AdviceTech Podcast #9 – LinkedIn – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the X Y advice. Advice tech podcast. Wow, that was a tongue twister there for a minute, folks. I’m Peita Diamantidis. And this week, we’re going to deep dive into LinkedIn. And joining me here today to give us a bit of a helping hand is an author, a crew speaker, a commissioner of declarations and a laptop lifestyle. Thank you so much for joining me on the show, Adam Houlahan.

Adam Houlahan
Welcome, welcome, Peita. Thank you wonderful to be here with you today. Not out not on the beach with the laptop right now in the in the studio at the office. Yes, they’d mind I’ve done a bit of work from the beach every now and then like every second.

Peita Diamantidis
I feel like I’m under achieving that feels like an ultimate goal for me. If I can be sitting with my laptop, you’ve given me a mission. Now I’m gonna get there. And we’re leading into summer. It’s perfect timing. All righty. Well, we’re gonna pick your brain about LinkedIn and just a just a minute. But I do want to take a little bit of a moment to get to know you a bit better through your use of technology. So tell me, what is your most used emoji? Do you use emojis at all?

Adam Houlahan
I never say yes. And they’ll also say is sparingly. And I mean that in context of LinkedIn, because your LinkedIn is kind of a professional platform, which we’re going to get into in a minute. But so yes, I do. And generally speaking, it used to be that like the thumbs up, one, for useless. However, if it’s in a personal context, and it’s talking to my wife about the kids or whatever, it’s the eye roll. So just depends on the context. But as long as to you know

Peita Diamantidis
what, I don’t think I’m using the eye roll enough. And tap into my, you know, teenage girl, rolling that I’m sure I did to my parents. I love it. And so then if you had to, you know, wipe off all the apps off your phone and just keep three which keep 3d You think you’d keep

Adam Houlahan
goodness me only three. First of all, it takes it takes me about three hours to wipe them off my phone, but Okay, three, well, LinkedIn clearly would be would be my number one, two. Box, that would be my number two, because that’s kind of how we communicate the we’ve got a team all over the world. So boxes kind of my ad Slack. So they’re the they’re the communication tools we use. So they’d be my three slow, LinkedIn number one, oxygen and slack.

Peita Diamantidis
Interesting. So you’re using Voxer, in addition to Slack, yeah, so

Adam Houlahan
slack is like all the channels and all that sort of stuff. But if I’m kind of on the run, I’m often not in the office, traveling to events and things like that, of course, quickly bang out a voice message to one of the team on walkthrough and they all say no, like, you know, I will check in on Slack all the time during the date, well, periodically. But if it’s what we call blood on the floor moment, then that’s good. Get on hippy and Voxer. And you know, I’ll respond immediately.

Peita Diamantidis
I love that blood on the floor. Yeah, fingers crossed. None of us have too many of those right going forward. You never know. It’s so unfair. electable. Alrighty, let’s deep dive into LinkedIn. So listening today, I sort of want to give some context. So the will have, you know, salaried staff might be listening, whether that’s advisors, or maybe support staff. But we could also have business owners, and even people a bit like myself who, I guess, like yourself, speaker, you know, sort of content creators. So there’s sort of different types of users in that sense that will be listening. So how do you think they each should be using it differently? Is there a different approach? You know, is there a, let’s start with the salaried sort of individual? Because I think there’s probably a bit unloved in lots of advice given on social media. If you work for somebody, how can you be using a tool like LinkedIn better?

Adam Houlahan
Exactly, and it is very different to, to how say, the business or the key person in the business would, would use it. So there’s really like three, three things we break it down into. And so sort of that first one you’re talking about, is very much, it depends on their role, of course, as well. So the one thing I’d say, Peter, is that everybody in the organization should have a LinkedIn profile. And they all should have a professional profile, meaning that it’s, you know, it’s, it’s aligned with the business, and that it looks presentable. It’s surprising how often, we go into sort of larger corporates. And it’s just a dog’s breakfast. You know, from Summit, some of the people in the and I’m talking about the leadership level teams that have really, really average LinkedIn profiles. So that’s the normal things have a professional profile. The second part is really, you know, that should be most likely connecting with and interacting with people that are aligned with the organization. And that might be there might be service providers to the business that they’re working with individually. It might be, you know, people that they want to work with, that, let’s say sales teams or things like that, clearly, that’s a very different use as well, because they’re going to be more of an outreach and connecting with people view of getting into conversations. So the use cases are going to vary depending on the department. But if we had an overarching sort of simple strategy, it’s it’s reaching out connecting with the people that are aligned with the the organization, but also within the world of that particular person. And the other thing is going to be really, it’s one of those those very, very interesting anomalies within who actually owns the profile. And there’s there are actual court cases where the individual’s profile was deemed to be owned by the organization or visual, depending on how it’s set up and how it’s used. So what I would say is that, as I know, you didn’t ask the question, but it’s, it’s a very, very important topic is that there’s has to be really clear guidelines. When, say you bring in new team members, as to what is the expected use of the profile? And what is it agreed that the, I’ll give you an example. So when when people join with us in their employment agreement, there is a section that clearly states that yes, you’re going to use the background, each value of the company, you agree to put a position description about the organization, you agree to act in certain, certain ways professionally, and your brief or your profile to be tagged as part of our company, our profile, a little things like that. Now, if you’re talking about salespeople as an example, then there’s then you get into some slippery slopes of you know, what is what is expected, and what is ultimate ownership. So when you don’t want to go down that that rabbit hole, but it’s just something that all organizations at the level that a lot of your listeners are going to be at today, to be very wary of and get some good advice on and build it into that hint, hint here, you’ll build it into your employment agreements as to what was expected and including common code of conduct. You really, really don’t want people in the organization being might have a very strong opinion, say for example, in a certain topic, that is detrimental to the vision mission of the organization. Now of course we can’t ask them to change their their pinion when he just asked him not to show off since

