Announcing My New Ebook: Maximizing LinkedIn for Business

Neal Schaffer: 0:03

Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, founder of maximize social business, their social media center of excellence, and the social tool Summit, Neal Schaffer. Everybody, this is Neal Schaffer. And this is Periscope. How y'all doing today? You know, I thought about my own process for doing podcasts. Based on my own experience, when I did my first Periscope in Japan, just showing you what the bullet train was like. And like many of you, I was blown away by just the number of people that watched it. So I thought that I would use this same idea to actually start to create my podcast using Periscope. So I hope you enjoy what I'm about to do. And I'll be looking for your feedback, obviously, not only your views, but also your questions. And I really want to try to make this as interactive as possible. So without further ado, welcome to another episode of maximize your social. Today, I'm going to be talking about something I've spent the last few months on actually, it's a project I've been working on for more than a year called maximizing LinkedIn for business, maximize LinkedIn for business is an ebook that I just released. Actually, today, on Kindle is the first place I released it. And it's based on a visit that I made. And I'm going to get into the content and sort of the takeaways that I went for you. If you're interested in this podcast, I want to go through sort of the history of it. I was actually invited to visit LinkedIn headquarters back in December of 2013. I know a little bit long time ago, that was a year and a half ago. And I made a commitment then that based on what I found, I was going to provide that information in an educational ebook format. So when I was there, I got to meet coca Sexton, who a lot of you from the social selling world, if that's your world, probably have heard about him. He's one of the influencers, someone at LinkedIn, who I have utmost respect for. And one of the things I got to do when I was there was actually interview him and the excerpts from the interview are actually included in this ebook. So and by the way, I'm in a hotel room in St. Petersburg, Florida. Actually, I'm in Clearwater, let me correct myself. And I'm not even from Florida. But if you saw me a few days ago, yes, I was in Japan, when I took that video on a bullet train, I literally was on my way to the airport to fly out here in St. Petersburg. So that's why you see behind me, you see a bed at a hotel here. So let's go into maximizing LinkedIn for business. And if you have any questions, whether you see this live or on the replay, I really hope you'll reach out to me, obviously, this is this is live. And if you have any LinkedIn questions, I'd love to hear them right now. But I really want to cover sort of, you know, the details of the e book, so that you have some concrete takeaways from this Periscope, really want to make this an educational event for those of you that are watching. Alright, there we go. So I think going to the Table of Contents will give you a good idea. And this is sort of a rough draft. So the final looks a little bit different. But really, the first thing that I talk about here is how LinkedIn is being used by corporations and professionals today, one of the big mistakes or I should say one of the big things that people don't understand about LinkedIn is it's just for job search. And if you work at a large company, if you haven't heard from your marketing department before, you're going to hear from them sometime or your HR department, something called employee advocacy, basically, employees are being asked more and more to participate in social media on behalf of their employer. And it happens at large organizations quicker than it happens in smaller organizations. It also happens if you're in a sales, marketing or an outward facing role more often than it happens in other internal facing roles. So if you're in sales, you've probably already heard about it. And if you're in social selling, well, employee advocacy, there's a definite connection there. So really, every professional and it's not just for job search, like I said, it's for your personal brand for your professional brand. And now more and more as an employee, you really need to have a certain aptitude of LinkedIn, you need to know how it works, and how you can make it work for you, and the role that you have or whatever company you work for. And that's really the point that I want to get across in this first chapter here. So the second thing I talk about, and whenever I talk on social media, I like to divide things into sort of a 10 step process and sort of, you know, dumb it down and hey, if you can count on two hands, you can sort of figure out all the important things that you need to know. So number one is really the mindset right, just understanding the value and the things that you're going to be need to do on LinkedIn. The second thing is The LinkedIn profile. So whatever you do on LinkedIn, it leads people to your profile, right. And I think people take it for granted. If you're going to create a website, you spend a lot of money on it. And a lot of time, a lot of thought process goes into creating it. Yet, your LinkedIn profile is your website. For LinkedIn, whatever you do on LinkedIn, your name creates a link that leads people back to your profile. So there are certain best practices that you should