The Transcript

How to Start Using LinkedIn (the Right Way)

Voiceover: This is The Missing Link, with your host, the insufferable — but never boring — Sean Jackson.

Sean Jackson: Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Missing Link. I’m Sean Jackson, and I m joined, as always, by the indispensable Mica Gadhia. Mica, how are you today?

Mica Gadhia: I am excellent, Sean. Thanks. How are you doing?

Sean Jackson: Oh, I am fantastic as always. And I am excited to be talking to you. Do you know why I’m excited to talk to you, Mica?

Mica Gadhia: Tell me why.

Sean Jackson: Because you are absolutely essential to the show.

Mica Gadhia: Thank you.

Sean Jackson: You want to know why?

Mica Gadhia: Tell me why.

Sean Jackson: Because not only are you the Customer Success Specialist at Copyblogger — right? Which basically means you do what?

Mica Gadhia: I help customers. I am a customer superstar. If you have a question, you can write us at Support@Copyblogger.com, and I might be one of your customer support specialists.

Sean Jackson: Oh. Even more important than that, she is the voice of the customer on the show. I’d love to have a show where I could have everybody who listens to it on it, but quite frankly, it’s not feasible. You know what is feasible? Having Mica here. So, Mica, as the voice of the customer, that s a big responsibility, by the way.

Mica Gadhia: Right. I’m feeling the pressure.

Sean Jackson: Exactly. So, don’t blow it, Mica. Don’t mess this up.

Mica Gadhia: Oh my gosh.

Sean Jackson: I want you to ask a question that you think our audience would like to know.

Mica Gadhia: Oh, the first question I actually do have from our audience is, Why LinkedIn, Sean?

Sean Jackson: Why LinkedIn?

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: Why does it exist? What do you mean?

Mica Gadhia: Why do I want to be on LinkedIn? What am I going to get out of LinkedIn?

Sean Jackson: Oh, the big why. More of the existential, Why should I even be listening to this damn show and learning about LinkedIn? Is that what you’re asking?

Mica Gadhia: We have great personalities, Sean, but yeah. I want to give the audience some information about LinkedIn and why they need to be there.

Sean Jackson: Okay. Alright, I ve got it. So, let me go though, and I’m going to put this into perspective, thinking that so many of the customers and audience of Copyblogger and of Rainmaker are professional marketers. They re either doing it for themselves or doing it for a client, or doing it for the organization they work for. Right?

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Why LinkedIn Should Be in Your Social Media Mix in the First Place

Sean Jackson: So, let’s go through why they should even be thinking about LinkedIn in the mix. Regardless of whether you’re selling to consumers, to businesses, it doesn’t matter. Let me give you a couple of things right off the bat.

Number one, LinkedIn is bigger than Twitter. It has 350 million users in that network, compared to about 310 million, 320 million, I believe, for Twitter. Now, I bring that up only as contrast point, because we spend so much time talking about Twitter and what you should be doing on Twitter and when you should post on Twitter and buying ads on Twitter and engaging on Twitter. Then, nobody really tends to talk about LinkedIn, yet LinkedIn is bigger.

But size is not the only thing that matters. Right? Yeah, I love that little giggle there, Mica. What also matters is quality. Right?

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: I think that is the other aspect of it, because when you start to really delve into those user stats about LinkedIn, what we tend to find is this. It has a very big bias toward professionals, meaning there are more professionals on LinkedIn. In fact, the stat that I know of is about one out of three professionals are using LinkedIn on an active basis.

But what that also means is that these people tend to be higher dollar spenders than your typical online user. What do I mean by that? It means that these people generally have a job.

Mica Gadhia: Are they not sharing their cat pictures on LinkedIn?

Sean Jackson: No. I know. Isn’t that sad? No. It usually is not cat pictures. It’s not usually because they have no life and they’re trying to post online to find something. It is because they are business professionals who tend to have higher earnings than your typical online user.

Mica Gadhia: Wow.

