How to Start Using LinkedIn (The Right Way)

Successful marketing on LinkedIn starts with optimizing your profile and this episode of The Missing Link shows you how.

Your LinkedIn profile is one of the most important elements of any LinkedIn marketing effort.

But just because you filled in a few of the missing pieces does not mean your profile is ready.

In this episode Mica Gadhia and I discuss not only why you must be using LinkedIn, we also provide a detailed step-by-step walk through of:

• What should and should not be in your profile
• What types of images work well for your status updates
• How to publish a post on the Pulse network
• The most important elements of your profile
• How to connect your profile to Twitter

Special note, don’t forget to signup for our exclusive LinkedIn discussion group by sending a text message (US/Canada only) to 414-11 with the keyword MYLINK.

The Show Notes

• 16 Smarter Ways to Use LinkedIn
• Important Stats about Linkedin
• Sean Jackson LinkedIn Profile
• Mica Gahia LinkedIn Profile

How to Start Using LinkedIn (the Right Way)

Voiceover: This is The Missing Link, with your host, the insufferable — but never boring — Sean Jackson.

Sean Jackson: Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Missing Link. I’m Sean Jackson, and I’m joined, as always, by the indispensable Mica Gadhia. Mica, how are you today?

Mica Gadhia: I am excellent, Sean. Thanks. How are you doing?

Sean Jackson: Oh, I am fantastic as always. And I am excited to be talking to you. Do you know why I’m excited to talk to you, Mica?

Mica Gadhia: Tell me why.

Sean Jackson: Because you are absolutely essential to the show.

Mica Gadhia: Thank you.

Sean Jackson: You want to know why?

Mica Gadhia: Tell me why.

Sean Jackson: Because not only are you the Customer Success Specialist at Copyblogger — right? Which basically means you do what?

Mica Gadhia: I help customers. I am a customer superstar. If you have a question, you can write us at Support@Copyblogger.com, and I might be one of your customer support specialists.

Sean Jackson: Oh. Even more important than that, she is the voice of the customer on the show. I’d love to have a show where I could have everybody who listens to it on it, but quite frankly, it’s not feasible. You know what is feasible? Having Mica here. So, Mica, as the voice of the customer, that’s a big responsibility, by the way.

Mica Gadhia: Right. I’m feeling the pressure.

Sean Jackson: Exactly. So, don’t blow it, Mica. Don’t mess this up.

Mica Gadhia: Oh my gosh.

Sean Jackson: I want you to ask a question that you think our audience would like to know.

Mica Gadhia: Oh, the first question I actually do have from our audience is, “Why LinkedIn, Sean?”

Sean Jackson: Why LinkedIn?

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: “Why does it exist?” What do you mean?

Mica Gadhia: “Why do I want to be on LinkedIn? What am I going to get out of LinkedIn?”

Sean Jackson: Oh, the big why. More of the existential, “Why should I even be listening to this damn show and learning about LinkedIn?” Is that what you’re asking?

Mica Gadhia: We have great personalities, Sean, but yeah. I want to give the audience some information about LinkedIn and why they need to be there.

Sean Jackson: Okay. Alright, I’ve got it. So, let me go though, and I’m going to put this into perspective, thinking that so many of the customers and audience of Copyblogger and of Rainmaker are professional marketers. They’re either doing it for themselves or doing it for a client, or doing it for the organization they work for. Right?

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Why LinkedIn Should Be in Your Social Media Mix in the First Place

Sean Jackson: So, let’s go through why they should even be thinking about LinkedIn in the mix. Regardless of whether you’re selling to consumers, to businesses, it doesn’t matter. Let me give you a couple of things right off the bat.

Number one, LinkedIn is bigger than Twitter. It has 350 million users in that network, compared to about 310 million, 320 million, I believe, for Twitter. Now, I bring that up only as contrast point, because we spend so much time talking about Twitter and what you should be doing on Twitter and when you should post on Twitter and buying ads on Twitter and engaging on Twitter. Then, nobody really tends to talk about LinkedIn, yet LinkedIn is bigger.

But size is not the only thing that matters. Right? Yeah, I love that little giggle there, Mica. What also matters is quality. Right?

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: I think that is the other aspect of it, because when you start to really delve into those user stats about LinkedIn, what we tend to find is this. It has a very big bias toward professionals, meaning there are more professionals on LinkedIn. In fact, the stat that I know of is about one out of three professionals are using LinkedIn on an active basis.

