ok we're going to jump in that too late comers will be carrying mags so when they come in you can kind of say hey carry him eggs what's going on this is one of the digital marketing summer sessions this is linked in case you're confused about what you're doing there is one more of these on the back that's are very very last one of the year google analytics so we won't talk about google analytics today but if you want to talk about it for three hours you can come back my name is tim haynes and i am with marketing agency called symposia labs in familiar so this is a picture of me at harry potter world the best place on earth we hope that you will be feeling that happy by the time you leave today that's a look of happiness right there so a couple of things to take notes i'm going to give you a u r l to all the things that i keep saying i'll give you later  but take notes because i'll give you the power point and it won't mean that much to you because it's really just a bunch of pictures get ready to get excited i know it is eight o eight in the morning on a wednesday and your coffee is still processing through your body but we are going to air it's going to be a working lab so that person next to you is going to be our friend if they're not already and for those of you have a mental one of these before i don't hesitate to raise your hand or shout out questions we're pretty informal we have a lot to cover if i don't like your question i just will tell you that  but it's probably something that everyone else is seeking already right so how many of you would say that you are a professional lay down user you're got the pro level on the sports team ok anybody would you say or you're like varsity your high school virus city level the use linked in but you just want to know more about it ok we've got some r c players over here i'm just going to assume everyone else is hasn't made the team yet that's ok what i want to do before we get started is i want to go around and just hear kind of like a thirty second version who are you what is your role at your company slash what does your company do and what are you doing here today are you s person did you sign up at your own discretion so sorry amy and what kind of clients is dish you're going after is that only business to business or ok good i love using linked in for business to business business development that's what i personally use it for and how long have you been have mastered everything awesome and what do you guys so mechanical services excellent and we'd invite is on are you guys targeting consumers i'm assuming other businesses exact executives ok that's great so you have a really specific niche right you're trying to research companies or individuals that would be interested in acquisition so you've got a pretty specific set of people that you're looking for cool really good to know more about you guys i want to have all of those things in mind as we talk today so that you can leave here today and pull a couple things out that are specific to you so first we're going to talk about what's going on on linked in and i'm going to spend a lot of time here but just kind of a quick fly over what do you need to know about the platform that's happened within the last year or so or first of all this is an older chart it's gotten much bigger sense even then but the usage of linked in has just skyrocketed pretty much ever since their i hit linked in has been doing phenomenal phenomenally well both with their growth and their revenue so linked in is is here to stay arguably for quite a while there's a lot of different features on linked in some of you have probably experienced these willingly or unwillingly the most popular one who's viewed your profile is also the most creepy one so you can see you've probably already seen who is looking at your profile and then you can go look at their profile there are a lot of other features on here that are also interesting so my personal favorite people that you may know sometimes it's great just to connect that way searching for companies is number four we're probably going to make it number one by the time that we leave the number one thing that linked in is greyed out that people miss is finding other people and other companies if you kind of think of it like the modern day of the yellow pages right we would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for customer lists if they were really good all of that is free or fifty dollars a month  inexpensive depending on how you think of it on linked in it's the world's largest customer database so there's lots of other features there too that we're going to come back to a lot of people are using linked in either to find a job or to post job opportunities and when we talk about posting a job opportunity we're not just talking about sharing a link and hoping that someone sees it we're talking about actually pain i think it's one ninety nine or two ninety nine depending on how you are your listings but you can very easily post without knowing much about advertising a paid job to linked in it's a matter of fact that's how we found our last hire their messaging system has evolved a little bit within the last year that looks more and more like an email platform than anything else there are also kind of start sending people seventeen notifications trying to get them one message so they're moving more of this this instant message sort of style they've updated groups they've arguing made them a little bit more useful i still think of linked in's groups as kind of the wild west not a place that i visit all the time but they are doing a lot better at managing spam making it a little bit more the user interface is prettier if you're looking for a freelancer or contractor linked in has their own little freelance marketplace where you can go out and you could try to find someone who does contract work on your website or your wordpress s so what is like to most powerful for according to a recent survey the thing that it's best at is researching people and companies and god that's why we're go really dive into that today it's also great at helping you connect building relationships increasing awareness all these different goals that we might have in our marketing plan a lot of them could be achieved here like all marketing tools we want to make sure we least have a quick idea of the demo who is using this platform and is it a good place for us to be so college and bachelor degrees most people on linked in are are fairly educated they're either in the process of getting an education or they're already very educated you can see the average age is about thirty five to fifty four so we're not we're not necessarily talking to college students although they're certainly college students on linked in thirty five to fifty four makes up most of the age here and you could see the income we could argue i guess depending on your definition that that's middle class fifty k plus one hundred k plus you will find executives on linked in you'll find people looking for opportunities and you'll find people just spread for opportunities so there's certainly a mixed group of people here but i might think of it as the the golf club so as far as being to be does linked in is hands down one of the best platforms out there i would debate this charts placement of twitter but that's another time linked in also acquired slide share so they own that that's another platform for sharing basically a power point deck online and they also acquired lynda dot com which is high quality training around pretty much anything you can imagine if you want to warn photoshop or facebook ads window dot com has  tauriel on every single topic imaginable so linked in is is being pretty sure t j about what they're acquiring what they're buying and where they're going as far as the primary audiences go right we're not going to find people that are super interested in food of rank as much on linked in they live more on instagram or facebook what we are going to find we're go find business and industry education and employment and a lot of i t technology digital sort of company in like all social media networks is selling ads this should be no surprise to you have probably seen them so just last year they did over half a billion dollars in ad revenue i can advertise in linked in their platform is not arguably as robust as facebook's or google's but it can be highly valuable depending on my target so you mention they are going after executives right  linked in would be a great place if i was going to spend money to reach executives but we're working with a choir right now who is trying to reach i team managers while linked in and twitter were our number two choices because we know we're going to be able to get to those people so know that one of the things that may help you fail or succeed is whether or not you spend money all died inside a little bit they haven't really done too much with it yet but they did acquire it as one of the largest acquisitions of history and it was microsoft's biggest jump yet into the space they've kept linked in kind of separate yet we haven't really seen a ton of integration between the two but i'm sure that it will come for better or worse with it i suppose so there's the content that will come down from the influencers on pulse and how you become an influencer is a whole nother conversation but so if i say there are people who are very influential and you see their content all the time and then there's more of your local so the neat thing about linked in paul says when i post to it every single person gets a notification that said it's actually it can be a pretty tricky platform to gain traction with but here's jim used to be the one of the presidents of the west coast chamber he's pretty active on here but you can see even jim only one hundred eight the right so again this is another place where you can advertise they can publish a blog article here and pay to reach more people the amount of content on linked in has saturation has increased rapidly so it used to be that we talked about posting twenty or thirty times a month and so if you me thinking who on the flip side i would say though quality is becoming more important than quantity so just like facebook a volved from it was a big deal that you posted anything to everyone is posting all the time linked in is arguably made that change too so maybe it's less important that you post so often and more important that you post better content and it's really easy we're going to look at buffer app which is why you loved in the that it's really we're going to look at today linked in for talent recruitment lead generation business development and growing your business and your personal brand on linked in a couple of quick vocab words newsfeeds you can kind of imagine that your newspaper that's your what you see when you first log in a post like to imagine that that's your megaphone exact same ideas what you do on facebook twitter or anywhere outs your profile that's your cubicle some people start to think of it as their c s v because there's so much information about your resume they're your network there's a couple different layers to your network there's your first there's your second and there's your third so there's the people that you've gone to lunch with there's the people who know the guy you went to lunch with and then there's the people outside of that and linked in treats all of them a little bit differently shows information differently except you can see someone's information for the most part earliest the basics without actually sending an invitation which is facebook's version of a friend request right if i haven't invited you to connect then you are not a connection and i might not be able to message you might not be able to see your phone number all of that sort of stuff recommendations and endorsements we're going to come back to but both of them are very valuable or interesting at least so just a couple quick takeaways