Mastering LinkedIn for B2B Growth

G'day everyone. Welcome to the LinkedIn for B2B growth channel. I'm your host, Michelle J. Raymond, LinkedIn expert. And today's video is simply going to be a walk around through LinkedIn for those of you who are brand new to the platform. Welcome, especially if you haven't been active on other social media platforms. And it probably feels like it's the cool kids club where every single person seems to know what they're doing, but the reality is maybe you don't. And there's a whole new set of language. jargon. And let's be clear, LinkedIn doesn't do a great job of helping you find your way around. So that's what I'm going to do today. We are going to just step by step work your way through. I'll explain where to find things, what sections you can look in to find different kinds of information. And it's literally just going to be an overview. There's more content on this channel about creating a great LinkedIn profile, creating content, or updating your LinkedIn company page. So today's video, I'm not going to show you. how to use all of these things. I'm just going to step you through what they're called and where to find them, as I said. Now, before you get started on LinkedIn, there's one thing that you need to do. Grab yourself a copy of the LinkedIn branding book. Before you get active on LinkedIn, it's so important to set up and establish your personal brand and your business brand and learn how those two things come together. So if you haven't got your copy yet, go and grab that. Also, same thing applies for company pages. If you haven't got your company page sorted, Business Gold is the book for you. And of course, the show notes will be in there. Promise you, that's the last of the sales pitch in this one. So let's just jump across to LinkedIn and I will step you through things. Let's take you through the jargon that's going to come along with LinkedIn so that you can have an idea of what's what and what exactly people are talking about. Whenever you log into LinkedIn, after you created your profile, you're going to be greeted by... this screen, which is what we call the home screen. So think about this is the landing page where all of the information comes from. And this is the main one where you're going to learn how to move around. On the home screen, we have what's called the home feed. And this is where if you scroll down, you start to see all of the content that's posted. Now, I'm not going to keep scrolling all the way down, but there's a couple of things that I want you to notice. In the top right-hand corner, you have this option that you can sort the content. by top, or if I click on this, I can go by recent. Probably recommend to stay with top. It's what LinkedIn's recommending to you, but it can get a bit monotonous. So check out recent from time to time. So I'm just going to go back to top. And again, LinkedIn has decided that that's the best content for me to see. Now, if I keep scrolling down, you're going to see that there's all kinds of different content and some of which you may like that content. and you want to support the creator. So just hit the like button. And as you hover over, you'll see a lot of these icons pop up. You've got funny, insightful, love, support, celebrate, or like. It doesn't matter which one you use. There's no right or wrong. If in doubt, just hit the like button and you're good to go. If you'd like to write a comment, we just simply click on comment and it opens up this box. And you can see right now that I could just type and away we go. The other thing that I want you to notice just here on this column is that we also have what's called the identity switcher. So if I click on that drop down box, it opens up an option where I can also comment as a company page of which I manage quite a few. So from that perspective, if I want those company pages to get involved instead of my picture, you can see now I've got my company logo. And any action I take now will be done on behalf of my company, not my personal account. So I'm just going to switch that back to Michelle J. Raymond and click save. But that's how you would do it if you had both options. Moving across here, we have the button called repost. And if I click on that once, it opens up two options, repost with my thoughts or just repost. Now, click on both of them. Have a go. Repost is where I would say is a. baby step for people. So if you see somebody else's content that you like and want to share with your audience, then just click on the repost button. You don't have to write any words, but if you see something and you have an opinion on it and you want to share that with your audience, then repost with thoughts. And there's a few other technicalities, but we're just going to leave it there for today. This is how we share content that we enjoy with our communities that somebody else has created. You can also send the post to somebody else. So if I see something that's of interest, I might want to send it to my friend, Michelle Griffin. And then down here, we can write a quick message and that will send Michelle a copy of this post. And I often do that because I like to look out on behalf of other people. And it's a really great way to say, Hey, I'm thinking of you and help you to keep top of mind. So always keep an eye out for that one. If I scroll down a little bit further, you'll notice in the top. right-hand corner of every single post, there's three dots. The full name for that is called ellipsis, but we'll just call it the three dots for this video. When I click on that, it's going to open up a whole new menu again, and we have the options to save, copy links to the post, embed the post. I don't want to see this, unfollow the person, or report the post. If you see a post that really goes against the LinkedIn user agreement, then don't forget to hit report post. help keep the platform safe and community-based. These options, they're always available. And these can often be the way that we can teach the algorithm what things we like to see and what things we don't. So if you hit save, of course, it's going to be happy. If you hit, I don't want to see this, then it will ask you why you don't want to see it. But again, you can choose. One thing that I would say is your time spent on LinkedIn, I want you to know that you are always in control and it doesn't matter whether... I like it or someone else likes it. If you don't like it, I want you to make sure that you hit that unfollow button. It is so easy to get swamped by people and things coming at you from all sides. And