Dilemma for Senior Executives: Should you accept that LinkedIn request?

This is one question I’ve been asked multiple times by trainees whenever I’ve conducted my LinkedIn training sessions for various senior executives across the globe. The typical query is that, “I just don’t know that person, so why should I connect with him/her?” Well, for starters, LinkedIn is not Facebook. The one goal to keep in mind when interacting on LinkedIn is that we’re here to network. Yes, network is the key word here. But that also doesn’t mean you should connect with just about anyone and everyone—there’s some method to this madness!

LinkedIn is by far the world’s largest professional network, and it is a tool that helps you build your network for whatever professional purpose you desire. So, the fact that you need to actively build your network to extend your outreach is a no-brainer. But you need to be judicious in your approach to avoid being a spam target and your LinkedIn feed becoming a complete mess. Read on if you’re really serious about networking on LinkedIn.

Should you accept a request from a complete stranger?

There’s no straight answer to that! This will depend on a number of factors and will differ from person to person. To make things easy, there are a few criteria you can apply to filter out the crappy ones.

When is it best to ignore?

Ignore the request when,

• The person is not from your company, function, or industry, OR
• The invitation text is not explanatory/customized, OR
• The person is from a competing company, OR
• The person is a recruiter, and you’re currently not looking for a change.

When is it safe to accept an invitation?

Accept the request when,

• The person is from your company, function, or industry, OR
• The invitation text explains why it is relevant to connect to that person, OR
• The person seems to be a competent recruiter AND you’re looking for a change, OR
• The person is a senior executive from a relevant company you’d like to network with.

Should you be wary of accepting requests from competitors?

You might want to think twice before accepting that request if you’re in a sales function and the person is from a competing company. How does that make a difference? Well, if you don’t have the right settings in place, your competitor might be able to view all your connections and figure out your existing clients or prospects. However, there might not be much harm in connecting with a direct competitor too if you have the right settings in place.

What does a connection get to know about you?

This is a big fear that a lot of people have. A connection would get to know pretty much nothing apart from your public profile and activity if you have the right settings in place! Head straight to “Settings & Privacy” on your LinkedIn and click on “Visibility” on the right-hand side panel. Among the various options available, you have “Who can see or download your email address.” You can choose to even not let your connections view your email address—they’ll only be able to contact you through LinkedIn’s messaging feature!

It’s only if someone is outside your third-degree network would they not be able to view your public LinkedIn activity. Remember, if someone within your third-degree network needs to track your activity on LinkedIn, they can do that anyway by visiting your profile and without even connecting with you. So, fear not—if and when required, you can remove anyone from your connections without even letting that person get any notification.

Interested in getting personalized LinkedIn training? Want to get 10X impact on LinkedIn?

If you’re looking for a personalized online LinkedIn training session for yourself or your team, a training session can help you understand LinkedIn well and get 10X impact. Drop in an email to minhaj dot rais at outlook.com along with your LinkedIn profile URL(s) to know more.

Advertisement

12 reasons to create a company page on LinkedIn

If you’re in two minds about creating a company page on LinkedIn, check out these benefits that you can take advantage of by creating a company page to represent your brand on LinkedIn. This blog post will also be very useful to understand if you’re making full use of your company page on LinkedIn.

Check out these twelve advantages that creating a company page offers.