winkin is a great tool for reaching walter all demographics individuals are probably not as young as you might imagine recent changes have provided some new opportunities for content marketing which is exciting if you're not posting content regularly you're probably missing some sort of an opportunity now you're going to have to decide over the course of this session is that something that is valuable to me do i want to start posting content regularly ok so next we're going to talk about growing your network at the very least you want to make sure that linked in is being utilized as much as possible to extend your existing network how do you do that so we talked a little bit about that one two three that will keep coming up over and over again because sometimes you'll click on someone and you'll be able to see everything sometimes you'll click on someone and you'll be able to see very much nothing almost that all has to do with are they a connection or they connection of a connection or they outside even that groups on linked in anyone who's a member of a linked in group falls into that third category too there's a lot to know about how to build your network one of my favorite little tools by show of hands anyone that uses g mail the superior email platform ok get if you're stuck with microsoft we're just giving you a hard time reportage is a very neat little tool and this is exactly what it does every single time i send an e mail from my dream an account report does its little magic and it says oh i know that person on linked in and if i wasn't connected to that individual there would be a little button here that said connect and i would put connect and without even leaving my email platform i would be able to send a little invitation so as a best practice in my life i always take a second to look at the side bar and i can instantly connected are not already connected at all even show some of their other social profiles depending on who it is so reported was a little start up they actually got bought by a linked in which is why the logo is right there so linked in actually owns this tool there is no existing i know of that does exactly the same thing with microsoft if you find it for outlook i would love to hear about it because i've searched very hard to find something but it's just a really need tool as part of your kind of like your ongoing set of processes if you are going to be using linked in you want to add people to it write your rolodex than have any value in one nine hundred fifty if you didn't put anything in it doesn't have any value if you forget to add people on that same note why not just adjure you are held to your business card one of the most common ways to connect with someone is on linked in it's a quick way to learn more about them to see what kind of experience they have if they have any credibility why not just add your linked in to your business card it's a lot more valuable if you're in business than your facebook page right not sure if you're a restaurant or if you're more b to c it makes sense probably to have both but if you're primarily in the business world why not add it right there on that same note ad email signature if you are any jar manager why can't i click from my view of you on your website to your linked in profile to you if you're an employee or a salesperson i should probably be able to get to your li den profile from the website it's just an extra way to create instantaneous credibility on the flip side if i'm afraid my employees i now could put any of their linked in information on my website right so it depends on what your goal is but anywhere that you put your phone number you can kind of stop to ask that i put my linked in your are all there to is there an icon on your home page is there a follow us button so on that note of actually adding connections first i'm going to show you how to do this and then we're actually going to do this together so that you don't forget to do it when you get home so here i am adding connections over on the right hand side there's a little guy with a plus button and if i click on him this comes up if i have a g account this is really easy i just click on g mail and i'm going along again and i'm not sure you do this right in front of you so look up here don't be tempted to be a bad student and do it first on your own so first i click on g mail this little box comes up it's going to ask if i want to give it permission i might have to log into the right account and it's going to look through every single person i've ever e mailed and it's going to magically make it possible to add that now all this is fairly straightforward but one disclaimer the first screen that comes up if this cooperates these are people that are actually on linked in now i can scroll through and i can see this select people who i don't want to add for whatever reason you know maybe my my strange aunt is on here and i don't want to invite her but these people are all actively on linked in the next screen is full of thousands of people that you have e mails for but that aren't on linked in and if you accidentally click yes your continue on that second screen you will be the person that sent out a thousand e mails and annoyed your friends i did this five or six years ago when linked in was new and i got lots of emails back from people that said who are you and what is linked in so very much want to avoid that complicated so if if you wanted to do this for an account that didn't have access that wasn't gene now and that didn't work so well you would have to take a c s v file you have to export your contacts so like if you were in mail champ there's an option pretty much on all programs now export contacts as c s v comma separated file and then you would import that back in and if you're smiling thinking aha i have g mail i don't care about that that might not be true because as soon as you finish importing your contacts i want you to consider this if you are on a sales team for a large company maybe there are five or six of you or if you're with a small company and there's one other person that's doing business development they probably have contacts that you want and you probably have contacts that they want so a couple different examples here one of you mentioned i'm doing this for the owner because the owner doesn't want to do and didn't and it sounded in that situation like the owner was kind of the face of the company which often happens well if that's the case one i'm probably going to use the owner's linked in account not my own and two i might of our contacts from our sales people on to the owners linked in to connect with them so i don't want you to think of this beyond just who i know and instead i want you to think about who do we know  that i could connect with here i saw a sales team about half a year ago where three or four people they'd combined all of their address books into one master address book and all of them instead of adding just one hundred connections were able to add eight hundred or nine hundred connections on linked in and since they were all doing sales it made sense that all of them would want to connect if you have an email platform with a list like in a mail stamp or a consequence act same thing can you export that and that upload it and then connect with those people on linked in even though they might not actually be in your address book this is a really big opportunity to connect with people and to expand your network for free so you want to make sure you take advantage of it did it everyone successfully add context i mean to give you another minute or two you keep going see you're looking at which is great you're looking at your company page these are all going to be added to your personal page ok and you just hit profile so there are added to your these so these are all going your personal profile and you can kind of imagine if your age are a quick question that comes up who owns your contacts on linked in so scenario that some of you fit you're in business development you spent maybe the last year maybe the last five years on the company dime going out there building your network you decide tomorrow you want to leave for a competing company while all of your contacts are going to come with you even though they're kind of the company's contacts in a way so something for h r people to consider is how does this impact our business department or our sales team do we have and do have non competes do we have a way of keeping these contacts probably not signed up you may have but if you're like me over the course of just a couple months your contact list grows the amount of people you've e mailed evolves so it's definitely worth doing again but the other thing i find is a lot of people are in a hurry when they did it the first time because they just want to figure out what went down was so it's worth revisiting right yes so the younger if you kind of think back to that that breakdown of the demographics thirty five is the most common young age on linked in which means a lot of the college students who are hires and in turn aren't here that's something that you know arguably the colleges need to start thinking more about why are they not teaching only didn't class one o one when i taught it hope last year that was the very first thing we did with our students we said hey you should be on linked in let's create a profile let's build your network off the ability for other people to see all of your contacts so if you have a concern about that you could turn it off that said it's a social media platform there is no such thing as one hundred percent privacy here so let's jump out of the sandbox and if you can see people create two profiles which is not my favorite technique but if it gets them there so two takeaways is ridge on back out of the sandbox there are multiple opportunities for connecting with linked in contacts and make sure that you're importing your email list because that could be a really critical step there's also and we did look at all of these but basically everywhere you go on linked in linked in will be trying to get you to add someone as a contact all social media platforms are pretty aggressive about this winked in is no different as a matter of fact they even have a little section here i believe under my network where you can click on people you may know and linked in well just because of everything you've told it bills they hey i bet you know these people facebook isn't the tory is for doing this right you are always finding people that you didn't necessarily want to find so sure you can scroll through here and you could say oh maybe i should connect with michael i haven't talked to him in a long time or if you're like me you might scroll through her new might think ha don't really know these people that's my aunts so i asked her that's great oh that's my friend's dad so as you're doing this another question that's going to come up who i am is your mission to have a million contacts probably not everyone takes a different philosophy when it comes to who who do i not at my philosophy personally is i never know what someone wants or how they might be interested in connecting with me down the road or who they might know right i recently had someone connect with me and i almost said no because i didn't know who they were they connected with me i got a call the next day from a friend that said so and so was asking about you and your services and wondering if you'd be a good fit and the day after that i had a meeting and almost landed a project on the spot so if i had said no would that of stop that individual from meeting with me i don't know i don't i hope not but it might of they might have been doing what i do what she is before i even bother to call you or talk to you i could quickly research you where did you come from what people say about you what sort of skills you have are be a good fit save myself some time so i make it a rule to accept all invitations and then if you are