quite often you'll notice that things might not align with your values. They might not align with your business goals or where you want to go. You might not be interested and that's totally fine. It's your time to spend how you want on the platform. We're looking at this. I'm just going to scroll back up to the top and you see... This is the homepage. Now, if we explore a little bit, we've got the menu across the top. So home is how you get back to this. Let's click on my network because that's important place for you to manage new connections, notifications, and things that come through in relation to newsletters, invites to events. Some of these things can pop up. You can see you've got any outstanding invitation. So in this case, it's a newsletter. We've got celebrations. So LinkedIn will show me a list of people who are celebrating work anniversaries, maybe birthdays, and you can quickly and easily work your way through here and either just like it or send somebody a message or drop a comment on these posts. So it's really quite easy. Once I come into here, I can always click back on home and that takes me back to the home screen. Like I said, let's click on my network. We go back there. You can see you've got your connections list. So let's click on that. And you can't break anything on LinkedIn. So don't be afraid to just click and have a poke around. All of my most recently added connections have been sorted in this particular view, but you have the option to go by first name or last name. And you can also search by the name or with filters over here. What does message mean? That means sending that person a direct message. So it's a... private communication between the two of you. Again, anywhere where you see three dots on LinkedIn gives you another option and you might have accidentally connected with someone and want to remove them and you can just do that from this screen here. So I'm going to click on my network again just to keep taking you through. You'll start to see you can see the groups that you become a member of, the events that you have attended or are upcoming. So if I click on this one This is one of my favorite places to check out to see all the great events that are going on on LinkedIn. So have a look around. See if there's something that captures your interest. For instance, if I was going through here, my friend John Lacey, shout out to John. If I was to see his event, that's something that I always like to attend. Now with events, we've also got company pages down here. So if I click on that, you can see that they're all open. These are the ones that I'm following. And again, if you're not interested anymore, just hit the follow button again. So following. And now it will ask me, do I want to unfollow that page? Which in this case, I will. And if I make a mistake, I just click on the follow button again. So then my network tab is a lot of where you can take actions to get involved in different areas on LinkedIn. So again, have a look in this left hand menu. As you get more information, it will pop up here. And when we're searching for new people, don't forget to scroll down. And these are the suggested people that LinkedIn has recommended that I connect to. Now, they don't always get that right, but it's often a place to start. Now, while we're on this screen, I want you to have a look and say, what is connect and what is follow? Let me explain what connect and follow is. So imagine if we are connected, that means it's a two-way street. I see your content. You see my content. And. and we can easily message each other. I can also invite you to come and attend events that I might be running. So there's lots of upside when you're starting out. You want to make sure that you connect with at least 500 people to begin with. Now, that might seem like a huge number when you're starting out, but trust me, you will grow that pretty quickly. From that, we also had the follow button. Now, what's the difference? Now, follow you will see for some people quite often, you can go to the follow button. If they have creator mode turned on, which I'll show you in a moment, what happens is if you click follow, say for instance, you come to my profile, the follow buttons there, it means that if you click it, you'll see all of my content, but I won't see any of yours and I can't invite you and you can't invite me. to any events. And so from that perspective, it makes it a little tricky. So when you're starting out, make sure that you try and connect with those 500 people. Once we have selected whether we want to connect or follow with someone. So let's just say I click connect on this person. It will automatically send a message across. Now it hasn't allowed me to customize a message. which is something that's really important that we do. If I click on Caroline's profile in this particular case, it opens up the whole profile and you can see there that my connection message is actually pending. If I click on more when I come to her profile, you can see that we have other options here as well. But for now, I'm just going to leave that and see what happens when she comes back. Click on the home button and I'm going to show you through a couple of other places. We now know we're on the homepage. If we want to have a look at our network or any events that we're going to, you can start to see that over here on the left-hand side and the manage my network panel. The next one, jobs. Now this is not something that I actively am involved in on LinkedIn because I love to help businesses grow, but have a poke around here and have a look. There is nothing that you can break. So just click away and see what you find. Next thing. messaging. This is your inbox. This is where things come to you, where you get messages from people. And this is the part where we want to communicate with people backwards and forwards. Now to write a new one, click on the pencil, and then you can select a name. And then from there, you can start to type any messages that you'd like to send to people. You can attach images, you can attach a GIF, you can send emojis. And there's also, I've got a integration with Calendly to be able to send people easily my booking link. You can also do LinkedIn audio messages or LinkedIn video messages in here in your inbox. This is something I find really hard to keep on top of. You have the options with the three dots. If you go next to somebody's name, click on the three dots, it opens up the menu and you can start to see that you've got all of these options. I am not going to step you through this. All I'm going