Peita Diamantidis
I think the other thing, I think the other side of the flip side of that is, is true for a lot of people maybe working, it could even be a small business. But even a bigger one is they just don’t post it all, like, they’re so fearful of all of that they just don’t post at all. And I think, you know, if you’re a leader of a team or you know, run a business, then I feel like it’s an untapped resource is the extent to which your staff can engage with the public, I think that’s very untapped. And their insights are so different. And so perhaps it’s just about better guidance, guidance, you know, perhaps

Adam Houlahan
100%, it is all about guidance, and having rules of the game. And let’s face it, the it is a professional platform. But again, if I use our organization, as an example, our team that are in sales, they have a very different use of an allowance of what they can and can’t do in cluding, creating their own content, but they have to create their content within a guideline. But our other team members that are in our marketing team, and the IT team and coaches and things like that, quite often or you know, we’re encouraging them to share that the company content or pose an opinion on content, but also to be interacting, engaging with our clients content, where it’s appropriate. So, so there’s very different use cases, depending on you know, where, what the role is that those people are doing. And that’s why I really need a very clear kind of outline as to in the employment agreement. This, this is kind of a, we call it the rules of the game. But it’s just a guideline, as you said,

Peita Diamantidis
and it is and it doesn’t need to be, you know, really, really strict. I know, there’s some very large institutions that may have people listening to this podcast, who, you know, you’re allowed to post the marketing edited post that everybody posts on the thing. And that’s it really like it’s, it’s really prescriptive, it doesn’t need to be that you could have a piece of content that you or somebody else has written in your business, and then your team can just share it with their take or checkout page number two, I was fascinated by or, you know, like you can, they can give them a window, whatever they would say in a conversation with somebody, they can do that way of introducing the piece of content. So I just think, like you say, have a meeting where you just debate the content, talk about it, what was interesting, right, well, that sounds like that’s your post, you know, like, I think we can train teams to, to comfortably and wealth, you know, with a great deal of thought post on these things. Without it being Thou shalt not, you know,

Adam Houlahan
100%. And in all honesty, even in your art career, there are organizations that get locked down tight. The interesting part, though, is that quite often, their social presence becomes actually pretty boring. It’s, it’s just, it’s quite obvious that, well, Peter actually comes across more that the the team stuck here, because, you know, that just looks like they’re not really interacting, or you can almost tell that their responses are pre scripted, or, as opposed to, you know, allow them Yes, have some guidelines, but allow them their own personality, it’s going to do the company or business a lot more value, if they, if they’re allowed to have a little bit of light and shade more than they express them in.

Peita Diamantidis
So in terms, then, you just made me realize that something that business owners could do for their stuff, they really want to make this sort of push of, alright, let’s just lift our LinkedIn presence, at least lift the sort of quality of what we’ve got on there. When we actually did a couple years, it must been just before COVID I think we did team strategy day, but during the day, we had a photographer come and take both posed and sort of animated photos of the team. So it meant they all had product proper headshots, and none of them ever had had that before. You know, these are admin support stuff, they just never never had a headshot before. So and that doesn’t need to be expensive, you know, you can do that. And suddenly, the photo on there looks like something actually professional.

Adam Houlahan
It does. And you know, there’s even there’s even photographers around now that have created businesses of doing headshots, but they do them remotely just the tech that is available now. We had some of our team’s headshots done from a photographer in the UK. We’re based here in Australia. And it was all done. Yes, the team members have to download an app onto their phone and then certain things happened and then the date of day later, they’ve just sent back these amazing headshots from the other side of the world. So you don’t even Have to be saying, well, we’ve got to wait until our corporate day or whatever, where everyone’s in the office that the tech exists now to, to do almost everything remotely.

Peita Diamantidis
That’s fantastic. I’ve written that down, because we’ve got some virtual staff. I mean, we all operate virtually, but most of us in Australia, but we do have some overseas, so and I really wanted to get some good shots for them. So you’re just given real winning idea. Thank you. That’s fantastic. So then, okay, so that’s the for the salary, then, of course, we’ve got, you know, the other more senior personnel, business owner thought leader, let me ask you this, what’s your take on the business page on LinkedIn? Like, is that worth doing at all? Is it really, it’s not worth your time? What are your thoughts?

Adam Houlahan
You know, interesting. If you’d asked me this question. Two years ago, I’ll give you the complete polar opposite of what I’m gonna give you now. Now, I’d say yes, every organization no matter the size, should have a company profile company pages. Because there’s a lot of functionality that has been added to company pages that was not there before, that now makes it almost a prerequisite? Well, I’ll preface that by saying, provided you’re really looking to use your company’s LinkedIn presence in a lead generation tool. Now, we talked about the team, obviously, that’s a different thing. But now the business itself. Now what I’ll, again, be fair to say not every single instance is going to want to use their profile for that purpose, but I can guarantee and mighty percent of them will, then yes, you have 100%, you’re gonna have to have a custom page, it’s going to have to be active, you got to be building followers to the page. So there’s a little bit of work to do. And, of course, the content. The big mistake that I see all the time, Peter is people have, you know, just the content on the company pages is often done by say, the marketing team, understandable, or an x, or an outsourced marketing team, or whatever are they really doing is, is adding links to blog posts and stuff like that, that that’s on the company website. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with adding links to blog posts, things like that, it just shouldn’t all be that it needs to have a variety, then you’ve got to give the company organization that personality and a reason for people to want to go to the page.

Peita Diamantidis
It’s interesting you say that, because I’m just reflecting on that for financial advice, because of course, it’s fair to say we’re not the most interesting or sexy industry out there. So So you know, bringing personality, these things is not necessarily natural, but you’ve just made me realize some of the things I love seeing on company pages, but even on websites, is the a bit of the behind the scenes, you know, a bit of the will how actually do you get that done. And that’s not something that in financial advice we ever really share, like we’d never really show? Well, this is all the grass we might look at, if we’re trying to check this out for you, or this is, you know, those sort of things actually can deeply connect people to either your business or yourself, but also establish that expert status, because it’s like, oh, goodness, that looks really complicated. Like, wow, you guys really know your stuff, you know?