employ in your profile that I cover in this ebook, as well. Some are pretty intuitive, some you might not have thought of. So I'm pretty confident even if you've been on LinkedIn for a while you're going to learn a thing or two, tactically, that can help you with improving your LinkedIn profile. So chapter three, build your empire, the importance of connections. Now, when I started on LinkedIn, I've obviously written two books on LinkedIn before, my first book was called Women on networking, it was on this whole concept of open networking. And at that time, believe it or not, when I was first on LinkedIn, the more connections you had, when someone was doing a search for a keyword, like internet marketing, or social media, whatever it is, if you had that keyword in your profile, anyone will have the keyword in the profile, they were being ranked by the number of connections they have. So there was actually a tactical benefit and SEO benefit that having more connections on LinkedIn. Now that's we're talking 2008, seven years later, they've evolved, right. But the notion of having a network of connections of discovery, well, I like to call the hidden connections that exist, I might be best friends, with the CEO of a company that you're trying to sell to, you might be best friends, the CEO of a company that I'm trying to sell to. And we never know the power of our connections of these hidden connections that we have, until number one, we connect on LinkedIn. And number two, we actually have an objective or reason for going into the advanced job search and finding those hidden connections, and then reaching out to those people so that they can help us it's it's one of the most powerful aspects of LinkedIn that I think a lot of people forget about. But it starts with having this connection starts with a habit, you already know a lot of people in life, it's just a matter of connecting with them on LinkedIn, right? It's a matter of, you know, sending them invites, as a matter of after you meet someone at a meeting of actually doing a follow up and saying, Hey, would you like to connect on LinkedIn, it's printing your LinkedIn URL and your business card, so that it makes it easy for others putting in your email signature, right, I use wise stamp as a way to do that, wisely. I've just published a blog post on how savvy people on LinkedIn are using their email signature in order to do just that, and make sure they stay connected with their professional network. So the value of doing that it cannot be, you know, underestimated. And it's something that you really should think about my famous equation for how many connections you should have is multiply range by 10. And I said that for the first time a few years ago, and it's still good today. And there are people out there with you know, more than 500 connections, I think a lot of selling, or sales professionals have over 500 connections. And if you just got to college, I don't expect you to have over 200 connections. But if you are a you know seasoned professional, that's been working for 10 or 20 years, I expect that you're going to be able to meet you know more than 10 people a year, and therefore multiply your age by 10. It's very, you know, appropriate number that I think you should have. So chapter four, using LinkedIn to maintain your professional relationships, it's one thing to be connected. But it's another thing to actually be maintaining that relationship, LinkedIn give you some powerful tools that allow you to do that, that I highly recommend, well, after reading the book, you'll learn about them. But I highly recommend that you look into them. Because you know, the value of your network is in keeping in daily touch. So you're Top of Mind brands, retarget, you wherever you are in social media or on the internet, because they want to keep top of mind, you want to keep top of mind with your network so that when there's a need that you can fill, you will be able to be the first one contacted and vice versa. If you want to contact someone of your network asking for help, you'll be top of mind with them, because they see you everywhere on LinkedIn, for instance, when they log in every day. So something to consider there. Chapter Five, establishing credibility. So there's a lot of fake profiles on LinkedIn. I think some of you have probably seen them yourselves. And whenever you want to contact someone, or whenever you post something on LinkedIn, or you send out a connection request, people go to your profile, one of the first things they look for, believe it or not, is recommendations. And recommendations are one type of this credibility, this social proof that you are who you say you are, and that you you know, you can back up everything you say you do in your summary. So if you're a small business owner, you're in sales, and you've been successful, you should have a few recommendations that would indicate that right? And so that credibility piece is really important. If you want to be successful on LinkedIn, and you're going to be a lot more successful with the more credibility you have. LinkedIn used to have this 100% profile completeness, where they would say you need at least three recommendations to get 100% Complete I think it's a good number to shoot for, you don't need 30 or 40. Like, you know, some people have like I might have, but just get a few. And I think they'll really pay dividends for you, especially if you work in a niche industry