to say is find your own system for managing this. Because if you're like me, it will get out of control very quickly as the numbers scale. So in this case, I can archive and that just tidies up my inbox. Notifications is the next one across the top. Now, having a look at this, it is as simple as what it says there. There is nothing more to it. This is the work that you need to do based on the activities that you've been doing on LinkedIn. Maybe people have commented on your post. Maybe you've been tagged in a post. All of these kinds of things will start to pop up. And as you get more active, you'll get more notifications to the point where you'll be like, oh my God, Michelle, can you just please make them stop? There is a way. And I will show you how we can do that as well. Just moving across here, we've come across to what it says there, me with my little profile photo. If I click on that, this is and go down to view profile. This is how you get to your own LinkedIn profile. So this is for personal individuals, not for businesses. They use company pages and you can start to see here, we've got up the top, we call them cover images or banner images. You've got your profile photo. We have our headline. You'll see that people start to include their pronouns as well. And this little speaker phone that's here beside that is if you've done and recorded a name pronunciation. You can do that on mobile phone. It allows people to listen in on how you pronounce your name, which is really great for people that have difficult to pronounce names. Anytime you want to edit things on your LinkedIn profile, see the pencils, just click on the pencils. You can see here, if I click on this section, it will open up and then I have the opportunity to change the things that we were just talking about. So anywhere on LinkedIn that you see over here on the right hand side, we've got pencils. That means you can edit things. Okay. So just in general, as we keep coming down and scrolling down, you may get LinkedIn reach out to you and ask you about creator mode and creator mode is something that if you are a new creator mode is something that if you're completely new to LinkedIn, I don't want you to turn it on. LinkedIn is going to keep prompting you and asking you to do it, but trust me, you don't want to do it. Now, the reason is when you have creator mode on, You have the automatic button as follow, and then you'll keep building followers. And as I said, your job in the beginning, you want two-way streets and connections. You want two-way streets where you're connected, where you can have conversations, where you can invite people and build it up to that number of 500. So don't turn creator mode on just so that you can see it. You're not missing out on anything. It just turns on a couple of new features such as these creator tools like LinkedIn audio events, newsletters, and a follow link, none of which you are going to miss out on when you are just getting started on the platform. This top section here is called the featured section, as it says. But if you want to come down and see what activities you personally have been making, or if you're visiting somebody else's profile, coming down to the activity allows you to see what they've been doing. So this will show you my posts. If I click on comments, obviously it's going to show you that. And videos and then images and newsletters, you guys get the hint. And you can set one of these as your... favorite so that when people land there and they get greeted by whichever one you choose. So if I was great at photography or creating images, I'd probably want them to stop here on images, but that's not really my strong point. I've got another video on YouTube, which will show you how to set up your featured section. So I'm not going to dive into that too much. Same thing down here, your about section, click on it with a pencil. You can edit it and add in things like your top skills. Adding in a new job, click on the plus button or click on the pencil to edit an existing role. And you can start to see that you can build up a lot of information. So work experience, make sure that it's up to date and education, same thing. You can see plus buttons to add and the pencil to edit existing things. And pretty much the whole way down your profile, it works like this. It's a matter of just scrolling, And eventually you come down to the bottom, which are recommendations. These are my favorite piece of my LinkedIn profile. And this is the place where other people get to see the social proof. So what are other people writing about you? If you want to get one, then just click on the plus button and you can see that opens up and you can ask for a recommendation or you can give somebody else one, which is also a great gift that you can give to people. So again, scrolling down here. you can start to see everything. There is nothing that you can do wrong if you just click on buttons. Okay. So either plus button to add or the pencil to edit either one of those two things and just play around and make sure every section is complete. Make sure that you're not underselling yourself and make sure that it's really clear what you do and who you do it for in your own style. Don't try and copy me. Don't try and be like me or any other person on the platform. Just try and bring your own personality to the platform. Now I say that and it sounds like a massive cliche and I talk about it and I say, go and create your digital twin. And you'll find that it's really hard when you're learning because you want to emulate what's worked for other people. And look, it totally makes sense to me, but it's a trap for new players on the platform. If I was to come back here and click on the home button again, comes back to the home feed. and we begin scrolling again. So click across the top menus. How do you get to your own personal profile? Click on me. That makes sense. I just want to show you down the left-hand side. Something's going a little bit weird. Sometimes LinkedIn will have these little gray buildings. What it actually is, is this section on the left-hand side is my company pages. So any company pages that you are a page admin on, they will display in this panel. You can also see if I scroll down, it shows me recently different groups or different hashtags that I've clicked on. So I can go in and have a look. And again, you've got sections for groups, events, and followed hashtags. So it's just a different way of getting into things. So if I click on events here, it will open up this screen and start to show all the events