Category: Linkedin

Top 15 LinkedIn Mistakes That Will Make You Look Unprofessional in 2021

When it comes to LinkedIn, lots of people tell you what you should be doing, but what about what you shouldn’t be doing?

LinkedIn is not just the place to find the right people but also to be found. Therefore, you need a LinkedIn profile that not only helps you get found but also will entice people to connect with you once they view your profile.

“Active participation on LinkedIn is the best way to say, ‘Look at me!’ without saying ‘Look at me!”

                                                                                                 – Bobby Darnell, Principal of Construction Market Consultants

I see many people making fundamental LinkedIn profile mistakes on their LinkedIn that hugely impact their professional networking on the platform. If you’re spending your precious time putting together a LinkedIn profile, I assume you really want to maximize your opportunities of being connected with the right people on LinkedIn, right?

Keeping that in mind, I’ve listed down some of the specific LinkedIn mistakes which can easily be avoided, so that you can get the most out of LinkedIn.

1. Having an Incomplete LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn offers a set of comprehensive sections that all provide you with the opportunity to showcase your expertise, skills, accomplishments, interests and current links to your business sites.

If you keep those sections incomplete or skimpy, it can send a negative message about your brand credibility. It can create a bad impression on your personality that you just don’t care, or you don’t follow through and finish things. That’s why I put this point at the top of my LinkedIn mistakes list.

Even though if you don’t need to fill out all the sections, makesure to complete the main sections to give a well-rounded profile view of your LinkedIn headline, summary, post activities, experience, skills, endorsements, education and other additional information.

2. Having an Inappropriate Headshot

The most primary thing people will first notice is your LinkedIn profile picture (Headshot). You know what? Within seven seconds a person will make several judgments about who you are which means you have only a few seconds to make a good first impression. And that is well-apt for your LinkedIn profile picture as well. So, now you understood why keeping an inappropriate headshot is one of the major LinkedIn mistakes, right?

Remember, an unprofessional or inappropriate profile picture is an immediate perception killer and a connection killer. As LinkedIn is a professional networking site with a bunch of professional and academic people, makesure your profile picture portrays the image that you want to be aligned with.

For example, consider the following two images as two LinkedIn profiles. One person, you might want to party with. But which person would you hire as an employee or consultant, and entrust with your most important business concerns? Hope, now you got your answer!

3. Failing to Personalize Your Profile URL

LinkedIn allows you to personalize your LinkedIn URL by including your name, instead of gibberish numbers.

If you want to promote your LinkedIn profile in your community, the best way to do that is with a customized profile URL that reflects your name or business name rather than the default string of numbers that are assigned to your LinkedIn account when you join LinkedIn. This is one of the main LinkedIn mistakes that may make People wonder about your seriousness as you don’t take the few minutes to set up a personalized profile URL.

To personalize your LinkedIn profile URL, just follow these below steps:

1) Hover your mouse over the Profile link in the top navigation bar and then click the Edit Profile option.

2) Below your profile picture, you can see a URL that starts with linkedin.com/in/ Click the Edit link option next to the URL.

3) Scroll down until you see Your Public Profile URL header along the right side of the screen.

4) Click the Customize Your Public Profile URL link. Then enter your own custom URL (start from 5 to 30 characters) in the text box. Mostly, people use a combination of their first and last names or their business name. You can enter letters and numbers only, cannot use spaces, symbols, or any other special characters.

5) Click the blue Set Custom URL button to save your entry and change your LinkedIn profile URL. After this point, your old URL is no longer functional, so make sure you update any references that include your LinkedIn URL.

4. Providing Inaccurate Career Information

This point shouldn’t need to be said but, unfortunately, it does. Never lie or fabricate your career information in your LinkedIn profile experience section. Jenifer DeLoach, who supervises background checks for corporate clients at Kroll Inc stated that “about 20% of job seekers and employees undergoing background checks by their companies are found to have exaggerated their educational credentials. Those seeking jobs usually get turned down when discrepancies appear.”

Never pad your resume. If you didn’t do something then don’t post about it. If you kind of did something don’t inflate to make it sound better. Trust me guys, it’s one of the huge LinkedIn mistakes that will make you regret it forever. Because somebody will eventually find out the truth and when they do, your career in that industry will essentially be over.

Therefore, it’s always best, to tell the truth about whatever you have done and accomplished. Also, learn to celebrate what you have achieved, not what you wish you’d achieved.

5. Not Including Brief Job Descriptions 

Even if you’ve listed positions at companies that you previously worked, it means nothing if you don’t have any job descriptions. Because when you leave out dates and descriptions of your prior jobs it makes them seem like they didn’t really exist or it may seem like you are trying to hide something.  So, don’t commit this mistake from the LinkedIn mistakes list.

Always, provide accurate dates and a simple description of your real jobs and your contributions that unfold your career story and the skill sets you’ve delivered. These job descriptions also provide you with the perfect opportunity to pepper your profile with keywords that will help you get found. Why aren’t you taking advantage of this?

6. Not Frequent Status Updates

Consistently showing up is the way to make people get to know us, in all our activities, whether at office or gym, in the social and community activities or even enjoying our favourite hobbies like singing and dancing with others, it’s important to maintain the consistency.

The same way, the more regular and consistent we are on LinkedIn, the more people will expect to see our activity. In nutshell, once in a blue moon appearance won’t work on LinkedIn because too much time in-between your LinkedIn activity updates will interrupt your networking and relationship building.

Also, it seems like you are not serious about being on LinkedIn. So, be consistent even if it’s three to four times a week, it will help you to establish a strong connection on LinkedIn and you can contribute to other’s activities on LinkedIn as well.

7. Doing Over Posting on LinkedIn

The flip side of not frequent status updates is “Doing Over Posting”. And these two LinkedIn mistakes should be avoided. Fast Company shared a guide on how often to post on LinkedIn and other social channels.

According to it, if you look at the top influencer like Richard Branson’s LinkedIn profile, you can see he publishes his articles on a weekly basis and does short updates 2 to 3 times a day. In my opinion, that’s a good formula to follow. But, you can find and follow your own formula which is convenient for you.

8. Not Personalizing Your LinkedIn Connection Requests

Each time you press “connect” on someone’s LinkedIn profile, an automatic message is sent to them that says something like: “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” This cold and generic message isn’t likely to improve your opportunities of actually connecting with people.

Therefore, it’s really good to take the time to research your potential connections and personalize your message to them, so they know you took the time to get to know them. Include something specific that you know about them. It will be highly appreciated. Here’s an example of how to do that:

“I enjoyed reading your latest blog “Top 10 Powerful LinkedIn Automation Tools for Maximize Your Lead Generation Efforts in 2020” and I would like to connect with you on LinkedIn.”

Here’s another example, this time a little more in-depth:

“Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge about LinkedIn through your blogs & webinars. I’m looking forward to meeting you sooner. Congratulations on your new Startup, that’s truly exciting. I’ll be on the lookout for its official launch.”

9. Connect to People and Sell Immediately

Don’t connect with people and then immediately send them your sales pitch. It’s one of the terrible LinkedIn mistakes. Remember, a relationship first. People don’t want to know your latest offers in your business or on your website as soon as they connect with you. Be patient and engage to build your commonalities by getting involved in their LinkedIn activities and comment on their posts.

Otherwise, you’ll make your new connections to regret their decision to accept your connection request. It’s always good to build your way up to sales activity after you have earned some trust and developed a good professional relationship with your connections.

10. Asking for Recommendations/Endorsements from People You Barely Know

If you need an introduction with a person, look at the common connections that you have on LinkedIn and reach out to somebody you actually know and are connected to, then ask that person to give you an intro with the person that you want to connect. I sometimes reach out to people this way to invite them to be a guest speaker on my webinars.

This is completely different from sending a request to someone you met once at a conference or networking event, then asking that person to endorse your skills or recommend your services. How would that person know enough about your skills and services to give an endorsement or recommendation? It’s totally unreasonable, never do it. Get the endorsements and recommendations from the people who are well aware of your skills and services.

11. Sending Spammy Direct Messages

Never send uninvited, promotional direct messages through LinkedIn to people, whether you’ve just connected or have been connected for years, it’s a relationship faux pas to send irrelevant messages to your connections. By irrelevant messages, I mean those messages that people send out which are not personalized in any way or totally irrelevant to that specific connection.

