Top 5 mistakes on LinkedIn (and how to avoid them).

LinkedIn is a powerful tool and we like LinkedIn a lot at New Results. We have looked into some of the most common mistakes that people make on LinkedIn. We have created a checklist and ideas to help you avoid these common mistakes.

1. Dead on arrival profile. Lots of people will look you up on LinkedIn (225Million + users can’t be wrong) and want to find out about you. Think about it, potential customers might be looking at your profile to see if you are a potential credible supplier. You could be missing out because you don’t have a great profile. Here’s how you can improve this:

• Have a good professional picture (remember people buy from people)
• Have a full description of what you and your organisation does
• Keep all of your information up to date

Take 15 minutes and have a real good look at your profile. Does it show you in a great light or are you hiding away your best assets. Ask others for their opinion on your profile, what have you missed?

2. Keywords in your description. Lots of people have their job title or a few words saying what they do, but how effective are these? Do they show what you do (not usually your job title). Do they reflect how others will search for you. Look at the keywords you currently use to describe what you do. Now think how customers will try and find suppliers or contacts and what sort of words and language they will use. You need to have these words and description on your profile.

We recently did some one to one work with a professional speaker (one of the best locally) and he wasn’t getting much work from LinkedIn, but when we looked he had forgotten to put the words professional speaker & presenter in his profile! He was horrified that when we ran a search (LinkedIn search is fantastic) he didn’t appear in the first couple of pages or results. Are you the same, do you appear in your potential customers searches?

3. Bland connection requests. You know the bog standard LinkedIn request with no additional information. We have all been guilty of this of some time, just sending a request with no compelling reasons why the other person would want to connect. Let’s get rid of “join my network on LinkedIn & I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”  Nothing screams out “can’t really be bothered” more than this.

Think about individual connections, make reference to how you know them and why they might want to connect with you. Refer back to the meeting / networking / party / event where you met and remind them of the discussion (especially if you can refer to something they were doing). Making a connection request personal significantly increases you chances of getting the connections.

4. No company page. LinkedIn gives you a free resource to set up a page for your company. Not only this it gives you the opportunity to list your products and services and share key information with your followers. To cap this off they have a great video showing you how to set up your page. LinkedIn’s help centre has a great article and video on how to do this – see it here .

Your LinkedIn company page is a great way of connecting with current and new potential customers. It’s worth investing 30 minutes to get this set up. Once you have set it up the key is to keep the content and information up to date and relevant for your followers.

5. Sell, sell, sell ………… Not something that we really like (individually or from a business perspective). We have all seen it, you get a connection request and accept it at 10.00 on a morning and by 10.15 there is a “Have we got the ideal product / service or widget for you!”. It doesn’t work, there isn’t a relationship yet, there is no interaction and if anything it might just put people off. As a general rule there needs to be some relationship and rapport for a sale to be made and just jumping on the first opportunity to sell won’t usually work.

Build rapport and relationship first, share information and ideas with connections. Help them first (who can you connect them with?) and position yourself as a trusted connection before thinking about selling. Rather than sending an Inmail or an email, why not phone them first (not straight after the connection is accepted) but after a week or two. Meet them and have a business discussion and see how you can help each other.

These are 5 common mistakes we see and if we are honest they are fairly simple to avoid. Invest a small amount of time and you can easily avoid these mistakes and make so much more of what is an incredibly useful and powerful business tool.

If you  want more than this, come and have a look at our one day LinkedIn courses here

And finally please connect on LinkedIn and say hello – we like talking to new and interesting people!

 Image sourced from Pixabay