that are available. So you've got my events or how I can create a new event. Have a look around. Events are a great way to get to learn about LinkedIn. So click on home and we come back. So home feed, information over on the left to do with how to get to company pages. I'm not going to include company pages in this video. I have got so many videos about that already, but anytime you're looking for stuff that you said, click attend, they're always over here. You will hear things like hashtags, and let's just have a look if I click on this one. So the good old hashtag, it's nothing new, but ultimately they don't have as much power on LinkedIn. But think about it as how do you want your post filed? Which filing cabinet do you want LinkedIn to put it under? So hashtag LinkedIn means that if anybody's going to the search bar and typing that in, your post will come up. So things like keywords become important. If we're to use... the search bar, in this case, I'm just going to type in company page and hit enter. Then this is where the magic begins on LinkedIn. You can start to see, first of all, any posts that mention company page. Now insert your favorite topic that you want to learn about. Type those words up into the search bar and hit enter. Here you can see posts, you can see people, and there's all kinds of different ways that you can start to learn information. And if I wanted to know about these kinds of things, you can see that there's other filters that pop up. If we click on all filters, we can start to see who else or what else we can filter out by. And there's so many different options in here. This is one area when you learn to leverage it properly, you will just be mind blown. You can see that it's prompting me to try and make me buy Sales Navigator. Again, if that's one of your questions. If you're starting out on LinkedIn, do not go and buy LinkedIn Sales Navigator licenses. They are expensive, you will be overwhelmed, and there's plenty of time to get to that if you grow into it in the future. Does that mean you should buy a LinkedIn Premium account? Look, they're roughly around $50 Australian dollars, so I guess they're probably around $30 in the US or something to that effect. And ultimately, I would say when you first start, you don't need to buy a Premium one. Start off with premium learning if you must and feel like you're coming up against blocks with the number of searches that you do. There may be a difference and a need as time goes on, but save your money until you actually need it. You'll be surprised at how much that you can get for free on LinkedIn. So save the money, go for a nice lunch or something like that instead. That is pretty much. the walkthrough that I can give you today, except there's one more place that I want to show you, which is your settings, which is really important because at the moment you're probably getting bombarded with all kinds of notifications from LinkedIn if you've just set your account up. And so click over on me and come down into settings and privacy and spend some time in here clicking on the left-hand menus from account preference all the way down to notifications and then start opening up each of these sections. So when you click on them, They open up new sections and then you can start to complete them and make sure that that info is okay. So I might want to come down here and have a look. Do I want autoplay videos? No, I don't. But the most important thing that you'll probably find here is notifications down on the left. Open up these. If you're not searching for a job, then turn them off. Have a look through each of these sections. When you open up messaging, for instance, from this, you can turn that on and you can have. different options within each of those. So on or off doesn't matter, but it's all personal preference. If you find you're getting too many, switch it off. The one that I often do, let me just find it posting and commenting. That's an important one. So when people are commenting and reacting, I don't want them to send me an email. I just want them to notify me within the app. So in app or push notifications are the two that I leave on and I turn off email. But that's as much as I want to go into that for this particular video. Settings are important. We want to make sure that we always are getting notified of the right things, but not getting bombarded with too many. Now, that's the walk around on the actual screen. But let me also show you how you will go around writing content and what buttons you need to press and have a play around with. I'm not going to go into how to create content or what kinds of content were. but rather just the features and functions that you have available to you. When you have a look at it, click on Start a Post, and it opens up a whole new window and asks you to start typing. So this is where you would start to type your post. But down here, you'll notice there's a menu across the bottom, add media, so that's videos and images, or you can create an event if you click on the calendar. We also have to celebrate an occasion. But again, what do we do with three dots? Click on that and it opens up some more options in these menus, creating polls, adding documents, and also finding experts who offer services. Notice how there's this little clock down in the bottom right-hand corner. That's how you can schedule a post. And what that means is you can write it now and schedule it for some other time in the future. So write your post, click on post, and then that's how they show up in the home feed. All of these things that I've shown you today are the... bare bones of how to move around LinkedIn. I don't want people to feel overwhelmed because there's no one that you want to ask because it's too embarrassing. It seems like everybody knows what they're talking about. You are in a place where people are very helpful, very welcoming. And when you find your community around you, it's just brilliant. For those of you who are looking to shortcut that learning and not spend like 10 years like I have getting the best out of LinkedIn, I can shortcut that for you with one of my masterclasses. So just reach out, connect with me on LinkedIn, and let me know that you've watched this video. That's the most important thing that you can do for me is reach out, connect, let me know that you enjoyed this. And of course, don't forget to subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss out on upcoming videos that I've got planned. I look forward to meeting you all over on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.