But what that also means is that these people tend to be higher dollar spenders than your typical online user. What do I mean by that? It means that these people generally have a job.

Mica Gadhia: Are they not sharing their cat pictures on LinkedIn?

Sean Jackson: No. I know. Isn’t that sad? No. It usually is not cat pictures. It’s not usually because they have no life and they’re trying to post online to find something. It is because they are business professionals who tend to have higher earnings than your typical online user.

Mica Gadhia: Wow.

Sean Jackson: And the reason, from a marketing perspective, that matters is very simple. You want to sell things to people who have money. Think about it, folks. If you’re trying to sit there and sell your wares, whatever those wares are, to people who don’t have money, they’re just going to look at you and smile and say, “That’s really nice. I wish I could afford it.”

The general rule of marketing is that we want to do things that generate money, right? Yes, engagement matters, and communication matters, but at the end of the day, most marketing departments are valued on the money they bring in or the money that they save the organization.

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: Does that tend to make sense?

Mica Gadhia: Absolutely.

Sean Jackson: I think when we start to look at this, we have to think of the demographics first. Who are we talking to? What type of people is there? I think there’s a big misconception sometimes that LinkedIn is only for B2B marketing. And I know that it is not. We share stories from other episodes about how it is not just for B2B marketing. And, I think, really, we should think of LinkedIn as a B2I. Do you know what B2I means?

Mica Gadhia: I don’t.

Sean Jackson: Business to individual. At the end of the day, these are individuals. Yes, they have a job, usually. Yes, they have skills and are professionals and are making money. But they’re also human beings.

Mica Gadhia: Right. Yes.

Sean Jackson: When you look at it that way, you realize that you can open your mind up to a bigger audience of people who have spending power, who also are individuals looking for things, not only for their particular business or their clients’ business, but also as individuals. They’re looking for things to engage with that may or may not necessarily be directly related to their work. Make sense?

Mica Gadhia: Yes.

Sean Jackson: You can’t really do that on Twitter. While Twitter is great, I actually think Twitter is a little harder, because on Twitter, you don’t know a lot of details about people. Right? You know what their interests are, but it tends to be a mishmash of personal interests, stories related to themselves, stories that they find interesting, updates that they’re are the airport.

It’s kind of all over, and you can get a feel if you really pay a lot of attention. But you have to dig in to Twitter. LinkedIn, it’s right there.

Mica Gadhia: Yes. That’s true.

Sean Jackson: So does that answer the question, Mica? Does that help create context around this?

Mica Gadhia: It does. Thank you.

Sean Jackson: You know, as a professional marketer, I’m always thinking about, “How can I have a better understanding of the audience and of the customer base? And where are those people?” Once you start to dig into it, you start to realize, “Holy cow, my audience is in LinkedIn.” It may not be the big swath of people that Facebook has, certainly.

But if I want to drill in on who this person is, what are their interests, and what are they doing, and realizing that these people probably not only have a large disposable income, but also have a lot of influence and decision-making authority — wow. Now it really changes.

Mica Gadhia: Yeah. And thank you for that, because I’m sitting here thinking about my LinkedIn profile versus my Twitter profile, and those are two very different things.

Sean Jackson: Oh, yes they are.

Mica Gadhia: Right, right. Twitter profiles are, like, “Conflicted optimist.”

Sean Jackson: “I’m a humanist on a journey through life’s effervescent reality.”

Mica Gadhia: Exactly. I think I also have ‘badass’ on mine.

Sean Jackson: Oh, wow.

Mica Gadhia: Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But I can put that on Twitter. I don’t have that on my LinkedIn profile.

Sean Jackson: That’s right.

Mica Gadhia: I have my education. I have my jobs. I have my interests. It’s very interesting to think about the difference between them, even right now as I’m not fully into LinkedIn or fully into Twitter — just to think right now of what I have on my profile. It’s different than Twitter, and you could find out a lot of information about me on LinkedIn right now.

Sean Jackson: That’s right. And there’s a lot of great information about LinkedIn from the marketer’s perspective. One of the things that Mica and I actually do for you is try to aggregate this for you in a convenient place. You know how we do that? We do it online, but you have to know the trick to get there. You ready?

Mica Gadhia: Ready.

