Why is LinkedIn so beneficial for the financial space? First of all, you can establish credentials for yourself. You can highlight any special designations, background or information about where you were educated to help build your audience with people who might have a similar background or to help people establish how your expertise is laid out online. You can also use LinkedIn to share relevant information with your network, which really helps with thought leadership.
Of course, an active LinkedIn presence also helps you build future opportunities. So, the more effectively you share information now, the more likely people will think of you in the future.
Here are my five ways to leverage LinkedIn properly:
- Plan for success
- Optimize your profile
- Build thought leadership
- Connect with the right contacts
- Engage with connections
Plan for success
Why do you want to use LinkedIn? Get clear on your goal for the platform before you get started so that you can ensure that you are reaching the milestones you want to reach through LinkedIn and through social media in general.
More often than not in the financial services space, we want to be seen as thought leaders. So, it is important to establish your authority on the topics you want to speak about. What specific areas of finance or insurance do you want people to hear from you about? Start to share that content so that you can be the go-to expert in that arena. It is also important to keep in mind that an active LinkedIn presence is sharing content often but also updating your profile properly with the right information to keep you up to date with your contacts.
Optimize your profile
Did you know that LinkedIn has one of the best search tools out there? You can search by location, job and credentials. There are so many key pieces that can be used in a LinkedIn search so that you can show up. But before you can show up properly on LinkedIn, you need to flesh out your profile properly. Here are my core steps to fill out your profile so that you will come up first on LinkedIn search results for your key topics:
No. 1 is a great headline, something that stands out, something that is engaging and that includes the keywords for the area of thought leadership that you want to be known for. A professional photo that is high resolution is incredibly important. People build trust by seeing a face, ideally something that’s on brand for your business. Leverage your profile to share some visual content. Do you have a PDF about your industry or your company? Do you have a video that you would want to share that talks about your firm and your background? All of these pieces can be added to your profile to add impact to what you have on LinkedIn. You can also share your experience. So, not only do people already know you from what you share with them, but you can use LinkedIn as a résumé or as an online credential tool. Honors and awards are incredibly useful to add to LinkedIn. What have you been recognized for in your space or in the community? Add those to LinkedIn.
Where you went to school is a key piece to add as well because you might want to reconnect with past classmates who now could be a great referral source for you. Something that always comes up is how many connections you should have on LinkedIn. And, truly, only 500 to 800 of your connections on LinkedIn are people you actually know. So, start to consider how you want to audit who you are connected with so that you can use LinkedIn to come up higher on search results.
Build thought leadership
This is something that we cover often. It is incredibly important for you to be seen as an expert in your space, to share value-added content frequently and optimize it in the best way. How do you leave a powerful and impactful digital legacy on LinkedIn and on social media in general? No. 1 is you share original content. Even if you are not the best writer, you can use video formats or have someone on your team take your key points and flesh them out into a blog post or a piece of content that you can then reshare on social media. If you really don’t know what to say in a blog format or a video, humanize your content, and share how your clients have impacted you. Share testimonials, share news that you find online, and add some intro statements about why you think they are relevant to your network. And lastly, as a business owner, as an executive and as a leader in your space, share some tips about your entrepreneurial journey or what it is like to be in business.
When sharing content, it is important to include a link so that they have somewhere to click to and to tag either a person or a company page. For example, if you want to highlight a member of your team in a blog post that he or she wrote, you can write two really captivating sentences, mention that person in the post, link to the blog posts that were written, and then include some hashtags to extend the reach.
Video is the best form of content to share on any social media profile. It can be 15 seconds to 60 seconds, and it is a great opportunity to engage people in a new way that you have not before. I challenge you to share one video a month that drives people back to your website or a blog post you’ve written and that entices people in a new format that you might not have used. But why video? Well, if I were to share a post with a photo, I might get 100 people viewing it. If I share a video, I can get three to five times the number of people engaging with my content.
Connect with the right contacts
Many of us have thousands of connections, but we don’t actually personally know who those people are. My strategy to really get the most out of LinkedIn for business development and for thought leadership is to try to connect with the people you actually know. Part of that exercise is to go through LinkedIn connections. If you don’t recognize someone’s photo or name right away, you might not need to be connected to them. However, if you share over 15 contacts in common with them, it might be an opportunity for you to send those people a message and book a call to learn more about how you can connect in business. If you have a strong number of connections with them, it might be an opportunity to actually uptick the conversation and to talk about some kind of referral opportunity that you might have if you are in similar spaces or your clients complement each other.
Engage with connections
Once you have a really great network of strong connections, you can then begin to engage with their content, and hopefully they will engage with yours. Engagement is when people like, comment or share posts. But be careful: If you start to like, comment and share too many other people’s posts, you will actually push down the value-added content that you shared. All activity on LinkedIn goes into your activity feed. And what that means is, any original content that you post will be pushed down by new posts that you engage with. So, keep that in mind when you are doing your LinkedIn engagement and are active on LinkedIn. Be strategic, build your connections strategically, and engage only with the best, most valuable content for your industry. Too much engagement can be a bad thing.
Philip Calvert, FPSA, is a financial-advisor-marketing expert. He was a pioneer of social media in financial services and founded the world's first online networking platform for financial advisors. He is in demand as an exciting speaker on LinkedIn lead generation and is the author of “56 New Income Streams for Financial Advisers: How to Turn your Financial Planning Expertise & Experience into Profitable Information Products for the Digital Age.”
Kyriakos Chatzistefanou is a 13-year MDRT member from Thessaloniki, Greece, who began his career in MetLife in 1992. He has degree in junior accounting, a diploma in management from Kingston University and a diploma from Chartered Management Institute. He is a life member of the Greek Circle of Successful Agents of MetLife and has spoken at conferences inside and outside Greece.
Tara Clark is a social media architect, entrepreneur, mentor and experienced speaker. The founder and CEO of Vancouver-based social media agency Social T, Clark’s mission is to enable brands to engage with existing customers and tap into new audiences using their social media networks. With more than a decade of experience as a dynamic event speaker, she inspires and educates audiences on a variety of topics including digital marketing, collaboration and entrepreneurship. She also enjoys consulting for businesses, both locally and internationally.