1. Creating a company page on LinkedIn presents you with an opportunity to create a distinct identity for your organization on LinkedIn.
2. You get to add a smart cover image representing your logo, products, services, or any other aspect you wish to highlight. You can also add a short tagline up to 120 characters to add some punch to the pitch on your company page.
3. You can add a short summary about your company, locations of your global offices, your company logo, website URL, featured groups, and relevant hashtags.
4. You can post and interact with select content as an organization, your employees can tag your company page as their employer (this shows up as the employee number on your company page), you can post jobs, and showcase your products and services.
5. Having a company page allows you to run sponsored campaigns on LinkedIn to target your audience based on various criteria. You can also run targeted paid campaigns to increase followers for you company page.
6. Potential clients, employees, and practically any user on LinkedIn can “Follow” your company page to remain abreast of all updates being posted on the page. The more the number of followers, greater the reach and impact.
7. Admins for the company page can view the number of impressions, clicks, and shares for each of their updates. You can add other members to become admins of your company page, but you need to be connected to them to be able to do this.
8. You get alerts for all activity related to content on your company page. In short, you get to know who all have liked, shared, or commented on the updates posted on your company page.
9. You get detailed analytics on your visitors, updates, and followers, including details on their geographies and job functions, apart from engagement statistics for your content for up to a year.
10. You can also compare your follower, updates, and engagement rates with those of your competitors under the analytics section. Note that these competitors/similar companies are auto-selected by LinkedIn, and you might miss out on some obvious ones.
11. Once you’ve added hashtags to your company page, you can click on those hashtags to interact with content posted under that hashtag as a company.
12. Once you’ve created a company page, you can create multiple showcase pages to represent your different brands on LinkedIn.

I’ll be covering the difference between a company page, an affiliate page, and a showcase page in a separate blog post. Till then, remember that growing the number of followers on your company page, at least in the initial stages, is not an easy task. But do not lose hope. Keep posting relevant and engaging content to grow your follower count. I’ll also be covering tips for attracting relevant followers to your company page in a separate post.

Did you find this post useful? Do not forget to like, share, and comment! Feel free to post a comment if you’d like me to cover specific aspects related to LinkedIn in subsequent blog posts.

Should start-ups opt for a LinkedIn profile or a company page?

With more than 645 million members in 200+ countries and territories, LinkedIn is by far the world’s largest social media platform for professionals across the globe. So, if your organization’s goal is to reach out to high-potential employees or to showcase your brand and reach out to potential clients, LinkedIn is the place to be. Especially, if you’re looking for B2B opportunities, LinkedIn is probably the best bet around.

The type of engagement and results you can get through connecting and engaging with other like-minded professionals through your personal LinkedIn profile will be quite different from the engagement you can get through a company page. I’ve covered the various advantages of creating a company page in a separate blog post. Do check it out. But first, let’s get done with whether it makes more sense to make do with a LinkedIn profile or to create a company page, especially for start-ups.

A lot of start-ups/small-sized organizations create a LinkedIn profile instead of a company page to represent their brand on LinkedIn. It must be remembered that LinkedIn profiles are for individual members, and company pages are for organizations, institutions, or brands. In fact, it is against LinkedIn’s terms and conditions to create a LinkedIn profile to represent a company or an institution. In other words, a LinkedIn profile should always represent a person and NOT a company or institution. But do also note that you can create a company page only if you have a personal LinkedIn profile.

Start off with networking using a personal profile

If you’re just starting off on LinkedIn, it is always advisable to create a personal profile and begin networking with like-minded professionals or your target audience. An easy way to begin is to connect with your family, friends, colleagues, and classmates. Always remember to include an introductory note if you’re sending a connection request to someone who might not know you. That said, building your network of connections on LinkedIn is much easier than creating a base of followers for your company page on LinkedIn.

Once you have a good number of connections and understand LinkedIn well, you can explore creating a company page, especially if you’re looking to do paid promotions to enhance the reach of your brand on LinkedIn.

Creating a company page on LinkedIn

So, how do you create a company page on LinkedIn? It’s simple! Click on the “Work” icon on the top right corner of your LinkedIn homepage and then click on “Create a company page” to create your company page. More guidelines on creating a company page on LinkedIn can be found here on LinkedIn’s Help Center.

Do read this blog post to understand the benefits of creating a company page on LinkedIn that cannot be availed using a personal profile.

How to use the right hashtags on LinkedIn

Have you ever wondered what kind of hashtags can get you maximum views and engagement on LinkedIn? Most users tend to create hashtags that they feel match the content of their posts. Little do they realize that hashtags are a recent phenomenon on LinkedIn and not all hashtags that are popular on Twitter or Facebook might be equally popular on LinkedIn. Moreover, hashtags on LinkedIn don’t necessarily work the way they do on other social media.