the kind of person who's just trying to pitch me i just block you that's very easy to do so before we leave this we should talk real quick how do you block someone well if you go to my connections you could see everyone here that you've ever talked to so maybe i realize that i want to block one of these individuals which i don't if i go to their profile there's a neat little button here that just says block right so maybe i decide this individual although very kind i'm going to block them and i could go and do that then they'll never see me on linked in again same as most other social networks and yes in your privacy settings you can turn off that ability for people to be able to see who you are when you look at their profile so that they don't get a notification saying sarah has looked at your profile here's a link to her profile get sucked into internet land and i happen you found your mom's best friend and you're adding her so how do we improve our personal and then our business brand here on in we're going to do a walk through but just a couple of pointers here the thing that people see after they see your picture is your summary lets you rearrange things they see your summary this is a great place to take some time to do something more than a resume the biggest mistake i see people make metaphor and would just look at a couple of people here so ok i don't know any of these individuals so it's easy to credit criticize them k one thing that i really like about hers first of all she's getting a little bit personal carry th spirals my bible when i was a little girl creating that connection right and then i also like she's kind of said hey i'm going to go around linked in's rules about who can and can't get my contact information and i'm just going to put my e mail right here and by doing that kay has said anyone who sees my profile even if they're not a connection they're going to have my e mail address i would do it but for her maybe it made sense ok now we're going to look at paul paul apparently has a very small head very nice guy i'm sure it would have been great if he had uploaded a larger version of his profile picture especially intriguing since he's used to work at social media today i question that specialty if you can't see paul's last name on there again ok just make a gesture i don't want to get sued specialties he's got a whole long list you know what i don't like about that he specializes apparently in everything if i were similar profiles trying to hire someone i would look at this and i would say you specialize in multitasking i can't hire for that and here we have another one love it or hate it they've decided to kind of do a ball of point unless it gets your attention it's creative i also think it's and it's something doing development of media and software since the web was born i had big ideas i don't care who gets credit i am the calm one now regardless of what you think of this pursuit not personify it does get your attention it is unique they did spend some time writing it for better or for worse so the all overall point here is you want to think about your profile it matters go figure just like your resume you have very little time to get someone's attention especially if they're on the hunt for a specific contact i run toward fires i know why i was hoping someone would lap that i don't know what i want to connect with someone that runs toward fires personally that doesn't sound wise to me but there's a whole nother conversation where we can spend a whole day just making fun of people but we won't we won't do that we won't digress so let's look at my profile let's make fun of myself safer so a quick walk through here don't do anything on your profile yet because we're going to do that in a minute first of all this is the most beautiful picture of me well you know i'm not the world's best looking guy but i try professional write we're not looking for real estate photo where it looks like a stock photo version of you but we're also not looking for your facebook photo of you with a beer in your hand at a party i want to find some middle ground here this right here is really critical this is your title everything in your profile especially your title to play into how people find you based on what they're searching for so a little bit about me it says i'm a digital marketing special person that says i'm a social media marketing facebook advertising google ad words well guess what this one why do i have that in my title well i made a decision when we started selling that as a service to add it to my title because i am doing business development like some of you i want people who are looking for google ad words to find me so that i can connect them with my team so you want to think about your title the keywords that you're putting in there and ultimately how the people you're trying to connect with are going to please don't put things in here like desperately looking for opportunities to connect or i am now available for hire or fundraising for an amazing organization that you should know more about those are great ways for people to ignore you so if you are in fund raising that's great maybe think about some keywords here that describe what your organization does why do i want to give you money making the holiday area a better place for young children whatever it might be the greater grand rapids area there is no holland option we're not big enough we fall into the greater grand rapids area you want to have your current company obviously and your previous that seems really straightforward if you click on your current company though and this doesn't happen oh it was a bad example well that was a bad example to here we go when you're putting in your current company the mistake that a lot of people make is they don't select it from a drop down and so they type it in and what that does is if i click on your current company i don't end up on your company page it's a really annoying little nuance so if when i click on your current company name i don't end up on your company page then that means that you haven't done this quite right and this is one of those scenes what have up on the website afterwords but if you're an h r manager suddenly it becomes your mission to get everyone in your company to connect to the company page so that if i click on the name of your company all of your people show up and if you don't have a company page we're talking about that a second but make sure that you've selected from the drop down you'll notice here that lots of little pencils are coming up that's because all you need to do to edit things is just click on one of those little pencils and you can even view the profile as other people might see it so if you click on view profile as right you can actually see this is what my connections are seeing this is what the public is seeing so if you're confused at all about how privacy works you can get a quick idea of what it actually is going to show them so my connections this is what they're seeing so i'm going to mouse over i'm going to go back to edit profile a couple of other things to look at here if you don't have a short u r l if yours is linked in dot com  in eight seven three two one th you want to go ahead and change that so that it's a custom u r l just like you have a custom email in order to do that you click on this little gear box up here and this little gear box springs up the side bar where i can customize my u r l based on what's available so linked in god is probably taken sorry but see if you can match it to your e mail if you have a twitter  facebook try to match it to those it's ideal for them to all be the same and then you can also customize your just looking at public view versus connection view we can customize what someone would see if they googled you and  you're listing as a non connection i have it set so that they can see as much as i'm possibly allowed to give them you might take a different stance you might say prove i want to hold it a little bit closer to the chest so make sure you customize the u r l really critical that you do so i'm going to go and save this and go back and then we're going to scroll down through a couple of other things hang tight so these are my posts these are the things i've written for the linked in pulse network we're going to revisit those in a little bit too you can see that i gave up back in may i haven't posted spence then skills in endorsements these should be taken with a whole bucket of salt this is a thumbs up version of whether or not you're good at something and if you use linked in you'll notice this shows up you've probably seen it whenever you're looking at someone's profile it'll be up above it'll say would you like to endorse john for babysitting and i say babysitting because these are half and half as far as accuracy i've been endorsed for working with kids i've been endorsed for i'm t i've been endorsed for all sorts of things i didn't know i knew how to do well so you want to take these are the grain of salt but they are neat and i will admit that i secretly take pride in them you can mouse over the people that have endorsed you and you can see that's a real individual with a link to a real profile which adds some credibility and apparently i also know all sorts of things about teaching and all other skills i didn't know i knew so your experience this is where you're putting in your past jobs this is also where i can get recommendations so the great thing about a recommendation i'm laying down is that it lives for ever as opposed to continually going back to that one person i found is willing to recommend me this lives forever someone could go they can click on it and they can see everything there is to know about you according to others ok we're going to pause i know you guys are getting sucked in as you should we're going to jump back into that good ole sandbox and we're going to actually audit our personal profiles so don't worry about number two because we're not on number two but i want you to snuggle up a snuggly an advantage over here i want you to snuggle up to the person next to you and i want you to go through number one and we're going to spend about five to eight minutes actually doing this you guys can be friends if you want to be there we go we got lost so talk to each other and go through number one and raise your hand as you run into questions i want you to run into question and you guys can debate like who's moving who has to do the hard work our goal before you leave here today is to have your profile at least seventy five percent because you're going to go home you're going to think about how you should do it and then you're going to forget so you'll notice that note about a background photo you can upload a background photo just like you can upload a cover photo to facebook it's pretty straightforward as to how to do it so if you're looking at your profile here and you mouse over it will just say add it back around now i'm fortunate enough to have someone that design stuff for our team that i can just turn to him and say hey design me one of these if you're if you don't have that person you can pick from a preexisting one you could try to take a stab at it and make your own if you don't know how to get a good one there it's better just to leave a blank i see people who do like pictures of cats and sunsets probably not appropriate for early dead unless you sell cats in which case power to  yeah absolutely keywords and then i want you to look at their summary improve upon early you skip prepared to prove a point improve upon those two things if you are writing a summary in you're on a team maybe your entire team wants to use a similar format write maybe all of you use a a same opening paragraph and then you add a second paragraph that's  unique it personal to you as an individual that works to kind of create that company brand to try to verify it when it comes through again to another verification but that's that's weird something funky