Sean Jackson: The trick is this. I want you to pull out your phone, and I want you to send a text message to 41411. And in the message, just put the word ‘mylink.’ You hit ‘send.’ Don’t let it autocorrect. Send ‘mylink’ as all one word to 41411.

You’re going to subscribe to our text messaging service. Now, the first thing that you get is a link to a very private discussion forum we have on LinkedIn where we share all sorts of stats.

Take the time right now to pull out your phone — 41411, ‘mylink,’ all one word, don’t let it autocorrect — and hit ‘send.’ It’s going to ask you to subscribe to our channel. We will never spam you. Right, Mica?

Mica Gadhia: Correct. Never.

Sean Jackson: Never spam. What we’re going to do, though, is immediately send you a link to our discussion forum so that you can start asking the questions so that we can make this show much more beneficial to you. Mica, do you think people will do it?

Mica Gadhia: I hope so, Sean.

Sean Jackson: I really do, too. We’re doing a lot of work over there in that discussion group and I want people to be engaged over there.

Mica Gadhia: And we want you to join us.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, the show gets kind of lonely if it’s just Mica and I.

Mica Gadhia: Although highly entertaining.

Sean Jackson: Highly entertaining. I enjoy it. I enjoy talking to you. That’s why you’re here.

Mica Gadhia: I love it. I’m glad.

Sean Jackson: So, remember to take out your phone — 41411 — and text ‘mylink,’ all one word, and we’re going to get you that link immediately to your phone so that you can start joining the discussion group.

So, Mica, I do want to give a little bit of a sneak peak, because you mentioned this earlier. You asked me why people should be doing LinkedIn. I think I pretty much addressed that.

Mica Gadhia: Yes.

Sean Jackson: But you know what? Let’s do something different, a little radical. Okay? Let’s do something that’s never been done on Rainmaker.FM before.

Mica Gadhia: I’m ready.

Sean Jackson: What we’re going to do is, in the next segment, I’m going to start drilling in to LinkedIn itself. I am going to walk you through, as I’m standing over your shoulder, exactly what you should be doing on LinkedIn right now.

Mica Gadhia: That’s fabulous. Yes, let’s do that.

Sean Jackson: You know what? When we come back from the break, I’m totally going to do that, so stay tuned.

Mica Gadhia: The Missing Link is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and online entrepreneurs. Find out more and take a free 14-day test drive at Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Sean Jackson: Welcome back, everybody. Now, we are on to what I promised. Mica, what were we going to do next? I forget, now. Hold on. What is it?

What Should and Should Not Be in Your Profile

Mica Gadhia: We’re looking at LinkedIn, and you’re going to walk us through exactly what we need to be doing when we’re getting started, or even if we’re experienced LinkedIn users, what we can be doing right now to make our profile more desirable.

Sean Jackson: What, who came up with that?

Mica Gadhia: I did.

Sean Jackson: Dang it. The voice of the customer resonates on the show once again and is forcing me to actually do things.

Yes, that is what Mica said, we’re going to actually spend some time going through what you should be doing on LinkedIn right now. Now, I’m going to preface this, Mica. Okay. Mica? I want you to sit at your computer.

Mica Gadhia: I’m here.

Sean Jackson: I want you to open up LinkedIn. Can you do that?

Mica Gadhia: I’m opening.

Sean Jackson: Okay. Because I want to walk our listeners through what they should be doing on LinkedIn, right now. So, if you’re not at LinkedIn right now, if you’re listening to this in the car, put it on pause. Come back. You’re going to want to listen to this segment, because you need to be at your computer and on LinkedIn.

You remember the days, Mica, when people used to say, “Hey, make sure that your computer is on and that you’re connected to the Internet.”

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: I’m, like, “Who is not connected to the Internet?” I’m like, “Who’s not connected to the Internet, you know, if you’re at your computer?” My connection is pretty much always on when I turn my computer on, so what a difference. God, I’m showing my age now, Mica.

Mica Gadhia: And I’m thinking dot matrix printing. First flash that came in.

Sean Jackson: So, I figure by now all of you listeners are at the computer, hopefully, connected to the Internet and on your LinkedIn page. Let’s get going on this.

So, when you first come in to LinkedIn, what is nice is that once you’ve logged in, it’s going to take you to your home page. If you look underneath the LinkedIn logo in the top left, it says, ‘Home.’ It’s generally your home page. Now, LinkedIn has a done a lot of experiments and is doing a lot to improve their interface, which, quite frankly, they needed to do. Great system, but UI is always important.

