How to Make Your LinkedIn Business Profile Stand Out
(Episode 1 of 2 with Viveka Von Rosen)
According to Hootsuite, LinkedIn is the most trusted social network in the United States with 722 million members. While LinkedIn was primarily used to connect potential employees with employers in the past, it is now a platform for publishing and sharing content as well. Not only can we use LinkedIn as a way to present our credentials to employers, we can also use it to show our credentials to our customers while building brand awareness, growing customer relationships, and generating leads.
Viveka Von Rosen is the co-founder and chief visibility officer of Vengreso, the largest provider of modern digital sales transformation solutions. She is known internationally as the “LinkedIn Expert” and has trained more than 10,000 business professionals on using this popular social platform. She’s also authored the best selling books LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day and LinkedIn: 101 Ways to Rock Your Personal Brand. Her business mission is to help sales professionals and business owners create more quality and qualified conversions on LinkedIn.
In today’s episode we’re going to discuss how we can make our LinkedIn profile stand out by using it to build our credibility.
Viveka’s Journey
15 years ago, Viveka was a manager and part owner of a co-share space. While she was there, she learned how much she loved entrepreneurs and business owners so she started to bring people together to meet at networking events. She brought in speakers and one of those speakers introduced her to LinkedIn.
From there, she dove right into it. While she still had her day job for a while, she eventually got to the point where she made enough money in her side business that she could quit her day job. Down the road, someone reached out to her asking her to write a book. Her book led to more speaking gigs and her speaking gigs led to more consulting, which led back to writing more books. It helped propel her career forward.
Years later, the current CEO of Vengreso, invited her to join their business. She said no twice before accepting the offer and becoming a partner of their mindshare space. This helped her renew her love of LinkedIn and she has been growing ever since. Joining Vengreso was one of her biggest home runs as it helped her open up to a bigger buyer persona and taught her more lessons.
The biggest mistake in her career was thinking she knew everything. She explained that if we think we are experts, it prevents us from learning, progressing, and being empathetic to others. However, we need to continually learn if we want to have a successful business.
“Once we stop learning, once we stop considering that we’re students and we think we know everything, that is the very minute everything shuts down,” Viveka said.
Throughout her journey, she has mastered the ins and outs of LinkedIn. Today, she shared how we can make our LinkedIn profile stand out.
How to Build Credibility on LinkedIn
Viveka said that her best monetization secret is to stand out. There are going to be thousands of people within our space doing similar things to what we do. If we want to stand out, we have to do things a bit differently. On LinkedIn, this means sharing valuable content, getting recommendations, and showing our customers who we are through the platform. What unique value do we have to offer that no one else has?
One of the best ways to make our LinkedIn profile stand out is to build our credibility. If we want to be noticed amongst a massive sea of professionals, we should build our credibility through these three tips:
- 1. Leverage Recommendations
People don’t want to hear how great our company is from us. Customers are becoming less trusting, so we want to get testimonials and recommendations from previous customers who have enjoyed our products or services before. We can use the recommendation feature on LinkedIn for this.
Gaining recommendations is an important part of making our LinkedIn profile stand out. Recommendations from LinkedIn can be even more credible than a great testimonial on our website page. This is because viewers are able to click on the recommender’s name and see their own LinkedIn profile, establishing them as a real and credible person.
“All day long we can call ourselves experts and the best, but it’s not until other people start saying it about us that it actually becomes true,” Viveka said. “What I love about LinkedIn is they have recommendations where you can get testimonials from people you have worked with. . . . Not only do they lend more credibility to your profile, they help your profile become more findable too if the folks that write your recommendations have keywords.”
Viveka explained that so few people actually ask for a recommendation, but it is such an important thing to do. The first trick to gaining recommendations is being willing to ask for them. If we don’t take the time to personally ask customers or associates for recommendations, we’ll be missing out on many that we could have received. Most people are happy to give our company a recommendation on LinkedIn if they enjoyed doing business with us.