The hashtags you follow on LinkedIn are one of the parameters that determine the content of the feed on your LinkedIn homepage. But more often than not, users tend to use hashtags that they think are relevant to their content without realizing that the said hashtag might have very few followers on LinkedIn.

For example, if someone from the academic publishing industry uses the hashtag #academicpublishing in their posts, little do they realize that it has only 443 followers (at the time of writing this post)! This implies that unless someone actually searches for this hashtag on LinkedIn, your post might reach the feed of only these 443 followers.

Now, compare this to more generic hashtags such as #publishing (4,558,030 followers) or #research (460,733 followers), and you’ll realize how important it is to first do a bit of research on the hashtags you’re using on LinkedIn.

It’s highly recommended that you use the right hashtags along with your LinkedIn posts to enhance the reach of your content. LinkedIn has now also introduced the concept of hashtags for company pages. So, company page admins on LinkedIn can now associate their page with hashtags to listen in and respond to conversations about their brand and other relevant topics. Clicking on these associated hashtags from the company page allows users to interact with content related to that hashtag as a company (and not as an individual user). So, go ahead and start using the right hashtags for your postings on LinkedIn.

Found this post to be useful? Do share your views through the comments section, and let me know in case you have any queries.

3 simple steps to multiply the impact of your LinkedIn profile

Do you know what is the most popular activity on LinkedIn? Yes, it’s viewing profiles! The fact that a huge number of recruiters are on LinkedIn and that they view dozens if not hundreds of profiles each day might be tilting the scales in favor of this metric. Nevertheless, this makes keeping your profile updated all the more important.

In this post, we’ll be covering three simple steps that will help you multiply the impact of your LinkedIn profile.

1. Add a photo to get noticed: LinkedIn says that profiles with photos get up to 21 times more views. Remember to add a professional close-up photograph that makes you easily recognizable.

Power tip: Search for profiles using any relevant keyword, click on “People” on the filters drop-down. View the photos accompanying profiles in your search results to understand how your profile photo will appear in search results. Will it stand out? If not, add a more relevant picture. LinkedIn provides some useful guidelines for adding the right photo to your profile.

2. Add a positioning statement: Refer to the power tip above. What do you see in the search results? Names, designations, and profile photos. You know what? You can simple add a positioning statement to your profile header. Just click on view profile on your LinkedIn profile and then click on the edit icon. Then, add a positioning statement alongside your designation. For example, “Senior Manager – Customer Care | Delivering enhanced value to our valuable customers.” This Hubspot blogpost has some very good examples and guidelines to help you write a very effective headline.

Remember that this positioning statement will help to draw more prospects and customers to your profile, help them understand your role and responsibilities at one glance, and make your profile stand out in search results. The snapshot below presents a good positioning statement.

This is a good example wherein a recruiter can use an image to add branding value.

3. Add a powerful background image: This is one aspect a lot of people miss out on. Anytime someone visits your LinkedIn profile, what they see at first is your photograph, your designation (plus your positioning statement as mentioned above), AND the background image. More often than not, users leave this blank, which then leads to the default LinkedIn image being showcased. Remember that the background image presents a very good opportunity to make a quick and lasting impression on the viewer thereby giving them more reason to read on further details on your profile.

The background image here gives a very good overview of how Don works at an important intersection of scholarly communication.

The examples I’ve showcased above are simply indicative of the potential of strong header images for making positioning statements. You can even choose to communicate certain aspects of your role or company using this background image.

Once you have completed these three simple steps, just begin engaging with updates and watch your profiles views shoot up! 🙂 Share your views through the comments section below.

How to improve your Social Selling Index on LinkedIn – Part 4

This is the concluding part of this series that focuses on building relationships. This parameter primarily revolves around strengthening your network by connecting and establishing trust with decision makers. Personally, I feel this is among the most critical parameters for sales personnel looking to have a strong impact on LinkedIn.

As per a LinkedIn survey, 73% of B2B buyers prefer sales professionals who have been referred by someone they know. In addition, they found out that buying decisions now typically include more than five decision makers. Hence, establishing strong relationships with different prospects is of utmost importance.

