Session 3
What draws you and what puts you off when reading a LinkedIn profile?
People will either visit your profile because they are searching for you or because they’ve seen an update you’ve shared. Either way, this is your opportunity to make an impression and draw them in. If the content isn’t relevant to them they won’t read it, which is usually the case if your profile reads like a CV. If someone doesn’t know you, they’ll likely just move on. If they have met you elsewhere, however, they may do you the courtesy of looking a little longer. In this video, we’re going to talk about how to engage your network via your LinkedIn profile and give you an idea of what to focus on.
How people behave on LinkedIn
It might sound harsh to say it, but people will not be interested in you until you become relevant to them. Just like we don’t try to get to know every person we pass on the street, we also won’t want to know about every person we meet on LinkedIn. It is only when someone becomes relevant to us that we will take the time to read their profile.
This might occur because we liked their status update, we were curious about something they wrote, they have been referred to us or because we met them in person.
Ultimately, we want someone to read our profile, as it is at this point we have the opportunity to engage with them about what we do. And remember how in the last session we talked about ‘Outcomes’. You don’t want to be someone who is busy on Social Media but going slowly broke because your content isn’t targetted and your intentions aren’t focused.
Our goal must always be to start a conversation.
Most people today are time poor and simply don’t have time to read profiles that aren’t of interest to them and don’t add anything to their busy day. This is why what we write and how we write is so important.
Get it wrong and your prospect will leave.
How to Become Relevant to Your Prospect
In the last session, we spoke about how 57% of a buying decision is made online. With this in mind, we need to build our LinkedIn profile in such a way that this can be achieved. A poorly constructed profile won’t do the job.
We need to grab our prospect’s attention by outlining exactly how we help people and the problem we solve.
Our most ideal prospect is probably busy dealing with the consequences of the problem we solve. Our job is to interrupt them and help them to quickly recognise that they have a problem, and that we are on hand to help them solve it.
Our LinkedIn profile needs to detail the problem we solve by highlighting exactly how it shows up in a person’s world. A prospect needs to ‘see’ themselves in our profile.
This isn’t just for our prospects’ benefit, but also for those who surround them, as they are the people who will witness the symptoms of the problem on a daily basis. Pulling on the fact that as humans, we love to help and offer insightful information, there is a high likelihood that if someone learns something valuable on your profile that will help their friend, they will say, ‘Oh that’s what’s going on for Mark! I must tell him this’ and thus a referral occurs.
Our name comes up in all the right conversations.
We don’t have our prospect’s attention for long so we must get to the point quickly. We must become relevant to them by putting ourselves in context and making it easy for the visitor to know what we do, and then how we do it. If our profile is confusing, people won’t stick around to find out and they certainly won’t refer us.
Structuring Your LinkedIn Profile
People don’t read LinkedIn profiles from top to bottom. There are a number of hot points we tend to scan to allow us to help us quickly decide whether we want to invest more time. At some points, we’ll make conscious decisions about a person, while other areas our judgements will be unconscious.
Here are a few things to be aware of:
- A professional photo
- A customised profile URL
- Spelling and typos
- Equal (or nearly equal) length entries in Experience
- A customised LinkedIn summary
- A call to action
Each of these things are important to consider. Watch the video for this section to see me demonstrate how someone views a LinkedIn profile. Do you agree?
Over the coming days watch your own behaviour. What draws you in and what turns you off? Which profiles do you read in depth and which ones do you leave quickly?
This will give you valuable insight into how to do your own profile.
Need a bit more?
It’s certainly hard to convey everything you need to know in a few short videos and a few paragraphs. That’s why I wrote an entire book. If you’re considering updating your LinkedIn profile yourself then I recommend my book ‘What to Put on Your LinkedIn Profile‘. It will walk you through each step of designing your profile and what to put in each section.
If you need more help than this, and consider outsourcing it as a better option, then we are here to help. We have a number of ways we help clients. Click here to find out more.
Your Profile from Tip to Toe
In the following slides, I’ll take you through each section of your profile.
Before Next Session
How about some further reading:
It’s not easy to say everything that needs to be said in such a short amount of time, so how about taking the time to read some helpful articles and watch a few videos to take your learning further.
- Video: How to decide where to invest time in your business
- Article: The Real Reason People Don’t Connect with You Online
- Article: 7 Mistakes People Make With Their LinkedIn Summary
- Article: Sending LinkedIn InMails? Make Sure You Know this first!
- Video: Facebook Live on the 7 Mistakes People Make with Their LinkedIn Summary
Tomorrow, we’ll be getting practical on LinkedIn and I’ll be showing you how to do a number of things.
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