For example, if your connection is not in an eCommerce industry, it makes absolutely no sense to send them a message telling them that you’ll provide budget-friendly dropshipping services for their eCommerce. We usually get irritated when we get spam messages, so, don’t send it to others.

12. Posting Negative Comments on LinkedIn

Remember, LinkedIn is a professional networking platform, so, never post negative, emotionally-controversial or shocking comments on others posts or in groups. It’s one of the must-avoid LinkedIn mistakes.

Also, it’s always best to stay away from politics, religion and sexuality topics. And talking about these topics never going to give you any business benefits, therefore it’s safe to stay away from them.

If you have a different opinion or a contrarian view, state it professionally, it will be highly welcomed.

13. Being Self Serving in LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups should be where like-minded people get together to exchange their, knowledge, ideas and information. If you’re joining groups on LinkedIn, it’s an opportunity to become a part of the insightful conversations and share valuable knowledge, not to pitch and sell your business.

Follow the conversations in the groups; add value by sharing your knowledge and ideas. But, don’t use LinkedIn groups to promote your self-serving interests. You can still, use LinkedIn groups for your advantage by demonstrating your expertise knowledge and add value to the group conversations.

14. Not Including Your Websites Links on Your Profile.

Contrary to the above point, you can be a little self-serving in your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is a great hub to organize and post all your links and information. Sure, people could search all around the Web to find information about your websites, your blog, your social media channels and so on. But, why make them search? When you can provide them with all the details in one platform. And it’s okay to talk about yourself on your profile.

15. Using LinkedIn Like Other Social Media Channels

We need to understand LinkedIn is NOT Facebook or any other social media channels. It’s a professional networking platform that features professional business content to educate and inform people to facilitate their professional networking and career.

When you’re posting on LinkedIn, makesure the content is repute as a source of reliable and credible business information. Also, you can enhance the text message by adding images and videos that best demonstrate your text message. Even I added this one as my last point, this is one of the must-avoid LinkedIn mistakes. So, consider this point as much serious as other 14 points.

 

Conclusion

LinkedIn is indeed the perfect platform to build your personal brand and reputation, along with creating your key professional connections. It all depends on how you use it. If you use LinkedIn in the best way possible by telling your professional story and showcasing your expertise, you can able to build true and authentic professional relationships that you will find valuable. On the other hand, if you use LinkedIn as a free marketing space, you’ll likely be disappointed with the results that you receive at the end. The below quote from the Co-Founder of LinkedIn also demonstrate the same:

“If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.”

                                                                                                         –Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

I hope the above list of what not to do on LinkedIn helps you to learn about what you should do on LinkedIn. Like I said before, if you present yourself professionally on LinkedIn in an authentic way, LinkedIn can be a great experience for you!

Top 10 Powerful LinkedIn Automation Tools for Maximize Your Lead Generation Efforts in 2020

Having more than 675 million members from 200 countries, LinkedIn has cemented its authority as the number one professional social media network for corporates and job hunters to spread the word about their brand and products. With that being the case, LinkedIn is the go-to resource for anybody to get connected with different prospects from allies to clients, among other peers.

In my previous posts, I’ve discussed LinkedIn social selling and important LinkedIn groups for marketers. While, today, in this post I’m going to examine 10 of the best LinkedIn automation tools that can help you become an acumen LinkedIn marketing expert.

I’ll give you the finer details of each LinkedIn automation tool based on my research in the criteria like the tool’s features, reliability, reputation among the users, customers’ feedback, customer care support, frequent updates of the software, trending technologies used in their features, the end-results customers get by using the tool, etc. So, while going through the post, you’ll realize that you can use any of the 10 LinkedIn automation tools for your present and future LinkedIn marketing plan.

It’s my hope that by the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of how to use LinkedIn to improve your lead generation and social selling while building trust among your prospects.

Let’s dive into the 10 LinkedIn automation tools to help you nail as a LinkedIn marketing pro.

1. Salesintel.io

Salesintel.io is one of the super easy and intuitive LinkedIn automation tools. Using salesintel.io sales and marketing professionals can find new LinkedIn contact data for prospects to start and close more deals and updating current contacts with accurate data. Salesintel.io users can filter data by tech stack, metro area, industry, position, and more. The salesintel.io service also includes a free Chrome extension to find contact data while visiting a prospect’s website or LinkedIn profile.

Here are some key features of salesintel.io:

  1. Salesintel.io provides research-on-demand for your niche market with its well-experienced research team.
  2. Use multiple filters to easily identify your target contacts and build lists for email marketing, events, and more.
  3. With the SalesIntel and Bombora integration, you can identify and reach out to the companies already looking for a solution.
  4. With accurate, updated data, you can reach out to the right people and close more deals.
  5. Research on demand with fast human verification.
  6. Search by intent topics let you actively monitored; learn what your prospects are interested in before you reach out to them.

Nothing is worse than spending time pounding away on the phone with bad contact information. Salesintel.io solves that problem with their research on demand and salesintel.io reverify the data every 90 days to maintain high accuracy and avoid data decay.

2. We-connect.io 

We-connect.io is one of the safest and affordable LinkedIn automation tools. Through we-connect.io you can able to reach very targeted people to link in with them and it will automatically set up a follow-up email once they accepted your LinkedIn request. Also, you can easily reach out to more than 100X people on LinkedIn using this automation tool. We-connect.io offers Powerful analytics and a dashboard to monitor your new connections on LinkedIn, focus on new opportunities, and drive meaningful conversations with email and chat-style interface.

With multiple We-connect.io features, here are the highlighted ones:

  1. Cloud-based automation tool, so no need to download any extension or software.
  2. Sync We-Connect with your CRM and other third-party apps.
  3. You can invite new LinkedIn connections, message, endorse, auto-follow, and visit profiles.
  4. Mark the replies from contacts as leads, follow-up, archive, and unread.
  5. Works well with free LinkedIn Account and Sales Navigator
  6. Run segmented campaigns based on job titles, industry, geography, company size, or any other filters available in LinkedIn or Sales Navigator.
  7. Create multiple campaigns. The next campaign automatically starts after the existing campaign completes.
  8. Get instant alerts when a prospect replies, the campaign starts or completes, and a captcha is detected, etc.
  9. Campaign level stats and charts allow you to compare different campaign stats in numeric and percentages.

We-connect.io helps you to automate professional networking on LinkedIn by assisting you to discover knowledge, insights, and opportunities 10 X faster. We-connect.io is best designed for busy sales & marketing professionals, entrepreneurs, business owners, recruiters, and professionals.

3. Leadleaper.com

LeadLeaper is one of the perfect LinkedIn automation tools as it provides useful features that LinkedIn doesn’t have, such as lets you build a list of dozens of contacts from your LinkedIn searches, gives you verified business email address for each of your LinkedIn contacts, and enables you to capture hundreds of prospects with a single click. LeadLeaper comes at affordable prices for organizations of any size and you can easily integrate it with Salesforce, and other CRMs.

Below are some of the highlighted features on LeadLeaper:

  1. LeadLeaper LinkedIn email finder empowers you to find and capture 100’s of new LinkedIn leads.
  2. LeadLeaper automatically adds the new lead to your selected list including the lead’s name, title, employer, and verified business email address.
  3. LeadLeaper’s open tracking and email history options let you notify whenever a lead opens your email.
  4. You can integrate LeadLeaper with LinkedIn free / Premium accounts, Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Recruiters, G Suite Email, Office 365 Email, and more.

LeadLeaper continuously upgrades its service so you can easily source your leads and LeadLeaper setup is simple hence it really makes finding leads on LinkedIn more efficient. Altogether, LeadLeaper is definitely a helpful tool for anyone looking to get in contact with someone they don’t know directly on LinkedIn.

4. Snov.io 

 

Snov.io is your perfect outreach automation platform for efficient contact management and CRM. This automation platform offers many useful tools, from email finders to well-designed email campaigns. It also provides a great variety of tools for lead generation, email verification, email sending, and email tracking. Especially snovio allows you to launch your own automated drip email campaigns to nurture your leads and gain their trust.

