How to show up on LinkedIn

This week, let's start looking at how you show up on LinkedIn.

The core aspects to think about are your Profile, your Company Page and your activity while you are on the platform. This week we will start to look at the Personal Profile.

Your LinkedIn Personal Profile

Your LinkedIn Personal Profile represents you as your professional self. Imagine we are off to the "national insert your industry conference" this week. How will you present yourself?

What will you wear? What will you bring with you? What do you want others to think about when they meet you?

Maybe you aren't at the stage of national conferences. Maybe you are starting out and considering attending your local council networking morning.

Everyone's LinkedIn is different.

Attending a national conference vs a local networking morning - are you showing up to a network of thousands on LinkedIn or just getting started with 250 connections?

The way you show up and present yourself matters just as much as when you are starting out, as when you have been posting and engaging on here for years.

Starting Out

Imagine yourself in a local coffee shop with 10-15 other local business owners. Everyone is friendly, standing around with a freshly brewed coffee and having conversations about how the economy is doing. You sit next to someone and comment on how you juggled getting out of the house in the morning with the kids going to school and walking your dog.

Further On

You are in the national conference hall. There are thousands of other people there. But guess what. You are still one person, and you still connect to other people through conversation and you still had to get the kids to school and the dog walked. And the people are still friendly.

In both of these occasions, you show up representing your business and your brand. When you walk in the door, someone will make a decision on whether or not to engage with you (or if you look like someone they want to do business with) straight away. In LinkedIn terms, this is when someone looks at your profile.

It may not be fair, but as humans, we do make judgements on first impressions.

Having a fully optmised LinkedIn profile that reflects you as you are now in business, means you are giving yourself the best chance of being found, getting connections and building relationships.

I will always remember back when I was hosting She Means Business networking events for Facebook in Belfast and only two people showed up at my networking morning. Instead of being disappointed that only two people had showed (I was doing this voluntarily for FB in the hopes of driving my business forward) I made the most of it. Guess what. Out of that meeting, I landed my first Belfast speaking gig for another organisation and met one of my local biz besties. Always make the most of connections when you can!

How do people find you on LinkedIn

Before we get to the event though, how do people actually find you on LinkedIn? How someone comes across you could be from several ways.

Maybe someone has introduced you. Someone else has tagged you in a post. You spoke at an event/on a podcast. You met someone recently at a different event. All of these things have led people to look at my profile this week.

These are all passive ways of people finding you. The other way of course, is that you start to reach out and connect with people. Savvy LinkedIn users will go straight to your profile for a quick run-through before deciding if they will connect with you.

You want your profile to be ready for when people start to look at it. Does it represent you and your business?

Does your Profile reflect you and your business?

Take a moment and look at your own profile. It is a large undertaking!

The Experience section alone involves text, media, dates, skills and links.

I believe the key areas to check are:

? Your Introductory Card - this is the bit at the top that shows us who you are, your name, your headline and gives us your Contact Info.

? Your About Summary - what can you tell us about your products and services and how you can help us? Really take time over this section. Think of how it looks. Use formatting (white space is really important here). Make bullet points with little emojis if that fits your brand. Add in a call to action at the end - whether that is to connect with you, set up a call or visit your website - you choose.

? Your Featured Section - this is where I need a little more work to make it look as fabulous and colour coordinated as Sarah Burgess - something we both picked up from Richard van der Blom at Uplift Live ??

Add in the key links you want people to see.

This could be a link to a speaker reel, your website, a YouTube channel. In Sarah's example below, all three of the key spaces are taken up with how different clients can work with her. Smart move. Do what works for you and change it up regularly if you are not getting the results you want.

When was the last time you had a good look at your LinkedIn Personal Profile? Does it fairly represent you?

If you showed up at an event in-person and we had a look at your profile, would it tell us all the things you want us to know about your work and how you can help us? If not, take a little time out and give it a polish. If you need help, here are different resources, free and paid ??

FREE - you can work your way through our free playlist of 40 short tutorials on the LinkedIn Personal Profile

Paid Mini Course - https://leveluplinkedin.teachable.com/p/linkedinprofiles ($49)

PAID - work with Louise - LinkedIn VIP Session

Next week, let's dive a little further into how you can make sure you are leveraging your personal profile with video.