Hints & Tips

LinkedIn Tip: How to Save Articles to Read Later

Laptop

You know what it’s like when you are browsing through your LinkedIn Home Feed and you see a really interesting article – but you just don’t have the time to read it?  You may think to yourself  “I must remember to find that article later” and then when you come to find it, it is lost amongst the noise of LinkedIn.

Did you know that you can save articles for reading at a later date?

This feature has been around for some time and yet, until recently, you could only find your saved articles in the mobile app.

Now you have the facility to find your articles in the desktop platform too. Well done LinkedIn for making this useful feature available to folks who want to use their computer to read the articles. Not everyone wants to read long articles on their mobiles and I am personally delighted this feature is now available in the desktop version too.

How to Save Articles and Locate Them at a Later Time

Watch this 3 minute video to see how simple it is to save articles and to find them at a later time.

 

LinkedIn: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

How well do you know LinkedIn?

There are many levels of LinkedIn training you can undertake: some people just want to build connections and relationships, while others intend to use LinkedIn as a key part of their marketing strategy.

Whichever the case, there are essential skills that everyone needs to learn, such as how to update your profile. This may sound simple, but as one MD found out, mistakes can still happen – and are not best made in front of your entire professional network.

Here’s how the story goes…

As the managing director of an established IT company, Lisa had built up a sizeable LinkedIn network, including: colleagues, vendors, clients, business associates and leads. The business was booming: she was in the process of setting up a subsidiary company, while reassuring clients, associates and prospective clients that the existing business would remain her primary focus.

Excited for the launch of the new business, Lisa booked some LinkedIn training for her marketing team, so they could start raising awareness of the new venture. They would need to update their profiles to reflect both businesses, which was a core part of the initial LinkedIn training.

Creating a Professional Image

A paragraph of universal wording was agreed for the ‘Experience’ section of all personal profiles within the company, so a consistent message would be created regarding the developing business. Lisa attended the training along with her marketing team, but when it came to actually updating the profiles, she said she had ‘other things to do’ and ‘knew how to do this anyway’.

On went the training, and by the end of the session the marketing team felt confident in using LinkedIn to promote the business, the new Company Page had been created and they were proud of their smart new personal profiles! The trainer left, happy with the results and off to prepare for her next client.

Where’s the Panic Button?

Very early the following morning, the LinkedIn trainer had 3 missed calls with voicemails from Lisa to her mobile – all with an air of distress and urgency. It transpired that instead of adding her new business venture to her profile, Lisa had replaced any mention of her existing business with the new company – she had effectively shut down her own business overnight.

In amongst the many messages of surprise, and hesitant congratulations, Lisa received a number of private messages from her clients and prospects: demanding answers and raising concerns. Her calls and messages to the trainer were cries for help – she didn’t know what to do, or how to explain her rather public mistake.

Damage Limitation

What followed, were many hours (at a cost) spent rectifying the profile mistake and offering apologies and reassurance to her valuable clients and prospects. It was a simple error.  The remedy was to use the profile ‘Experience’ section to add the new business; then rearrange the order so the existing business would appear on top, as her primary focus.

Sharing profile edits swtichThis knowledge was built-in to the LinkedIn training schedule, just after Lisa left to attend to other things. So too, was the advice that when making any major changes to your profile you should ALWAYS switch off ‘Sharing profile edit’ – so you have the chance to review and move things around before your network are notified of the change.

To find this, go to Settings ➡️ Privacy ➡️ How others see your LinkedIn activity ➡️ Sharing profile edits ➡️ Switch to No

The Moral of the Story: You don’t know what you don’t know

If you are aware that training is needed, then book a trainer you trust to teach you and set aside the time to learn, even if you think you know it already. Like other platforms, LinkedIn regularly adds new features and updates existing ones, so a professional trainer will have the expertise to guide you through these.

Lisa is now happily running both businesses and has not lost any clients or prospects fortunately. However, following step-by-step instruction for something so important could have avoided unnecessary time and money spent, and removed the risk of damaging her business reputation.

 

💡 For more information on using LinkedIn to grow your business, or to book a targeted training session, please contact Linda for a no obligation conversation.

 

My Interview on The Business Podcast

In conversation with Linda Huckle

I was delighted to be invited to be interviewed by Debra Levitt, from Bridge Consultants, in her Podcast series Bridging Gaps – The Business Podcast.

In my conversation with Debra, we discussed lots of subjects, including my transition from a corporate environment to business owner and LinkedIn trainer. We also talked about how I found The Athena Network and why I took the decision to invest as a franchisee and become a Regional Director with The Athena Network.