G'day everyone. Welcome to the LinkedIn for B2B growth channel. I'm your host, Michelle J. Raymond, LinkedIn expert.

And today's video is simply going to be a walk around through LinkedIn for those of you who are brand new to the platform. Welcome, especially if you haven't been active on other social media platforms. And it probably feels like it's the cool kids club where every single person seems to know what they're doing, but the reality is maybe you don't.

And there's a whole new set of language. jargon. And let's be clear, LinkedIn doesn't do a great job of helping you find your way around.

So that's what I'm going to do today. We are going to just step by step work your way through. I'll explain where to find things, what sections you can look in to find different kinds of information.

And it's literally just going to be an overview. There's more content on this channel about creating a great LinkedIn profile, creating content, or updating your LinkedIn company page. So today's video, I'm not going to show you. how to use all of these things. I'm just going to step you through what they're called and where to find them, as I said.

Now, before you get started on LinkedIn, there's one thing that you need to do. Grab yourself a copy of the LinkedIn branding book. Before you get active on LinkedIn, it's so important to set up and establish your personal brand and your business brand and learn how those two things come together.

So if you haven't got your copy yet, go and grab that. Also, same thing applies for company pages. If you haven't got your company page sorted, Business Gold is the book for you. And of course, the show notes will be in there. Promise you, that's the last of the sales pitch in this one.

So let's just jump across to LinkedIn and I will step you through things. Let's take you through the jargon that's going to come along with LinkedIn so that you can have an idea of what's what and what exactly people are talking about. Whenever you log into LinkedIn, after you created your profile, you're going to be greeted by...

this screen, which is what we call the home screen. So think about this is the landing page where all of the information comes from. And this is the main one where you're going to learn how to move around. On the home screen, we have what's called the home feed. And this is where if you scroll down, you start to see all of the content that's posted.

Now, I'm not going to keep scrolling all the way down, but there's a couple of things that I want you to notice. In the top right-hand corner, you have this option that you can sort the content. by top, or if I click on this, I can go by recent. Probably recommend to stay with top.

It's what LinkedIn's recommending to you, but it can get a bit monotonous. So check out recent from time to time. So I'm just going to go back to top. And again, LinkedIn has decided that that's the best content for me to see.

Now, if I keep scrolling down, you're going to see that there's all kinds of different content and some of which you may like that content. and you want to support the creator. So just hit the like button.

And as you hover over, you'll see a lot of these icons pop up. You've got funny, insightful, love, support, celebrate, or like. It doesn't matter which one you use. There's no right or wrong. If in doubt, just hit the like button and you're good to go.

If you'd like to write a comment, we just simply click on comment and it opens up this box. And you can see right now that I could just type and away we go. The other thing that I want you to notice just here on this column is that we also have what's called the identity switcher. So if I click on that drop down box, it opens up an option where I can also comment as a company page of which I manage quite a few.

So from that perspective, if I want those company pages to get involved instead of my picture, you can see now I've got my company logo. And any action I take now will be done on behalf of my company, not my personal account. So I'm just going to switch that back to Michelle J. Raymond and click save.

But that's how you would do it if you had both options. Moving across here, we have the button called repost. And if I click on that once, it opens up two options, repost with my thoughts or just repost.

Now, click on both of them. Have a go. Repost is where I would say is a. baby step for people. So if you see somebody else's content that you like and want to share with your audience, then just click on the repost button.

You don't have to write any words, but if you see something and you have an opinion on it and you want to share that with your audience, then repost with thoughts. And there's a few other technicalities, but we're just going to leave it there for today. This is how we share content that we enjoy with our communities that somebody else has created.

You can also send the post to somebody else. So if I see something that's of interest, I might want to send it to my friend, Michelle Griffin. And then down here, we can write a quick message and that will send Michelle a copy of this post. And I often do that because I like to look out on behalf of other people. And it's a really great way to say, Hey, I'm thinking of you and help you to keep top of mind.

So always keep an eye out for that one. If I scroll down a little bit further, you'll notice in the top. right-hand corner of every single post, there's three dots. The full name for that is called ellipsis, but we'll just call it the three dots for this video.

When I click on that, it's going to open up a whole new menu again, and we have the options to save, copy links to the post, embed the post. I don't want to see this, unfollow the person, or report the post. If you see a post that really goes against the LinkedIn user agreement, then don't forget to hit report post.

help keep the platform safe and community-based. These options, they're always available. And these can often be the way that we can teach the algorithm what things we like to see and what things we don't. So if you hit save, of course, it's going to be happy. If you hit, I don't want to see this, then it will ask you why you don't want to see it.

But again, you can choose. One thing that I would say is your time spent on LinkedIn, I want you to know that you are always in control and it doesn't matter whether... I like it or someone else likes it.

If you don't like it, I want you to make sure that you hit that unfollow button. It is so easy to get swamped by people and things coming at you from all sides. And quite often you'll notice that things might not align with your values.