Adam Houlahan
Yeah. And it’s, it’s the age old thing, isn’t it? It’s, you know, we’re often blinded by the fact of how good we are at whatever we do. And thinking, well, everybody knows that, that’s reality is that they don’t. And you’re right. That’s the type of content that people actually really like, it’s just seeing that behind the scenes, sort of view of things. It could be it could also be as simple as how your team researchers, obviously, especially in financial services, is a lot of a lot of research involves a lot of compliance, that type of thing. And whilst I know, we have clients in financial services, so reasonably, across how, how much time and effort is actually put into maintaining your, your level of currency on what’s going on, through the point system, and, or obviously, but actually, that’s quite interesting stuff. It’s, you know, we want to know that our financial advisor is on his or her game. So, as simple as that, hey, you know, blocked out half the day today to get up to speed on X Y, Zed and put a bit of a personal spin on your thoughts on that, that that’s actually content that people go wow, yeah, realize you guys have to do that. Charge me so much.

Peita Diamantidis
Well, it’s interesting you say that I mean, x y, the podcast we’re on X Y hat. Have two days a year where it’s a whole day of CPD virtually, and they sort of do that. So we can, you know, sort of go hard and really knock it out. And I might share, you know, me watching that, from my life sort of set up the living room, and, you know, I stream it to the TV, and so you can all see it happening, but, but I had, it hadn’t occurred to me to almost on the business page go, this is us keeping up to date for our work with you, you know, like really positioning it that way.

Adam Houlahan
Exactly. And imagine, imagine, if you got, you know, it’s a, as you said, they’re all sort of remote. But if everybody on that, those two days, you know, kind of took a selfie, or someone taking care of them. So you just the way you do it, but you’re streaming onto your TV, and there’s someone else, you know, in their pajamas, or you know, whatever it is, people are comfortable with, of course, but where you how interesting Would that then be to see, hey, we’re all we’re all on the same page, we’re all doing the same thing. But we’re all doing it our own way that, you know, people will definitely resonate with that type of content. And that’s the type of content people just never organizations should say, just never really think. And that will be interesting to people. And I guarantee you every time that will be the ones that get the most traction interaction.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, that is, and when in finance, you know, we’re particularly light on with the whole experiential stuff. You know, we need to sort of tap into our Heston Blumenthal and make this stuff sort of more interesting and think about the experience more, because I do think, you know that, yes, there’s, it’s nerdy, but it’s really interesting to other people like, Oh, is that what it’s like? You know, like, it’s fascinating. And there’s lots of people that, that have a secret wish to understand more about finance and how we do things. So you know, why not share.

Adam Houlahan
And I think the one thing we should talk about to Peter is, especially in financial services is of course, there, there is a degree of structure around what can and can’t be said, when you’re talking about financial advice. However, when you’re talking about the vaccine, the backstory of how the organization is, has a life in a team and stuff like that. That’s open, we can we can say and do as we please. It’s reality of what’s going on. So often, when we’re working with some of our clients in that space, it’s always initially the conversation goes down, oh, I’ve got to be so careful in what I say, and I can’t do this. That’s fine. Let’s just leave that out. Because that will be part of that. Anyway. Frankly, what they want to know is the the life and the behind the scenes of the organization. So so let’s go super light on that stuff. Yes, of course, but we share it stay within the guidelines don’t. Don’t give advice, so to speak. But let’s have more of our content, really, in the stuff that is interesting. And it’s very, it’s got to be variety to it. And when I say variety, it’s that’s also across different posting concepts. So you’ve got standard status approach. You’ve got posts, with images, you’ve got short videos, you’ve got newsletters, all these different things. So you have a company page needs to have a bit of variety, as as the profile of the key, maybe the founder, the CEO, whoever is the pace organization is exact same rules apply just content, slightly different. It’s interesting.

Peita Diamantidis
So you mentioned newsletter there. And I think it’s something that like as users of LinkedIn, we might have sort of come across it that somebody’s you know, there’s a notification, somebody’s asked you to be complete. But we probably aren’t as aware of it as an actual function that we could take aware of, do you want to just run us through? Like, how that’s different to just a post, you know, and why that might have some benefits?

Adam Houlahan
Yeah, absolutely. It isn’t really important if it’s reasonably recent, that company pages can have its own newsletter, us as individuals, we’ve been able to have our own newsletter for some time. But now, given again, using us as example, so I have my own personal newsletter, and then we have a company newsletter, of course, the contents just a little bit different. But in the concept of what we’re talking about here, it’s definitely so every company page can have one newsletter. And the value of the newsletter is its long form content, as opposed to everything else is generally very short, punchy type of content. But also people can subscribe to your newsletter. So you definitely should be reaching out to your clients and said, Hey, here’s a user on LinkedIn to hear. allocation is like that. But the so you can actually have a subset of of clients or interested parties He’s that follow your newsletter. And the more that LinkedIn sees that you have your building followers to that particular piece of content, the more inclined they are to, one, make sure that those people subscribe, clearly get notified by notification on LinkedIn. Clearly it’s coming up in the feeds, but also by send you an email, say, hey, X, Y has just released a new newsletter today, here it is. So they’re actually helping you get it out there. But also behind the scenes, they’re also working out who are the people subscribing to it, who are the the people who are interacting on it. And they’re starting to show that to more why a wider community of people beyond just your followers or connections or anything like that. Because what LinkedIn is trying to what they’re not even trying, they’ve actually been very successful app is, is trying to ensure we all see the type of content we really like, there’s a number of ways you can actually determine or have a say in what shows up in your feed. Most people don’t do it or are aware of it. But there’s also why LinkedIn is kind of, you know, they, they, we’ve all heard of him, Facebook terminologies like audiences. And so it’s kind of similar to that concept, where it’s like a car not connected to these people that know these people. But LinkedIn knows that the people who I am connected to who are interacting with my content, that these other people out, there are kind of the same type of people. And it’s in their interest to at least show it to them to see whether they like it and want to engage on it. And of course, that helps the organization to expand its reach organically,