is happening so a couple of you have been asking about visuals or power points so your question i think that's a good tag like yeah i mean you might like is there another key word for what you do so you could do like empowering it's on my an empowering little wine and then i do empowering yes but that could be a good way to do it there's no there's no perfect formula for writing your headline i would definitely advise that you have a couple people look at it and give you feedback real quick that last bullet point talks about adding a visual and some of you are going to do that so to add a visual there's a couple of instances in your profile where there will be just a option to add media so if you have a video awesome you can go to your whole team and you can say add this video to your profile if you don't have a video you can add a little power point so at the very least we hopefully all know how to make a power p make it an informational power point about what your company does make a power point about you and what you do and who you are if you have a portfolio you can do that it's pretty simple the upload this goes through lin consistency across an organization all of you can have the same powerpoint all of you could have the same video if you're more kind of looking to connect with individuals if you're more on the hunting and then the receiving end maybe if i'm a recruiter this is why i put a video where i talkie hey i'm so i'm so i'm kind of a chart for a company i've been here bob why this is why it's so great you should come it's a great opportunity again for someone to to it but that is after a couple of you are running into little hook ups that are unexplainable other than technology is weird that always happens restart the computer throw it out the window you should be able to just click on a move was once you once  you yet and then you know just remember that position yes so before we leave here i know some of you have or have gotten through good one other thing to be thinking of how you get recommendations on your profile they're really powerful to all at the very least we all want to have a couple the easiest way to get them is to give them pick four or five people that you know will give you a recommendation go to their profile and give them one so i might look up i might say you know i've got riley will give me a recommendation we've been hanging out for a while at a couple of networking groups so here i am at her profile i'm just going to click next to send message and i'm going to click on recommend it's going to pull up this opportunity to write her recommendation i'm going to really think this through because i wanted to be good i'm going to explain i'm recommending her on the basis of she worked with me we were friends she worked for me i worked for her and then i'm going to send and then i'm going away to day and i'm going to call riley and i'm going to say hey riley can you write me a recommendation back if it's someone who's really busy sit down next to them over lunch and have them write it in front of you because they won't remember it to one of th challenges just like in the real world when we use to do this through the mail right it's hard to get that awesome executive to write your recommendation because they're an awesome executive and they're very busy so for some people it's go be strategic as far as how you go about getting them to do this but i would recommend that you start by  giving them and i try to be a yes i'm failing here i have got some recommendations i haven't given groups and if anyone ever gives you a recommendation you don't like what usually is a case of they just gave you a recommendation for maybe an old job or maybe they're just a poor writer you can always choose to not show it so if chad wrote me recommendation and it was terrible i could just say you know what i'm not going to show that i doesn't really look good and as we speak i'm thinking gosh i need to get out there and update some of these recommendations because my role has changed so your last item and it's not on your checklist is to go give one recommendation you have three to have minutes to do it pick someone if you don't know how to do it for  you just you just want all this about the person next to you could recommend them if you don't recommend me right but then i have to recommend you and  you pull up their profile click on the blue drop down and it will be right there and i'll do it up here so you can see it looks like so here i am on seth it's right there next to that button recommend smiles some concerned look it's good ok it's all a you lot i'd have a little bit as we keep going but you'll notice the theme today we're trying to actually get some stuff done while you're here so hopefully you're feeling better now about your personal profile you might have some things that you want to do later you gave one recommendation maybe you want to go give another ten i don't know how ambitious you  next we're going to look at company pages so just like on facebook you have a personal profile and then you have a brand page or a facebook page you probably don't do this as an individual you do this is a company so if you are in the room and you are just functioning as an individual that's great i used to do that too you would probably not necessarily need a company so here's our company page it is by no means a shining star of what a company page should be it is not a promise as a matter of fact i am flabbergasted that one hundred seventy five people follow us i don't know why i don't ever post anything here and i don't listen to any of my own advice but here we are at the very least from a brand standpoint you want to have a company page that looks good so here we've got  logo it's properly sized here we've got our cover photo and match is the same one that we use on twitter and facebook and on other platforms again it's properly sized the biggest thing when you're uploading means and thinking this through if you're just matching it to facebook or to another plot form it's going to be resizing stuff as a better fact that's pretty much the summary of most people's problem when it comes to properly branding their social media no matter what platform it is so if you don't see it added button you are not an administrator you don't have access or control of your page that's a problem does anyone not have an edit button that is sitting here thinking gosh i should but you don't have one you guys don't have one you might not have a company page so if you don't even have a company page where do you begin i will include a link on the on the site that we're sharing afterwards to make it easy i actually end up because it's so hard to find on linked in i usually end up googling how do i add a company page on linked in because it's faster than it is to figure out where they've put it recently which is interesting but in order to out a company page you'll need a company email address you all be able to use a gene now or anything like that you'll have to add that company email to your profile settings before you can even create the page that part usually isn't too tricky once you create the page or assuming you are to have a page if you don't have the edit button that means you're not an admin h r people you're familiar with these scenarios as so and so it's great she was a student she moved to africa for the year apparently she created the company page we can't get ahold of or what do i do best case scenario you're going to have to email a couple people hey do you have access t worst case scenario you're going to submit a ticket to linked in's help center vailable under the menu here on the top corner and you're going to actually have to say i don't have access i can't get access someone else has access then you're going to have to basically go through an i d support ticket with them they are pretty helpful they're actually quite helpful but it is of course a hassle you also on that note of administration when you click on the added button assuming you've you've been fortunate enough to get a hold of it you want to scroll down and look at designated admins x so seen a linked in company page is messy so on facebook i can make it so that i have a company page and anyone can access it from their own personal profile without logging into my profile right linked in can use some of that but it's not as good for the company page here you're going to want to add in anyone else that's going to be posting to it you're going to first have to add them as a connection and then you're going to be able to add them in here you want to make sure if your company pages been around for a long time that sarah who is in africa doesn't have control or access right you can also put people who are allowed to create sponsored content or ads so if you have an agency working for you you might give them this level of access and set of admin access you'll see that i have an opportunity to put my image and if i click on that added button it will even tell me exactly what the dimensions are so it has to be less than two megabytes it has to be exactly  four six by two two zero zero or larger you can crop it if it's bigger than that so size even is important same thing with the logo you'll add in your specialties so i've got these maybe i need to add another one maybe i'm going to add marketing strategy i should have that in there i could feature a group so maybe i'm a member of a association or something as a company like a local first or the west coast chamber and i want to feature one of those i could add am not a member but i could add one of my groups if i wanted to so local first i could add this and now that will be a featured group or maybe as hope college alumni or michigan state alum ni i could feature that group right it's both of you you're the h r person you're you have a personal relationship at a business relationship with them but really didn't really blurs the line more than most networks when it comes to personal and business in the same way that when we're in a networking room for a chamber event right it's both it's not one or the other it's bill or you're on the right hand side this is all pretty straightforward you don't get a lot of different options here from what kind of industry you're in you have to fit into a template whether or not you want to so i think we're working with a funeral home at one point and we had to list them as a religious institution because that is the closest thing that was available all of this is pretty straightforward i will make one know if you have more than one location so right now we're we're excited we're just about to open up an office in grand rapids when i remember to do it i will add a location here and i will put in grand rapids office now if you have just a couple of locations it's pretty straightforward if you have more than five if you're a bigger company like lighthouse auto you know they've got dozens of  can only put in five so you're probably going to put in your corporate office and a couple of your most important will keisha if you have more than you can actually fit but again important to put here also by the way can make you feel bigger than you actually are right we're not a huge company but by putting in two different locations even though they're both fairly small offices oh wow they must be bigger than i thought right so if you have a sales person working at home and you're a virtual company maybe their home becomes a second office who knows and then you can even define how many employees you have and it's good to see this data from this side because when we jump into the search settings you're going to see is data from the other side instead but here is how i would tell you how  so all of this together creates my company page you can post content to your company page just like you can to anything else and we're going to look at how to do that through buffer in a second but at the very least you can cross promote if you have con that you're