They might not align with your business goals or where you want to go. You might not be interested and that's totally fine. It's your time to spend how you want on the platform. We're looking at this. I'm just going to scroll back up to the top and you see...

This is the homepage. Now, if we explore a little bit, we've got the menu across the top. So home is how you get back to this.

Let's click on my network because that's important place for you to manage new connections, notifications, and things that come through in relation to newsletters, invites to events. Some of these things can pop up. You can see you've got any outstanding invitation. So in this case, it's a newsletter.

We've got celebrations. So LinkedIn will show me a list of people who are celebrating work anniversaries, maybe birthdays, and you can quickly and easily work your way through here and either just like it or send somebody a message or drop a comment on these posts. So it's really quite easy. Once I come into here, I can always click back on home and that takes me back to the home screen.

Like I said, let's click on my network. We go back there. You can see you've got your connections list. So let's click on that.

And you can't break anything on LinkedIn. So don't be afraid to just click and have a poke around. All of my most recently added connections have been sorted in this particular view, but you have the option to go by first name or last name. And you can also search by the name or with filters over here.

What does message mean? That means sending that person a direct message. So it's a...

private communication between the two of you. Again, anywhere where you see three dots on LinkedIn gives you another option and you might have accidentally connected with someone and want to remove them and you can just do that from this screen here. So I'm going to click on my network again just to keep taking you through. You'll start to see you can see the groups that you become a member of, the events that you have attended or are upcoming.

So if I click on this one This is one of my favorite places to check out to see all the great events that are going on on LinkedIn. So have a look around. See if there's something that captures your interest. For instance, if I was going through here, my friend John Lacey, shout out to John. If I was to see his event, that's something that I always like to attend.

Now with events, we've also got company pages down here. So if I click on that, you can see that they're all open. These are the ones that I'm following.

And again, if you're not interested anymore, just hit the follow button again. So following. And now it will ask me, do I want to unfollow that page?

Which in this case, I will. And if I make a mistake, I just click on the follow button again. So then my network tab is a lot of where you can take actions to get involved in different areas on LinkedIn.

So again, have a look in this left hand menu. As you get more information, it will pop up here. And when we're searching for new people, don't forget to scroll down.

And these are the suggested people that LinkedIn has recommended that I connect to. Now, they don't always get that right, but it's often a place to start. Now, while we're on this screen, I want you to have a look and say, what is connect and what is follow? Let me explain what connect and follow is.

So imagine if we are connected, that means it's a two-way street. I see your content. You see my content. And.

and we can easily message each other. I can also invite you to come and attend events that I might be running. So there's lots of upside when you're starting out.

You want to make sure that you connect with at least 500 people to begin with. Now, that might seem like a huge number when you're starting out, but trust me, you will grow that pretty quickly. From that, we also had the follow button.

Now, what's the difference? Now, follow you will see for some people quite often, you can go to the follow button. If they have creator mode turned on, which I'll show you in a moment, what happens is if you click follow, say for instance, you come to my profile, the follow buttons there, it means that if you click it, you'll see all of my content, but I won't see any of yours and I can't invite you and you can't invite me. to any events. And so from that perspective, it makes it a little tricky. So when you're starting out, make sure that you try and connect with those 500 people.

Once we have selected whether we want to connect or follow with someone. So let's just say I click connect on this person. It will automatically send a message across. Now it hasn't allowed me to customize a message. which is something that's really important that we do.

If I click on Caroline's profile in this particular case, it opens up the whole profile and you can see there that my connection message is actually pending. If I click on more when I come to her profile, you can see that we have other options here as well. But for now, I'm just going to leave that and see what happens when she comes back. Click on the home button and I'm going to show you through a couple of other places. We now know we're on the homepage.

If we want to have a look at our network or any events that we're going to, you can start to see that over here on the left-hand side and the manage my network panel. The next one, jobs. Now this is not something that I actively am involved in on LinkedIn because I love to help businesses grow, but have a poke around here and have a look.

There is nothing that you can break. So just click away and see what you find. Next thing.

messaging. This is your inbox. This is where things come to you, where you get messages from people. And this is the part where we want to communicate with people backwards and forwards. Now to write a new one, click on the pencil, and then you can select a name.

And then from there, you can start to type any messages that you'd like to send to people. You can attach images, you can attach a GIF, you can send emojis. And there's also, I've got a integration with Calendly to be able to send people easily my booking link. You can also do LinkedIn audio messages or LinkedIn video messages in here in your inbox.

This is something I find really hard to keep on top of. You have the options with the three dots. If you go next to somebody's name, click on the three dots, it opens up the menu and you can start to see that you've got all of these options.

I am not going to step you through this. All I'm going to say is find your own system for managing this. Because if you're like me, it will get out of control very quickly as the numbers scale.

