At Fusion Digital, we are often asked by our clients for help on how we can position their LinkedIn profile to drive more meaningful, better quality connections and engagements.
So, we thought we would outline our thought processes here on how we prepare someone’s profile for a LinkedIn campaign.
Your LinkedIn profile:
Your profile is the hub of your LinkedIn presence. It reflects your business brand, and your personal brand. It needs to be tailored according to the goal of your LinkedIn engagement. So, the first thing we need to establish is:
What is the goal for your LinkedIn activity?
For Technology Blueprint, the overall goal might be sales and greater investor awareness. But each individual will have a different goal that their personal profile is looking to achieve, and this will be based on their own role within the company, the things they might feel interested to post about, and who they will be reaching out to.
So, each individual firstly will need to understand:
Who will this person be reaching out to?
Once we have this defined, we can think about their profile in this context. We need to think:
What will my target audience be interested or impressed with? What will make them want to connect with me?
Now we can start to think about each element of the profile in this light.
- Photo: Does my photo reflect my personality and the personal brand I want to create? Think of the target audience. What will their first impression be? Literally the first 5 seconds. If it’s not good enough, get a new photo.
- Header Image: Does the header image look interesting and encourage people to contact me? Once people have glanced at your photo, their eye will be drawn to the header image.
- Name: It may sound strange, but your name is part of your brand. Consider the following. Is “Vanisha Narayan” or “Vanisha Narayan FCCA” the better first impression? The latter is far more formal but might suit certain audiences that you might be trying to reach out to.
- Headline: This is key. It needs to convey seniority, as more people connect to senior people. So, Managing Director is good, CTO is good. Sales Administrator is bad. But as well as your role, this section should be used to convey that you know things that would be interesting to your target audience.If, for example, I was going to try to reach people new to property investment, I might say “Buy your first property with no money down: I will show you how.”. If I were a marketer specialising in lead generation for accountants, I might choose “Building automated lead gen systems for Accountants”. It has to immediately resonate with the audience we established earlier.
- Summary: This is not a summary of you. This is used as your landing page. It should have a strong message for the audience we defined earlier. Typical structure would follow the AIDA principle: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Nearly all summaries I see have no call to action. You should tell your audience what they should do.
- Experience: Less important than the sections above, but you should review what you have written, considering whether your experience would position you as an expert to your audience.
- Education: As above – Expert?
- Recommendations: Are important. Try to have at least 5 recent recommendations written, that again extol your virtues that are likely to impress your target audience.
- Media: You can upload pdfs or videos, so there might be some relevant content that you have that you could highlight to your audience here?
Finally, people do check out your activity, so it is worth taking the time to do some posts, presenting ideas that your audience would find interesting, and commenting on current industry news.
And that’s it. Hopefully, that helps get people thinking critically about their profiles.
If there are any questions that you have from this, please send them over! >