Now, your SSI score component under this parameter of building relationships is based on the following four aspects.

1. Connect with contacts: It is obvious that a larger network will give you greater leverage in finding new prospects and getting your foot in the door with potential clients. Hence, never underestimate the power of constantly developing your network. You just need to remember that a good, strong network cannot be built overnight. Make it a point to spend a few minutes everyday in building and extending your network. Send out personalized invitations to prospects in the industry. You never know which contact might help you get your next big order. Some users hesitate to connect with people they don’t know personally or whom they haven’t met at least once. However, this approach greatly limits your networking capability on LinkedIn. Hence, I would recommend being open about connecting with new people based on their profile credentials.
   Power tip: Connecting with those who have a huge number of direct connections gives this parameter a huge boost because it almost instantly increases your third-degree connection base exponentially.
2. Focus on decision makers: The key is to establish strong relationships with decision makers at the prospective or target company/institution. Getting through to senior decision makers is not always easy. Also, not all of them might be active on LinkedIn. So, it’s always better to target multiple senior personnel and decision makers to increase your chances of success.
3. Connect internally and leverage TeamLink: It’s surprising that at times, employees within a company/institution are not connected with each other. Each person has his/her own unique network and connections. Hence, connecting with as many colleagues as possible helps you increase the depth and reach of your network with minimal effort. You might not even need to write personalized notes for connecting with fellow employees. Also, do not forget to connect with the senior management in your company/institution.Power tip: If your organization has a big enough sales team and the stakes are high, it might make sense to go for the Sales Navigator Team package offered by LinkedIn. Once you go for a Sales Team package, you can use your company’s network to uncover the best way to get introduced with TeamLink. But until you feel the need for purchasing a Sales Team subscription, connecting internally with senior folks within your organization is the best bet!
4. Nurture relationships over time to keep your services top of mind: A big mistake some people do is to not maintain a healthy relationship after the initial contact. Remember that LinkedIn is just a platform built to facilitate relationship building. It’s your responsibility to maintain regular contact and reach out periodically. Add value by providing relevant information and solutions to your prospects or client’s business problems. If nothing else, at least make it a point to like, share, or comment on updates shared by your prospects.

We’ve now covered all four aspects – establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships – comprising the primary parameters that determine your social selling index (SSI) score on LinkedIn. Note that this is especially important for those focusing on B2B sales since LinkedIn is arguably the most successful platform for generating B2B leads.

I would like to conclude with saying that it’s best to regularly spend time networking on LinkedIn so that you build a professional brand and strong network over time. Please do share you thoughts using the comments section below.

How to improve your Social Selling Index on LinkedIn – Part 3

In the third part of this series, we will be focusing on how to engage with insights to improve your social selling index (SSI) score on LinkedIn. The earlier two parts of this series can be accessed here and here.

The third parameter mentioned by LinkedIn for improving your SSI score is based on your ability to discover and share conversation-worthy updates to create and grow relationships on LinkedIn. Did you know that around 64% of B2B buyers report that they appreciate hearing from a sales person who provides knowledge or insight about their business? Which is why knowing how to engage with insights holds a lot of importance.

The following pointers will help you ace your score on the engaging with insights parameter on LinkedIn.

1. Share relevant resources to strengthen personal connections: Make it a point to post content that is relevant to your prospects. This can be in the form of industry news, trends, or updates from your own organization. Sharing and liking updates posted by others is also a great means of engagement. Make it a point to be on the lookout for insightful updates and sharing them. Show that you care about the successes of your prospects and tag them whenever you share an update relevant to them.
2. Stay in the know with timely content: Remember to leverage industry data and news on LinkedIn to stay up to date. LinkedIn Pulse was earlier a separate platform, but it was merged into the main LinkedIn platform a few years ago. So, now any long form article published on LinkedIn actually goes on to Pulse. When searching for anything on LinkedIn, searching for “content” allows you to search for relevant content on LinkedIn that you can then share.
3. Engage in discussion where your connections are: LinkedIn advises you to leave thoughtful, constructive comments on content posted by your prospects and to join LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn groups are a great way to find people with similar interests. Search for groups, especially large groups with a significant number of members, to join and engage with prospects and like-minded people.