So in this case, I can archive and that just tidies up my inbox. Notifications is the next one across the top. Now, having a look at this, it is as simple as what it says there. There is nothing more to it.

This is the work that you need to do based on the activities that you've been doing on LinkedIn. Maybe people have commented on your post. Maybe you've been tagged in a post. All of these kinds of things will start to pop up.

And as you get more active, you'll get more notifications to the point where you'll be like, oh my God, Michelle, can you just please make them stop? There is a way. And I will show you how we can do that as well. Just moving across here, we've come across to what it says there, me with my little profile photo. If I click on that, this is and go down to view profile.

This is how you get to your own LinkedIn profile. So this is for personal individuals, not for businesses. They use company pages and you can start to see here, we've got up the top, we call them cover images or banner images. You've got your profile photo. We have our headline.

You'll see that people start to include their pronouns as well. And this little speaker phone that's here beside that is if you've done and recorded a name pronunciation. You can do that on mobile phone.

It allows people to listen in on how you pronounce your name, which is really great for people that have difficult to pronounce names. Anytime you want to edit things on your LinkedIn profile, see the pencils, just click on the pencils. You can see here, if I click on this section, it will open up and then I have the opportunity to change the things that we were just talking about.

So anywhere on LinkedIn that you see over here on the right hand side, we've got pencils. That means you can edit things. Okay.

So just in general, as we keep coming down and scrolling down, you may get LinkedIn reach out to you and ask you about creator mode and creator mode is something that if you are a new creator mode is something that if you're completely new to LinkedIn, I don't want you to turn it on. LinkedIn is going to keep prompting you and asking you to do it, but trust me, you don't want to do it. Now, the reason is when you have creator mode on, You have the automatic button as follow, and then you'll keep building followers.

And as I said, your job in the beginning, you want two-way streets and connections. You want two-way streets where you're connected, where you can have conversations, where you can invite people and build it up to that number of 500. So don't turn creator mode on just so that you can see it. You're not missing out on anything.

It just turns on a couple of new features such as these creator tools like LinkedIn audio events, newsletters, and a follow link, none of which you are going to miss out on when you are just getting started on the platform. This top section here is called the featured section, as it says. But if you want to come down and see what activities you personally have been making, or if you're visiting somebody else's profile, coming down to the activity allows you to see what they've been doing. So this will show you my posts.

If I click on comments, obviously it's going to show you that. And videos and then images and newsletters, you guys get the hint. And you can set one of these as your... favorite so that when people land there and they get greeted by whichever one you choose. So if I was great at photography or creating images, I'd probably want them to stop here on images, but that's not really my strong point.

I've got another video on YouTube, which will show you how to set up your featured section. So I'm not going to dive into that too much. Same thing down here, your about section, click on it with a pencil. You can edit it and add in things like your top skills. Adding in a new job, click on the plus button or click on the pencil to edit an existing role.

And you can start to see that you can build up a lot of information. So work experience, make sure that it's up to date and education, same thing. You can see plus buttons to add and the pencil to edit existing things. And pretty much the whole way down your profile, it works like this. It's a matter of just scrolling, And eventually you come down to the bottom, which are recommendations.

These are my favorite piece of my LinkedIn profile. And this is the place where other people get to see the social proof. So what are other people writing about you?

If you want to get one, then just click on the plus button and you can see that opens up and you can ask for a recommendation or you can give somebody else one, which is also a great gift that you can give to people. So again, scrolling down here. you can start to see everything.

There is nothing that you can do wrong if you just click on buttons. Okay. So either plus button to add or the pencil to edit either one of those two things and just play around and make sure every section is complete.

Make sure that you're not underselling yourself and make sure that it's really clear what you do and who you do it for in your own style. Don't try and copy me. Don't try and be like me or any other person on the platform. Just try and bring your own personality to the platform.

Now I say that and it sounds like a massive cliche and I talk about it and I say, go and create your digital twin. And you'll find that it's really hard when you're learning because you want to emulate what's worked for other people. And look, it totally makes sense to me, but it's a trap for new players on the platform. If I was to come back here and click on the home button again, comes back to the home feed. and we begin scrolling again.

So click across the top menus. How do you get to your own personal profile? Click on me.

That makes sense. I just want to show you down the left-hand side. Something's going a little bit weird.

Sometimes LinkedIn will have these little gray buildings. What it actually is, is this section on the left-hand side is my company pages. So any company pages that you are a page admin on, they will display in this panel. You can also see if I scroll down, it shows me recently different groups or different hashtags that I've clicked on.

So I can go in and have a look. And again, you've got sections for groups, events, and followed hashtags. So it's just a different way of getting into things.

So if I click on events here, it will open up this screen and start to show all the events that are available. So you've got my events or how I can create a new event. Have a look around.

