LinkedIn is the biggest social media websites for professionals and business owners. Founded in December 2002, it now boosts overs 500m+ members. In this video blog, Angus Grady shares his top LinkedIn Tips and Tricks for 2018 and beyond. Angus is known as The LinkedIn Unlocker and is an expert on anything LinkedIn. He trains businesses & professionals to use the power of LinkedIn for lead generation, sales & business development.
Video Transcript
Uzair: Hello everyone, thanks for joining me. My name is Uzair and today I’ve got a very special guest and a dear friend. His name is Angus Grady. He is called the LinkedIn Unlocker. Have I got that right Angus
Angus: Perfect, Oz Perfect, and yes you are a dear friend and I’ve known you for a long time through networking and it’s, it’s just real privileged to be asked to do this so great.
Uzair: Not at all, not at all. And thank you for your time.
Angus: My pleasure.
Uzair: Everyone is excited as well as to what tips you can give about LinkedIn, so to introduce Angus to everyone, Angus is the Go-to guy for anything to do with LinkedIn. He is an expert and he has given me some great tips as well. Even though I don’t use LinkedIn as much as I ought to and do this and do that and update and post which is great because it’s all good and it benefits me and my business. LinkedIn is a great platform for any professional or business person or who would like to get their name out there to generate leads or sales. But we’re not going to start with LinkedIn. We’re going to start with some really boring stuff first GDPR,
Angus: GDPR puts the fear of God up small businesses because they’re afraid of the legislation that’s coming in, in terms of how they have to be compliant on their email and everything else. And we know that email open rates are plunging , you know, not all. Email is not what it used to be. It’s still a very, very powerful tool and a great tool in your marketing toolbox. But open rates are certainly down. Click-through rates are certainly down as well. So GDPR for me stands with Growing Deep Personal Relationships and that’s the basis of what LinkedIn is all about. It’s about connecting with people, engaging the people and growing that meat, like no trust. And it’s about, it’s about fostering your
Angus: kind of business connections through LinkedIn to start with and also face to face networking. So the idea would be that you get introduced possibly via LinkedIn or maybe via twitter, but certainly through LinkedIn. And then from there you then progress that to where you actually meet them face to face. So it’s kind of like networking before you go networking and it’s building the trust. And I think that going forward, this is going to be where LinkedIn wins, hands down, over any other platform because it’s seen as a business by accident tool by a lot of people, but if you use it correctly, you can hand pick the people that you want to work with. And that’s the beauty of it.
Uzair: Brilliant. Thank you. Yes absolutely. Growing personal and deeper relationships is the key to any business. Absolutely. So let’s get started with the basics. Anyone who is not using LinkedIn, I’m sure everybody has got a LinkedIn account and it’s sitting there dormant and nothing is happening. What would be your best tip for someone who was a complete newbie and don’t know how to use LinkedIn?
Angus: Most people have a presence, but they’re not present in order to make sure that they get seen. It’s getting the profile sorted out. It’s getting a good photograph. It’s getting a good headline and making sure that when people come to your profile, there’s something of value for them to see. And again, most people make the mistake of LinkedIn of writing their profile about themselves. I did this, I can do that, I could do this, we can do that, I can get you this and it’s not. It’s about a problem that you solve. So, step back a little bit and think about what it is that, what problem do I solve for my target market. And just think about who your target market is as well. So it’s, about working out who your ideal customer is, your target market, and then crafting your LinkedIn profile around that area.
Uzair: I’m glad that you mentioned and talked about good headshot because I see so many bad ones on many profiles. I personally don’t accept any connections if they haven’t got a headshot, you know, I also see lots of people who have crop a picture…
Angus: Oh cropping…
Uzair: or wedding photos.