putting elsewhere you can cross promote it here if you are promoting content elsewhere this could be a great opportunity for you to start right the same sort of content that works in all forms of content marketing is going to work well on linked in think about it as an opportunity to establish expertise and to share how to information to people that would be interested in your industry right so we would probably share tips about how to create a marketing strategy or how to publish valuable content to linked in or how to make content or where to find content or how did you add words you in your industry would do something different and this is a conversation about content marketing and so we're going to kind of fly over it a little bit but the easiest way to think of this is if you were to build an f a q tomorrow for the target audience that you're working with on linked in what w questions be and what would the answers be right there you can create the basis of a content plan i want to go to your page and i want to find the answers to those questions unless you're doing this for h r then all the sudden it becomes well we've got to tell the story of why we're a good company to work for of how we're helping people of how much we care about our employees so your goals are always going to drive what you do h r versus business development probably going to look quite different if you're fund raising you're going to be posing content here about how valuable of an asset you are to the community how you're helping people the stories of the individuals that you help i will say the value of your linked in company page has a lot to do with your target audience symposia we tend to work with people that are figuring out how to implement social or they're not even on social media yet and that means that we actually don't find them on linked in very often at least not where they're looking at our company page so should i have an entire content marketing plan around our company page probably right so i drink my own kool aid probably but the reality is i don't have time i don't it's not a high enough priority for me if i have five hours in a week this is not where i'm going to put it so you have to have a realistic conversation with yourself and with your team about whether or not this is actually going to be valuable to you that said we're working with a client right now who is a huge i t company and they get so much engaged when they attract so much attention from their company page that it just blows my mind because they're in the right industry their target audience is there they've got everything going for them they're not even posting that amazing of content and they're getting really high engagement so like all things tha to be considered and discussed you could see that i'm not getting a ton of reach without spending money right one hundred thirty five impressions is not very good in my world as one hundred thirty five people that maybe kind of saw it as a stroll by that's not great in my world i get a lot more organic reach through my personal profile far beyond what i would ever get on my company page so i want you to go through your company page checklist or up to spend quite as much time on this as we did on the personal one just because we want to get through other stuff i will add just one thing again for the h people in the room it is very common that when i look at people who work at this company people show up that hill longer work there eighty percent of the time it's because they're like you and me they're busy and they forgot to change their lin profile twenty percent of the time it's because they want to borrow the credibility that working for your company creates and they've intentionally left it so i run into many an instance where a previous sales person has listed that they still work at your company they show up when i click on your company page as an employee on the right hand side and they're doing that because it's helping them get another opportunity how do you think so you have two choices it's an email to them or it's a ticket to linked in saying this person was fired they no longer work here please help me remove them as being connected to my company this becomes a really big deal when you're a company that is either large or just has it's very easy for lots of people to say they work for your company and you don't want them to say that they work for your company so go to your checklist we'll give you five minutes on this one talk to the person next to you so ty asked a good question he said call to action is there like a button where i could put that in no not on linked in but you could be added to your image where it says it at the bottom of your cover photo so maybe you have like we are now hiring starting  well you could just add it to your artwork on your i could add it to that piece of artwork just so that is more than you know and we should we should add it or if you don't have a call to action g minded say really something like give us a call at and have a phone number there at the very least i would add to that artwork so i could just at this image on my own at my phone number you know call dave we just want to make it is easy as possible wherever people are looking at us for them to get a hold of us or to know what it is that we want to go up to that when i get home yeah photoshop in design pick monkey whatever you're paint whatever year weapon of choice so let's keep trudging along hopefully you got through a good chunk of those check items before we leave this section i want to talk about how to schedule content so whether i'm post seen it from here right or whether i'm posting it from my personal page how do i schedule content how do i make it so that the news feed shows my information and my content all the time well first of all a disclaimer here we're not going to get into content marketing in depth this is a properly sized image this is not this is definitely not across also a sure media format in your post correctly is seemingly the sim most simple but actually some of the most challenging work that needs to be done i will include links to the right dimensions and how to format and all of that but make sure that you know it might not look good if you don't do it right that you want to take up this full with imagine how that looks on my phone takes up the full with of my phone great content i'm not totally sure you want that picture has to do with that but interesting so if you want to schedule content you could do so from buffer app which i gave you all quick log into you can go home and you could play around with that log into you can get your own free trial if you want if you are simply trying to creat industry expertise a buffer up can be a great way to do it buffer up will allow you to add a little button to your toolbar in chrome or whatever browser you use and whenever i'm reading an article i can just quickly that button and schedule that post out for later in the day so if you want to have a really basic marketing plan this could be a simple way to execute so let's imagine i'm reading c n n and i decide that i want to just put that out  there and it looks like it's mad at me and wants me to upgrade are you all getting an upgrade message here we go so i would connect to my social network you'll notice i can use this for all sorts of things not just for a link to it's a matter of fact we use a buffer  at an agency wobbled to schedule content across multiple platforms but it's really good across linked in you notice there is a profile and a page so i would just go and connect my profile pretty straightforward it's mad at me because i haven't upgraded and here we go i could go ahead and schedule content out right here so i might put in cnn's latest article i'm sure about the elections without even looking i going to guess that that's what shows up here we go automatically it's going to load in a link a picture i'm going to be able to select multiple pictures opinion on what it is i think looks best i can even upload my own if i want so look at says replace a link with a photo or video create an image got a couple of different options i could add my own little commentary so if you can imagine that you're sharing expertise around your industry this is where i would add my own amar's i think i think this is important for any marketing managers to now write some sort of commentary where i add my two cents my input and just like that if i click on add to keep you what buffer does is it says we're going to give you three slots a day or five slots a day or whatever is that you want and we're going to automatically schedule things into those slots so if i click add to keep you it's going to go to change to q and then if i click on schedule i can customize what that queue looks like so i can decide if i want to post something once a day twice a day ten times a day i can decide when those time slots are and every time i put something in the buffer it's just going to say or put it into the next available slot so it makes scheduling really easy if i click back on contat you'll see where my my scheduled content actually lives so i've only got one i put in another one here maybe i'll do fox next sure there's it's fun add my little commentary again click on add to q and you'll notice it just drops it right in there so now i've got two things in my queue and i can reorganize them by dragging and dropping if i want to i can rearrange them or a really simple tool for scheduling contests it will take you about five to ten minutes to figure out at the most even if you consider yourself an internet  beginner it's very easy to use a really easy interface with this i can do the following i can read for five minutes a day which hopefully i already do about my industry or about whatever it is or relates to what i do and i could pick a couple of my favorite articles add commentary and just add them to buffer so instead of publishing three things in a row it looks like i'm sitting in front of my computer all the time pushing now content that allows me to get into people's feeds across the day i will make a couple of notes about this strategy as i presented it one i'm sending people and this example to other sites and other articles you have to consider the value and the cost of doing them right the value is and saying hey trust me i'm willing to share a third party content the cost is  i just sent you to a different website not mine consider too if we go way back to the very beginning quality versus quantity it's really easy doing this to shove out dozens of articles a week but if they're all terrible articles people are going to quickly pick up on you know joe shares a lot but he doesn't share a lot of stuff that seems to matter so when i share content i try to make sure that it's always good if i were being really ambitious i could say it's always great that would be the goal so as were two years ago i might have done eight posts a day now maybe i'm just doing two a day that's all i have time to read through and think about another disclaimer doing this with images doesn't always work well you don't want to use this to schedule a giant image to your company page to your profile it'll work but if you do it to your company page whether it's with buffer or pretty much any of these platforms that allow you to schedule it'll show up as a little tiny thumb now and it will not look good that is linked in's fall it's not the fault of the the buffer app or any of these other platforms but because of that if you're sitting here today thinking i really want to use powerful custom visual content like we're looking at on the home page if you want to do content like that you're going to have to post it manually so if i want this sort of content to go out i'm going to have to do that manually from my company page or sometimes even to get it to look right let's do it manually from my profile and what that means is that if i have a marketing assistant or social media manager