people, People do work with people. So the relationship aspect has to be at the forefront. And I have seen ever since we have started learning from you, my connections have grown, I think more than 500%. I was at 1500, now I'm at 9000, and it's just increasing. And I'm having so many great conversations with really, really, really amazing people. And it's all because I am telling the world who I am so that they feel that I want to have a chat with you. And to everybody else on the call, don't choreograph every conversation.

Right.

If you choreograph the input, the output is also choreographed. It's like if you go shopping for milk, that's what you will get. Milk. But if you go out just to meet some interesting people or have an interesting conversation, the outcome can be infinite. And all my conversations start with, hey, I have no expectation. Imagine you and I met at the airport. And I have met so many amazing people, so many commonalities, because. So this process that you are teaching all of us is the process of having that human connection. So many things can happen once that human connection that that heart to heart connection is established, then everything else can happen. It's like laying the freeway and on that cars can go, trucks can go, Tesla can go, but if there's no freeway, even a Tesla will not go.

Yeah, 100% yeah. And some of my, like, I had over a thousand meetings last year just using my own techniques. So this is something that I not only tell people how to do, I do this myself. It's important to what I do. And that shift that you're talking about, Rupee, about changing from being kind of thinking about selling and being that being the important factor, what you're doing instead of like, that's not even really in the front of my mind at all. It's just I'm walking in this as another human. I'm going to see what valuable nuggets I can receive and give to this person in this time that I'm there with them. And often I've had several meetings. In the first 10 minutes the person says, hey, no matter what you're selling, I'm not going to buy anything from you right now. I'm not interested in that. And I go, that's totally fine, let's just talk. You know, I noticed you're in Colorado. Do you happen to snowboard or ski? Like I've loved some of the mountains in that area. And that conversation goes. And about the 45 minute marker, they go, you know what, I don't think I can use your service, but I have a really good friend. He has an agency, he has like, you know, all these people. And the next day I have a $5,000 a month client signed up. And it just came because even in the first 10 minutes he was quick to shut me down. And I'm fine with that. But just that referral and that friendship and today he's still a common friend that I speak to every other week. Even though he's not a client of mine in the software, we built that relationship. So I would encourage people to approach it with that mindset. You can get so much more out of these meetings if you do that now. Yeah, it works for me. It works for a lot of my clients. Not everybody, but a lot of people. If you can kind of use some of that mindset into how you're doing this, I feel like it can really open up some doors you wouldn't have otherwise even seen possible.

Brilliant.

Amazing. Wes, let me pause here for any other last minute questions that might be there.

Awesome, Wes, thank you so much.

Go ahead.

I have a question for Wes. What Is One aspect of LinkedIn that you did not know until you. You started teaching people. Was there something that caught you by surprise as to about LinkedIn?

I'm trying to always learn and figure out what you can do better in there. Now, one aspect that's growing inside of LinkedIn is LinkedIn events. I feel like there's much more people using LinkedIn to have RSVP for events, promote an event, which is great. And the nice thing about these events is once you attend the event, you actually have access to the full list of attendees at that event. And it really opens up a neat door too, for you to go after a dialogue to talk to those people that are attending the event. A commonality is there is great.

Another thing that just I saw recently, and this is small, these are nuggets. Maybe they can be helpful or maybe not helpful to everybody. But I wanted to see what question somebody could ask on LinkedIn that's going to get the highest response rate across the board. And so I searched through our database of maybe 3,000 questions that we people ask, we call them hook questions, trying to see, like, what gets the highest percentage of engagement. And I mean, this is simple. But the one that stood out was one guy that had a campaign. He graduated from Vanguard University and he was doing a campaign searching for people that also were alumni from that university. And he says something like, you know, I graduated in 2007. What year did you graduate? And I noticed you're a fellow alumni, and anyone that went to that college, I think he had like an 85% response rate to that question across the board. And so it might not be practical, but you're trying. If you ask something that people feel proud of, that's kind of neat. And I've been using that logic many times for many of our clients. Having a good opener question to how you have that conversation with people is really important, something that makes them feel proud. Like, how long have you been leading a business in your area? Or how long have you been, you know, a chief human resource officer? People take pride in answering some of those. And once they start talking to you now, you have a conversation and you can kind of turn that into possibly a meeting. And that relationship is on the beginning tracks of going somewhere.

Awesome. Thank you, Wes. Really brilliant. Over to you, Abhijit.

Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. Let me be here today. Awesome.

Yeah, thank you, Wes, so much. And thank you, audience. Thank you, Ravi. And thanks to Mentor Cloud for sponsoring this and for future sessions, please do sign up@mentorcloud.com MCE Wes, thank you again. This is simply brilliant. And thanks for your generosity.

Absolutely. Pleasure being here.

All right, take care.