I share some LinkedIn tips, networking tips, some personal challenges, and my motivation for doing what I’m doing. Please listen in – I get the giggles half way through when what I want to say just escapes me! So please forgive that part.

I hope this gives you an insight into me and my businesses.

Listen in to In Conversation with Linda Huckle

Find out more about Bridging Gaps – The Business Podcast

 

 

How to Align Your Personal LinkedIn Profile to your Company Page

One of the things I see frequently when helping people to use LinkedIn for Business is that they have set up a Company Page in LinkedIn but haven’t linked their Personal Professional Profile to it.

💡Here is how to do it – once your Company Page has been set up, it honestly takes a few seconds to link your Personal Professional Profile to it!

  1. In Your Personal Professional Profile, scroll down to your Experience section
  2. Make sure you have added your role in the business as an Experience – if you haven’t then you’ll need to Add an Experience – then follow from step 4 below
  3. Click the Edit button (the pencil button at the right) which opens the Editing window
  4. Click into the Company field
  5. Delete anything that is already in the Company field (even if it is the Company name)
  6. Type in the name of the Company Page (as this is what you are aligning to) – as you do so, you will see some different options appear.
  7. When your own Company Page is visible, click to select it and then Save

💡 Be careful not to select the wrong Company Page – I’ve seen several people select what looks like their Company Page as the name may be similar.

💡 When you set up your Company Page, I strongly advise you to add your logo to it, so that when you select the page in step 7 above, it will be easily identifiable.

Watch the short video to see the above steps demonstrated.


 

 

Make It Easy For People To Follow Your Company Page

One of the most common comments I hear when training people to use LinkedIn for business is that they are not attracting Followers on their Company Page. Usually it is because people fall into the trap of publishing their Company Page and then are not proactive in telling people it exists.

An easy way to do this is to add a Follow button to your website. LinkedIn provide a free Follow button plugin, which can be added to any page of your website.  You can either do this yourself or send the code to your web developer. You will need to be logged into LinkedIn to retrieve the code.

When the code is added and published on your website, this is what it will look like:


You can choose to show the number of followers horizontally, or choose not to show the number of followers at all. If you have less than 50 followers, this may be the better option. It shouldn’t be a numbers game however, we are naturally attracted to businesses who already have a positive presence, so if you are building your followers, leave the follower count out until you reach a number you are happy to publish.

To retrieve your own Follow button, go to the following link:

Add a Follow button

This is just one of the ways in which you can attract followers to your Company Page. If you would like to find out more about building a Follower Strategy for your Company Page, please Schedule a Call with Linda

Follow my Company Page

For more tips, advice, short ‘How To’ videos and LinkedIn news, please follow my Company Page – Linda Huckle Training.


Re-order Your Skills and Endorsements section

Pinning your top 3 Skills in LinkedIn

LinkedIn have made it a little bit easier to re-order your Skills and Endorsements section in your Personal Profile.

There is now the ‘Pin Skills to Top’ feature which enables you to pin your top 3 skills so they are prioritised over all your other skills, to encourage other LinkedIn users to endorse you for those top 3.

Here is how:

  • In your LinkedIn Profile, scroll down to your Skills and Endorsements section
  • Click or tap the pencil icon on the right to Edit
  • Once there, you’ll see your top 3 skills with the Pin button on the left in bold
  • To remove a skill from your top 3, just click or tap the Pin button. Don’t worry, you will not be deleting the skill, purely moving it out of the top 3
  • To add a skill to your top 3, scroll down the list of skills, identify which one you want to pin to the top and click/tap the Pin button on the left
  • Then click/tap the SAVE button

Watch this very short video to see the feature in action:

 

 

 

New LinkedIn Profile Design coming to your profile soon

LinkedIn continue to update its user interface – or in plain language – the layout of your profile.  After a major redesign in the late summer of 2017, another is on it’s way and being rolled out gradually to users.  It is still in the very early stages of roll-out and as soon as it reaches my profile, I will be updating this article with further information and guidance.

The new design is only for desktop (your PC or Mac), and the mobile/tablet design will remain unchanged for now. This in itself creates a few challenges, mainly for the cover image on your personal profile as it will need to accommodate your profile photo both centrally for the mobile app and left aligned for the new design for your desktop.

