9 Tips to Improve your LinkedIn Profile

Good Morning, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Today in Sydney it is a wet rainy day, so perfect for getting your social networks firing!  Below are a list of things you should do RIGHT NOW to improve your LinkedIn profile, but first if you are a newbie to LinkedIn a few stats:

• LI is a professional social network
• There are 66 million people using it globally (in Australia 1.2 million)
• The average income of users is $109,000
• The average age of users is 37

If you are a professional looking to connect with other professionals this is the network for you, use it to grow your business, increase brand awareness (for you and/or your business) and position yourself as an expert.

TIPS:

1. Set up a LinkedIn profile if you don’t have one, if you do skip straight to no. 2!
2. Make sure that your profile is 100% complete, yes even the hard boxes people.
3. Keywords are really important in your profile because they help people find you when they want someone with your expertise by searching in people eg accountant.  You need to decide what you want your expertise/specialty to be – ideally 1 or 2 words and use that.  There are 5 places you should include your keywords…
   a) Your headline – the line of text under your name is your headline, it should not say “Director at x” but instead what you do and how you can help people
   b) In your current work experience
   c) In your past work experience
   d) In your summary
   e) In your specialties
   TIP: To edit your profile click on PROFILE and then edit

4. Website – rather than use the defaults that LinkedIn gives you, eg My website or My blog, choose the OTHER category then you can customise what they are called, as I have done in my profile above, this gives your audience a much clearer idea of what they are going to be looking at
5.  Recommendations – The more recommendations you have the higher you will appear in searches within LinkedIn (however, it is not this alone that ranks you).  Plus if people are looking for people to do business with they are going to prefer to work with someone who has been recommended than someone who hasn’t.  There are two ways to get recommendations – give them (people will usually give back) and ask people who you have worked with – do not ask randoms.  When someone gives you a recommendation it is the same as in the offline world, by recommending you are putting your reputation out there saying this person is good.
6.  Summary – Don’t use this to say I’ve got x sales, but instead use it to tell people what you are all about and how you can help them.  Make it easy to read, so that does NOT mean one massive paragraph!
7.  Specialties – Make sure you fill this in, this looks best if it is a list, rather than word, word etc.  Put in here what you offer people and how you help them, eg Growing Facebook Pages
8.  If you have a blog add it in using the applications on your profile, so that when people look at your profile they see it – it gives you more credibility, however don’t add it if you only have 2 posts and they were from 2008!
9.  Your public profile URL – please customise it… you can have it looking like this:   http://au.linkedin.com/in/larasolomon rather than like this: http://au.linkedin.com/pub/lara-solomon/7/a97/275, it makes it easier for people to find you, and if you use it in your email signature it looks good!

These 9 tips will take you 30 minutes max to do (depending on how many recommendations you write), but will make your profile look much more professional, and more importantly will tell people who visit you much more about you and how you can help them.  If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn I’d love to, so please send me a request.

There is lots lots more you can do with LinkedIn, more posts to follow 🙂  But tell me below if you are stuck on something.  Until them this Rabbit is off to bounce in puddles…

Before your start on Social Media

Good Evening, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Today’s blog will be filled with furry words of advice to help you have a fantastic social media campaign.  It’s all very much common sense, but often (this Bunny included) we get carried away with the excitement and addictiveness of Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Foursquare etc that we forget to start at the beginning.  DON”T WORRY!  It’s not to late.

You want to use a social network for business, your business, it might be a hair salon, real estate office, coffee shop, accounting firm, clothes store, product or whatever, the rules are the same for EVERYONE.  So you have decided which social networking tool or tools you want to use, now follow these steps;

