LinkedIn is a powerful and effective social media channel to help you raise your brand, demonstrate your credibility, build a network and ultimately win you new clients.
Why then, do so many accountants, bankers, lawyers and financial service professionals send out mixed and confusing messages on LinkedIn?
The mixed messages seem to fall into two key areas:
- Not investing a small amount of time into completing your professional profile
- Sharing content that doesn’t engage your target audience
Let’s look at the profiles first and see how this can create a mixed message.
If you are a professional, you take great care and pride in the work you do for your clients and the results and outcomes you get for them. Why then doesn’t your LinkedIn profile reflect this?
What areas on your profile can send out these mixed messages?
- Working in professional services and having a poor quality old photo (or worse still no photo at all)
- Your firm investing in great branding, but you don’t bother to use this on your personal profile
- You want to be easy to access for potential clients but provide your personal email address in your contact details rather than your company email address (or the biggest crime the email address of the firm you used to work at!)
- You have had a successful career working with one or two top-flight firms, but you provide no details of this on your profile
- You work for a great firm but haven’t successfully connected your profile to your company page
These may all seem like small things, but you will know that your clients spot these little things, and lots of little things can add up to make a big difference.
Investing a small amount of time into your profile can really boost your personal and professional brand in your marketplace.
How does the content you share and engage with send out mixed messages?
Firstly, you are engaging with and sharing content on LinkedIn, aren’t you? When done well the content you share should reflect how professional you are and how much value you bring to your clients. We always recommend discussing as a firm what type of content and what tone and approach you want to take on LinkedIn. You can then personalise this with your own individual approach.
Sharing useful, insightful content that educates both existing and new clients builds a huge amount of credibility.
The disconnect around content tends to happen when you don’t have a strategy or a plan to engage others. The single biggest mistake you can make is sharing content that you find useful. Yes, you read that right, if you send out content you find useful this could be a mixed and confused message for your network. You need to share content that your clients and potential clients might find useful. Focus on what your clients value and consistently share and engage this content, that way you don’t send out mixed and confusing messages.
Stopping for a few minutes and thinking of the questions clients always ask you is a great starting point. You can take these questions and turn them into discussion points around resources you create and third-party information you share. Your network on LinkedIn needs to see you as adding value and sharing content that they want to engage this.
Check out our other blogs, resources and online learning to help you deliver value to your clients and potential clients on LinkedIn.