There are many features of Snov.io, here are the most important ones:

  1. Email Finder helps you to find the email addresses by domain, company name or via Boolean Search.
  2. Verify emails to get a clean list of email addresses that you need the most
  3. Snovio.io Email Drip Campaigns lets you create your personalized drip email sequence that gives you more control in your workflow.
  4. You can set email tracking for your Gmail accounts.
  5. Through the Email Finder chrome extension, you can collect high-quality contacts from any website you visit.
  6. You can Integrate Snov.io with your social media apps, CRMs, customer support platforms and other tools.
  7. You can manage your prospects by sync your leads with Snov.io API
  8. You can find out what technology your prospective clients use in their websites which help you to understand their pain points and needs.

Using these features you can find more convertible leads, verify your contacts, track your lead’s progress, and automate your outreach on LinkedIn which saves your time and improve your revenue and personalized automated outreach with over 2000 integration options. Snovio.io is best for sales reps, recruiters, event organizers, freelancers, startup CEOs, and marketing specialists like link builders, PR specialists, and outreach specialists.

5. Linkedhelper.com

Linkedhelper is one of the amazing LinkedIn automation tools that can help you to organize and simplify all the processes needed to boost your LinkedIn profile. Actually, this automation software is a Chrome extension and desktop application that can automate LinkedIn functions like messaging first connections, inviting new people to connect, inviting first connections to join a group, creating autoresponder messaging for new LinkedIn connections, etc. in a larger scale.

Let’s have a look at the key features of Linkedhelper:

  1. You can get thousands of targeted contacts by sending personalized invitations
  2. Auto-mailing system, Auto-Responder, Sequential Messaging to 1st connections or LinkedIn Group Members
  3. You can add a personalized message for your connection requests
  4. Automatic Profiles Visiting & Export to CSV file and build targeted mailing list
  5. Boost your LinkedIn profile and help you to get hundreds of endorsements from fellow LinkedIn users
  6. Endorse your contacts automatically to get endorsements in return
  7. Powerful Lists manager – allows building your own lead generation funnel

Using Linkedhelper can benefit you generate leads using LinkedIn. People in the SEO field also use this automation tool for outreach, so the Linkedhelper tool can be used for a wide range of interactions with people if you think outside of the box.

6. Dux-Soup

Best Linkedin Lead Gen Tool Duxsoup

 

With Dux-Soup LinkedIn lead generation tool it’s easy to find, attract and engage with your prospects on LinkedIn. Dux-Soup automatically views your prospects’ LinkedIn profiles, endorses their skills, follows their LinkedIn activity, and sends personalized messages on your behalf. You can also set up an automated LinkedIn drip campaign for your prospects that stops automatically when you get a response from your prospects.

Here are the main features you can enjoy by using Dux-Soup automation tool:

  1. Turn LinkedIn into a lead management system.
  2. You can easily find previously tagged LinkedIn profiles for follow-up actions
  3. You can upload your own list of profiles for micro-targeted sales campaigns
  4. You can follow up your LinkedIn connections with automated messages or set up a longer-term drip campaign.
  5. You can download the LinkedIn profiles details and upload them to your CRM for easy lead management

With all these above features Dux-Soup lead generation tool allows you to select your LinkedIn prospects, automate your LinkedIn functions, organize the results of your campaigns and let you share your leads. Therefore, it’s a comprehensive tool to automate your lead generation on LinkedIn.

7. Drift.com

Drift is one of the best conversational marketing tools. You can use drift to provide a modern buying experience for your potential customers, generate more qualified leads through LinkedIn, and dramatically accelerate your sales cycle. Usually, traditional marketing and sales rely on forms, calls, and countless follow-up emails, but, drift connects you with visitors in real-time using bots and artificial intelligence.

Drift offers some of these key features to you:

  1. Automate your sales and marketing experience with AI-powered solutions.
  2. Connect with your best buyers through live chat
  3. You can engage more leads with conversational email
  4. You can open and close more deals with sales video

Drift helps you to streamline your lead creation process with your potential customers and save both yours and your customers’ time by automating the calendaring and support request process with web chat functionality, email automation, and it connects very well with the other sales tools you use.

8. elinkPro.com

eLink Pro marketing software is one of the best LinkedIn automation tools for sales. eLink attracts and connects sales prospects to your LinkedIn, and help you to streamline your LinkedIn sales funnels. If you want to make your LinkedIn profile into a sales magnet by professionally increase your network on LinkedIn and successfully drive your online influence, the eLink Pro is the right choice for you. Also, eLink Pro is a perfect companion for users of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Linkedin Recruiter, LinkedIn SalesForce, Sales Navigator for Gmail, LinkedIn CRM Social Selling, and LinkedIn Hubspot.

eLink Pro features to automate your LinkedIn functions:

  1. You can target your clients on LinkedIn, access their data, and export details to Excel to streamline your CRM management.
  2. eLink Pro helps you to get your target audience to engage with you back
  3. eLink Pro grows your connections at the scale of social media.
  4. You can streamline your LinkedIn functions by using search filters together with the Campaign Scheduler.

eLink Pro is a fully-featured LinkedIn automation tool that is designed to serve Enterprises, Startups by offering Keyword Filtering, Post Scheduling, Analytics, Automated Publishing, Customer Targeting at one place for automating your LinkedIn lead generation.

9. LeadConnect.io

LeadConnect is one of the most traditional LinkedIn automation tools for Lead Generation. This automation tool helps you to find your targeted Prospects and nurture them for your business and grow your sales funnel in a short time by assisting you to generate Quality Leads from LinkedIn. Simple searches with LeadConnect in your field will reveal thousands of peer experts, service providers, and potential clients on LinkedIn. LeadConnect supports CSV Imports, and Sales Navigator Search as well.

LeadConnect features to automate your lead generation process on LinkedIn:

  1. LeadConnect helps you to create, implement and manage your outreach approach with actionable insights.
  2. Offers you LinkedIn automation functionalities and sales prospecting with campaigns/sequences.
  3. You can contact an unlimited number of prospects daily with personalized auto sequences and build predictable revenue.
  4. You can automate follow-up message and response tracking

LeadConnect automates your lead generation efforts on LinkedIn with personalized multiple Follow-ups. also, sync prospect details to Hubspot automatically with a click. Hence, if you are a salesperson or marketing agency who wants to get Leads from LinkedIn outreach then LeadConnect will offer you the best automation service to improve your lead generation.

10. Growth-hacking.io

Growth-hacking.io is one of the effective cloud-based LinkedIn automation tools to automate your LinkedIn Lead Generation that put your LinkedIn outreach on autopilot. Growth-hacking.io Scrapers targeted Websites for Phone Numbers, Emails, Social Media and check which Website Plugins they use to segment your leads. Simply Growth-hacking.io helps you to step up your marketing game with High-Quality APIs, Scrapers, Automation Tools, and Workflows.

Growth-hacking features to grow your LinkedIn leads:

  1. You can send automated LinkedIn connection requests
  2. You can set up LinkedIn Messages on autopilot.
  3. You can extract Job titles, emails, companies, employees, phone numbers, and more
  4. You can track whether users reply to your outreach
  5. You can extract your LinkedIn contacts and sync your CRM.

Growth-hacking.io helps you to outgrow your competitors by automating your marketing outreach with High-Quality APIs, Scrapers, Automation Tools, and Workflows. Choosing this LinkedIn automation tool will help you to keep track of your LinkedIn lead generation with simple yet flexible documentation.

Conclusion

Comparing to other social networking channels like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn offers you the top-level B2B networking opportunities. There are many LinkedIn automation tools from software programs, bots to browser plugins/extensions. So, it’s important to get the right tool with solid testimonials that showing real ROI.

While choosing your LinkedIn automation tool, look for a consistent track record of customer support from the team behind the tool. Check:

  1. Are you able to get access to customer support?
  2. Can you able to speak to the relevant people behind the tool?
  3. How is customer support offered?