I think the new change they made is very helpful, which is in the very first top left-hand side of your screen. Right underneath the menu bar, you should see your lovely face right there, with your name. You see that, Mica?

Mica Gadhia: I do.

The Importance of Regular Status Updates

Sean Jackson: Now, this is going to be important, because LinkedIn has made it very convenient to start to act on the system. I want to walk through this particular one in this episode, for this top little area, where it has your picture, your name, and some options below there, because I think this is going to really help. I’m going to give you some power tips along the way. Let’s go ahead.

The first thing you’ll see, below your mug, are three options: ‘Share an update, ‘Upload a photo,’ and ‘Publish a post.’ Now, those three buttons right there are pretty important. ‘Share an update’ is essentially what you would see below there, what you’re probably seeing from all your connections already, which is the little snippets of information they have in there.

Sometimes, they’re sharing a story on there. They’re putting an update on what’s happening. An interesting stat is that LinkedIn has said that if you share an update once per day for a month, you will actually reach about 60 percent of your unique audience by just posting new updates on your profile.

Mica Gadhia: Oh, is that a power tip?

Sean Jackson: Yeah, I think it’s a power tip.

Mica Gadhia: That’s amazing to know.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, it is, because if you’re sharing an update once a month, obviously you’re not going to reach everybody. So, if you’re sharing once per workday, I think that’s the essential part of it. Because the other stat about LinkedIn is that, when you’re sharing an update, weekends and evenings obviously are not going to have the same type of engagement that during the workday is going to have.

Mica Gadhia: Okay.

Sean Jackson: So, if you’re doing the updates, share something daily during the workday, as it feels natural to you, because it’s going to reach the max amount of audience out there.

However — and this is where I’m going to go into your profile in a second — one of the power tips I want to talk is that, when you are on a website like Copyblogger.com, and you see that little LinkedIn button there? A lot of people click Twitter first, or maybe LinkedIn. But I’m going to share with you some things to help make your life a lot easier by clicking on that LinkedIn button.

What Types of Images Work Well for Your Status Updates

Sean Jackson: But we’ll get there in a second. The second portion is the ‘Upload a photo.’ Now, what is upload a photo? It’s not for cat pictures, Mica. Don’t put any damn cat pictures up there.

Mica Gadhia: Or my children, no?

Sean Jackson: No. What you want to put on there is very simple. When I look at ‘a photo,’ I’m thinking ‘infographic.’ I almost wish that would say ‘Upload an infographic.’ Right? Upload a picture that maybe has some text on there that reinforces a point that you want to make. Use that ‘Upload a photo’ not for your cat or kids, but for things that matter to professionals, which generally is insight into an industry. Right?

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: That’s where that ‘Upload a photo’ is very important, and certainly infographics are a great way to do it.

How to Publish a Post on the Pulse Network

Sean Jackson: The third button over there is ‘Publish a post.’ Now, I want you to go ahead and click on ‘Publish a post,’ because a lot of people are not familiar with it. They’re not comfortable. So, a year ago, LinkedIn introduced this option where you can literally publish a post on LinkedIn as part of the Pulse Network. Pulse is their information news network. Last year, they were doing 50,000 posts a week. That number has significantly increased from 2014.

But when you click on it, you are presented with — what I like — a very clean environment. You’ll notice that is says, ‘Your posts,’ listing any posts you have over there on the left-hand side. And then, on the right-hand side, now we start editing the content.

Now, one of the things that they introduced, which I really like, is the ability to put a picture up there, a 698-by-400-pixel image. Now, as any publisher will tell you, having a good image is essential to capture initial attention, because they tend to resonate with an audience very well to start the conversation with them.

So, just like on Copyblogger, we put images in our posts. Certainly have, in your arsenal, some images that engage the audience with what you want to talk about.

Mica Gadhia: Now, do you have to put an image?

Sean Jackson: No, you don’t have to put an image in, and that’s nice, too. So, don’t let this scare you. If you don’t have an image, don’t put it in.

The next thing, if you scroll down, you’ll see your mug there again, and then you see where it says, ‘Write your headline.’ Now, I can’t tell you — we all know this — headlines are super important.

Mica Gadhia: Yes.

