Maja Voje is a growth hacking expert and LinkedIn specialist, and that’s why I asked her to write exclusively for my blog about how small business owners can use LinkedIn for themselves and their business.
LinkedIn is a professional network primarily designed for networking and business connections. In case you didn’t know, LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, has recently undergone significant changes and aims to become the largest space for job searching by 2020.
According to Maja Voje, the two best ways to permanently secure a strong LinkedIn profile are:
- LinkedIn works like Google. It indexes keywords. Have you thought about which keywords you want people to find you by? This is called LEO – LinkedIn engine optimization.
- Fill in as many fields as possible and complete your profile. LinkedIn’s algorithm ranks (highlights) profiles higher in search results that have more views and are more complete.
For most people, LinkedIn is one of the first three results on Google: Think about what you want to communicate to your clients?
It’s no surprise that clients, business partners, future employees, and other key stakeholders of your company search for you on Google. Most of them sooner or later end up on a LinkedIn profile. Entrepreneurs, marketers, and salespeople should not be using LinkedIn the same way as people looking for a job. Maja says that when people ask her to help them optimize their LinkedIn profile, people care very little about who you are – they’ll perk up much more if you tell them what you can do for them. When writing content for your LinkedIn profile, keep in mind that you are communicating to the reader which of their business problems you solve.
Concrete examples of how to present yourself on LinkedIn:
Maja’s friend from Belgium with a Growth hacking agency – www.linkedin.com/in/paristhomasbel
Dutch data science expert – www.linkedin.com/in/ronald-van-loon-5411a
Tip: If you’re not sure what to write, Maja recommends the LinkedIn headline generator tool.
Since your headline, the first two lines of your summary, and your most recent work experience are the most visible elements in the new LinkedIn interface, it’s only appropriate to condense the key information into these mentioned areas. Two really simple methods to spark interest are to incorporate relevant numbers into your text that demonstrate you’re good at your job (growth, revenue, number of markets, etc.) and well-known elements such as famous brands (partners, suppliers, clients). Maja recommends reading the article she wrote on her LinkedIn.
Quick optimization tips: The Žan Nekrep example
Let’s look at colleague Žan’s LinkedIn profile:
At first glance, I would give him the following recommendations:
You can change your profile link so that it no longer contains numbers and letters, but only your name. You can read more about this HERE. Žan should create a cover photo (dimensions 1535 x 768 px) for LinkedIn, showing happy cat/dog owners or a beautiful annual willow garden. This can be done on Free LinkedIn backgrounds or he can create his own graphic in Canva.
Tamara from Infinum has done this very well, as you can see HERE:
Under the Headline, Žan should rather write how he helps his clients. He should add a summary.
In the new LinkedIn interface, 6 recent posts are displayed under activity (Žan’s activity). If Žan were to write a LinkedIn article, he would have only three recent posts and a prominently featured article that drives traffic in the long run. Žan should add text and multimedia to his most recent position (e.g. links to pages), which is the only one automatically displayed. He can copy from mine, which is visible at www.linkedin.com/in/majavoje/ under Your Articles & Activity and Experience:
It would be much better if he links these profiles to official pages. If he doesn’t have them yet, they are easy to create. Instructions can be found here: Creating a LinkedIn Company Page. It is important that all employees link to the same company page. This way, the company page can also develop as a separate social network.
Žan’s email is not obvious enough. If you want to contact people on LinkedIn for new business opportunities, it is good practice to place your website and email in a visible location. I had to find Žan’s email using the Prophet tool (visible in the photo below, top right):
Increase your reach and relevance on LinkedIn
What Maja Voje considers important:
- Write quality articles, participate in groups relevant to your industry, and post at least two links/images/news items per week. By being active on LinkedIn, your number of views grows simply because people see you, and LinkedIn also ranks active profiles higher in search results. The practice that has worked best for Maja Voje is publishing a LinkedIn article. She does this a few times a year, only for the highest quality content. Others achieve similar results, for example Frugi by publishing slides on SlideShare. Maja received 12 inquiries for consulting projects from the article she wrote, which is visible HERE. The post was not sponsored on LinkedIn. All the outreach came from social media channels and due to the fact that the topic is truly interesting and was well indexed on Google. You can see more in the photo below:
- You can access analytics very easily. It now appears on the LinkedIn homepage (your news feed). Simply click on the number you want to analyze and see who has viewed your profile and what the reach of your posts has been.
Adding people who have already viewed your profile usually yields good results (visible in the photo below), especially if you accompany the invitation with a friendly greeting.
You can also get very interesting suggestions for new contacts by searching for people through the search engine (search) and filtering them by the criteria on the right, as shown in the photo below:
Accept the fact that LinkedIn is very slow. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, where posts you just viewed will never be found again in your timeline once you refresh the browser, LinkedIn is truly a slow medium. Likes, comments, and impressions roll in throughout the entire week. In fact, posts can have multi-week life cycles, which Maja finds fascinating. However, this by no means suggests that you cannot track performance on LinkedIn. Try generating links with Bitly and always have a realistic picture of how much traffic you have received.
Bonus Materials instead of a farewell paragraph: Since Maja doesn’t like goodbyes, at the end of the article she gifts you two great resources that will help you achieve a phenomenal LinkedIn profile and new business opportunities:
- A Trello To-Do list that will help you optimize your profile
- How to get new email contacts on LinkedIn? Download the Chrome extensions Email Hunter and Prophet.
Maja also has her own website, visible at www.majavoje.com/ and of course a LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com/in/majavoje
Maja, on behalf of the readers, I would like to thank you for the great content and I recommend that you also check out the 100 growth hacking tools that Maja recommended at https://growth-hacking.zeef.com/majavoje