Sean Jackson: And the reason, from a marketing perspective, that matters is very simple. You want to sell things to people who have money. Think about it, folks. If you’re trying to sit there and sell your wares, whatever those wares are, to people who don’t have money, they’re just going to look at you and smile and say, That’s really nice. I wish I could afford it.

The general rule of marketing is that we want to do things that generate money, right? Yes, engagement matters, and communication matters, but at the end of the day, most marketing departments are valued on the money they bring in or the money that they save the organization.

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: Does that tend to make sense?

Mica Gadhia: Absolutely.

Sean Jackson: I think when we start to look at this, we have to think of the demographics first. Who are we talking to? What type of people is there? I think there’s a big misconception sometimes that LinkedIn is only for B2B marketing. And I know that it is not. We share stories from other episodes about how it is not just for B2B marketing. And, I think, really, we should think of LinkedIn as a B2I. Do you know what B2I means?

Mica Gadhia: I don’t.

Sean Jackson: Business to individual. At the end of the day, these are individuals. Yes, they have a job, usually. Yes, they have skills and are professionals and are making money. But they’re also human beings.

Mica Gadhia: Right. Yes.

Sean Jackson: When you look at it that way, you realize that you can open your mind up to a bigger audience of people who have spending power, who also are individuals looking for things, not only for their particular business or their clients’ business, but also as individuals. They re looking for things to engage with that may or may not necessarily be directly related to their work. Make sense?

Mica Gadhia: Yes.

Sean Jackson: You can’t really do that on Twitter. While Twitter is great, I actually think Twitter is a little harder, because on Twitter, you don’t know a lot of details about people. Right? You know what their interests are, but it tends to be a mishmash of personal interests, stories related to themselves, stories that they find interesting, updates that they’re are the airport.

It s kind of all over, and you can get a feel if you really pay a lot of attention. But you have to dig in to Twitter. LinkedIn, it’s right there.

Mica Gadhia: Yes. That’s true.

Sean Jackson: So does that answer the question, Mica? Does that help create context around this?

Mica Gadhia: It does. Thank you.

Sean Jackson: You know, as a professional marketer, I’m always thinking about, How can I have a better understanding of the audience and of the customer base? And where are those people? Once you start to dig into it, you start to realize, Holy cow, my audience is in LinkedIn. It may not be the big swath of people that Facebook has, certainly.

But if I want to drill in on who this person is, what are their interests, and what are they doing, and realizing that these people probably not only have a large disposable income, but also have a lot of influence and decision-making authority — wow. Now it really changes.

Mica Gadhia: Yeah. And thank you for that, because I’m sitting here thinking about my LinkedIn profile versus my Twitter profile, and those are two very different things.

Sean Jackson: Oh, yes they are.

Mica Gadhia: Right, right. Twitter profiles are, like, Conflicted optimist.

Sean Jackson: I’m a humanist on a journey through life’s effervescent reality.

Mica Gadhia: Exactly. I think I also have badass on mine.

Sean Jackson: Oh, wow.

Mica Gadhia: Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But I can put that on Twitter. I don’t have that on my LinkedIn profile.

Sean Jackson: That’s right.

Mica Gadhia: I have my education. I have my jobs. I have my interests. It s very interesting to think about the difference between them, even right now as I’m not fully into LinkedIn or fully into Twitter — just to think right now of what I have on my profile. It s different than Twitter, and you could find out a lot of information about me on LinkedIn right now.

Sean Jackson: That’s right. And there’s a lot of great information about LinkedIn from the marketer s perspective. One of the things that Mica and I actually do for you is try to aggregate this for you in a convenient place. You know how we do that? We do it online, but you have to know the trick to get there. You ready?

Mica Gadhia: Ready.

Sean Jackson: The trick is this. I want you to pull out your phone, and I want you to send a text message to 41411. And in the message, just put the word mylink. You hit send. Don’t let it autocorrect. Send mylink as all one word to 41411.

You’re going to subscribe to our text messaging service. Now, the first thing that you get is a link to a very private discussion forum we have on LinkedIn where we share all sorts of stats.