Sean Jackson: If you don’t know how to write a headline, go to My.Copyblogger.com, get a free account on there, and do a search for ‘headlines.’

Mica Gadhia: ‘Magnetic headlines.’ ‘How To Write Magnetic Headlines’ is a free ebook that you can access right now.

Sean Jackson: That’s right.

Mica Gadhia: I refer to that ebook probably twice a month, still.

Sean Jackson: Every writer at Copyblogger has that printed out.

Mica Gadhia: Yeah, we do.

Sean Jackson: It is the essential. So get that headline to be engaging. Follow the rules in ‘Magnetic Headlines,’ available at My.Copyblogger.com.

And once you have that headline, you’ll notice they have that really nice, clean editing environment. I really love this particular portion of their interface, where you can start writing. But, you know what you can also do? You can copy and paste.

Mica Gadhia: I was just going to say, this is something that I would probably want to write in Word, then copy and paste straight into here.

Sean Jackson: Not a question. Or even better, maybe you have something you’ve written already. You know what you can do?

Mica Gadhia: Repurpose.

Sean Jackson: That’s right.

Mica Gadhia: Yeah, I love it. Okay.

Sean Jackson: Copy and paste your old posts. Now, the question comes up, “What about duplicate content, Sean? Is it going to be penalized on the Google engine?” And the answer is, “No.”

Mica Gadhia: Well, that’s good to know.

Sean Jackson: Yes. It is absolutely fine as long as you have published first on your site. If you made the published post on your site first, and it has been indexed by Google, then you can repurpose it right here. And, I think that is an absolutely essential part of content marketer tool kit is to repurpose powerful posts. If you have a post that’s done well on your site, repurpose it here. Maybe put a call to action at the bottom of it, to refer people back over to your site to read more.

I know one experiment that someone is doing, where they’re taking the headlines and ledes from posts that they’ve written on their site and putting them into LinkedIn with a call to action to read more back at the site. It’s worth experimenting, don’t you think, Mica?

Mica Gadhia: Absolutely.

Sean Jackson: You also can, of course, put in images. If you look over on the far right-hand side of that little toolbar they have, you can see that camera icon: ‘Add in images.’ You can even add in video. This, to me, is super exciting. And I’ll tell you why.

Mica Gadhia: This is amazing. I mean, I’m a blogger myself.

Sean Jackson: I know.

Mica Gadhia: Yeah, and I didn’t know this, so I’m so glad to be the voice of the audience, because I’m seeing whole new worlds opening up right now.

Sean Jackson: You can in to your Youtube, to Slideshare, to Vimeo, to Livestream, to images, whatever. Add that iFrame code that they give you. So, if you’ve got it on YouTube already, just go and get that code, and put it on there, because we know video engages the audience exceptionally well. And it’s already part of the topic that you’re writing about.

So think about the power that we have here now. We not only have a very easy editing tool to put images in, to repurpose content we’ve already written, and to create up new things, but we also can put in additional multimedia, like video, all within this very clean environment. And we can save drafts of it, Mica.

Mica Gadhia: Yeah, I’m looking at that.

Sean Jackson: So, that way, if you want to play around with it, it’s not real-time publishing. You save it. Then, when you publish, it then goes off.

Mica Gadhia: I see that on the right-hand corner.

Sean Jackson: It starts the whole conversation through the Pulse Network. The Pulse Network tends to be the place where millions of people go to get their news and information. I remember talking to Jason Miller, and he uses Pulse as his RSS reader now because of aggregating things from different sources to put in there.

So I would say that if you have not had a chance to play with this posting feature, you should do it. If you want to experiment and you’ve got existing content, this is the place to put it in. I can’t recommend this enough, and I think it is definitely worth your experimentation. It’s all right there.

So you’ve got the ‘Share an update,’ which is the little snippets that appear in the feed that’s shown to your connections. ‘Upload a photo’ is basically the idea of an infographic or industry imagery that you want to comment on. Then, ‘Publish a post’ is your content marketing super weapon, if you will, to start putting this information out there to people. Sound good?

Mica Gadhia: Love it.

Sean Jackson: Let’s go back to our homepage once again, and you can click on the little home menu item below the LinkedIn icon. It’ll take you back, and again, you can see the image that we started out with.

But now, something that I want to spend some more time on — and we’re going to pretty much end it after this particular area — is the profile. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff I’m going to cover in later episodes, but right now, I want to talk about improving your profile. Go ahead and click on that line, ‘Improve your profile.’ You got it?