Angus: Who the hell is that person on your right-hand side? Why’ve you included it? Then you, some people that are in dumb enough to put their holiday photos, you know, with a pint glass or a glass of wine in their hand. Don’t do it. And again, just sensible photographs. You know, I’ve actually seen somewhere from you know, sort of women who have virtually nothing on and do you think, why are you doing that, or just looking away looking interesting up or, you know, it just doesn’t work. It’s got to be full face, eyes and teeth and just straight in because that’s how you build all that trust element as well by having a good, good photograph to start with. That’s one of the key things that actually puts me off as well or they’ve actually set it up as a company and I put the company logo as that photo, which again isn’t good.
Uzair: So if you’re doing that then you ought to have your company page isn’t it rather than a logo?
Angus: It’s bit like other platforms. You have a personal profile which is you telling the world what problem you solve and you can have a company page. You can link your personal profile to your company page and always worth doing that because basically when you actually look at somebody and you’re going to do business with them, you also want to know what their business is. And it’s like two wings of an airplane. You’d never get on a plane with only one wing. One wing is your profile, one wing is your company page and the body, the engine of the plane is like your strategy and how you present your media as well.
Uzair: So after your headshot what’s the next thing you should do? Should they look at the head of design or fill in all the bios and the information. There’s a lot of information which you can use and leverage to showcase your profession.
Angus: The basics are make sure before you start doing a banner, make sure that you’ve got a headline that says what it is that says, what problem that you do, who you do, and who you’re solving for. Some of the results that you get. Make sure that your headline is a value proposition. There is also an area called the public profile where you should go in because you basically got two profiles so you’ve got the one that you see when you’re online, when you actually logged into LinkedIn. And the one that people see of you when they’re not logged into LinkedIn. For the public profile has a whole lot of areas on it that you could fill in. And it’s worth actually spending time doing that, but again, it’s quite an art form to work out what to say in the actual headline because then you come on to the summary and that whole area takes time, takes time to craft properly rather than just, you know, people just jump in and just put any old stuff up there, but you’ve got to consider that you’ve now got media in there as well that you can add media. And down the bottom of like the new format.
Angus: You get five thumbnails. So those thumbnails are important as well. And again, it’s important to, to craft what you put in there with valid descriptions as you know as well as that. I mean, there’s a whole area here of you know, what to do first. There’s a whole checklist of what to do first. I know you’re a great fan of, you know, sort of processes and checklists. That’s what you have to follow when you actually do your LinkedIn profile.
Uzair: Tell me a little bit about the four Cs, which you have created.
Angus: The Four Cs of LinkedIn. OK It’s a bit cheesy, but it works brilliantly. The first one is create OK, so you create a valid ideal customer. You create something, a document or very short sharp document that tells yourself and the rest of your team who your ideal client is. You then build your profile, you create your footprint, your profile around that. The second C is c for connect and that’s about. That’s about looking at what you do. You know your existing connections. Who is it that you connect with and basically an audit as well as what you got. OK? The third one is then converse, which is about messaging, which is about the content that you put out there. The fourth one is convert. Basically the convert one is you bring together all the three previous Cs and you think, OK, That’s actually like a pitch pack. I actually call them pitch packs or working document together of each person, of each company that you want to
Angus: then make a client. So you research the people in there, you know something about them, you’re following them on other platforms and you just think, OK, what do I need to know about this particular prospect before I can approach them? There’s like search and then you do it properly by researching an awful lot of people do top line searches and they think, wow, I know everything there is to though, but no you need to think about it and stand back, but also in like the first C, the create. It’s about working out what your plan is, what your goals are in terms of, you know, do you want to connect with marketing directors, managing directors, is it facilities managers and then doing an audit of what you’ve currently got. So quite a bit of work that goes into that first initial stage.
Uzair: So if I want to connect with local businesses, how can I go about it?
Angus: Very, very simply, you can just put, like the name of the town in the search bar.
Uzair: OK, the one at the top?
Angus: One at the top and one of the tutorials will do is how to do this. And then you just press search and then you just click on people and then that will give you a list of all those people that are in say, Hemel Hempstead, Watford, London or anything else. Then you could start filtering them by applying the filters that come up.
Uzair: So is there a way where I can see who is very active because I want to connect with those people and not those who just have an account and don’t do anything on LinkedIn.