Just choosing the right automation tool is not enough; you need to follow the right LinkedIn automation practices to get the result. Here is the list of best LinkedIn automation practices:

  1. Treat your LinkedIn automation tools like any other automation tool and use it sensibly.
  2. While selecting your automation tool, think about your core objectives: whom you want to reach on LinkedIn and what will encourage your prospects to respond to your connection request?
  3. Always stick with the LinkedIn usage limits unless If you are ready to take risk of penalties.
  4. Be as targeted as you can in your prospect outreach on LinkedIn. It will help you to receive dividends.
  5. Personalize your interactions on LinkedIn to increase your chances to get responses from your prospects.
  6. Practice good housekeeping rules on LinkedIn.
  7. Create a plan for the extra time you’ll get in your hands by automating your LinkedIn functions – Find out, how can you use that time most productively in your business?

Growing your network massively on LinkedIn is not enough. You need to use your network in the right way to make your LinkedIn network result in your business. With the help of these top 10 LinkedIn automation tools, you can take the highest advantage of your LinkedIn network. From better organizing, your LinkedIn contacts to streamlining your sales funnel, these automation tools help you to become a better player in the world of LinkedIn marketing which nurtures your business in real-time.

Do you use any of the above tools for your LinkedIn automation process? Feel free to share your opinions about them in the comment section below.

LinkedIn SSI : Effective Hacks to Improve Your LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score

LinkedIn continues to grow its active users in 2020. If ever there is a right time for you to get serious about your LinkedIn, it’s now. So, today, I’d like to write about one of the most interesting social selling data metrics provided by the LinkedIn name called LinkedIn SSI score.

SSI is the abbreviation used for Social Selling Index. Have you ever heard about the term LinkedIn SSI score before? What are your opinions on LinkedIn SSI? Some folks call it a beneficial and valuable metric to measure your performance and execution on LinkedIn, while others call it a totally useless and a vanity metric. Well, let me stop confusing you guys with these rapid questions! If you guys have no idea about LinkedIn SSI, No Worries! Because today in this post, I’m gonna discuss all the key information about LinkedIn SSI, and how you can use them if you wish to do so. Keep reading and discover more!

What Does the LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) Score Signify?

Back in October 2014, LinkedIn rolled out the new social selling measurement called LinkedIn’s SSI score. LinkedIn SSI is an algorithmic solution metric for sales and the significant measure of a company’s or individual’s adaptation to the four major pillars of social selling on LinkedIn, based on a measurement range of 0 to 100.

The index and ranking of LinkedIn SSI happen based on your organization’s or your individual activity around the four pillars of social selling. Performance in each of the four pillars is evaluated, and the collected score will become your LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index rank. 25 is the maximum score for each pillar and as per the LinkedIn statement, the LinkedIn SSI is a measurement of a person’s or organization’s social selling skills and execution on LinkedIn.

The more relevant and insightful activities you have around the four pillars of SSI, the higher you can score in your SSI score. Basically, the LinkedIn SSI score fosters exactly how organizations or individuals should engage and interact with their prospects on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn SSI score is created to help you gain visibility and awareness into your personal or your company’s activities on LinkedIn, help you to discover new opportunities and breakthroughs, and lets you benchmark your score against your fellow peers and competitors.

Here you can find your LinkedIn SSI Score

The Most Important Four Pillars of LinkedIn SSI

As I discussed earlier, The LinkedIn SSI score calculates you or your company’s performance and execution in four major areas and they’re known as the four pillars of LinkedIn SSI. The four pillars of SSI include:

1) Create a Professional Brand

2) Find the Right People

3) Engage with Insights

4) Build Strong Relationships

Let us have a brief look at these four pillars and their key metrics one by one.

1) Create a Professional Brand

Under this category, LinkedIn looks into the key factors such as have you set an altogether completed and professional-looking LinkedIn profile that includes a relevant cover photo? How many LinkedIn posts have you created on your own and Published? How many page views are you generating through your LinkedIn posts? How many connections and followers have you gained on LinkedIn so far? Then based on these measurements’ results, you will get your SSI score for Create a Professional Brand.

Tips to create a professional brand to boost your SSI Score

  • Complete Your Profile: You should complete your LinkedIn profile 100% in a way that strengthens your industry credibility and builds trust. While building your profile professionally, you also get to know what the LinkedIn profile building mistakes are to avoid.
  • Use Multimedia: Use rich multimedia content in your LinkedIn profile such as videos, images, and presentations to make it more attractive and relevant.
  • Get Endorsements: Aim to increase the endorsements and recommendations for your skills and expertise.
  • Create Long-Form Posts: Publish long-form posts with regular intervals to share your expert knowledge and skills.

2) Find the Right People

When it comes to your LinkedIn connections, the numbers count doesn’t matter, the actual value is in the meaningful connections with the right people. That’s why LinkedIn wants you to connect effectively with the prospects by finding their lead builder system and reaching out to them with relevant insights. To calculate your SSI score for this pillar, LinkedIn analyses the value and effectiveness of your LinkedIn connections and relationships, so, it’s really worth getting the right connections for your sales and your SSI score.

Tips to find the right people to boost your SSI score

  • Become Proactive: Make yourself actively visible in your prospect searches on LinkedIn or in Sales Navigator.
  • Connect with the Right People: As I said earlier when it comes to LinkedIn connections, the number doesn’t matter, the actual value is the meaningful connections you have. Therefore, use filter criteria like skills, role, or seniority to find the right potential prospect profiles.
  • Follow Up People: Check up and engage with the people who have viewed your LinkedIn profile.
  • Keep Track of Your Progress: Save the details and progress of your sales generation in Sales Navigator or Lead Builder.

3) Engage with Insights

Find and share valuable and beneficial information through your LinkedIn posts to cultivate new relationships or to maintain the existing relationships on LinkedIn. This particular pillar measures your engagements on LinkedIn, in terms of the number of likes, comments, and shares your LinkedIn posts are receiving. When you succeed to make effective engagement then you will gain more than a rise in your SSI score; it will contribute to creating lead relationships and building long-term credibility with your LinkedIn audiences as a whole.

Tips to engage with insights to boost your SSI

  • Everyday Engage: Take 10 minutes in your day to like and comment on relevant content on LinkedIn.
  • Share Content: Put yourself as an expert by sharing relevant content and industry-related news through your LinkedIn posts.
  • Reach Out People: Actively engage with your community by commenting on relevant status, updates, and discussions. Also, keep in mind your engagement should be problem-solving rather than selling.
  • Join Groups: Find out your industry niche groups on LinkedIn and actively engage in group discussions.
  • Use InMail: Send InMail messages to relevant people and make sure to reply to the responses you received on your LinkedIn posts to maintain the relationships.
  • Build Strong Connections: Connect and follow your prospects, current customers, and competitors to build your own community on LinkedIn.

4) Build Strong Relationships

This fourth pillar measures how successful you are at developing and growing your network on LinkedIn to not only reach direct prospects, but also those who can introduce you to your potential prospects. These relationships building should be based on trust and solving the pain points of your connections.

Tips to build strong trusted relationships to boost your SSI score

 

  • Expand Your Network: Use LinkedIn to connect internally with your colleagues, co-workers, and to connect with your prospects after introductions.
  • Connect with Decision Makers: In LinkedIn, the strength of your connections counts. Thus, it focuses on connecting with strong-status individuals and decision-makers.
  • Use InMail: Contact your prospects through your sincere and realistic InMail Messages and begin a relationship with them.
  • Ask for Connections: Don’t be afraid to ask for connections. Just ask your mutual connections to introduce you to your valuable prospects.
  • Avoid Overdo: Focus your efforts on connecting with relevant people rather than sending mass messages to everyone on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn calculates and defines your SSI score by measuring your performance and execution in each of the above four sections on LinkedIn and based on the results you will receive your SSI rank. LinkedIn recently tweaked its metrics to make the SSI score more relevant and predictive. While incorporating the new techniques LinkedIn has established itself as a podium for the users to socially sell. New features involve adding activities through your Sales Navigator to increase your SSI, adding metrics that evaluate quality as well as quantity of your performance, and linking publishing platform activities to make more effective SSI measures.

How Important and Valuable is Your LinkedIn SSI Score?

Lot of people often asked me like ” How to improve my LinkedIn SSI score? “. To be fair, I only use these data metrics to analyze my activities on LinkedIn, I don’t bother about it but not my clients and circle. LinkedIn says that the higher score the user gains on SSI, the more successful and effective that the person or firm is at accomplishing their respective goals on sales. For instance, they say that exceptionally active users on LinkedIn get 45% more sales opportunities for them, 51% of LinkedIn users are more likely to achieve their own sales quotas without many efforts and 80% of LinkedIn users have become more productive on their LinkedIn activities.