Mica Gadhia: I got it.

The Most Important Elements of Your Profile

Sean Jackson: Okay. Now, they’ve made a lot of changes to this. Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking my profile, and I’m amazed at how they have changed this.

The first thing that you’re going to want to do is, if you can, add a background photo. Again, this a place where you can add a little bit more flair to your particular profile. They give you some by default. You’ll see some default images in there. If you want an image, I would first make sure you get a royalty-free image or an image that you have the rights to.

Mica Gadhia: Yeah. I think that can turn into no joke.

Sean Jackson: Just like on Twitter sometimes, people will put a background image in there that doesn’t necessarily include them. That’s fine, but if you are maybe a solo practitioner, someone who’s selling your services, that background could also be an ad. It could be an ad for your service.

So I think it’s worth thinking about what you want that background photo to be. Click on it, and make sure you have the rights to use that in the venue. If you’ve taken a photo, that’s great. If you’ve got one that you’ve edited, that’s great. Then, add it to your background photo. If you’re selling things, and you want to maybe use it as a form of advertisement for the products or services you have, I don’t think that’s bad either.

Now, below that, it usually will pull up what I call a ‘smart box.’ A smart box is where LinkedIn is trying to predict things or trying to help you through the conversation. This will change depending on how much information you have in your profile already. So, you’ll notice on the right there, it says, ‘Profile strength.’ It basically says, here’s how far you’ve gone in the profile process. Profiles are hugely important. But take a look at the smart box. Take a look at what it’s asking you to do. It generally is a very good guide.

But once you’ve looked at the smart box, I want you to go down and start mousing over your name, or start mousing over that front box right next to where your photo is. See that, Mica?

Mica Gadhia: Yes. It highlights it.

Sean Jackson: It highlights it. It makes it so easy. This is called ‘on-page editing.’ It’s definitely a trend in UI that more and more companies are doing, where you just edit inside of the environment. I do want to point out that beyond the ability to edit what you see there, make sure that right underneath your name you use a solid description. I talk about this, and I write about this — how important a solid description is there. If you are on a life journey, this is not the place to say you’re on a life journey.

Mica Gadhia: “I love taking care of my 60 cats.”

Sean Jackson: Exactly.

Mica Gadhia: I got it. Point taken.

Sean Jackson: Let me tell you why. This is the bozo filter. This is where I determine if you’re a bozo or not. If your description is super long, then I realize that you may not necessarily want to be someone I do business with because you may not know what you actually do. Usually, longer descriptions are for people that aren’t quite sure: “I’m a strategist, evangelist, engagement expert, blah, blah, blah.”

Oh, gosh, really? No. “I’m a business owner.” Very easy, you own a business. Or, “I’m the head of marketing,” or “I am actually a customer support specialist,” or something that makes it easy for me to put you in a little box. I know that no one want to be put in a box, but take the time to fill that out.

More importantly, I want you to go down to where it says, ‘View profile as.’

Mica Gadhia: Okay.

Sean Jackson: There is a lot of power in that little icon right there. First off, you can view your recent activity, which is not really important for right now. You can ask to be recommended. Now, recommendations are hugely important.

Mica Gadhia: So — I’m just going to tell the audience — don’t click on ‘View profile as.’ Hover over the triangle on the right.

Sean Jackson: That’s right. ‘Ask to be recommended.’ I have written about this as well. One of the best ways to get recommendations, which has value, is to ask for them: “You are someone I respect. I would appreciate a recommendation.” Another way to do that is to give a recommendation to somebody, and usually, they will give you one back in return. So recommendations are important. I will discuss their importance later, but if you’re thinking of your profile is a way to show others that you may not know the expertise or value in the relationship with you, ‘Recommendations’ is a good filter.

The other thing that I thought that interesting is that if you are overseas, outside of the United States — maybe you’re in Brazil, like some of our great people that we have working at Copyblogger — maybe you want to see your profile in another language. You can do that as well.

The other thing, of course, is ‘Manage public profile settings,’ the last one. I’m going to skip over ‘Save to PDF.’ This could be a whole show. Because if you are concerned about privacy, then you want to manage your public profile settings. What the public and your connections can see is pretty important. Let’s go ahead on, and I want you to click where it says ‘Contact info.’ You see that right underneath where it says the number of the connections you have?

