How You Can Promote your Career Service with LinkedIn

By Kerry Bell.
As a CPC Mastermind and career entrepreneur, I recently researched LinkedIn as a tool for promoting my career brand and business. LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook or Twitter. There are 400 million users on LinkedIn and most people looking for career help will search on LinkedIn at some point.
Most career professionals are very busy. So, I would like to get to the point and share with you some ideas about how to leverage this valuable tool. Here are some simple tips you can use to quickly and easily improve your brand and attract more clients. While you may be already employing some of these ideas, if I can provide one or two tips that will help you deepen your reach within LinkedIn, then I have achieved my goal. Happy reading!
LinkedIn Profile
On your LinkedIn Profile, make sure there are no letters after your name as it makes it more difficult to find. If you have changed your name, consider adding your former name for searches. As an example I have only been married 8 years and many of my business connections know me by my maiden name.
Get a good professional head-shot done. Users with photos are 14 times more likely to have their profile reviewed. In your picture, smile and dress as you would for the job. Also, consider adding a background picture or your logo, maybe you want to add an upcoming event or a call to action. The picture size should be between 1000 X 425 and 20,000 X 20,000 pixels. Put your mouse pointer over the area and a pen will show up and you click on it to add pictures or text.
The LinkedIn Professional Headline is your current function, by default. Change that text to make it stand out. Use words that connect with your clients. Make every word count, on mobile apps the headline gets truncated to just 58 characters. What words would your ideal client use to search for you? Would they use “career strategist” or would they use something different? In fact, don’t stop there. Write all your LinkedIn content as if you were your ideal client.
On the LinkedIn Contact Info section, you can list up to three websites. Adding websites might help the sites you are linked to rank higher in search engines. If you don’t have three sites to list, instead of choosing company website select “other” then write some interesting text.
LinkedIn Background
Your LinkedIn Summary should be conversational in tone. People do business with people they know, like, and trust.
- Write in first person – this is not a resume. This creates rapport – it’s more personal.
- Make your business email and phone number prominent to make it easier for people to reach you.
- Have a call to action that is human and relate-able – “call me and let’s meet for coffee.”
- Describe the value you provide in clean and simple language – consider this a combination of your love letter to your perfect client, a cover letter, and your elevator pitch.
- Talk about what you do and the problems you solve. People are more motivated by pain than anything else.
- Add personal pictures of you on the job or at a charity function.
Over 50 percent of people that look at LinkedIn view your profile via mobile app. Only 78 characters of your summary (including spaces) show. It might be a good idea to put your phone number and business email address there. Make sure that your URLs in the summary start with “www” so that they automatically become hyperlinks in the mobile app.
LinkedIn Posts
Status updates help tell other people what you are doing and can raise visibility and personal branding. If you post 20 times per month, you reach 60% of your network. Most LinkedIn experts suggest posting once daily. This may also be useful for users who see your profile using a mobile app since it displays only your last two posts.
SlideShare.net is an application you can use to showcase PowerPoint presentations and documents. This is an excellent way to feature your knowledge and personal branding (know, like, and trust factor), visibility, and credibility. Google loves SlideShare and you can achieve higher ranking results. You can also add audio and create a slidecast. Google Slides is similar to SlideShare but allows you to do a video as well. It is the only application that allows you to do a video on LinkedIn.
Next Steps
Use your email signature to connect to social media and promote who you are and what you do. Think about how many emails you send in a day. Make sure you have added a link to your website and links to all of your social media sites. Here’s how – it’s very easy. While you’re at it, add other important links to your email signature. I noticed that CPC Mastermind, Gayle Draper put her upcoming workshops on her signature. You can make a call to action – “Let’s meet for coffee” or “Join my email newsletter.” Or, put a link to your latest white paper or eBook.
Many of the resources I shared here came from a LinkedIn workshop called “LinkedIn Means Business” given by a colleague of mine, Colette Robichaud. If you are looking for more in-depth training, consider attending an online branding seminar by Willian Arruda who owns a company called Reach Personal Branding. Reach also provides a course to become a certified branding specialist. Sign up for the newsletter, you can get some very valuable free tips.
Good article worth reading -LinkedIn is powerful both for practitioners and for our clients.
Dorothy