Angus: The way to do that would be then to look at each individual account is to go into each person’s and look at their activity, you can then see from. So you will see articles, posts and activity. If you look at posts, which is the middle one. That will give you a good indication of how active they are, how many days are active, and it will also show you what they’ve also done in terms of how many likes that article, that posters got or how many comments it’s got. And there’s a lot of people that say, you know, Oh, person X is doing this and they’re doing very well. Again, you can then go in and like the metrics don’t really lie. You know, if somebody got 20,000 comments on their posts and you know that they’re doing quite well, you know, if they’ve got 2 or 3000 views on that post. And again, you just know that they’re doing very well.
Uzair: So what’s the difference between a post and an article?
Angus: OK. the long form articles are the ones that appear underneath your profile. So basically they are proper written articles. Posts have now taken over. Posts and updates are more important now than big long form articles. Basically what people did in the past was they would take their blog, they would repurpose that blog and rewrite it slightly from LinkedIn and that would be an article. Those are getting less and less traction now because Pulse is all but gone and kind of the onus now is on more engagement updates, which shows that LinkedIn as a platform is becoming more and more popular. I think it was Ad week that said year on year this year engagement had gone up 68 percent or something. Well certainly well over 60 percent.
Uzair: Thank you for that. One final question as you know, video marketing is very important and these days video plays a huge part in any businesses marketing mix. Would you recommend uploading a video directly to LinkedIn or embedding a youtube video on LinkedIn.
Angus: I would go with the native video option. So if you put a youtube one on there you’re effectively taking people off LinkedIn away from the wolves.
Uzair: But that’s playing on LinkedIn, isn’t it?
Angus: No it’s not. If you actually have a youtube link, it will take you off LinkedIn. What you want to do, you kind of want to upload video to LinkedIn on like their native video platform?
Uzair: Yeah,
Angus: Because basically when it plays, plays within LinkedIn it doesn’t take you elsewhere. The great mistake people make, and still make is, when they put a link to an article, they put the link to the article. You Click on the link and it takes way from LinkedIn and it’s pretty obvious when you look at your viewing stats of that post, that no one’s liked it, that no one’s actually read it. Why? Because you’re going away from LinkedIn. LinkedIn want you to stay on their hence native video. Native video is now coming on to the pages as well.
Uzair: So you know you get the transcription text on the video which just sync to the video? Is that done on LinkedIn?
Angus: There are some apps that you would probably need to look at. One is called Clips, one is called Biteable, but also you can now upload a sort of text file to go along with it as well. Again, I’m not sure the technicalities in that because I mean again, you and I can actually sit down and probably do that.
Uzair: That’ll be a really good way to upload one video for the session and see how it works. That’s what I do on YouTube and Facebook. I’ll upload a text file onto YouTube to sync the video to the text.
Angus: As powerful as YouTube video is. You know, if you’re taking people away from LinkedIn to YouTube, it won’t do your LinkedIn footprint any good at all. Basically, it’s uploading the videos from your own file to LinkedIn.
Uzair: Thank you so much. One final tip before we log off from our audiences and viewers.
Angus: Well, basically I think that the fundamental tip is to make sure that your headline says what it is that you do and run that headline and that summary past to close colleague or somebody that doesn’t know you and say, read my LinkedIn profile and tell me what it is that I do.
Uzair: How can anyone connect with you or reach out to you?
Angus: The easiest way would be here on my LinkedIn, just Angus Grady and I think there’s only two of us and one of them is me. It’s the LinkedIn Unlocker. I’m on twitter at you know, @angusgrady as well. But LinkedIn is my primary contact point because I kind of see LinkedIn as my landing page, as my website.
Uzair: Yeah,
Angus: Basically my LinkedIn profile will come above a website when people search on my name.
Uzair: Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time and interesting and informative and I’m surely going to do a few more of these sessions. I would like you to do a little what you call it, a look at my profile and rip it to shreds. Thanks everyone for joining in again and I got up with you sometime very soon. Take care.
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