Mica Gadhia: Yes.

Sean Jackson: Make sure that’s filled out. Quite frankly, I have a work phone number. I’m not going to put my personal cell phone number in my thing. I have my work email in there. I even have my connection on Skype, if you will. Maybe my business address, my mailing address.

This is, quite frankly, the modern business card of today. In fact, I don’t even have a business card — well, I think I do, but I don’t know where it is. My business card is LinkedIn. If you want to know who I am, you come in here and you can get my information by connecting with me on LinkedIn. You’ll also notice that visible to everyone on LinkedIn, you notice where it says ‘Twitter’ over there?

Mica Gadhia: Yes.

How to Connect Your Profile to Twitter

Sean Jackson: Okay, this important. This goes back to what I was talking about earlier. You want to put your Twitter profile on there. You want to connect your LinkedIn account and Twitter account together, and here is why. You know how I was talking about those LinkedIn buttons that you see on sites everywhere?

Mica Gadhia: Yes.

Sean Jackson: I always click on the LinkedIn button first, because when I go to share on LinkedIn, it gives me the option of concurrently sharing on Twitter. So I can get one share button to two different social media sites. Makes sense?

Mica Gadhia: Yes.

Sean Jackson: So by connecting your Twitter account with your LinkedIn account, now when you click that LinkedIn button, you also can Tweet it out at the same time period.

Mica Gadhia: That’s fabulous.

Sean Jackson: See?

Mica Gadhia: Yep.

Sean Jackson: But then I want to go one step further. You’ll see below there, they’ll have the websites that you have — again, I always encourage you to put websites on there — it has that little greyed-out LinkedIn logo that says, https://LinkedIn.com/?

Mica Gadhia: Yes.

Sean Jackson: That is the URL to your profile. That’s what the public sees. Now, Mica, what I want you to do, is I want you to take that URL, and I want you to go to Twitter, and in Twitter, when it asks for the URL, you know how you can put a URL in Twitter?

Mica Gadhia: Correct.

Sean Jackson: Put that as the URL for your Twitter account. Now think about this for a second. You can see this at my profile on Twitter, @SeanThinks. If I really want to start engaging with somebody and they’re following me on Twitter, let’s say, do I really want to send them off to my website, or do I want to send them off to my profile? Quite frankly, the profile has a lot more juicy information about me and the things that I’m interesting in and the things that I work on.

By connecting your LinkedIn account to Twitter, you can not only share things, but if you go into your Twitter account, and put a URL back to your profile, now if I run into you on Twitter and I click the link, I can see a lot more about who you are as a person.

Mica Gadhia: Immediately.

Sean Jackson: Another power tip right there. So, let’s go ahead and continue on down, because I do think there is so much in this particular capability for your profile. I can’t stress enough how important the profile is, having a quality picture in there, a big picture, a picture where I can see your face.

Also, when you continue on down, you’ll see that LinkedIn tries to help you fill in the rest of your profile. They’ll ask you, “Hey, do you know languages? Do you have any volunteer experience?” etc. There’s a lot that you can do in that.

But also, when you come in and you look at the summary — and I always put the summary right after the basic details on my contact info. You’ll notice where, on ‘Summary,’ on the far right-hand side, you see that little up and down arrow? You can drag these boxes around.

This is another benefit. I love the fact that I can control what people see and the order that they see. Not only can I drag my summary up there, but if I go ahead and click on the actually summary text, I can edit it. It’s very easy to edit the text. Now, when it comes to your summary, one of the things that I always recommend is to use your name, not ‘me’ or ‘I.’

So, it’s not, “I went to Boston University,” it’s “Sean Jackson went to Boston University.” The reason is that there is an SEO benefit to your profile. Google and Bing and the other search engines will crawl these public pages, and if the name is in the body or in the summary area right here, it reinforces that “Maybe this is Sean Jackson,” or “Maybe this is your name.” That way, when people are searching for you on the search engine, they’re coming to your LinkedIn profile, which you control.

Mica Gadhia: Right. It has everything they need.

Sean Jackson: That’s right. Another little trick that I like to do, is, when you are next to the word ‘Summary’ up there — you see that, where it says ‘Summary’ up there — and you’ll see a little box with a plus sign in it. You see that there?

Mica Gadhia: Yep. Yeah.