Key Changes

I don’t yet have the new design on my own profile however, from the screenshots I’ve seen shared on LinkedIn,  these are the key changes:

  • The Profile Photo which is currently centrally placed will be left aligned and slightly larger in size
  • The Headline and Location will also be left aligned and will sit directly beneath the Profile Photo
  • Contact Details section will move from the right of the profile and become an integral part of the top section. These details will sit directly beneath the Cover Image on the right.  This is a positive move as it means the reader will be able to see how to contact you without moving to a different section of your profile
  • There will be more text of the Summary section visible, currently you only see two lines before you have to click the Show more to expand the section
  • Media items (photos, video, links) currently located at the bottom of the Summary section will also be visible before expanding the Summary as you currently have to do

 

From what I’ve seen, the new user interface looks much cleaner and provides more information in the top section than we currently have. I am pleased to see that Contact details have been brought into the top section too and that there is more of the Summary available to read.  The new design will however affect the Cover Image…

Cover Image

Like many people, I have a Cover Image that is designed to fit well with the location of my Profile Photo. As the Profile Photo will soon be left aligned and not placed centrally as it is currently, I will need to redesign my Cover Image as it won’t work with the new user interface.

Remember though that the Mobile/Tablet versions of LinkedIn are not changing (yet). So I must make sure that my Cover Image is compatible with both designs.

If you are working with a Graphic Designer to design your own Cover Image, please make sure they are aware of the imminent changes and design your Cover Image to suit both desktop and mobile versions of LinkedIn.

Keep up to date with changes in LinkedIn

It seems to be almost every week that new features and changes are implemented in LinkedIn.  To keep up to date with the new features, and see relevant articles, tips and short videos, please Follow Linda Huckle Training on LinkedIn

 

 

 

 

 

 

Selling Second Hand Cars on LinkedIn?

This morning, I saw in LinkedIn a post advertising a second hand car for sale. It wasn’t a post from a dealer, just from an individual who clearly wanted to sell his car.

LinkedIn is a professional network, it is not a buying and selling advertising space.  There are other forums for that.

My call to action is….

Please don’t use LinkedIn Posts to advertise your second hand car, or any other items you want to sell.

Car Dealers

If you are a car dealer, then there are ways you can use LinkedIn – not to sell cars, but to build relationships with your ideal clients, to develop trust by sharing content of value with your audience.

  • Be the person who gives, not takes.
  • Be an authority – share valuable advice and information
  • Be mindful of etiquette – take the conversation off-line if the other person is truly interested.

Not sure how to use LinkedIn and add value? Ask me how – I’m happy to help.

Beat the Algorithm

There have been a number of changes in LinkedIn during 2017, however, one hasn’t been as visible as the rest.  This is the algorithm – the bit of code – that helps your posts and activity to be posted to your connections Home feed.

What does this mean to you?

Previously, LinkedIn trainers (me included!) emphasised the importance of sharing external links to content on your website, therefore driving traffic across to your website.  LinkedIn want to keep as much activity within LinkedIn as possible and so quietly changed the algorithm so that updates linking to content within LinkedIn have greater priority to links to external URL’s (websites, Facebook pages etc).

This meant that updates containing external links were not as visible on your connections Home feed as they were previously.  It didn’t take long for LinkedIn regular users and trainers to realise what had happened and so here are a couple of ways in which you can beat the algorithm:

Beat the algorithm

  1. When posting an update, don’t add the link to your external URL in the update itself. Just write the text and post. Then add the link to the URL in the comments.  For some reason, this seems to miss the algorithm sequence.
  2. Beat the LinkedIn algorithmAnother technique is to add the link as you would do usually and then, when the preview of the website you are linking to appears in your update, click the little X in the top right of the preview to delete it, retaining the actual URL link in the text. Once again, this appears to bypass the algorithm.

 

It is surely only a matter of time before the algorithm changes again so watch this space for updates.

People Buy People

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with 550 million users globally (statistics quoted by LinkedIn). For small businesses, it is a valuable resource for networking, connecting, sharing information, being more visible and engaging with your clients and prospects.

Behind every LinkedIn profile, there is a person – and people buy people. It is this personal approach to business that I bring to my LinkedIn training and coaching services. Keeping it personal, and relevant to your unique needs, means that the training you receive is unique to you and your business.

  • Does your LinkedIn Profile relay the best possible image of you and your business?
  • Would you like to utilise LinkedIn as a business tool?
  • Would you like to create engaging updates and articles?
  • Do you know how to build positive relationships through your LinkedIn activity?
  • Would you like to attract new business?
  • Would you like to create a content strategy that works for you?
  • What about images? Do you know where to find them and how to use them in LinkedIn?
  • Would you like to portray consistency of message, brand and ethos across your company in LinkedIn?
  • Would you like to rise above the LinkedIn ‘noise’ and connect with, engage with and build positive relationships with the right people?

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