or in a community where everyone knows each other. When someone sees a recommendation at someone they know that's incredible social proof that you really you can't buy through advertising, right. So just something to consider. Chapter Six is understanding skills and endorsements. So people do not understand how skills work. And people even less understand how endorsements work on LinkedIn. And there's some powerful ways to make skills and endorsements actually work for you, instead of being considered a nuisance. So I want to help guide you through what those are. And that's, you know, an important chapter the skills become part of your professional brand. And the endorsements are another social signal, right another way of sort of tapping someone on the shoulder that can be invaluable in keeping mind share with them that you should definitely be leveraging. Can you make LinkedIn profiles private? As a question I'm getting? Thank you for that question. I really want to make this as interactive as possible. So you can make a LinkedIn profile as private, as LinkedIn allows you to so in the settings, there are a number of things you can do, instead of showing your full name, you can show your initials, you can hide your profile photo to only your first degree connections, you can hide the visibility of your connections to nobody, which is what I do, which I recommend people do as well. So you it can't be completely private. But there are a lot of things you do go into the Privacy and Settings. And that's where you're going to find all the different features or the settings that will allow you to make it as private as possible. Obviously, the whole value of LinkedIn is that it's a public database, right. But understand that there are things you want to keep private about. So if you're looking at your competitors, or maybe your boss's profile, you don't want them to know that you've been there. But if you're looking, if you're sort of digging around on LinkedIn, looking at your competitors, and snooping around on your bosses, or people you work with, and you don't want them to know that you've been there, then there's definitely a way of hiding the fact that you visited their profile that I recommend you look into. On the other hand, if you're in sales, or you're job searching, you want to know all these people who saw their profile, right? In hopes that out of 10, maybe you want to actually contact using, Hey, I saw you visited my profile, I actually have a need for you. And that actually happens a lot. So use these things strategically. But definitely, if you're going to make a lot of changes to your profile, you don't want your employer to see, you want to turn off the broadcast that LinkedIn will make that says to your network, that you just changed your profile, because that's sort of a red flag. So use these features strategically. Going back in now we're at chapter seven, pulse. So LinkedIn is trying to become the media like Facebook and Twitter and all the other social networks are. So LinkedIn has a very, very powerful news curation feature called pulse. And pulse actually also brings in the blog posts that influence and others on LinkedIn right as well. And I'll get to why that's valuable. But if you make pulse, sort of the source of your daily business information, it's going to be a great way to not only learn and educate yourself on what's going on, in whatever industry you're in, but also a great way of easy way of curating that content and sharing it with your network and providing value through sharing content, which might seem you know, trivial to many people. But you know, I can show you anecdotal evidence of people that post things that are really relevant to their professional network and to their clients, some piece of content that they saw that their client just happened not to see that ended up thanking them and saying, Hey, we, you know, we might be able to work together on this or what have you. So, you know, that's the whole idea about social medias. It's the democratization of information. So there are things that seem very natural you and you think everybody knows, but to someone else is another part of the world, I might be a godsend that they just happen to miss because, you know, a viral video to you might I've never even heard it, right. And that's just the reality that we're all over the place. And there's just so much information out there, right? Especially, you know, even here on Periscope. So chapter eight talks about letting your professional voice be heard and talks about blogging using LinkedIn polls. So for those of you who remember that LinkedIn has this influencer platform, and if you wanted to blog on LinkedIn, in the past, you had to be an influencer. To do that well over the past year, LinkedIn to open up their blogging platform to everybody, at least everybody in United States, I assume it's going to be opened up worldwide as well. And this can be a very, very powerful thing, a powerful vehicle a powerful tool for your business, because there are a lot of people that read pulse on a daily basis. And with all the eyeballs around pulse, LinkedIn can really show your content to a lot more people than you might have thought. So something to consider. And I know that a lot of people shy away from blogging, it can be really easy. I've written a lot of blog posts on blogging. I actually started my blog on LinkedIn, they just have an application for WordPress