Events are a great way to get to learn about LinkedIn. So click on home and we come back. So home feed, information over on the left to do with how to get to company pages. I'm not going to include company pages in this video. I have got so many videos about that already, but anytime you're looking for stuff that you said, click attend, they're always over here.

You will hear things like hashtags, and let's just have a look if I click on this one. So the good old hashtag, it's nothing new, but ultimately they don't have as much power on LinkedIn. But think about it as how do you want your post filed?

Which filing cabinet do you want LinkedIn to put it under? So hashtag LinkedIn means that if anybody's going to the search bar and typing that in, your post will come up. So things like keywords become important. If we're to use...

the search bar, in this case, I'm just going to type in company page and hit enter. Then this is where the magic begins on LinkedIn. You can start to see, first of all, any posts that mention company page. Now insert your favorite topic that you want to learn about. Type those words up into the search bar and hit enter.

Here you can see posts, you can see people, and there's all kinds of different ways that you can start to learn information. And if I wanted to know about these kinds of things, you can see that there's other filters that pop up. If we click on all filters, we can start to see who else or what else we can filter out by. And there's so many different options in here. This is one area when you learn to leverage it properly, you will just be mind blown.

You can see that it's prompting me to try and make me buy Sales Navigator. Again, if that's one of your questions. If you're starting out on LinkedIn, do not go and buy LinkedIn Sales Navigator licenses. They are expensive, you will be overwhelmed, and there's plenty of time to get to that if you grow into it in the future.

Does that mean you should buy a LinkedIn Premium account? Look, they're roughly around $50 Australian dollars, so I guess they're probably around $30 in the US or something to that effect. And ultimately, I would say when you first start, you don't need to buy a Premium one.

Start off with premium learning if you must and feel like you're coming up against blocks with the number of searches that you do. There may be a difference and a need as time goes on, but save your money until you actually need it. You'll be surprised at how much that you can get for free on LinkedIn.

So save the money, go for a nice lunch or something like that instead. That is pretty much. the walkthrough that I can give you today, except there's one more place that I want to show you, which is your settings, which is really important because at the moment you're probably getting bombarded with all kinds of notifications from LinkedIn if you've just set your account up. And so click over on me and come down into settings and privacy and spend some time in here clicking on the left-hand menus from account preference all the way down to notifications and then start opening up each of these sections.

So when you click on them, They open up new sections and then you can start to complete them and make sure that that info is okay. So I might want to come down here and have a look. Do I want autoplay videos?

No, I don't. But the most important thing that you'll probably find here is notifications down on the left. Open up these. If you're not searching for a job, then turn them off.

Have a look through each of these sections. When you open up messaging, for instance, from this, you can turn that on and you can have. different options within each of those.

So on or off doesn't matter, but it's all personal preference. If you find you're getting too many, switch it off. The one that I often do, let me just find it posting and commenting. That's an important one.

So when people are commenting and reacting, I don't want them to send me an email. I just want them to notify me within the app. So in app or push notifications are the two that I leave on and I turn off email. But that's as much as I want to go into that for this particular video. Settings are important.

We want to make sure that we always are getting notified of the right things, but not getting bombarded with too many. Now, that's the walk around on the actual screen. But let me also show you how you will go around writing content and what buttons you need to press and have a play around with.

I'm not going to go into how to create content or what kinds of content were. but rather just the features and functions that you have available to you. When you have a look at it, click on Start a Post, and it opens up a whole new window and asks you to start typing.

So this is where you would start to type your post. But down here, you'll notice there's a menu across the bottom, add media, so that's videos and images, or you can create an event if you click on the calendar. We also have to celebrate an occasion. But again, what do we do with three dots?

Click on that and it opens up some more options in these menus, creating polls, adding documents, and also finding experts who offer services. Notice how there's this little clock down in the bottom right-hand corner. That's how you can schedule a post. And what that means is you can write it now and schedule it for some other time in the future.

So write your post, click on post, and then that's how they show up in the home feed. All of these things that I've shown you today are the... bare bones of how to move around LinkedIn. I don't want people to feel overwhelmed because there's no one that you want to ask because it's too embarrassing. It seems like everybody knows what they're talking about.

You are in a place where people are very helpful, very welcoming. And when you find your community around you, it's just brilliant. For those of you who are looking to shortcut that learning and not spend like 10 years like I have getting the best out of LinkedIn, I can shortcut that for you with one of my masterclasses. So just reach out, connect with me on LinkedIn, and let me know that you've watched this video. That's the most important thing that you can do for me is reach out, connect, let me know that you enjoyed this.

And of course, don't forget to subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss out on upcoming videos that I've got planned. I look forward to meeting you all over on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.

Transcript for:Mastering LinkedIn for B2B Growth

Transcript for:
Mastering LinkedIn for B2B Growth