and i want them to do this i might have to give them direct access to my page and to my profile which is frustrating  at best right so i have to give access to my team in order for them to do this through my actual profile and linked in is messy when it comes to some of these sorts of this questions about buffer app i don't that was a five minutes a tauriel and something that we could spend an hour on my intention was just to kind of show you the basics show you what i can do and teach you that it's not scary but any questions about b well that all depends on how ambitious i am right if i had the time i would create a graphic i would customize it if that wasn't in my scope or if it was beyond my scale i would just use what's there the the simple thing that i will say magazine people often forget to remove and they do this on facebook too they forget to remove the u r l so you copy and paste the u r l to get the thumbnails show up but then you can remove the u r l you don't need it anymore and people do this on facebook all the time they forget to remove that from the posts and it ends up kind of looking silly because you don't need to have it there another way to create content so we talked about the long form of content this is the short form of we're looking at right now we talk though about linked in's paul switches long form blog content a wa create that from here share an update upload a photo or bowl short form content it's a status update if you will the writing article that's going to pull up what will look exactly like writing a blog looks like do this i can upload an image i can add some content i can make hyperlinks all of those sorts of things are very possible here you are going to have kind of two options when you you may have a blog already elsewhere on your site what you could do is you could go here you could post the first paragraph and then you could create a link that says seymour that would be a very simple way to cross promote your blog to link then everyone gets a notification right here when you publish so it's a good way to push it out you could also take a different approach which is story original content so i could write something that was completely original here as someone who is useless a lot i will say like everything else grains of salt write i've even advertised these before i had one that i spent three or four hundred dollars on just as an experiment it can be challenging if you're not already an influential writer to get a lot of traction here so if you're a seth goblin you're going to get on here and people are going to eat it up  when people are following you you're going to get on here and people are going to eat it up if you don't write anywhere else and you've never written before you should expect results that reflect that right you're not going to go viral here the first time you post on the internet this isn't going to be a magic bullet i've actually decided that this is a place that i'm not going to invest again if i had a team of thirty and a million dollars to spend sure but this isn't a place that i decided to invest if you're in the h r space though the survey a great place to go even if you don't get a lot of use from your content you can kind of keep in mind that every time someone's researching your company they're going to see this content so for you have might be more about the big picture and less about the short term so two options there originally or repurpose both are certainly viable option a couple of takeaways here make sure that your personal profile is leveraging all the available features right you've got a powerpoint you've got recommendations you wrote a summary get a company page and connect your employees to it again i'm going to have a how to p d f on how to get your employees to add the company page if you even got one they had to send out as an email talk with your team and think about how you're going to protect the fact that your brand is out here as are your contacts consider that if you're a smaller company and you just hired someone and they're working remotely are they adding all of their connections to linked in what happens when they decide to leave do they own them so before we jump in the module for going to take a four minute bathroom slash coffee slash water break and enter a power through this last hour where we're going to focus on finding people so go ahead if minutes together from a casino on how to find people and what to do once we find them so if you are sitting here and you're thinking probably not to post content i don't know if i need a company page this is where you're going to shine because of the very least we can all use linked in for what they find the people that we want to connect with so let's solve a how to do that we're going to we're going to have a sandbox session but first look up here don't try to do what we're doing yet we'll get lost first of all we all know where the search bar is is right up there at the top we're going to be looking today at advanced search it's a very simple step that a lot of people just don't know that they should take so you'll see there's a button here there's a dropdown rather i can look for people jobs companies excel drama we're going to be clicking over here this is what we care about i almost never use linked in's de fault search menu unless i look it for someone that i already that otherwise it's not very useful so i could got advanced search and we're going to look at a couple of pieces of context so first of all everything here is going to be toggle i could toggle things off i can toggle things on there's a left hand bar and then there's going to be a big pop up box to we're going to be able to you're going to learn quickly that creating a good search could take some energy one of the most common mistakes that people make with like get in is they they look at linked in search for a minute and they go h the didn't really find anybody and then they come to give up and they move on building a good search can take five minutes ten minutes i've spent fifteen subtitles mean a series of search criteria that are going to get me exactly who i want so because of that we want to keep in mind that we can save the searches we're doing we can save i think it's two for free or three for free and then the rest we can only save more than that if we upgrade and this is really where we talk about does it make sense to pay linked in as a grass is with their push for you to upgrade right i think the plan that i'm on is fifty nine ninety nine it's the basic one they used to have them for a sheep as twenty it's hard to do that anymore so what i would advise you to do is after today or maybe even today if you're really ambitious everybody gets a free month after today decide for the next thirty days that you were going to really see if this doesn't needed for you because that's the best way to find out and you're going to try it out for free and if it doesn't do anything for you cancel it you've lost nothing unless you like mean you forget to cancel it and then it renews which of course is their goal but try it out that's the only way you're going to now the way that i look at linked in is if i find one person that i want to know found otherwise they are probably worth ten to twenty thousand dollars so am i willing to pay six hundred dollars for that opportunity yes if i have a budget of five hundred dollars is that where i'm going to spend it maybe not so it depends before we get into this and before you get lost i see you guys i know you're getting lost already that's ok i do the same thing i want to understand how we did search works we're going to go back to one nine hundred ninety five billion search is something that linked in is capable of so in my search box where it says keyword what you can't see at all but it does say keyword i can do and i can do or and i can do minus so i could say i want to find everyone who is in sales and then i wan find everyone who is in marketing but i don't want to find anybody that says that they sell so i'm going to do minus beads so i did the end then i did beads or i could have done sales or marketing maybe i don't care if they do one or the other maybe i'll get rid of beads maybe i'll get rid of bayer's who knows this is why it should take a little bit of energy to build a search that works what we're going to do is we're going to search and we're going to think about how to get rid of the people that we didn't want we're going to repeat until we have a small enough pool of quality people if we go too far right if i search for people in sales who live in holland and like the color blue and went to michigan state i'm going to get too small of a sample maybe even nothing and if i go to why i'm going to look at linked in search i'm going to say wasted time so all searches work i could search in a lot of different ways one common thing that a recruiter my do is they might try oddly enough looking at misspellings because that might allow them to find people that others have  devout maybe not the best candidates so keep in mind that different people whether it's a typo or whether it's different ways of spelling they might spell things differently so maybe i search for engineer keep in mind bully and so like we were just saying we could do it and we can do or and we can do not so i can have an entire list of terms to widen my search there's a whole bunch of different tactics here that come to mind so first of all i could try to include as many people as possible so in this example i'm trying to find someone in sales and i'm just  using or so i said sales manager or sales specialist or account manager or account executive and i just gone on and on and on and i'd listen every single position that they might use in their job title notice i put them all in parentheses too so that they would show up next to each other again we have time travel we're back to google before it was so good this is how we used to have to do it could try to do what some people call in or out of search so i could look for industry terms instead of just keywords if i know in my industry that the people i'm trying to find use things like cloud or i a s or p a s by the way i don't remember what those stands for they're all i t related this could be a really good way to get to a very specific niche maybe i'm looking for executives and i know that they're a member of a certain group or that they use certain buzz words again this is a way for me to get t people not based on who they say they are but who they are intentionally told me they were you can imagine how if you were searching for someone who worked at a hospital you could put in certain forms that they would work with that would be industry specific also by the way a great way to get past marketing manager and said get to someone who has experience or capability with a very specific thing so maybe you want someone who uses but perhaps was sort of searching for marketing research for buffer app notice it's going through the entire profile for keywords so i can kind of go out there and i can i can do it this way i can say anyone who's a member of a group in this scenario we're looking for a developer so we search for anyone who is a member of any of the job the development groups we could five we assumed that it was implied if they were in these groups they would be someone we wanted to talk to right not too many non developers hang out in a java development group everyone else that does this probably a recruiter think about how people use natural language so one of the challenges we run into is searches we're looking for how we would say it you want to look for how they would say it so this is some natural language and you'll notice it's pointing up their summary you'll notice it's pulling up their job description so medical device designing medical devices again and getting really narrow you run your search what you're going to do here in a minute if you haven't already done it well we're talking