While the LinkedIn SSI score is not an assurance of improvement in your sales success, it does make a strong and valuable connection between your certain networking activities on LinkedIn, give rise to your sales opportunities and let you effectively reach out to your potential prospects. Having said that all, it’s still up to you to discover and use the tools that help you to grow your sales and business while keeping track of which activities are actually producing the results you’re desired to get.

What Benefits Can You Obtain from Your LinkedIn SSI Score?

From your LinkedIn SSI score ranking, you can easily measure and define how good you are doing in building your LinkedIn profile to attract the right kind of people to nurture your connections and network on LinkedIn while emerging and growing yourself as a thought leader in your chosen area of expertise. As you complete your professional-looking LinkedIn profile with the target audience in your mind and publish meaningful and insightful posts on LinkedIn, your professional brand score on LinkedIn SSI will begin to rise.

You can be taught how to find your better prospects in less amount of time by utilizing the benefit of LinkedIn’s profile search function, and you can easily find the right people to reach out to by using this functionality.

Publishing relevant and insightful content on LinkedIn can help you to establish yourself as a trusted source of insights. it’s also crucial to engage yourself through likes and comments with relevant insights from others as well. Likewise, you can get yourself to participate in relevant and meaningful discussions with those people in your network and industry and in the groups’ discussions that you are a member of.

Boost and build your network stronger by connecting and building trustful relationships with decision-makers. You can build a meaningful and more valuable network by efficiently connecting with your contacts. This kind of networking gives you greater influence in discovering your new prospects, as well as getting your foot in the door of your prospective clients.

How Do You Improve and Better Your LinkedIn SSI Score?

There are numerous things you can do to enhance your SSI score on LinkedIn, Like, completing your professional-looking LinkedIn profile with your target audience in mind, share your skills and expertise through your valuable posts and insights that showcase to others what value you can bring to the table and why you would be the right fit to offer the solutions for the professional needs in your niche market. With that said, here’re some of the effective ways to improve your LinkedIn SSI,

       1. Establishing and Building Your LinkedIn SSI

Once you calculate the results of your LinkedIn SSI score, you can easily see what areas of the four pillars you need to focus for more improvements. Once you get a groundline of where you’re standing in your SSI rank, then you know exactly in which areas you need to concentrate. You can track your SSI score regularly on a weekly basis to find out whether you are getting improvements or not and measure how good you are doing compared to your peers in the industry and network.

      2. Create Your Professional Persona on LinkedIn

You perhaps know what a buyer persona is, hence if you’re on LinkedIn, you may as well try to establish a persona that highly relates to your ideal colleagues, customers, clients, or employers. You can also try to look at your own profile from the perspective of those people: See would they really be drawn to your profile and would they be willing to engage with you? Does your profile look ready to send them a quick message? Also, pay attention to the completion rate for a fully established profile on LinkedIn to ensure you fill out your profile perfectly without any left out.

      3. Leverage the potential benefits of LinkedIn Tools

Take the full benefit of the free tools on LinkedIn to get to know how well you’ve built your profile on LinkedIn, use those tools to give and receive professional endorsements, recommendations, and congratulate connections. You can also share industry-specific content by using the tools like LinkedIn blogging, video tools, and SlideShare, all of these tools are extremely effective and efficient tools to utilize for building your credibility and authority on LinkedIn.

    4. Avoid Using Automate 

Apparently, we need to use automation tools to build and manage connections on LinkedIn via communications and interactions for the purpose of targeting our potential customers whether this is something we’re doing for another firm or for ourselves. But, when we’re too automated, we become less personal. So, avoid using automated tools or social bots for all your socializing purposes and try to write personalized messages to build specific connections. The very important point is here to be noted is being yourself in your interactions with people.

     5. Build High-Quality Connections

It doesn’t actually matter how many followers you have on LinkedIn, what matters more is the quality of your connections. Because the right people will be more delighted to lead you towards greater opportunities, whether this is engaging you as a potential worker or a skillful colleague.

A good rule of thumb is to follow here is to contact and connect with people that you feel you genuinely like to mingle with! It may seem so clear, but sometimes we get so caught up in what other people are doing that we automatically follow their footprints without our understanding. So, before sending a connection request, ask yourself whether you really want to connect with that person, or the specific connection adds any value for you.

LinkedIn groups are another great way to gauge not only to connect with the true professionals in your industry but with the people who are respectful and helpful about the network and community.

Is LinkedIn’s SSI Score Just a Metric of Vanity?

People address LinkedIn’s SSI score as an ultimate vanity metric use up in the social selling world. As some people like to wear their LinkedIn SSI score proudly as a sign of honor and attaining a score above 80 on LinkedIn SSI is actually thought of as a “Great Achievement.”

In my opinion, it’s totally up to you to decide whether you want to consider it as an ineffective vanity metric or want to use this SSI score to develop and grow your ongoing dedication to daily activities and interactions on LinkedIn.

What to Concentrate on and What not to Bother on Your LinkedIn SSI Score?

Some of my folks use to ask this question to me, “What should I concentrate on regarding the LinkedIn SSI score and what can I overlook?”

As you can see, all four pillars are interconnected in defining the overall score of LinkedIn SSI, so, it’s not possible that any of them can be ignored or overlooked when you’re resolute to build a respectable SSI score on LinkedIn. If you’re a bit serious about LinkedIn then at least you have to consider the first pillar – Creating your professional brand – as the foundation, even if you’re not that much concerned with the other three pillars. I’ve seen many LinkedIn users build their perfect professional-looking LinkedIn profile, establish their professional brand on LinkedIn and after that, they do very little, but still score well in their SSI. If you ask me, I’d say LinkedIn users who are really serious about their professional brand and connections on LinkedIn will sure, want to engage in all the four pillars of SSI to emerge themselves as thought leaders within their LinkedIn community.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the starting of the blog, the usefulness of LinkedIn SSI continues to be a topic of debate, and our community seems pretty much evenly divided on this debate. Apart from all these debates around SSI, the question is actually for your own self: Where do your own thoughts stand? Is LinkedIn SSI a tool you use effectively or are you willing to use it? If you are using it currently, what are you going to do to boost your LinkedIn SSI score, and will it help you to improve and grow your social selling success with your current clients and prospects?

While you’re finding your answers to these above questions, if you get the feeling that your SSI score is lacking or you just want to use LinkedIn more effectively, I hope this article will help you to improve your use of LinkedIn by boosting your LinkedIn SSI score.

It’s time to hear from you! Let me know your thoughts on LinkedIn SSI in the comment box below!

Top 25 Important LinkedIn Groups Every Marketer & Decision Maker Should Join

With over 675 million+ users in 200 countries, LinkedIn is the world’s biggest social network for professionals. Whether want to grow business connections, stay up to date with the latest trends in the industries or learn best practices from the experts, LinkedIn is a one-stop-shop for marketers and decision-makers who are looking to advance their skills and career.

Creating a LinkedIn profile, connecting with the peers in your industry, and regularly posting about the professional happenings and updates in your industry is a great way to start using LinkedIn, but if you want to get the real benefits of LinkedIn then you need to participate in LinkedIn groups. By providing relevant and quality content to groups and taking part in thoughtful conversations, you’ll be able to build trust, integrity, credibility, and authority within the industry.

Discovering the best business and marketing related groups on LinkedIn is somehow a fool’s errand, but you may be amazed by what you find here! With that said, here are the top 25 LinkedIn groups to get you started.

LinkedIn Groups for Business

  1. Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review is one of the leading business groups on LinkedIn for smart management thinking. Harvard Business Review (HBR) offers professionals around the globe rigorous insights and best practices to lead themselves and their firms more efficiently and to make a positive impact.

The HBR  community including insightful discussions about passion, values, innovation, leadership, and management in the workplace and the HBR  publication itself comes out 10 times per year and focuses on topics like business strategy, operations, marketing, finance, management, and leadership. In HBR, you can often see some of the business’s top thinkers like Peter Drucker and Theodore Levitt. So, in short, HBR is a premier business community you should be a part of if you enjoy learning from thought leaders and want to go beyond visions exclusively focused on marketing.