that I started July 4, I think 2008 Come to think of it but blog gain, it's just it's the most powerful thing you can do for your professional brand. And it's something I recommend everyone doing you don't beauty with LinkedIn is you don't even have to have a website to do it. You can blog directly on LinkedIn. And I talked about, I think that's one of the hidden secrets on LinkedIn, that you should definitely be taking to your advantage. I've seen people like you and me get hundreds of 1000s of views from their content. I mean, that says it in itself. And these are people with a few 100 connections. And if you look at the history of their posts, they've had a few 100 views on one post few 100 on another, and then boom, 800,000. And it just happened to be content that resonated with the LinkedIn community, that LinkedIn also exposed to polls. And that helps explain those numbers. But anybody might be able to get that type of readership for their posts, by publishing on LinkedIn, if the stars are aligned, right. But either way, a few 100 views for a lot of small businesses or even for professionals, is a big number as well. So something to consider there, chapter nine groups. So you know, a lot of people say that LinkedIn is not an engaging platform, well, it's probably cuz they're not involved in LinkedIn groups, and LinkedIn groups are far the most engaging aspect of LinkedIn. So if you're missing out on connecting with people, if you're missing out on prospecting, can't figure out you know where to go. The groups or the communities that are in the groups really are another hidden secret sauce on LinkedIn. And hopefully, you will have joined some groups joined in some discussions. I know that I've developed business on LinkedIn groups. And when I asked sales professionals, how did you develop business, I think then, you know, half will say through connections, introductions or network, using that core functionality that LinkedIn has, the other half will say they found conversations or develop relationships and LinkedIn groups. So I'm going to lead you through that as well. And then chapter 10, talks about just staying up to date that social media is always changing. And I'm actually creating a new community called the Social Media Center of Excellence, where I hope to continue the conversation and really offer regular educational events, you know, webinars, more ebooks, what have you to help educate professionals and social media. So that's it. So once again, the name of the ebook, it's called maximizing LinkedIn for business. I just released this today on Kindle. So right now, it's only available on Kindle for 99 cents. Total disclaimer here. If you wait about a week, it'll be available for free download on PDF. And I really wanted to get it on Kindle, because I'm an author. And I have two books on Amazon up, I have three books in Amazon. So for me, just having another book in top of mind in Amazon was important to me, but for my fans, and hey, for those few of you that are watching this on Periscope, they'll get more replays, I just want you to know, if you want to be the first to read the content, do a search on Kindle, maximizing LinkedIn for business, Neal Schaffer, otherwise, wait another week, make sure you follow me on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn friend on Facebook, Neal Schaffer. So that's it. So you know, I can just record myself speaking into a microphone, which is how I do my podcasts on a weekly basis. Or I can record it in a video format and take that audio and repurpose it into a podcast. So now I have a podcast and Periscope. And that's why I know that there aren't that many watching. But for the two of you that are watching right now, I'm really thankful. And oh, that's number three, I'm really thankful that you watch and even if one person watched, to me, that's positive ROI from doing this Periscope, it's not necessarily about the numbers, it's it's just the fact that it's getting out to more people that might be interested. So I hope you like this, if you did, I really hope if you'll sort of engage back, send me a tweet or whatever it might be. And, you know, in summary, these are the key things that I think every professional needs to learn more about using LinkedIn. And I think if you have those bases covered, those 10 bases covered, then you're set up for success on LinkedIn. And hopefully, the e book will help you get there in a very, very easy to understand. way. So that's it. Oh, sorry, I miss most of it. Thank you. Oh, that's okay. I really appreciate the comment, you'll be able to see the replay. But you know, I started this as a podcast saying welcome to maximize your social. That's where I published my podcast. They're also on iTunes and SoundCloud. So I'm going to end this in podcast fashion, by saying thank you for listening to this episode of maximize your social and as I close out all of my podcasts, I'm coming to you from today from Clearwater, Florida. But wherever you are in the world, make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate all of your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on the show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social comm. Please also make sure to check out Neil's new community, the Social Media Center of Excellence at social media ce o e.com. As well as Neil's social media conference, the social tools Summit, which will be in San Francisco on On October 27, and 28th