Peita Diamantidis
okay. And he’s this, this is outside of I mean, I know I’ve followed some hashtags on LinkedIn, it took me a while to discover those. And it meant that changed my feet a bit. So it’s, it’s sort of, it’s doing that sort of more organically behind the scenes, it’s saying, well, that sort of thing that you’re producing, I reckon those people over there would find that valuable, as opposed to where we all are quite prescriptive about our GI like that, or somebody commented or wait, you know, I’m connected to them, it’s, it’s actually a bit broader than that, of what people can see if your content,

Adam Houlahan
again, your company page can attribute up to three hashtags to the page, sort of kind of gives people an idea of what what the organization is all about. On your personal profile, you can do up to five, what’s called Creative Mode. And you should, and the, but also, like you did, you can, you can go out and say, Okay, this particular hashtag, I like that. That’s the content I’m interested in. And the, by the way, if you’d like to see all my content shopping feed, look for the hashtag Adams view, and follow that, then you’re guaranteed to start seeing all my stuff. Same thing for the company, you know, you should have a company, hashtag, and share that on every piece of content that you create. I’ll give you a quick little case study of why that’s important. Some time ago now, had somebody reach out to hey, let’s have a chat about what you guys do. Cut to the chase, they became a client. And after that, how did you find out about us, you saw, somebody just told me about your content. And and I looked on your profile, I found that I saw you had this hashtag out of this view or clicked on it. And before I knew that, I’d finished six hours of your content. And over a weekend, in my head, I said, Wow, you find better things to do and spend six hours or more. So the point being the point being that hashtags really, really important on two fronts, one for you to make sure you see the right type of content in your feed, and two for outbound, and the organization is and these key people who are creating content, personally within the organization, or using hashtags, very strategical.

Peita Diamantidis
Interesting. Okay, and so that’s, that’s something that’s different than just tagging the company page. You know, this is a hashtag as well. And so that’s sort of making it a bit broader than that. It’s it’s almost becoming its own theme, then you become your own your own topic. In that season. Yeah, okay, powerful. So let’s talk about then profile, the LinkedIn profile. There’s got to be so many features on there that you just can’t believe people don’t use, you know, are there a few of those that stand out for you the like, Would you all please just turn these things on or, or add some information to them? What are most people missing on their LinkedIn profile?

Adam Houlahan
Yeah, you’d be really surprised to know that it’s all part eight. 100 and 50 million people on LinkedIn. And less than 5% of that 850 million people actually have a profile that makes any sense. What I mean by makes no sense. I mean, it makes any sense algorithmically to LinkedIn, whereby they can understand the flow of the profile, and therefore actually can be shown in searches by LinkedIn. So that gives you an idea of how how well overall we do in that state that space. But you’re right, there’s the 8020 rule, there’s, there’s a few little things will get you 80% Of Attraction. And what they are is, is three three key themes. Or actually, for this the background banner image, you know, you’ve got to have a professional image, you’ve got to have something that if you’ve got nothing, there is a placeholder there. But think about it. Imagine, I came to your website, and you just had a placeholder at the top of the website, that tells me you just don’t really care about your website, the same as on your LinkedIn profile. If there’s not something there, it just says you don’t care. The second part is, of course, as you alluded to earlier, is a good professional profile image. And now, almost always, people have a profile image. But there’s a big difference between a good one and a bad one. A bad one can be a number of things. So if it guys, if you’re doing any of these things, you don’t have time to update. So if your profile image is 20 years out of date, you need to update it. Now, the reason why is why is that really important, because at the end of the day, what we’re using our profile for is to get conversations with people, whether that’s live, like you mentioned, imagine this, imagine, I’ve connected with one of your advisers on LinkedIn had a chat, right, I’m gonna come in next week. And let’s talk about what we can do together, walk in the door. And the person that greets me there is 20 years older than the personal I had in my head on the profile image. There’s an immediate disconnection, there’s immediate creation of distrust. So it’s a bigger issue than what most people think, equally, if put on the wait since your last photo, or you’ve lost a lot of weight since the last photo, again, this is this, it’s got to be current thought for the ladies often, you know, change of hairstyle, not so much just a little change in style. But if they complete change a color like that, I think we’ve had guys. That’s number two. Number three is the professional headline, that’s what you write about yourself directly under your profile, you’ve got about 240 characters text to put in there. There’s lots of different ways to do that. But one of the worst ways is to allow LinkedIn to just put as a default, your will if you don’t put something better there is whatever your position description is. So Mike’s CEO have promised this title to us. But that’s a massive waste of a huge opportunity in this getting people to have a sense of who you are and what you’re about. And the last one is hashtags. As we said, this is a thing on your profile everybody’s got access to it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a free account or Premium accounts or anything like that it’s everybody has it will create a moment. And you just have to go to the dashboard. And the very top of it since its creator mode, on or off. Now if it’s off, then it doesn’t give you the opportunity to attribute up to five hashtags to your profile. So and that is the number one what if you said out of all those things, what’s the one thing that the highest majority of people are not using? It’s

Peita Diamantidis
okay. And it’s something that what I liked about doing it, so when I came across, and I’m pretty sure actually I came across it because I attended one of your live web events. And I just went, Oh, okay, I better do that. And because I am an opinionated person. So I do have things that I talk about frequently is that when you’re forced to come up with five things, it really gets to think about gets you to think about your messaging, it really gets you to think about well, what actually are the things that I want to be known for? And I think that’s a good process, right? Because it forces you not to just be sort of blathering about anything, you’ll be prescriptive because you’ve put that down there as this is what I’m focusing on. Of course, it means you can post on something else. But I think it’s a good thought process for anybody to really sort of focus on Well, what do I want to be known for on a social media platform like LinkedIn? So it really sort of pushes you to consider that carefully.