Take the time right now to pull out your phone — 41411, mylink, all one word, don’t let it autocorrect — and hit send. It’s going to ask you to subscribe to our channel. We will never spam you. Right, Mica?

Mica Gadhia: Correct. Never.

Sean Jackson: Never spam. What we’re going to do, though, is immediately send you a link to our discussion forum so that you can start asking the questions so that we can make this show much more beneficial to you. Mica, do you think people will do it?

Mica Gadhia: I hope so, Sean.

Sean Jackson: I really do, too. We’re doing a lot of work over there in that discussion group and I want people to be engaged over there.

Mica Gadhia: And we want you to join us.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, the show gets kind of lonely if it’s just Mica and I.

Mica Gadhia: Although highly entertaining.

Sean Jackson: Highly entertaining. I enjoy it. I enjoy talking to you. That’s why you’re here.

Mica Gadhia: I love it. I’m glad.

Sean Jackson: So, remember to take out your phone — 41411 — and text mylink, all one word, and we’re going to get you that link immediately to your phone so that you can start joining the discussion group.

So, Mica, I do want to give a little bit of a sneak peak, because you mentioned this earlier. You asked me why people should be doing LinkedIn. I think I pretty much addressed that.

Mica Gadhia: Yes.

Sean Jackson: But you know what? Let’s do something different, a little radical. Okay? Let’s do something that’s never been done on Rainmaker.FM before.

Mica Gadhia: I’m ready.

Sean Jackson: What we’re going to do is, in the next segment, I’m going to start drilling in to LinkedIn itself. I am going to walk you through, as I’m standing over your shoulder, exactly what you should be doing on LinkedIn right now.

Mica Gadhia: That’s fabulous. Yes, let’s do that.

Sean Jackson: You know what? When we come back from the break, I’m totally going to do that, so stay tuned.

Mica Gadhia: The Missing Link is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and online entrepreneurs. Find out more and take a free 14-day test drive at Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Sean Jackson: Welcome back, everybody. Now, we are on to what I promised. Mica, what were we going to do next? I forget, now. Hold on. What is it?

What Should and Should Not Be in Your Profile

Mica Gadhia: We’re looking at LinkedIn, and you’re going to walk us through exactly what we need to be doing when we’re getting started, or even if we’re experienced LinkedIn users, what we can be doing right now to make our profile more desirable.

Sean Jackson: What, who came up with that?

Mica Gadhia: I did.

Sean Jackson: Dang it. The voice of the customer resonates on the show once again and is forcing me to actually do things.

Yes, that is what Mica said, we’re going to actually spend some time going through what you should be doing on LinkedIn right now. Now, I’m going to preface this, Mica. Okay. Mica? I want you to sit at your computer.

Mica Gadhia: I’m here.

Sean Jackson: I want you to open up LinkedIn. Can you do that?

Mica Gadhia: I’m opening.

Sean Jackson: Okay. Because I want to walk our listeners through what they should be doing on LinkedIn, right now. So, if you’re not at LinkedIn right now, if you’re listening to this in the car, put it on pause. Come back. You’re going to want to listen to this segment, because you need to be at your computer and on LinkedIn.

You remember the days, Mica, when people used to say, Hey, make sure that your computer is on and that you’re connected to the Internet.

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: I’m, like, Who is not connected to the Internet? I’m like, Who’s not connected to the Internet, you know, if you’re at your computer? My connection is pretty much always on when I turn my computer on, so what a difference. God, I’m showing my age now, Mica.

Mica Gadhia: And I’m thinking dot matrix printing. First flash that came in.

Sean Jackson: So, I figure by now all of you listeners are at the computer, hopefully, connected to the Internet and on your LinkedIn page. Let’s get going on this.

So, when you first come in to LinkedIn, what is nice is that once you’ve logged in, it’s going to take you to your home page. If you look underneath the LinkedIn logo in the top left, it says, Home. It s generally your home page. Now, LinkedIn has a done a lot of experiments and is doing a lot to improve their interface, which, quite frankly, they needed to do. Great system, but UI is always important.

I think the new change they made is very helpful, which is in the very first top left-hand side of your screen....