Remember, we should seek to get recommendations about the unique services and products we offer. We want to leverage recommendations to help us stand out.
- 2. Gain Skill Endorsements
We can also use the skills endorsement section on LinkedIn to build our credibility. Recommendations are written statements about our service or product while an endorsement is a one-click way for connections to say they approve of our skills. It’s easier for someone to endorse our skills than to write a recommendation, so we can ask more people more quickly.
Endorsements are great for credibility because it’s a third party telling potential clients that we’re good at something instead of us trying to say it about ourselves. This will make our profile stand out amongst our competitors, especially if we can choose unique skills to include on our page.
The more endorsed a skill is, the more credibility we will have. We can create our own skills and have people endorse those skills. These skills should be related to our business and how we can specifically help our customers and add value to their lives.
“The more endorsed a skill is, the more likely you’re going to be found under that keyword on LinkedIn,” Viveka said. “People look at those numbers. If you’ve got one endorsement and your competition has over 99, it might actually sway the person towards [your competitor.]”
We should make sure we go to our LinkedIn profile and look at our top three most endorsed skills. If they aren’t the most important skills we want to be known for, we can push them lower. Our best skills should be at the top so they are noticed. By putting them at the top we also signal to our friends and family that this is what we want them to endorse us for.
- 3. Post Valuable and Engaging Content
We should focus on making our page and our company’s page impressive by publishing and sharing interesting and engaging content. When we post valuable content targeted directly to our niche audience, we will resonate more with our customers.
As we create and publish content consistently on LinkedIn, we build our credibility and trust. A great way to establish ourselves as a thought leader on LinkedIn is by sharing original content that is insightful, helpful, and entertaining for our followers. Our content should be written with our unique voice and insights, allowing our followers to feel that they are getting to know us by reading our words.
Viveka explained that one great way to utilize LinkedIn is to post and share video content. Since the pandemic, so many people communicate through social media and a lot of that communication is through pictures and text, but it doesn’t give people a great sense of who you are. Video does.
She suggested we use a video cover story, the name pronunciation tool which is a 10 second audio introduction, add a speakers reel, or share video content to help our customers learn a bit more about us and see our personality.
“[Video] gives people a great sense of who you are,” Viveka said. “They help build your credibility. They help build the know, like, and trust factor, and that means people are a lot more likely to A) accept your invitation and B) have a conversation with you.”
As we create content on LinkedIn, we not only build our credibility, but increase our reach, expand our audience, generate traffic and leads, increase engagement, and build our online presence.
In the featured section of LinkedIn, we can also include customer testimonials and video case studies. The goal should be to make our profile a resource for our customer.
“There’s so many different ways that you can utilize LinkedIn and the different features to build that credibility,” Viveka said. “ Share your knowledge [through] blog posts, podcasts, voicemails, videos, excerpts of your books, articles, etc. . . . Prove your expertise, don’t just say you’re an expert.”
Key Takeaways
Thank you so much Viveka for sharing your stories and insights with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:
- Once we stop learning, everything shuts down.
- We can call ourselves experts all day long, but it’s not until other people start saying it about us that it actually becomes true. We can ask for recommendations on LinkedIn to build our credibility.
- Through endorsements we can get a third party telling potential clients that we’re good at something. This will make our profile stand out amongst our competitors, especially if we can choose unique skills to include on our page.
- We should publish and share interesting and engaging content targeted directly to our niche audience.
- Video content helps our customers get a sense of our unique personality, and video tends to be effective on LinkedIn.
Connect with Viveka
To learn more about or connect with Viveka:
- Connect on LinkedIn
- Visit her website at Vengreso.com
- Read her books on Amazon
Next Steps
- Get a free Passion Marketing ebook, and learn how to become a top priority of your ideal customers at PassionMarketing.com.
- Subscribe to Monetization Nation on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, our Facebook Group, and your favorite podcast platform.