Adam Houlahan
It does. And the other thing is, it also will help a great deal in because what movies is trying to do is they’re trying to make an alignment between what you put there your hashtags, and overall on the profile, the type of people you’re connecting with. And by the way, again, you didn’t ask me, I’m gonna give it to you anyway, was one of the big mistakes people make. The number one mistake, I believe, is accepting connection requests from just everyone, anyone. So it’s kind of like that dopamine hit, it’s like, oh, somebody wants to connect to me, that’s awesome. Except you far better off to be very selective in, in who you’re connected with, because that’s what’s happening. It’s LinkedIn looking for this three way online, watch profile says you’re all about who you’re connecting with. And what’s the content you’re actually creating and sharing or interacting on. When they can see that alignment between those three that it goes clearly Okay? Within reason we know who your tribe is, even if you don’t win if you don’t have your, your hashtags or your profiles all over the place, and you’re connecting with anyone and everyone. And today you’re talking about topic a and tomorrow’s topic B. And then it’s about what you did on the weekend and all that stuff. They just get on with this. I don’t know what the heck’s going on here. Let’s just not show Peters profile. Anyone? Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
Yes. And actually, that brings up a an interesting question. And, you know, I’m a good example of this. So as somebody so I own and run a financial advice, practice. But I also talk to advisors, you know, about advice tech, so, so it’s an interesting, you know, how do you handle that when you’ve sort of got, you know, two sides to your audience, you’ve got the public or your niche, or, you know, whoever you’re talking to in that way, and they could be on LinkedIn. But also, there’s your peers, you know, in the industry, how do you think is the best way to handle that in terms of either the hashtags or just your content? Generally?

Adam Houlahan
Yeah, it’s a great question. And one of the ones that actually is easy to resolve, but most people don’t go about it the wrong way. The reality is, you’ve got to pick one of them, as far as the what you do on your personal profile. And then of course, you can, and I, I’ll give an example. Often that people say to me, ah, but I’ve got three businesses. Pick one, what about the other twos and I had to pick one, you’ve got to stay within a lane, you can’t be all things to all people on your personal profile. However, of course, on your company page, you can have a whole different so your company page can be for a different audience. So as you said, your clients on one piece on the other, but also you can have what’s called showcase pages, showcase pages are like a subset of your company page. So you can have as many showcase pages as you like. And therefore in your exam, in that case for you, I will be recommending that, you know, your personal profile is very much about your, your clients, you your company page, mostly about your clients as well. But then have some showcase pages that might be for fears and other subsets that you think are relevant. Now, word of warning, of course, once a year, the more of those you create, the more content you’ve got to create, because each one then has to have its own followers and its own content, and whatever. So be careful for you Careful what you, I’ll give you the I’ll give you the solution. But the solution may be a lot of work in front of you.

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. One of the things that I am sort of accidentally came across as a, one of the features on the profile actually is the voice where you can record how to say your name. And as somebody with a ridiculous name to say, I’ve had so many comments of gratitude from people like MCs at events, because you know, I’ll speak and the pool, people have to introduce me. And they’ve commented on a suit, because they hadn’t seen it very often that not many people have actually turned that on where you just say, say your name and even a simple name, I think it’s worth doing like it’s them hearing you say your name, so they know how to introduce you or they know how to refer to you, you know, it’s powerful

Adam Houlahan
it is and that’s what it was. That was exactly what it was created for. However, there’s two use cases for every almost everything on LinkedIn. So in the context where you do have a name that’s somewhat difficult to pronounce, like yours 100% You should be using it for that. Where that’s not necessarily the case. Like if you named Jack Jones as an example. Then there’s still a use case for it. Even though you know it’s not going to be nobody’s calling get Jack Jones wrong. But you actually have a little bit 10 seconds or so of recording there. So as an example go and have a look at mine. And of course, you’re going to share a LinkedIn profile for everyone. Go and have a look at that part Peters talking about What you’ll see it looks like a little microphone next to your name or my name in this case. And you’ll see that when I use it, I actually kind of use it like a call to action is, hey, this is what we’re about, this is what I want you to do next seconds. So there’s two very powerful ways to use that.

Peita Diamantidis
That’s a great tip. And I think, you know, that’s the case for lots of things, isn’t it, where you’ve just got to utilize it for what works for you, just because it was created for version A doesn’t mean that you need to use that going forward. And LinkedIn is one of those things that has, it has a lot of elements, doesn’t it? I mean, even just to the profile, there is so many places you could fill things in. I mean, I guess the obvious thing people do is their work history, which I get. But there’s probably other elements there that people don’t use, I’m betting that the featured section is probably one that people don’t necessarily set up. Well, is that correct?

Adam Houlahan
Yeah. It’s featured section isn’t optional. So it’s not there. By default, you’ve got to get on activated. And of course, lots of people just not even aware that, that it’s there. But it is an allows you to add video content, links to stuff on your website or anywhere else. And the value of it is it’s very visual on your profile. So again, we use that featured section as a really intrinsic part of setting up a profile. And if you again, if you if you went to my profile, and you’ll see it, you’ll see if you clicked on the See there’s like a video where my profile images gives you like sort of 20 seconds of me talking. But what you’ll see is in and I say go to the featured section, if you read the professional headline below that it says go to the featured section, if you do that, when you talked about with the line pronounciation go to the featured section to every part of those those things in the profile. We’re driving people exactly to that to that finish section. Now that the again, if we want to talk about how not to use the the featured section is don’t put more than three links there. 1123. The end, I’ll be fair, Peter saying this is my opinion. And anyone else could have their own. The worst example of this life scene is someone had 78 Links in their featured section, which is just crazy to think people are going to swipe right all the time, right. So there’s not going to happen. So you want to just very in your face visual, that’s three kind of format, well, on a desktop view, on a mobile view, it’s just going to see one. So yes, you can scroll, but three, three maximum is that as many as going to get in a good view on on a desktop.

Peita Diamantidis
That’s really helpful, because it’s, um, I know, and it’s, this is one of those things of texts, Oh, interesting. And we don’t shedule enough of our updates on this stuff. And I don’t mean, posts, I mean, you know, maybe once in a quarter, we should just go into our profile and freshen it up, like just sheduled these things to just keep it up to date, because what happens is, we let it go. And then we are either going to announce something or we’ve got a new book, your authors, you know, read something and we look at your profile go on No, that’s really out of date. And he’s wasting all of that engagement. I mean, you know, listeners, something you might find surprising. I think some of the biggest networks or following we any of us have is actually on LinkedIn, I know mine is mine, my numbers on LinkedIn are much higher than they are anywhere else. You know, we’re probably under utilizing that, you know, if we don’t keep it up to date, the profile, then people are seeing stuff that is no longer really reflecting who we are and what we’re doing.

