LinkedIn Social Selling Tips: Turn Your Profile Into a Business Growth Machine
Feb 27, 2023, 4 Minute Read
Social selling is about finding, engaging, and connecting with your target audience through social media. It can help you better qualify prospects, expand your reach and raise awareness, promote your company, engage with prospects and clients, conduct research, gain trust, and establish relationships to increase sales.
With over 830 million members, LinkedIn is the only platform focused on business and professional networking and it’s an essential tool for brokers looking to connect with potential clients. In fact, it’s one of the top places to reach decision makers, influencers, and practitioners.
According to Hubspot, B2B blogs and websites receive most of their social media traffic from LinkedIn. And 43% attributed their sales to LinkedIn, Facebook followed at 24%, and Twitter at 20%.
There is no ‘silver bullet’ for attracting LinkedIn leads. Instead you’ll need a combination of strategies to establish yourself on the platform and get in front of your target audience. To help, here’s our first Social Selling Tips article on how to turn your profile into a business growth machine.
An Optimized Professional LinkedIn Profile:
- Increases your visibility, engagement, and leads.
- Acts as a personal website and is the first page people visit to learn about you.
- Showcases your expertise, experience, and accomplishments, establishing you as a trusted and credible professional in the industry.
- Boosts acceptance rates on connection requests.
- Escalates conversion rates from profile viewers to followers.
- Is not your resume.
Profile Optimization Framework
- Upload a high-quality, professional, friendly/smiling headshot photo to build trust. People trust people.
- Create a professional, helpful banner image that tells, in a few words, what you do. It can highlight your company, branding, or a lead magnet.
- Customize your public profile URL, e.g. https://linkedin.com/yourname. Edit it under the “edit your public profile” option of your profile.
- Write a professional headline, below your name, that explains who you help and how you help them. This is critical. This headline (the first nine words matter the most) is displayed on your outgoing connection requests to LinkedIn members. It’s the description others use to judge whether they should accept.
Examples:
- Change your “Connect” button to a “Follow” button so your content is immediately introduced in their news feed.
• Go to your privacy settings (use the dropdown under “Me” then “Settings & Privacy”), click “Visibility” on the left panel, then “Visibility of your LinkedIn activity.” Then click “Followers.” Switch on the “Make follow primary” button.
- Promote your money-making products/services in the Featured section. Demonstrate your expertise and showcase relevant content for your target audience.
• Highlight major projects and publications, e.g. documents, videos, LinkedIn published content and external links. Make sure you have at least three items.
• Include your contact information and a Calendly link.
- Make your About section short, sweet, engaging, conversion-driven, and easy to skim. It’s your LinkedIn sales letter and should convince the reader to take action.
• Include a professional personal introduction and a call-to-action.
• Showcase your expertise, experience, work results, and accomplishments. It should be a summary of who you are as a professional coupled with relevant keywords that make your profile discoverable via search. Leads can find you organically from your profile alone.
• This section should explain why you are worth following.
- In the Work Experience section, let the reader know who you’ve worked for, how much experience you have, and how long you’ve been in the industry.
• Add a client-centric job description (minimum of 4 lines).
• Add media to your current experience, e.g. links or documents.
- People hire and buy based on referrals from peers. Ask your friends, colleagues, and clients for in-depth reviews to populate your Recommendations section.
- In the Skills section, make sure your top three Skills are aligned with your current services. Use up to 50 Skills to highlight your competencies and added value.
- Enrich your profile with more relevant information by using the “Add Profile Section” to add languages, publications, projects, honors/awards, volunteer experience, and more.
- Enable Creator Mode to increase your followers and strengthen your brand.
- Once you have enabled Creator Mode, add a 30-second LinkedIn profile video with the LinkedIn mobile app.
- Include spaces between sentences for easy scrolling, especially on mobile devices.
Your profile should be a landing page that focuses on the needs of your prospects and clients. Make sure to include all of your contact details and keep it up to date. It does influence sales!
For playbooks on how to acquire clients through LinkedIn, check out our upcoming articles on LinkedIn Social Selling Tips.
Questions?
Contact The Answer Team at 800.696.4543 or info@claremontcompanies.com.
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