Sean Jackson: If you click on that box, what you can do is you can add to your summary.

Mica Gadhia: Oh, I’m seeing, ‘Add media.’

Sean Jackson: That right.

Mica Gadhia: Wow. Again, you can add videos, the photos.

Sean Jackson: SlideShare presentations. I give a lot of presentations. I tend to add them to it. You can add media to your profile so that underneath your summary is additional content that you have created about who you are or the services you provide or information about your industry.

Think about it — if I want to be known as an authority, we all know the importance of being an authority, you’re going to want your summary to not only include your name and why you do the things you do, but also to share other media you have been engaged with: SlideShare, which is owned by LinkedIn, videos, images, et cetera. Make sense?

Mica Gadhia: Right. It takes them to all of your hotspots and all of the places that you hang out with your content.

Sean Jackson: That’s right.

Mica Gadhia: Depending on what they want to see and what is their interest in you, they can go right there.

Sean Jackson: That’s right.

Mica Gadhia: There’s a lot more you can do on your profile, and again, if you have not spent time on your profile, you should be doing this. You should be going in. I personally recommend, a good photo, your name, a description of what you do.

Then, put your summary, which has your name reinforced in there, and put it up underneath your contact information. Then, link to any slides that you have, any media that you have, so that again, as a new person coming to take a look at who you are, I can not only see what you do, but I can see why you do it and the things that you’ve done towards it.

But I want to do one final thing before we close off this particular episode. Mica, I want you to look on the right-hand side of your screen, and you’re going to notice on the right-hand column at the bottom, it says ‘Notify your network.’ Do you see that?

Sean Jackson: I do. Mine says ‘Yes.’

Mica Gadhia: That’s right. When you change your summary, it does notify all of your connections that you have updated your profile. That’s another way to send out an automated update to your entire connection list, by letting them know, “Hey, I’ve just added in a new slide presentation I gave,” or “I’ve changed my summary,” or “I’ve got new experiences that you may not know about.” And it’s done automatically.

Sean Jackson: Let me ask you: should we turn that off and then update our summary, and then turn it back on while we’re working on our summary?

Mica Gadhia: No.

Sean Jackson: No. Okay.

Mica Gadhia: It realizes that you’re editing things. Again, it’s a notification that “Sean changed his summary” or “Sean added a slide.” So, I would not be doing that while you are editing. I would keep it on, because the moment you navigate away from this page is the event that’s going to trigger the network update.

Sean Jackson: Right, right.

Mica Gadhia: So, go ahead. Again, I will say LinkedIn has done a great job of being both predictive — things that you need to know, helping you — but also providing some automation to updating your network on things that you have changed to your profile.

If you have not spent time on your profile, if you have not really taken the time to improve your summary, to improve your description, to add in those other media assets, to continue to evolve out the schools that you went to, the languages that you know, the experiences that you have, then you’re not really getting the full value of LinkedIn. More importantly, it’s going to limit some of the things that you’re going to want to use in your profile in the future as we go through this show.

So, Mica, is that helpful to you?

Sean Jackson: I love it. I have to tell you, for me, I’d like to listen to this show about three or four more times, and I feel like I’ll get something new from it each time. This is amazing information. Thank you, Sean.

Mica Gadhia: Thank you, Mica. For everyone else, I would highly recommend to not only listen to the show, but also to get your phone out, to send a text message to 41411 with the keyword ‘mylink,’ all one word. Don’t let it auto-correct. Hit ‘send.’ Subscribe to our email. Subscribe to our text messaging service.

You’re going to get access to that group that we have started with all sorts of juicy information and discussions going on about how to improve your experience on LinkedIn. With that, we have concluded another episode. Boy, this is getting easier, don’t you think, Mica?

Sean Jackson: I do. More interesting and more exciting.

Mica Gadhia: I told somebody, “I want to hurry up and get through all these episodes so I can stop sucking so much.”

Sean Jackson: Yeah, I’m with you. We’re doing the best that we can. We’re just going to keep getting better.

Mica Gadhia: I think so. You know what’s going to make us better is when our audience starts participating in our discussion group. Then, the show becomes even more tailored for you guys, so take the time, help Mica and I out so that we’re a little bit better at this by being more responsive to you.

Sean Jackson: No pressure. Help us.

Mica Gadhia: No pressure. Most importantly, have a great day, everyone. Thank you again.

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