Adam Houlahan
Yeah, it was interesting. You are 100% Correct. And a good example of that is always looking at a profile of somebody that was asked their opinion on who was a branding expert. And in the background banner that we talked about earlier. He had a it was referencing an event that he was hosting in 2019. And had the data had the date on there. And I was like, really, really want me to share an opinion on that. It’s not obvious.

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. But it is. I just think, honestly, unless you schedule it, these things don’t happen. Do they? We’ve just got to make.

Adam Houlahan
We always say to our clients, every 90 days, Tom, just have a check in check it out. Make sure everything’s relevant. Everything’s topical. There’s new features coming out all the time. So we’re getting people to just Make sure they’re across all these new features that are there. So yeah, every line days.

Peita Diamantidis
That’s a good tip. Now, in terms of then automation are talk to me about posting, you know, the tools out there that can post into LinkedIn, those sort of things. Do you think they’re positive, negative can be detrimental? How do you find them in terms of helping people get a bit more regular with their posting in LinkedIn?

Adam Houlahan
It’s a good question. And there’s two, two sides to that coin. So it seems like where you might schedule content, and that’s fine. No problem with that at all. And there’s lots of lots of tools, let’s say HootSuite buffer mean, LinkedIn don’t have their own scheduling tool, what Facebook does, but and there’s a lot of this conjecture, some people say I use getting tools, it won’t get as much traction, you know, call BS on that one, tested that across many, many posts across many profiles, that’s fine. So in that context, there’s other ones that kind of aggregate content from other places and says, Oh, we can automatically post this to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or whatever. Those are not generally speaking, there, you can’t put any context to it. It’s all it all is doing is pulling in the data information that’s on some other website, or blog, or whatever it might be. And also, it’s going to be sharing a link to that that particular piece of content and LinkedIn do not lie content that takes you off the platform, as cases. So So those types of tools, definitely, I would say, stay away from.

Peita Diamantidis
And I just want to Can I just hold you there? Because I think just in case the listener miss that, what you’re talking about, there is a website link in your post, which I think people do intuitively, like it’s something that lots of people will just go, Oh, hey, go here. But what you’re saying is LinkedIn don’t like you doing that.

Adam Houlahan
They’re going to suppress the public content, meaning they’re not going to stop you posting it, they’re just going to make sure, pretty much nobody sees it. And yeah, so really, the type of content they’re looking for is content that keeps people on the platform creates conversation on the platform, that type of thing. So sharing a link to a blog article or whatever, is rarely ever going to excite people to do that. So So yeah, there’s this, you know, we could we could be here all day to talk just about content strategies. But I know we don’t have that time. But the type of yet so just to your question of those types of scheduling tools, definitely. No, no. And of course, the real No, no, is the ones that are automating, say, connecting with people and messaging, people, stuff like that.

Peita Diamantidis
And it’s just, you know, there’s a theme with, you know, we’ve just chatted with somebody about Facebook, and there’s a theme here, these tools are about connection. So that means you actually need to connect. You know, that’s, that’s the that’s the name of the game here. Collecting faceless strangers, is not connecting. That’s not and you look, it’s easy to get caught up in the vanity metrics of that, isn’t it? It’s like, well, you’ve got, you know, 10,000 40,000 however many followers, but but how many of them act? How many? How many of them actually interact with you? You know, it’s, that’s telling to me, that’s the thing I’m more interested in?

Adam Houlahan
It is, and you know, it’s funny. I’ve seen less and less of it now, thankfully. But we’ve all seen it. People who have on their having their profile saying their name and 8700 connections? Well, yeah, who cares? or 15,000, whatever the number, the fact you put a number that says you don’t care about your connections, you care about the number of connections. That’s a real red flag. So somebody sends me a connection request. And I got that in their profile.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and it’s an interesting lesson, I think that is, is hard when you’re first going down this path. And you see it a lot on Instagram, I had a quick look at your Instagram page there. And you’ve got a high number of followers on Instagram, but when you look through your posts, you’re also getting spammed by people who clearly want you to market products all the time. So you know, that’s not connection, either. So, you know, it’s we’ve got to learn that it’s it’s finding your tribe. That’s what that’s our job here. And if your tribe is just 100 or 200, very highly connected people. That is a huge win. You know, you’ve done super well.

Adam Houlahan
It is and it used to be different, but these days, LinkedIn is not impressed by how many connections you have. By the way, the maximum anybody can have doesn’t matter who it is, whether it’s Richard Branson, or Peter 30,000. I know that sounds like a lot. However, there is There is a cap. So you want to make sure even if you’ve got 30,000 Live ID, you want to make sure that they are the right type of people. However, that makes no difference. Now I could have 30,000. And just for argument’s sake, let’s say you had five, and then it makes no difference now, in the level of traction, you can get on your content to what I can get. It’s you can get as many if you go about your content strategy the right way, I’d better put that parenthesis around it. If you have a properly construction, structured content strategy, the numbers of your connections are all relevant.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s hard to get our heads around that. And in finance, where we are about numbers, it’s easy to get caught up in numbers. But I think

Adam Houlahan
there are good numbers and bad as we know,

Peita Diamantidis
absolutely. And I think ultimately, all no impact is really the measure. Right? And so whatever your chosen impact is, that’s the thing you need to be measuring yourself on. One of the things I don’t know, you know, how much you would be able to share or be aware of what’s down the track, like what a LinkedIn working on, you know, what are the things that are coming up in the future that we can look forward to or look out for?