1. What is the purpose of what you are doing? For your Facebook page what is the purpose?  Why are you setting it up (because it’s fun doesn’t count), I want real reasons, eg to build a relationship with my audience, to use it to find out more about them, to get my product awareness out to a wider audience etc – get the picture?  This is the same if you are choosing Twitter or LinkedIn you NEED a purpose, if you don’t have one, well it just won’t work as well, and you will find it harder to maintain.
2. What are your goals? Eg for your Facebook page you want to get 500 likers in the first month and increase the click throughs to your website by x%.  For Twitter it maybe that you want to be retweeted x number of times and gain x number of followers in the first month.  Whatever you decide that your goals are these are something that you can go back to and see how you are tracking and decide if it’s working.
3. What have you got to offer?  OR What value are you adding?  OR Why should people follow you/connect with you or like you? This is the old “what’s in it for me”.  This should interlink with your purpose, so if your purpose is to “be seen as an expert in social media” the value you add could be in unravelling the mysteries behind social media, helping people to understand it and use it to grow their business.
4. What are you going to promise? I have said this before that your followers etc have memories like elephants – they never forget.  So if you entice them to your Facebook page with the offer of free ebooks or the chance to win prizes or a daily tip, when they don’t get it they WILL rebel.  Rebelling in the social networking world means de-friending/unfollowing/disconnecting, which when you have worked SO hard to get them is not what you want.

The idea behind following these steps is that when you get stuck and think “oh no what shall I blog about, post, tweet etc.” you know what your purpose, values and goals are so it makes it easier for you to deliver.  PLUS it helps with the consistency of your message, if people know you as a social media expert, then you suddenly start rambling on about how to make apple tart, it’s kinda confusing…  They won’t know what’s happening, they will lose a bit of trust and faith, who is this flaky person that yesterday was telling us how to get more likers on Facebook and now is talking about how to get the pastry just right on an apple tart…..

If you already have your social networking set up, it is NEVER too late to go back and revisit what you are doing and why, and don’t think you have to stay with what you decide forever.  However don’t change your mind daily, but often it can take a while to find your niche that both you and your readers are comfortable with, so by all means try out a few things, but let them know.  For example, when I decided to start Mental Monday’s on this blog to review books, I said that I would see how it goes, but I am not doing it daily, only once a week.  So if say 50% of you guys don’t like it I guess you don’t tune in on Monday’s, but no one has complained yet!  But if you want to make a comment do, I LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVE comments positive and negative.

Tell me below what you think or on the Social Rabbit Facebook Page.

Social Rabbit TV launches

Good evening, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Today a post with a difference, I have launched Social Rabbit TV on YouTube with our own channel http://www.youtube.com/user/TheSocialRabbit

The Chief Rabbit has long wanted to have her own TV show, and although this isn’t quite what she envisaged, it is now reality 🙂  Have you noticed how you can near enough do anything you want with social media?

Today there are only a few shows up, but don’t worry more will come.  The two I added today are:

30 minutes a day on social media – how much time should you spend on social media (the title kind of gives it away!)

30 minutes a day on LinkedIn – this explains what you need to do each day on LinkedIn to be succcessful on it

To come will be 30 minutes a day on Facebook, plus other topics as I develop them, but I want each one to give you practical ideas that you can take away and implement to make your social media work better for you 🙂

If there is anything in particular you would like tackled please comment below or on our Facebook Page.

Choosing the right fork, is like choosing the right social media

Good Morning, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Today I read a great article on personal branding which basically helps decode some of the confusion around which social media to use when, it is worth a read.  This lead me to thinking about when you go to a restaurant (or someone’s house if you have posh friends) and get served an 8 course meal, the dilemma is which fork and knife do I use for which…..  Social media is the same, except instead of 8 courses there are a hell of a lot more, try 100.  So how do you decide on which fork with which food?

Tips for choosing your social media utensils…

• Work out what you are trying to do with it… eg sales, brand awareness, handle customer enquiries
• Work out who your audience are and where they go, eg if you are targeting people in China you are not going to be using Facebook, as the government has blocked it
• Which utensil has what you need? eg ability to upload links, photos, have friends etc
• What are your competition using?  Note: this doesn’t mean they are doing it right, but you should be aware, particularly if they have a big following, as you my be able to ride on a few coat tails
• How much time do you have to put into this?  Can someone help you?  As easy as social media looks, it takes time to get results
• Can you use the utensil you’ve chosen to integrate into EVERYTHING else you are doing?  and I mean EVERYTHING people  – business cards, website, email signature etc
• Ask people, you probably know people on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Google Wave, writing blogs etc find out why they like the one they use
• Finally if all else fails hire an expert, they will be able to advise you, help you get set up and then you can run with it

If you feel like you are still using the wrong fork with your prawns because you just can’t seem to get them in your mouth, then get some advice – good luck.

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