when you run your search you're going to go down to the bottom of the page a near going to click on for five six or seven because the first page is going to instantly show you everyone you already know and you're going to go do anything so you want to click past the first page this is another opportunity for linked in to try to charge you you may try to click on number ten and linked in may say not upgrade because if you upgrade will show that to you if you don't we won't so they got more and more aggressive about that walled garden  content as a matter of fact that's why i ended up upgrading eventually because i can use a search the way i wanted to but you'll see while it's showing you these results it's also going to show you who you share in common it's going to show you show you nuns who their connections are and it's going to show you other people that are like them and we're going to come back to the is in a second but because i know what you're doing i want you to go ahead you have a simple mission you need to find three people that you would actually call and invite to coffee or lunch all of you are going to be looking for slightly different goals but you have three people that you're trying to find and i want you to actually write them down maybe even on this since you don't have scrap paper or on your other piece of paper and i'm going to come around and i'm going to work with each of you so that you can build a search that skating you people you actually care about hi ok so so who are you looking for someone that you want to have coffee with for any reason you could be selling to them you could be hiring them you could be asking for money you could be anything so in that keyword box try to doing a version of the search where you're doing or so maybe star you want together appear real quick because that might help so here i am in my advanced search i want to find people who are owners of companies or who work as marketing professional so i might do owner or and then i might do marketer or and then i do partner and as soon as i do that i'm going to run into why i want to use the no sign or the negative side right a lot of these people own other marketing companies so all the sudden i realize you know this isn't helping me because i'm pulling up marketing companies those are my competitors i don't want them so maybe i'm going to get rid of marketing and i'm going to do instead of marketing v p or marketing manager and then i'm going to look through here i'm going to think how can i get rid of the people that i don't care about right now i am sure that all these individuals are wonderful but i see some of them that are a sales force so maybe i decide i'm going to get rid of anyone that says or it sells force too big of a company for me now i've got it down a little bit over here on the left hand side there's a lot of other options i can change the location i'm probably going to do it by zip code so maybe i'm going to do for an eye for two two and i'm going to do fifty miles out so now i've got it down to thirty thousand i'm noticing right away here that a lot of people that say they are an owner are actually at a restaurant so maybe i'm going to get rid of restaurants they're not in my niche so i'm going to do another minus and i'm going to do restaurant i see that a lot of banks are showing up banks aren't really helpful to me everyone that's at a bank sends to use the word man branch so i'm going to get rid of the word branch didn't like that so now we've gotten down by another thousand i'm going to get rid of food so you can see it's a process you have to keep building it should take you ten minutes at least to get it to show you people that you're really interested in you'll notice too that if you click on advanced again this entire box shows up this is the advance people search the ones in yellow or orange those are premium features they basically make it easier to do some of the stuff that we could do with keywords so i can automatically go after seniority level maybe i want to get rid of anyone who isn't at a certain level so i'm going to focus on people who are managers directors or seniors i'm going to get rid of v p's personally because i'm not targeting companies that have enough staff to have a vice president of marketing i'm going after companies who are just one marketing person so i know that is are not valuable to me maybe i want to get rid of certain industries so i could focus on just a couple maybe instead of trying to get rid of banking and i'm just going to only focus industries that i'm i'm really worried about so i'm going to go after things like design maybe i'm going to go after events that maybe i'm going to go after who knows furniture and then i'm going to redo my search maybe you are you know really simple strategy is once you narrow down your search results scroll through the list of ten and think for the two or three people that you know you don't want to talk to what could you change about your search criteria to get rid of them would look at luke and i would say luke is a great guy i know him but i don't want to talk to steelcase they're not my company so they're not my target market so i'm going to go back and i'm going to get rid of steelcase or maybe if i have the advanced options enabled i'm going to get rid of companies of a certain size so because i have that premium right it may still a bit easier i could go over here and i could say company size i want five fifty one to two hundred or eleven to fifty anything smaller or bigger than that is outside of my criteria so just by doing that all this out i'm going to go from three three seven results for people who are marketing managers or owners and probably going to get down to sixty seven not to bat and i could keep going and i could say you know what construction not really are people i mean to get rid of them too so i'm going to ask a couple of you just to share what are you finding or who did you find or who did you not find yet you want to define could go either way right so let's see here amy fisher you're doing business development you're going after me to be did you find someone what are you what are your struggles are what are you seeing working for you and so for you it might just be a matter of clicking further down the results because the first couple of pages might be people that already are connected to your company so you might want to go deeper and why do you want to talk to those people  exactly i love that let's talk to someone who's beat  well let's just makes it up to have a what do you know who are you finding here so you're in a position where trying to advocate for size maybe fundraise for partner with others who did you find i wonder if you could even search for you could try like a natural language approach where you search for working with kids or improving our community maybe you could get to volunteers that don't know they're a volunteer but they described in their profile that they they might want to be we'll pick out just one more person so you can keep pushing along but i want to share these examples because it's all so different let's go after concert construction and ask your wife so what about you he's doing excellent and that's a whole thing sense because you're trying to really get to someone who's already passionate about that industry right cool so all i can say again and again is you have to work hard to custom mailing list right off of the search is free to do let's kind of talk about that but first let's just look at a couple of other things don't forget there are a couple of other opportunities for finding people there's an opportunity under jobs like we talked about before to actually post a job so i know michelle said you know hey were looking for someone so this could be where i go to jobs and i could actually pay for a job post it's going to make me log in because i'm going to have to access my credit card information but for a fee of course i'm going to be able to actually post a job here and the way they sell  these is based on how many are buying and of course they're trying to get me right down the final so they're not showing me pricing here right they just want me to start my job post and then later they're going to talk to me about maybe paying for it so don't quote me on it but i believe the last time we did this it was one ninety nine maybe as to ninety nine but it is a great way to get a lot of applications depending on your industry you may get quality applicants or you may get terrible on so i've talked to lots of business owners who have done this and they've hired someone but i've also heard from other business owners in different industries hey we did this we got thirty applications they were all awful and they were not people that we wanted to hire so all forms of advertising are an experiment this could be one that you choose to try as far as connecting with other people don't forget all the different opportunities to find people in other ways so if you go to linked in dot com slash alumni you can actually focus on connecting with people that graduated from your same college this could be a really great way to grow your network or find people that you miss or didn't want to see again depends right so i can go to whole college i could say show me everyone within one hundred miles that is a psychologist mental health  there's also always just that simple idea of following the link trail everywhere you go on linked in it's talking about how this person is connected to that person and this company these people work there it's amazing what you can accomplish just by following the link trail so i might search for someone that i might look at there are similar connections that i might find a company etc etc etc a quick way to is just a quick peek at the latest in plans they target these based on what it is you think you want to do there's even a sales version of this which is i think ninety nine dollars a month that adds old version of linked in that we haven't looked at today that allows you to save leads and do a whole bunch of other things that sales force might do for you so lots of different opportunities in the world do you do after you find someone let's just imagine if you did your search you're ready to fall in love right first of all don't send spam you already know this because you're a wonderful marketer but finding someone you've never spoken to before and sunning them a message where you attach your sales sheet and pitch to them probably isn't going to create good results if you do that to me i will quickly block you i want to look to connect with people that are focused on relationships not just selling so consider sending them content whether that's message on linked in or an email or something else consider sending them a white paper or e book or inviting them to web in our lab or give them an info graphic a case study that's specific to their industry i've tried all of these are variations of all of you're going to notice that sometimes you get this button that says send a message as sometimes you get a button that says send an email in mail is just a paid email i think they run it ten docs a piece not cheap and you're going to have to like everything else experiment with it i know clients who have used in mails and who have gotten amazing results i myself i use them and fifty percent of the time i've gotten nothing and the other fifty percent of the time i've had it out of the park so is it worth it it depends but for me it in mail is usually a last resort right i've sent an e mail i call them now i'm going to send them in mail maybe that'll work maybe they're really busy and they'll see that whenever we talk to someone a little bit assails want to go on right so we're going to use words they want to hear you want to show that you've actually looked at their profile it's amazing how many people send me messages where it's just clear that they copied and pasted right if they didn't even bother to mention one