Adam Houlahan
Yeah, wouldn’t we all love the crystal ball on that one? What I’ll say is that they don’t tend to be super open about that. However, what I can share with you is that new features go through some stages of rollout, just called alpha, beta, and three levels of release. Alpha means it may not actually go to full, full utilization across the globe. And funnily enough, quite often Australia, is picked as a country to test Alpha products. And you can look at that in two ways. Look to say, ah, that’s cool. Australia must be an important market for them. It’s actually the reverse, it’s the steam as well, we’re so far away from everywhere else. And it’s such a little, if we

Peita Diamantidis
mess it up, it doesn’t matter

Adam Houlahan
if it stops up like Australia. So funnily enough, yeah, we often get first release on these things. What they’re working on right now is in sort of, probably just come out of alpha, it’s, in fact, even just through beta, it’s now ready to roll out is, believe it or not a podcasting, called LinkedIn audio. So it’s now I wouldn’t say it’s as functional as a would never recommend replacing your traditional podcast with LinkedIn or audio. However, you can now create an audio version of interaction with people directly on LinkedIn, which in certain cases is right. The downside is you can’t you can’t syndicated across multiple platforms, you can’t store outside of that type of stuff. So but if you’re kind of new into podcasting, it can give you a bit of a taste of what podcasting is like.

Peita Diamantidis
I guess it’s probably is that almost like an audio version of the newsletter? Is that sort of what it’s no, no,

Adam Houlahan
it’s a think of clubhouse. Remember that remember, clubhouse is the next biggest thing that was ever going to exist that nobody, nobody even remembers that? Yeah. That’s the easiest comparison. It’s kind of like LinkedIn version of clubhouse. But what I will say is, what’s really the future, I can guarantee you What the You don’t need a crystal ball for is that it’s all about content. So it’s gone are the days where it’s all about, you know, he or she has the most connections and all that sort of stuff. LinkedIn wants to be the place that we all come for really high quality content on subjects that they’re interested in. So what they’re really working on is, is improving the functionality of us being able to have some say in what the type of content that we see. And being able to flag content with don’t like and signal content we do like, which improves the quality of stuff we see on our feeds. So, interestingly enough, though, you’d be very, again, I think you’d be really surprised to know that of the if you said exactly how do you create a content strategy that LinkedIn loves and it’s gonna give you this massive amount of organic reaches a lot but it’s less than 1% of all the people on LinkedIn have any idea of how to or that or at least even implementing strategy like that. So the what I would say is it is a target rich, untapped resource. If you if you if you Get it right where the organic reach that you can get to the right type of people. And they’re putting into place all the metrics that you can see with your content, like, who are the people are seeing what industries are they in? What locations? Are they in? What companies are they from, you can see all this information on your content there. And that is the future. And so the game is going to be won by the content creators that create really high quality content that high quality content is not often promotional content, something like selling a product or service course there is a place for that as well. But the real long term wealth not even long term, it’s here right now, it’s just less than 1% of that 850 million people on there, understand it and utilize it. That is that is the future.

Peita Diamantidis
And I think that’s probably that’s probably something you can’t say about most of the platforms, right? So you can’t, most of them, you can’t say that the majority of users aren’t really utilizing it to its full extent, you’d probably say the reverse, you probably say, it’s, you know, most people are pushing stuff out. And then whereas, whereas, you know, and I’ve heard that from a few different places, you know, LinkedIn is this thing that people just haven’t tapped into. And that’s okay, if it’s not your niche, but that means that people that work at your niche, and that might be the case, but I would argue most advices, you know, work with people with role jobs, or business owners or like most of them are going to be on there. And if not, it’s a great thing to even introduce people to cheat. I noticed you don’t have a LinkedIn profile. Why not? You know, like, it’s, this is something that for most people that would be value in that. So yeah, I think that’s an interesting insight that makes you it’ll make everybody I think, as a listener question where your effort lies, you know, and making sure that you just sort of don’t spread yourself too thin, why not dive into something and do it really well. And maybe linked LinkedIn might be that, you know, for the listener,

Adam Houlahan
yeah. And just to maybe expand on that a little bit. Even if potentially your your main market is not only in any financial advisor, I guarantee you 95% of cases that will be, but even if they weren’t, it’s still a place where you can build a lot of credibility by creating this great content and getting a lot of interaction, engage with them. So that when you are having people check you out, interesting thing, if you Google, none of us do whatever do we pay to look Google our own names, we never do that. But I guarantee you, if you were to do that today, that the number one thing that will come up in that search will be your LinkedIn profile. The only reason ever where it won’t be is if you have a personal website like that. I don’t mean a company wide. So for say for me, we have our company website, promise global, I also have speaking, roles, a personal website that will handle comm. So that will often come up first. But from the highest majority of people, if ever, our name gets Googled, our LinkedIn profile is going to come up number one. And really, if you think about it, if somebody’s interested in reaching out to us for something as important as financial advice, they’re going to do their research. They’re going to check you out. They’re going to they’re going to and how we do that we do a Google search. And the first thing they’re going to see is LinkedIn profile, they’re gonna click, and it looks like rubbish, then come across that way.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s, that’s probably something that we underrate, isn’t it that, that, well, you might have a business website, and it might have your headshot and your description, but there’s a good chance that won’t be where they sent first, you know, if they Google you, it’s probably going to be a LinkedIn profile. So why not give it you know, the attention it deserves, and make sure not only does it look right, of course, but also that it represents you, you know, that you’re really capturing, you know, who you are on your LinkedIn page.

Adam Houlahan
And if I can get get, I’ll just quickly give you another little case study on that. Recently, one of our clients contact me said, Oh, I just use a mortgage broker. And just I just want a contract to do a $5 million finance for commercial property. Right from LinkedIn, I didn’t have to do anything. So what do you mean? He said, Well, when I spoke to this person, asked him like, how did you find out about me? And they said, well actually spoke to a friend of mine who recommended one of your competitors and gave me a link to their LinkedIn profile when I went on there. It had a link to your profile as someone that you should also check out and yours just looked so much more appealing than the person that I was personally referred to. I love coming to you instead of them. Is the difference power of a professional presence? Where he didn’t even it wasn’t even the search for him it was for someone else.