   Power tip: When you’re sharing an update, always remember to add your own bit. For example, you can add your thoughts on the update or explain why someone should read that update or article. It’s always preferable to add a comment as compared to simply liking an update. But there will be situations when you’d like to just bookmark an update or show some immediate engagement.

4. Use relevant information when reaching out: Nothing can match an informed and personalized message. When reaching out to anyone, always customize messages using relevant information you have learned about the person on LinkedIn. A simple example is to always remember to add a personalized message when sending anyone a connection request – explain why you’d like to connect with that person. To be able to do this, it’s best to visit a profile and then click on “connect” to add a personalized message. This will significantly increase the chances of the prospect accepting your connection request.

Engaging with insights is a great way to ensure that you win over the attention of your prospects. The key point is to never use a mechanical approach when trying to engage with prospects. Always try to personalize any message you send out to your prospects. That little bit of extra effort will go a long way in multiplying your engagement.

How to improve your Social Selling Index on LinkedIn – Part 2

This is the second part in the series of posts on improving your SSI score on LinkedIn. The first post on “What can you do to establish your professional brand on LinkedIn” can be read here.

The second parameter mentioned by LinkedIn for improving your SSI score is based on your ability to find the right people. Hence, in this post, we will be elaborating on how you can improve your score on this parameter.

So, how can you go about finding the right people on LinkedIn? We’ve listed a few pointers below.

• Use LinkedIn’s powerful search tool to zero in on the right decision makers: Now, LinkedIn earlier used to provide free unlimited profile searches to all users. But with time, they realized that certain recruiters and sales guys were finding loopholes in their system to search and download profiles. And all of this wasn’t paying off for LinkedIn. So, they have now limited search functionality for users unless you purchase a premium account. The search prowess of your account increases with each higher level of premium. You get more filters and greater reach with each higher level. Hence, if you’re really looking to leverage the power of LinkedIn and need to regularly search for various profiles, purchasing a premium account is indispensable. LinkedIn also recommends using Boolean search terms such as AND, OR, and NOT for your LinkedIn search.

Power tip: Remember, the key is to ensure that you keep oiling LinkedIn’s search engine on a regular basis. So, keep searching for relevant profiles in your industry and try to connect with them. That apart, one important aspect most people don’t realize is that even if you purchase a premium account, your search capability on LinkedIn is still limited to your third-degree network. The larger your third-degree network base, the broader your search will be. Hence, it is really important to connect with LinkedIn power users with large networks. Further details on this are available in a separate post on How to increase your LinkedIn network exponentially. Note that this limitation of search capabilities does not apply to recruiters who purchase a national/global recruiter license (which is very expensive by the way!). 

• Leverage warm introductions to expand your network: You might be wanting to reach out to someone who is in your second-degree network but you’re not sure if you can reach out directly without making it sound really intrusive and salesy. LinkedIn makes it easy through their introductions feature. Check out how you’re connected to that person. Then, reach out to the common connection between both of you and request the person to introduce you to the prospect. This will help you transform the cold outreach into a warm introduction through a common acquaintance/colleague. Reminder: you might not be very excited about using this feature like several others, but if you do, LinkedIn views this as a sincere move to expand your network.

• Research potential prospects: LinkedIn advises you to look for commonalities to establish a relationship. When checking a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, check out the LinkedIn groups they’re a part of. This information is available right at the bottom of the profile. Request to join any of these groups. Once you are a part of the group, that can serve as a common point of engagement to reach out to the prospect. Furthermore, the advantage that Sales Navigator provides you is that you can save prospects as leads, and you keep getting regular email alerts whenever any of your leads posts anything on LinkedIn so that you can get a trigger to reach out or engage with the prospect. The bottom-line is to ensure that you too join popular groups in your industry.