thing about me i know they didn't look at what i wrote you want to create some form of curiosity you arguably want to ask for a decision to be made although there's lots of conversation out there about doing this too soon especially annulling did e mail can be dangerous again we want to create a relationship right you and i just met at a networking event there's a big difference between the guy that says hey you know my kids are cute too how do you want to buy a house and the guy that talks to you for an hour invites you  coffee and then pitches the opportunity by house but we all know that guy or that woman and we don't want to be that person and most importantly whenever you're writing something on linked in keep it short it's a social media platform people don't take time to read too much i'm going to run you through a whole bunch of tactics i've tried all of them have failed and succeeded depend one hundred day so one thing i think we have going for us and in west michigan people are very willing to grab coffee that i when i first started my career write out a hope i use linked in and i just message to everyone i knew i took advantage of the fact that i was a student grad and i said hey you're amazing what you do i love to learn more about it i think you may be doing it too right there's there's nothing like appealing to someone sense of ego oh sure i'd love to tell you about what i do asking someone to coffee not a huge commitment not aggressive never hurts to ask  right using this is an opportunity to make a warm call instead of a cold call so whether this is in a literal sense over the phone or in another way we should really never be talking to anyone now that we don't already know a little bit about right when i call you even if it's just to ask you about your services i already know what school you went to i probably already saw pictures of your kids and i already know that you and i both know john so even if you're picking up the phone you're going to use linked in to give you information to make that a warm conversation not a cold one sometimes i'll even use this to be honest most often when i'm walking into a meeting with someone i haven't met in person before especially if they're the one that asked to me i'll be looking at my phone first up pull it out so i could find a picture of them and i could figure out who the guy in the coffee shop is that that i'm looking for right and then while i'm waiting there for that person to show up obviously going through and i'll be thinking ok they go to m s s use or we're going to talk about football and how they're not good we're going to talk about the church that we both went to we both know this person right i'm  right social media empowers us to create relationships faster so that that power of creating sparks so we can we can laugh about the fact that there's a certain amount of weirdness to it but there's also an expectation these days for a lot of people that you already have done your research the fastest way for me to know that i'm not interested in talking to you is to see that you didn't bother to do your homework number two that you can export all of your connections so maybe you build a list here and you export the emails and you send a form letter through something like sales force now you have to be careful with this you don't want to break it you spam rules i can't tell you how many people have added me on linked in and then instantly sent me an e mail newsletter that i didn't want so you want to be cautious with this but you could kind of think of a scenario let's imagine boys and girls club is trying to create an e mail list of people that might be interested in donating while they could build that list some link them they could export their contacts they could upload it to a sales force or a c r m program and they could send a plain tapped form e mail letter out to two hundred fifty people and say hey we know we never talk before we gradually email from the chamber or from linked in and we're wondering if you would be interested in helping with a b c and d i'm working with a company right now that is using exactly this tactic which mainly has to take a little bit because it's something you need to be careful with but they're see phenomenal results they're going after a very specific group of people and their product is so good that even though they're sending out a cold e mail and unsolicited e mail asking would you like to receive e mail they're getting a yes over and over and over again twenty five percent of the time so just by doing this they're getting good results you'll notice so if you're listening as i talk quickly they asked if they could continue to e mail that's how you avoid breaking spam laws and becoming a bad person there's a big difference between hey i got your email and i put you on a list is it ok if i keep you here and oh i'm going to send you fifty things even though you never asked you to do so so you see here in this example i uploaded seven hundred twelve of my contacts in amount champ and i'm actually going to send marketing you're going to have to keep track i use a little tool called unsightly which is our little c r m and i just keep truck found this person contacted them on linked in and got a response tried this it worked try this it didn't work i keep notes because under business development i keep notes on everyone i've ever spoken to so that in three years i can remember our sara and i grab coffee were introduced by john i connected to her on linked in all and it seems to work because here we are we're closing the deal keeping track will also allow you to know did asking for a copy work for this group of people that work there calling them work did mailing them work right i can always take what i find on linked in go to the internet and build a mailing list if i want to we did this recently and we sent out a snail mail campaign it was a lot of manual work because those addresses one available on linked in we had to take the contact list go to the google look for them find their address and build a file so it took a lot of energy but it allowed me to do something powered entirely by linked in so here's me i keep all this in and slightly i'll kind of put in my leads or make notes about where they came from  record my linked in conversations because i'm so organized sometimes and of course i would be remiss if i didn't say sure it's ok to disconnect to not everyone on linked in has to be with you forever like i mentioned earlier i block a lot of people so couple takeaways here linked in is powerful for finding people be patient with the energy required have a strategy for how you're going to find those people and then tustin truck what's going to work maybe you send them a box with a free kit and that's what does it as are the nonprofit recently and we made a list of thirty really important potential donors and we saw them a natural kit in the mail so like i mentioned before we're going to not cover content marketing today so i wanted to spend energy on the other things but i do want to take a quick peek at our last five minutes here behind the scenes because some have asked about the segments so first of all know that the advertising looks something like this not appall up the ad platform but know that this is something similar to what you're going to find all of those different things that you refin and search you can target ads in very much the same way so if you're going after executives who live within fifty miles you can do an ad targeted at those individuals like i mention linked in is not quite as robust it's a little bit more focused on who you are and not quite as good at figuring out what you're interested in as where other platforms are a little bit better at the second we talked a little bit about paul so if you ever forget how to get to it it's just linked in dot com slash pulse there's a tool that all include a link to cold autopilot and  will actually help you automatically build a list based on keywords it's again something kind of in that gray zone i've experimented with it and i've had mixed results and some of you are already looking at your privacy or your account settings this is where all of those advanced features list serve you want to make it so people can see your connections or if you want to make it so people can see that you those options are going to live here and they updated this recently it's a lot easier to navigate they've organize into privacy blocking advertising and security so it's a lot easier to work with and just a couple pointers things you might want to look at in here they usually come up don't forget you could turn off your activity feed so if you are changing your job and you don't turn off your activity feed well might happen you is you might get a bunch of congratulations right i changed my title recently just as a as a tweak to how we were doing things and i forgot to turn this off and i got a lot of hey congrats new position new position where so you can turn that off which is a good idea probably should have told you that earlier some of your i think you already did that already got a couple who graduations you c too but if you click on the dot dot dot and you click on customize invite you can actually say something like john great senior at the event today wanted to connect on here so i had your phone number you're get a lot better response from invites if you customize them linked in has a built in reminders underneath each person's profile if you want to use this a little bit as a c r m you could create information about how you met them how you connected you could create a reminder to email say or on her birthday or when her kid is turning three so those are just a couple of tips hopefully all of this you've been listening for three hours it's a lot of time hopefully all of this is helpful i know that we've probably left a few things unturned as is always the case all the things i mentioned this is the only thing you need to write down today symposia labs dot com slash a linked in that will take you to a page with a power point another version of this document and then all the different links we talked about today so write that down you don't need to give me your email i'm not going to send you anything it's just a page on the internet that anyone can go to and it's slash a linked in the other thing i would do just real quick as a shameless plug if you are interested in meeting other people maybe you decided today that marketing isn't for you a need to hire someone or maybe you just want to talk to other people who are doing some of what you're doing drinks and digital is a group that partners with a m a and a couple of other organizations it's a free meet up there's one in holland and there's one in grand rapids and there will soon be one in lansing it's just drinks digital dot com so you might need someone else in your position you might need someone you want to hire we've got videographers photographers bloggers writers advertisers and people who are just a little bit curious so we'd love for you guys to come to the first round of drinks and appetizers are arnott's second one is on you thank you guys so much for common the west coast chamber concert and great job putting these together a late shore advantage and am a great sponsors so hopefully you guys can make it to the last one if it applies to you if not i understand but i would love to see you in a linux and if you have any feedback i'd love to hear it you could just shoot me an email at ten at symposia labs dot com now you could say hey tim that was awful you should do this anymore you can give me some tips you could tell me what you like what you hated i love to hear from you so that i can improve these for future audiences and you will get a survey i think it's really simple it's from the west coast chamber i think it's just one question for a number right so there you guys are coming please take a muffin make a friend back at the office and have a great day