Peita Diamantidis
That’s, that’s such a good tip. I feel like, you know, that’s the represented in the old days, it’s like if you had a ratty business card that got scratched up in your pocket, and you’re handed that over to somebody, that’s what we’re doing, if we’re not keeping our LinkedIn profile, literally split, and you know, and particularly personable, you know, and sincere and capturing who we are, then you’re not doing yourself any favors. It’s essentially for most people, it’s probably the closest they’ll ever have to a personal website.

Adam Houlahan
Exactly. And to be honest, Peter is actually more SEO optimized than what your personal website could ever be. So it’s if you if someone said to me, I can, I’ve only got the budget to do one or the other. I said, Do your LinkedIn profile all day?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, that’s good advice. Good advice. Anything we’ve missed? Feel like we’ve covered a

Adam Houlahan
lot. Yeah, we’ve covered a lot. I can guarantee you when we jump off this, we should have thought about that. But I think I think overall, we’ve we’ve covered a lot of ground. Hopefully, it’s been chilling.

Peita Diamantidis
Look, I think, undoubtedly, you know, the listeners are going to want to find out more about you, Adam. So we’re going to include Adams website link in the show notes along with his LinkedIn profile, which in this particular instance, I think would be the first place everybody should look, there’s a lot of lessons just from looking at what Adams doing in his profile. I’d also personally encourage you to attend one of his free web events, once you follow him on LinkedIn, then he does mention those as they’re coming up. And, and you know, it’s constant updates about what’s changing, you know, what’s new in LinkedIn, but also reminding you of, of behaviors or, you know, strategies and content strategies and things like that I’ve found that are really valuable. So encourage all of you to do that, too. Thank you so much for joining us. And I’ve really got huge amount. I’ve got huge amounts of notes I’ve written down as we’ve been doing the interview. So if nobody else finds it valuable, I certainly did. So thank you so much for your time.

Adam Houlahan
It’s absolute pleasure, absolute enjoyed it. Hopefully, we’ll do it again sometime in the future.

Peita Diamantidis
With a new update done. I’ll see you then.

So could it be that you one of the 99% of LinkedIn users that aren’t really utilizing the tool to its full capability? You know, do you did anything we were talking about really prompt you to think, you know, please share your insights on the x y platform, maybe even you know, share your LinkedIn profile on there and ask for some feedback. You know, we’re all here to help each other out the x y platform was a great way to do that. So be sure ask for assistance as people share their profile. So we can all take a look. And certainly take a look at Adams and get some insights from there. And in terms of my thoughts, I guess what I would say is, you know, that was a bit of a a eye opening moment for me, when you know, you realize LinkedIn really is your personal website, this is, this is really the best version you’re going to have have your own website on you and what what you like to talk about. And that’s why it’s so important that it truly reflects you. To give you some insight, you probably have already seen a theme with the interviews I do on the pod, I do this wacky introduction. And those were I come up with all sorts of different backgrounds, about the individual interviewing and, and some, you know, things that might create more interest. And that is either easy or incredibly difficult, depending on how well people’s LinkedIn profiles and other social media profiles really represent them as both professionals but also as human beings. And so sometimes it’s super quick, because, you know, they have all of that background in there. And I can see some personality in their posts, and I can grab some little insights. And sometimes I struggle, I struggle to come up with one or two points. So you know, this is a page that really represents you and whether you think people are looking at it or not, they almost certainly are. So I think it’s worth all of that time, you know, to just really lean into upgrading the quality of the content, they’re taking advantage of the different elements and making sure we’re on top of all the different features we can use SAR alrighty then we need to get those curiosity muscles working a bit more. You know, each week we’re going to be doing this. I’m going to bring to your attention another apples something that I came across and given were in the sort of professional office space with LinkedIn being our interview today. Then the app I’d love you to take a look at is called hyper context. And you can find them at hyper context.com. Now this is a tool that helps you streamline internal meetings, team goals, and sort of get it Raise Morale on the one page and create automatic workflows that help make this much easier. And this can turn sort of really dull or even awkward one on one meetings into things into meetings that have high impact and high impact discussions. You know, your team member could take ownership of the one on one agenda, they can share their feedback on some things that you wanted to talk about. You can assign follow ups, you know, that you can really foster accountability in a team. And it even has 500 conversation starters to get that sort of meeting going so that it can get people conversing and relaxing. In terms of team meetings, then, you know, your meetings, you know, they sit in your calendar, whichever one you use, it could be outlook, or it could be Google Calendar, like we use, then hyper context sits within the meeting when it’s booked in your calendar. So it’s got a button there that when you open the appointment for the meeting, you click on take me to hyper contacts, and they’re the agenda sets. And so once again, then the team can see what they’re going to be covering, they can take notes, they can add links, they can add images, so that when you get to your weekly team meeting or have her on it is whatever the topic is, they’ve already added in all the things they want it to cover. Now, during the meeting, you know, team members can add comments, you can assign tasks or follow ups to different team members. And once the team meeting is done, then the minutes of that meeting, essentially the way you’ve been interacting with the agenda. And the follow up tasks get automatically sent to all the attendees. So it’s just one of those narrow tools that just streamlines a particular functionality for business. I think we’d all agree that internal meetings can get a bit dry, they can struggle, we maybe lack a bit of structure. And also it’s difficult for people to remember what they want to cover. They can at any point go all I want to bring it up in a team meeting, they go to the calendar appointment, they open it up, click on the hyper context agenda and they just add it and it will appear then when it when the meeting starts. So I’d encourage you to check it out. Well, that’s all we’ve got for this week. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll get your advice tech fix magically sent to you each Friday. And if you’d like a speaker at your next event, or you’d love to suggest me as a speaker for the next event you attend, then I’d love to talk to your audience on the seven habits of bionic advisors, and the secrets to tech powered human centric advice. Please reach out to me on LinkedIn if that’s something of interest. my LinkedIn profile is Peita M DPITA. M D. Otherwise, oh look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember, advice explores Stay curious.