  1. Entrepreneur Magazine

Entrepreneur Magazine is a group of 91,900+ members focused on the topics associated with entrepreneurs. The guys and gals who run the group also own the URL www.entrepreneur.com and do the publication of Entrepreneur Magazine which covers everything related to entrepreneurship.

At Entrepreneur Magazine group, you can leverage your professional network and Communications. By subscribing to their publication and request to join the group (members only), you can get your digital supply of “entrepreneurialism, small business management, and business opportunities.”

  1. On Startups – The Community for Entrepreneurs

On Startups is the largest entrepreneurial startup group on LinkedIn with 627,900+members. This hefty-sized LinkedIn group affords entrepreneurs who seek to learn from and find out significant thought leadership in their careers.

On Startups group is concentrated on topics like sales, operations, financing, and hiring. But of course, if you want to have a discussion about startups or small business-related topics, then they won’t turn you away.

  1. Business Development

Business Development is a LinkedIn group where you will find like-minded individuals in business development, business management, demand generation, marketing, sales, and inside sales operation fields that too primarily in tech companies.

In short, it’s a wonderful place to learn how to effectively turn your professional contacts into your customers. This professional business group has 338,900+members, therefore it’s a great place to improve your business opportunities and learn from other professional people to boost your business.

  1. Executive Suite

Executive Suite is a professional group with 353,300+ members which is operated by ExecuNet. Here you can find business leaders, recruiters, corporate hiring decision-makers, and coaches. The purpose of this private network for senior-level executives is to provide executive-level peer connections and reliable advice to help you create the transformative results you want to achieve in your work,  career, and life.

As a member, you will get the chance to attend free sessions of the much-admired online executive learning series, ExecuNet Master Class: https://www.execunet.com/webinar/ The weekly sessions are led by A-list CEOs, leadership pioneers, top B-school professors, wellness experts, and acclaimed executive career strategists and recruiters.

LinkedIn Groups for Marketing

  1. Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is one of the most exciting and vibrant groups on LinkedIn for digital marketing professionals with 1,356,000+ members. As one of the largest groups, this community is chock-full of inspiration, motivation, captivating discussions, and detailed tips and best practices for the digital marketing landscape and include discussion topics like social media marketing, mobile marketing, search engine marketing, online PR, email marketing, online advertising, measurement, and web analytics and lot more.

In this group, you can also get updates to the latest whitepapers and industry reports which keep you updated on trends, innovation, and best practices in digital marketing. Digital Marketing also organizes exciting event programs of conferences, social and networking events to bring the digital marketing community together.

  1. Inbound Marketers – For Marketing Professionals

Inbound Marketers is created by HubSpot’s own Dharmesh Shah. Now the group has 148,000+ members and provides tips & tricks, techniques, templates, and tutorials for planning and executing successful inbound marketing strategies for your business.

It’s a community for those who are looking to reach their best customers online through techniques like inbound marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media.

  1. Marketing I Social Media I Business I Digital Media l CMO I Life Coaching Marketing I Social Media I Business I Digital Media l CMO I Life Coaching

This group is the largest group on LinkedIn with almost 800,000 members and it’s intended for anyone interested in digital marketing, as it focuses on topics related to social media, search, email, mobile, web marketing, and general inbound marketing.

There are high chances to meet your fellow marketing friends and coworkers in this group.

  1. SOLUTIONators for Marketing, Sales, Social Media, Digital Advertising, Promotion, and PR Innovation

Do you want to talk about different strategies? Looking for some inspiration for your next marketing campaign? Then this group is for you! As this group is for networking with marketing, social media, public relations, promotions, sales & selling professionals, you can get to know these professionals’ innovations and strategies to optimize your own strategic plans.

Also, you can share your best practices, ideas, advice & solutions with others. Even you’ll receive invitations to participate in  webinars, workshops, conferences & events featuring “world-famous innovation experts & gurus.”

  1. B2B Technology Marketing Community

The B2B Technology Marketing Community is an extremely involved group on Linked for B2B tech marketing with 120,800+ members. This group is created for marketing professionals to get the hottest digital marketing news, facilitate networking, giving out ideas, best practices, and opportunities.

If you love Q&A sessions and enthusiastically join in group discussions, this one’s for you!

  1. B2B Marketing

If you’re a marketer who concentrates primarily on B2B, this is an exclusive group for you to join. Here you can gauge the views of other B2B marketers, seek advice from industry peers, and offer help to those who need it.

These group discussions cover most of the B2B topics like content marketing, customer experience, social media, lead generation, professional development, email, and much more. Also, you’ll learn all about the trials and tribulations related with the B2B sector and how you can go about winning your biggest challenges with marketing to these companies.

  1. Non-Profit Marketing

Non-Profit Marketing is the largest and most active nonprofit marketing group on LinkedIn with 97,000+ members. If you’re a nonprofit marketer, this community is the primary place to meet and network with other nonprofit marketers on the social podium as well as learn how to use Direct Marketing, Public Relations, Donor Relations, Fundraising, Grant Writing, Social Media, Digital Engagement, and inbound marketing successfully for your Non-Profit organization.

LinkedIn Groups for Sales

  1. Sales Best Practices

The Sales Best Practices group is for marketers who have an interest in sales. With 332,000+ members this group creates a platform for marketers to share their experiences and solutions that relates to Selling, marketing, and Best Practices.

The most common discussion topics in this group are Sales Development/Prospecting,  Marketing, Cold Calls, Productivity, Team management, Business Strategy, Sales Tools or Software (CRM), Closing Strategies, and Recruitment. It’s an optimal place to get a glimpse of what sales best practices really look like.

  1. Sales / Marketing VP Forum (CSO / CMO / Leadership / Executives / Management)

Sales / Marketing VP Forum (CSO / CMO / Leadership / Executives / Management) is an exclusive LinkedIn group for Sales & Marketing Executives. This group is a Peer2Peer discussions forum that uses a Q&A format.”

With 257,00+ members, this group actively discusses the topics related to sales and marketing executives. If you like to get inspired by super-smart thought leaders, this group is a prime one to join.

LinkedIn Groups for Finance

  1. Angel Investor

Getting funding, however, is more tough than you might think because there are a lot of people with ideas out there battling for it. So, Angel Investor group on LinkedIn is created with the goal to share deal flow (potential opportunities), feedback, due diligence work, and pool funds to make larger seed fund investments in high-growth business start-ups in trade for exchangeable debt or ownership equity.

They seek a 30x return over 5 years & an exit strategy. With 42,000+ members this group is a place to learn tips on getting financing.

  1. New Routes to Funding – ICOs, Crowdfunding and Beyond

This is the largest discussion group on LinkedIn that  Crowdsourcing the Entrepreneurs and Investors for innovation and deployment of their local Startups.

This is a great place for entrepreneurs trying to stay up to date on crowdfunding news and resources and for main street investors to put small sums of money in projects they love.

  1. Finance Plus: Private Equity, Venture Capital and M&A News

Finance Plus is a group for business finance and investment professionals, entrepreneurs, and managers of small and medium-sized businesses, listed companies, and financial service businesses like investment boutiques investment banks.

This group provides insights into the news from private equity, venture capital, and mergers & acquisitions. Therefore, being a part of this group is a great way to incorporate larger CFO perspectives into your business.

LinkedIn Groups for Social Media

  1. SocialMediopolis.com – ▶️ New Home of Social Media Marketing Group

Social Media Marketing is the largest and most active social media marketing group on LinkedIn. This group is large community-led and moderated by an excellent group of managers. The group has 20 sub-groups for specialist topics related to social media like Social Media Marketing and Non-Profits, and Social Media and Politics.

If you crave new insights on social media, this is the ideal group to join. As a member of this group, you will receive weekly messages in your inbox with great resources and webinars, in addition to the energetic discussion from the broad social media community.

  1. Social Media Today

Social Media Today is an active community of social media professionals and professionals in PR, marketing, advertising, or any other discipline where a thorough understanding of social networks is important.

This group is operated by Social Media Today and the team at Industry Dive. With 251,000+ members, this group is brimming with experienced professionals sharing best practices and tips on social media and social media management. From this community, you’ll also learn more insights and trends about social currency, brand advocacy, or the importance of social media.

