Effective Business Networking

02 Feb Effective Business Networking

We are pleased to introduce inspirational speaker, Tony K Silver, whose mission is to help both individuals and teams maximise their marketing potential.  He is a leading international award winning LinkedIn Profiler and shares his experience in highly effective and interactive presentations and workshops.  Tony is much in demand for corporate events and is particularly well suited to SME networking events.

Here he shares some of his thoughts ...

“So, you are on LinkedIn and may have been for some time as it reaches 20 on the 5th of May this year. But are you really getting the most from it, are you using it as a business tool to move you towards your goals for you and the business? I guess for many people the answer is no, not really, and I am not surprised as this is an honest answer for many. We all generally joined LinkedIn years ago but there are some things to consider that may just have hindered our use of it. Now what follows in this article is based on my 17 years’ experience on the platform and from delivering advice and training for over 10 years.

My conclusion is that of all these businesspeople, across all different industries and in different places internationally, there is only a small percentage that actually use it effectively for their needs, most people are having a go (less than 5% is being nice)

Now there is nothing wrong with “having a go” but would it not be better if you had knowledge of what works the best. In fact only 1% of the nearly 900 million on LinkedIn post weekly, so try and post at least once a week consistently with good quality content.

I often ask people on stage or in training sessions “when you joined LinkedIn, did they send you a manual on how to set it up?” I have yet to have someone say yes to this because it never happened. Yes, when anyone joins, they have a go at setting their profile up, maybe they get help from a friend or colleague or Doctor Goggle, but very rarely do they get help from an informed source.

Tips & Hints

So, they do what they think is needed, sometimes guided by LinkedIn’s minimum requirements. In the beginning this was basically just uploading their CV to various parts of LinkedIn, but from about 10 years in it has been used for so much more so the old Online CV style profile was no longer cutting it. You need to consider who will be looking at your profile and what they will see. So make it engaging and one that affirms to the person they are in the right place. The tip here is to have a banner that highlights what you are a specialist in. Then once they had a profile maybe they got active and did some posts and got some engagement and were happy, but by what standards were they measuring the engagement? They were probably only scratching the surface because they were not aware of how LinkedIn treated their activities.

May I introduce you to the notorious LinkedIn Algorithm and how it plays a big part in what LinkedIn does with your posts. I call it the LinkedIn Rulebook and without a copy, again you can only have a go. So it would be handy to know what is the best time of day to post, so I can tell you 10-12 most weekdays will do the trick. Also consider peoples attention span and don’t make the post too long – a 1-minute read will work well, and to increase your reach add an image.

You guessed it LinkedIn does not send this report to you much like you not getting a manual when you joined, so try and use the tips I have sprinkled in this piece. Finally it has a really good search engine but, when you do use it, you must use the “All Filters” button, to take your search results from millions to a useable number.”

Please do get in touch

To invite Tony K Silver to join your company for a speech or workshop and help increase individual and organisational impact, please call us to discuss your event on +44 (0)1895 827 800

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