• Take advantage of who’s viewed your profile: This feature of “Who’s viewed your profile” is a great source for driving engagement on LinkedIn. Always keep checking from time to time who has viewed your profile. This will help you get a flavor of who all are really taking interest in your posts or profile on LinkedIn. You’re only able to see a few profile viewers with the free account. If you take a premium account, you can get to see profile viewers for up to 90 days ago. Treat profile viewers as inbound leads and always make it a point to engage with them.

So, there you go! These four pointers are the primary aspects that determine the score for your ability to find the right people on LinkedIn. Keep watching this space for more information on how you can improve your sales profile and ultimately your SSI score on LinkedIn.

Do share your thoughts using the comments section below.

How to improve your Social Selling Index on LinkedIn – Part 1

In a previous post, I’d written about what social selling entails and how to find out your social selling score (SSI) on LinkedIn. In this series of posts, we’ll explain how you can improve your SSI score based on parameters defined by LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s SSI score is calculated on the basis of four parameters, namely, establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. It is important that you focus on improving each of these parameters to improve your SSI score. We’ll elaborate on “establishing your professional brand” in this post.

What can you do to establish your professional brand on LinkedIn? Read on for details.

• Complete your profile: First and foremost, ensure that you complete your profile with the customer in mind. Remember to emphasize instances that illustrate how you’ve provided value to a client. Take care to complete every detail on your LinkedIn profile, including your profile picture, headline, summary, and experience. Pay special attention to your headline because that is what makes your profile stand apart from millions of others in your domain. To understand the importance of your profile headline, just search for people using any keyword on LinkedIn, and notice how you’ll tend to click on profiles that have self-explanatory headlines.

• Add rich content to your summary: This aspect is one of the most underutilized items among LinkedIn’s profile page functionalities. Add content that can make you stand out as a thought leader. You can add an image, video, or a presentation to showcase examples of your work or your company’s specialties. You can also upload a deck outlining your company’s products and services on Slideshare and host it on your LinkedIn summary. 

• Post and interact with content: Always keep in mind that the basic foundation of a strong content marketing strategy is nothing other than relevant and useful content. The key is to post relevant updates on a regular basis so that you’re perceived as a thought leader in your domain. Make it a point to spend some time to curate high-quality content that can be helpful for your target audience, and then, post updates summarizing that content and explaining the importance of why should someone read what you’ve posted. Merely sharing links might not get the kind of engagement you’re looking for. If you post high-quality and relevant content, the likelihood of your content being shared and liked increases several notches. 

Power Tip: Like I’ve mentioned in a separate post, LinkedIn’s algorithm tends to promote content with links to content on LinkedIn rather than that with links to content off LinkedIn. That apart, write long form articles on LinkedIn to share your personal experiences and industry insights. This can go a long way in establishing your brand value as a thought leader. The bottom-line here is that if you do things that please LinkedIn’s algorithm, you’ll see your score zoom up! 🙂

• List skills & get endorsements: The “Skills” feature of LinkedIn is among the lesser used features, especially by industry leaders who don’t have time for these nitty-gritties. I’m not a great fan of this feature, but like I mentioned in the paragraph above, LinkedIn likes it if you engage with their platform the way they want you to!

  So, if you’re really serious about networking on LinkedIn, make it a point to add relevant skills to your profile. You can do this by clicking on “Add a new skill” in the “Skills & Endorsements” section. Once you add skills, your connections will view requests to endorse your skills from time to time. Make it a point to endorse the skills of your colleagues, friends, and acquaintances to expect favors in return. Now, this is a separate argument altogether as to how reliable these endorsements are. This situation has arisen from random endorsements by random people who haven’t even worked with you once. LinkedIn doesn’t seem to have figured out a way yet to address these concerns. That said, skills and endorsements remain a factor that can influence the aspect of “establishing your professional brand” on LinkedIn.

Now, all these pointers just constitute one of the factors, i.e., establishing your professional brand, that can influence your SSI score on LinkedIn. Keep watching this space for more details on how you can ace social selling on LinkedIn.

Also, don’t forget to share your thoughts through the comments section below.