LinkedIn Groups for SEO

  1. Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land is a must-in group for news and information about search engine marketing, SEO, PPC, and how search engines work. You’ll learn everything from penalty fixes to the latest and greatest best practices in SEO from this group.

By just speedily checking the most popular discussions in this group, you’ll get the instant fix you need to better your search strategies.

  1. Moz

Moz is a LinkedIn group to learn accurately about the best practices, struggles, and challenges top SEOs are facing. This group creates informative resources and produces better marketing feasible for everyone by providing marketing software, robust APIs for link data, and social influence. Also, presents the web’s most vibrant society of online marketers.

The main highlight of this group is the ability to post questions and get instant answers from marketing pros far and wide around the world.

  1. Marketing Group Digital SEO Search Social Mobile App Data Internet Media Brand CRM PR Jobs

This group is for Digital Marketing professionals who are looking to lead business success via the digital highway. Here you get expert knowledge and tips to targeted SEO, Social Mobile App Data, affiliates Internet Media, Brand PR, Internet Marketing & Digital Marketing.

It’s a platform for all professionals like Search Experts, Pros, Analysts, Internet Marketers, Website managers, business owners, recruiters, Hiring HR, service providers. Join this group on LinkedIn, if you’re interested in contributing or listening to some of the most contentious SEO optimization topics on the web.

LinkedIn Groups for Content

  1. Content Strategy

Content Strategy is a group for content creators to learn about enterprise content strategy and content operations which includes creating, publishing, and managing content. Here you can also learn about content related to marketing, technical, UX, and microcontent.

This group will get you planning more tactically about every blog post, webinar, or eBook you create, which could use when you’re trying to boost your lead generation.

  1. Professional Bloggers

Professional Bloggers group is one of the most popular blog-specific communities on LinkedIn. If you want to emphasize more on your content’s mission, vision, and general blog strategy join this community on LinkedIn and start discussing with like-minded marketers to pick up their tips and best practices to apply in your blog content.

Also, you can get their insights to promote and market your blog posts.

  1. Creative Design Pros – Designers Forum

Creative Design Pros is a LinkedIn group for professional designers from different backgrounds in graphic design, web design, fashion industrial design, advertising designs, illustration, animation, and interior design. Even Though this group is geared for professional designers, I recommend any inbound marketer to gets into this group for observation and learning.

This group is filled with experienced designers sharing their best graphic design tips and best practices. From this LinkedIn community, you’ll also learn more about the lifestyle and work of a designer and get ideas on how to build a good relationship with your design team.

Bonus: A LinkedIn Group for Inspiration

TEDspire – BLOGS about Inspiring TED Talks

This is a group for the people who enjoy TED Talks. The group shares blogs centers around “the thought-provoking TED Talks offered by TED.com.” But, this is not a debating group, rather a gathering of well-mannered people who wish to learn more about their world.

Marketers and decision-makers have a lot to do with being inspired and TED Talks is the perfect fit to seek inspiration.

Conclusion

Marketing and decision making is tough business. I know, trust me I do. It cannot be done alone. Without a network of valuable connections, we become our own resources. That is asking a lot from ourselves. Therefore, it is so important for marketers and decision-makers to have a group(s) of people to validate their strategies and decisions. So, here are the top-picked list of LinkedIn groups for marketers and decision-makers where you can learn the different aspects of business, marketing, finance, sales, management, leadership, decision making, and a lot more from the industry experts and use their valuable insights and best practices to enhance your marketing and decision making skills that can assist you to run your business successfully.

Feel free to share your comments below. Let me know other LinkedIn groups you’re aware of that marketers and decision-makers would find useful. Thanks for stopping by!

 

How To Change your LinkedIn Background Photo

With the enhancement in mind, LinkedIn offers its existing and new premium members a new set of functionality that allows you to add customized LinkedIn background photos to your profile. With this new feature, you can make your profile more visible and presentable to employers and other internet users. However, right now this privilege is available only to the premium account holders with LinkedIn. The photo-centric redesign with LinkedIn offers a larger photo area for your profile and lets you add your own LinkedIn background photo images to your profile and stand out in the crowd.

With This New Feature, You Can:

Make your profile presentable: By adding a customized LinkedIn background photo to your profile you can make your profile visually pleasing and presentable. The picture you add will make you look distinguished and a larger photo area allows you to reach the employers easily. You can simply add your own images, Inspiring Quote, corporate logos as your header image, or even upload your stunning group and individual photos as LinkedIn Background Photo images.

Appearance and connection: LinkedIn also offers a gallery of images for you to choose from for your profile background. You can choose an image that relates most to your profession. This way you can connect your profile to your profession which is very handy for the out lookers.

How To Add/Change LinkedIn Background Photo? Easy!

Simple! With a user-friendly interface, it is very easy for LinkedIn users to add and change the background Photo images for the profile editing. Simply click on the tab “edit profile” on your profile and go to the option edit background. You will see an array of images in the gallery by clicking on the aforementioned tab. You can choose any image in the gallery for your profile or simply upload your own customized image from your directory. You can choose any image file format like JPG, GIF, or PNG.

How To Optimize Your LinkedIn Background Photo

The only reason behind adding your profile to the LinkedIn network is to reach out to companies and employers for better job prospects. There are a set of rules and criteria offered by LinkedIn to make profile view better and rank your profile for better searchability. LinkedIn Help center offers a set of suggestions to its users which help to optimize their LinkedIn Background photo professionally. It is very tiresome to make a professional profile without any professional help. As I said earlier, you need to have an active premium subscription to enable this feature. Here is some information about optimizing your LinkedIn background photo.

  • File type – JPG, GIF, or PNG
  • File size – 4MB maximum
  • Ideal pixel size – 1400 x 425
  • Use Your own Photos or Royalty-free stock images for background ( No copyrights images)
  • Add your Favorite quotes or Tagline to inspire your network/connection
  • DO NOT use large images with lot’s of Texts, tagline
  • Make sure you have enabled the ” LinkedIn Premium ” Option from your profile.
  • Share your timeline Images with your connections through social media or use any social Automation apps like buffer,onlywire,socialmotus, etc.

However, LinkedIn also offers you expert suggestions which you can incorporate in your profile details for better viewability. With this feature, you can are available to members who are not in your professional network. The connections out of your network can see your profile and contact you. In this way, you can open up the possibilities to be found by the employers outside your connections.

” Two New Users Join LinkedIn Every Second “

LinkedIn while introducing photo background for the LinkedIn users mentioned in a post that the feature is for the professionals who are looking for their career to the next level. The main motivation behind the redesigning was to ensure that LinkedIn networks grow out of boundaries and millions of users get its benefits. The new and existing premium subscriptions will get all the above-mentioned LinkedIn features at reduced and new rates. There are continuous efforts on the side of LinkedIn to provide a competitive edge to the users and offer ambitious professionals a platform where they can reach the next level of their business.

I hope my ” LinkedIn Background Photo Tips”  will help you optimize your profile professionally. If you are a premium LinkedIn user it’s time to share your strategies.

LinkedIn for Marketer – Learn How To Convert Potential Leads From LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the increasingly growing network for the business professionals all around the world. LinkedIn is the best platform for grownups as well as for those people who are actually serious about spreading the word about their own business. There is no doubt that LinkedIn is a great platform for marketers as well as for brands. The more your business will get a share with the people so it appears to be better. LinkedIn is the place for businesses to network along with other businesses and people. Many small and big businesses are using such professional social networking portals for establishing a connection with the people who assist them to grow the business globally. This is the beauty of online networking.

LinkedIn getting 187 Million monthly unique visitors from 200 countries

It is quite important to learn the tips which should be followed by the marketers and by the brands as busy business owners and professionals can really get great benefits from it. Below mentioned are the benefits which the LinkedIn marketers and brands may get:

  • You will get a high volume of quality customers by using the feature of LinkedIn’s recommendation where the satisfied customers will make the recommendation for your brand or for your company. It is true that Word of mouth referral is considered to be the most effective tool of marketing so make most from it.
  • LinkedIn permits their users to create a strong network of the industry through the Group memberships as well as other features of the network. There are several groups which you may join and so you may even create your group to invite the connections of your industry on LinkedIn with this you can also get various business referrals.
  • Your business and brand credibility will get established for the potential customers by linking the profile to the twitter account or to your blog, as there are more than 150,000 companies are using LinkedIn.
  • You can get the practical answers to questions about managing your business and brand through LinkedIn Answers, which is a tool where members can share their level of expertise by answering the questions of other members.

LinkedIn is quite lucrative as it allows your business to grow and let people get aware about your business and services offered.  You may download my e-book absolutely free from where you may get to know various useful tips for modern marketers through which they will get the targeted and potential customers, they can popularize their brands and services offered by their business and can also enhance the credibility of their brand or company. I wrote an ebook about how to improve the LinkedIn profile professionally as a marketer. It’s absolutely free and no catch at all, Please feel free to download the ebook from below.

Top 10 LinkedIn Personal Branding Tips To Grow Your Business

If you are an active social network user then you probably already know about the power of LinkedIn for businesses and brands. LinkedIn is a Goldmine for Marketers, Businesses, Investors, and of course, recruiters, let’s take a look at how LinkedIn is transforming the world.

2013 LinkedIn Statistics:

  • LinkedIn has 200 million total users and 135 million active users around the world
  • 77% of job openings notifications  and 48% of recruiters are posting their Jobs on LinkedIn
  • B2B Businesses are now getting a 61% Customer Acquisition Success rate from LinkedIn
  • 71% of American College graduates find their dream jobs via LinkedIn
  • 77%  of research Companies and 65% of Asian and European journalists use LinkedIn as their primary source
  • LinkedIn is now available in 200 countries and in 19 different languages
  • 2.6 Million Companies  have a LinkedIn Business Page
  • 320,000 Srilankans Using LinkedIn, This is 1.49%  of the total population in Srilanka

Based on these mini LinkedIn statistics you can estimate the potential of LinkedIn, but there are so many other professional social networks available on the Internet as well, Yammer, Nimble, Zyncro, etc.  Still, LinkedIn is the Giant Professional Social network so far!  Let’s see how you can add Extra Cheese to your LinkedIn profile to make it professional and stand out from the crowd.

LinkedIn Profile Tips

LinkedIn for Personal Branding:

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Quora, and Pinterest Profiles are all trusted by Search Engines and all of them have perfect search engine-friendly Profile Architecture. When someone is trying to find out your name on the internet, Your LinkedIn profile name will appear on the first search result pages (SERPs), so maintain your LinkedIn Profile like your own Personal website.

Your Professional Headline: 

LinkedIn also having its own Search Algorithms like Google and Bing, but it’s entirely different from Google’s Algorithm.  If you maintain perfect keyword density in your profile then your profile will appear in the LinkedIn Internal search results. To maintain better keyword proximity you will have to spice up your LinkedIn Headline tag with relevant keywords as your profession or industry specialization name very nicely with a maximum of 120 characters. Good Examples: UX Designer, UI Engineer, Graphic Designer, Multimedia Engineer, etc…
 

LinkedIn Profile Picture:

Your profile picture will say thousands of words about you for your potential audience and a good profile picture will create new ventures, so try using some nice “ Professional “ photos with good resolution.

Do not use LinkedIn Profile pictures that are taken outside with unprofessional backgrounds. Oh yes, if you have a professional photo with a nice smile then it’s perfect for your Linkedin profile, use LinkedIn for your Personal Branding.

Your Experience: 

this is a very important part to attract recruiters and investors; Of course, you can add your previous employer’s name and your position, work experience, etc, etc, but when recruiters, investors, or Venture Capitalists are trying to shortlist for your profile then you will lose your chances from this point! Let’s say if you have more than 5 different Work Experiences within the last 3 years it’s clearly saying you are not working with any companies not more than 12 months and Recruiters and investors will hesitate to shortlist your profile for a long-term business relationship!

But they really don’t know the real story about your job history! So, always try to display a Maximum 3 work experience and make sure you have been there more than 12 months. And don’t forget to use the right keywords, Relevant Images, Slideshare Documents, or any Videos Related to your work Experience field as your Profession.

Secure Your Identity:

This is another priceless gift from LinkedIn; you have an option to secure your own Vanity URL.  When you are changing your LinkedIn Profile URL then keep in mind it should be very tiny and make sure your LinkedIn Public URL reflects your name, profession or your industry Specialization.

  • Right Example: lk.linkedin.com/in/maheshdesigner
  • Bad Practice: lk.linkedin.com/in/pub/Mahesh-lastname/9587-hfja 

 

Education:  

Your Education is going to point out a very strong judgment for your Competitors, Recruiters and of course investors, so try to add enough information about your education details, Do NOT use a short name about your School or Courses. Try using the full name with correct abbreviations.

  • Right Example: Srilanka Institute of Information Technology
  • Bad Practice: SLIIT 

Profile Summary: 

Your Profile (Credo):  Ah, This is very important! I have seen lots of people make huge mistakes in these sections! To write a 2000 characters perfect LinkedIn profile summary You need to think about some different important factors.
Third-Party Point of View: Ask questions about yourself and find out the right answers and make your profile like an interesting story.

  • Call to Action (CTA):  Write some effective call to action words and let the reader find out the answer him/herself to understand the value of the word.
  •  Supportive words:  When you are trying to say something about you or your achievements then try to add supportive words Like “ Awarded by “, “ Offered By “ “ selected by “, etc! Do not say it alone like “I’m “I “, etc! Because readers don’t like to read these words again and again.
  • Serve Nicely:  Try to avoid using long paragraphs or too many spaces between the paragraphs. Give a Subtitle and Write a story match to the subtitle. Eg: Achievements, Business, etc

Get what you want:  people are reading your profile for some reason, which means they need some sort of services or benefit from you, so, this is the right place to market your brand. Just write a few lines about how you can help them because this is what you/they want.

Milestone and Projects:  

If you already did any individual or Group projects then simply add the above Project summary of your responsibility and outcome of this project along with Team members Details.  Based on your project details investors and recruiters can get an idea about your teamwork, commitment, and contribution.

If you don’t have any Group projects or Milestones, No problem simply add your future milestone and upcoming project brief along with team member’s details.

Recommendation: 

Recommendations are the secret weapons representing your identity, skills, and your professionalism! Like I said LinkedIn is a Professional Business network!

You can request recommendations from your Previous Employers, Co-Workers, or School Colleagues. But there is a way to request recommendations J First of all give them a nice recommendation about their Attitude, Experience, and Enthusiasm, now you have the right to request recommendations about you in return.

LinkedIn Connections: 

Creating strong connections is the most beautiful part of LinkedIn Personal Branding. You DON’T need to have thousands of unknown people in your business networks. Establishing a good relationship with people who know about you or you know about them is important. LinkedIn is giving you a chance to gather all your email contacts in one place or you can import your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail contacts using Yahoo as a CSV file and Import all your well-known Contacts in your LinkedIn Network. All I can say, if you maintain a Good business Relationship with your LinkedIn contacts then it will create new ventures for your career.

Good Practice: Sharing some interesting, Informative, Relevant content is a good way to engage your LinkedIn connections.
Bad Practice:  Sending Promotion News, Any Paid Offers, Survey links, Affiliate Links will create a negative view about you.

 
Customize Your Websites: 

LinkedIn gives you a chance to add your personal Website, Business Website URL, and of course, you can connect your Twitter profile as well.  If you have personal Blogs, Different social profiles then there is a chance to get inbound links to your website. But it’s “rel=follow”, but still this is a very effective way to build some backlinks from high authoritative websites to your site.

Be Professional & Stay Updated: 

LinkedIn has its own User Policy, please read and understand LinkedIn Terms of services, Share your updates and collaborate with your connections, follow the latest posts and wall updates as a reader and share your feedback!   It will create brand goodwill about you and you will gain Industry Experience from these regular activities.

If you really love to learn more about Social Media Marketing and Branding Strategies then I strongly recommend ebusinessacademy.org, they are really good at Social media strategy courses!

Conclusion:

As you can see, LinkedIn is the goldmine for Job seekers, Investors, recruiters, companies, and of course Brands! I just shared basic LinkedIn Profile Branding Tips only; there are lots of unrevealed secret strategies available to convert 60% of your LinkedIn connections as a customer and get at least two leads per day on demand using LinkedIn from entirely new unknown LinkedIn users.

 

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