All materials based on LinkedIn Learning

Lecture 3: Employee Personal Profile Branding

Create a LinkedIn policy

- [Instructor] Successful employee branding on LinkedIn is not just about having

great profiles, it's about encouraging your employees to share and engage more
on LinkedIn. If you are going to encourage your employees engagement, you
must also be clear as to what your employees can and can not do on
LinkedIn. It's time to take a look at your social media policy or write one if you
don't have one already. You want a social media policy that both empowers
you and your employee amplification. But you still need to make sure that your
company is protected too. Sometimes this can be a bit of a balancing act but
that's why we have this video. When you get a chance check out this blog post
called, how to create a social media policy that empowers employee
advocacy. We'll share the link for you. Your policy also needs to explain legal
requirements and compliance issues if there are any. Now this is usually the
case for legal, financial, and medical industries. So always make sure to ask a
legal professional if your industry has compliance issues when it comes to social
sharing and what they might be. Add them to your policy. Make sure they're
summarized and please make sure they're readable. You can keep the legalese
out of your LinkedIn policy. This is so that your employees can read it, digest it,
understand it, and sign it. Use the policy to encourage the right kind of
sharing. As far as the right kind of sharing, make sure to give your employees
posts, images, infographics, and videos to share, so that they're comfortable
and have easy access to great content. Do set expectations of what's private or
inappropriate and what's appropriate behavior. We just want to make sure that
your employees are not using LinkedIn like a Facebook account, oversharing
political and religious posts, overly personal content, or anything that's out of
alignment with your company culture. And then you need to make sure that
there are consequences for bad behavior and that you follow through on those
consequences. I just want to bring up one final thing. While I've been talking
about creating a policy so that you can encourage your employees to share the
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right type of content and not the wrong type of content, you can't tell them what
they have to do. Their LinkedIn profile belongs to them and you can even see
that in LinkedIn's end user agreement. As between you and others, including
your employer, your account belongs to you. Now I would encourage them to
share content, create content for them, and let them know why it's a win-win
situation. Let them know why it would be beneficial for them to share the content
for you as well as being beneficial to the company itself. More visibility might
mean more business for them, more visibility might mean the company does
better and they get a raise. More visibility, more employee advocacy, means
that the brand is stronger and they attract more clients. There's a lot of upsides
to getting your employees to buy into employee advocacy. And while it might
not seem like it, this policy really is about reinforcing your company culture. Use
the policy to empower your employees in sharing content to make them feel
safer, and to let them know what they can and can not do.
Who owns it? Best practices for employee profiles

- [Instructor] Your employee owns his or her own profile, but there are some
exceptions in LinkedIn's user agreement that chances are neither you nor your
employees have read. But you probably should, and no excuses. We're giving
you the links to the user agreement and to the summary. So even if you're not
going to read the whole user agreement, you should at the very least read the
summary. And yes, I realize you're probably not going to, so I'm going to cover
two highlights here. First of all, your employee's profile belongs to them and your
profile belongs to you. With the exception of if you have purchased a premium
account for your employee, either Sales Navigator or LinkedIn Learning, which
you're on right now, you do have access to any reports. So you can access
reports on their usage. On the other hand, it also says in the end user
agreement that employees are not allowed to share parts of your account with
anyone else. So things like connections your employees have made are theirs
and theirs alone, whether or not you've purchased a premium account for
them. So this is all to say while you definitely should encourage your employees
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to brand their profiles, which we're going to talk about next, you can't force them
to.
Build personal profiles with branding

- Did you know that all your employees who attach themselves to your company
page could possibly show up in a search of your company? Now, the more
active they are, the more likely they are to be seen, but the other thing to be
aware of, is search results are also very much aligned with how you are
connected to someone. Whether they're a first-level connection, which on
Facebook would be friends, a second-level connection, friends of friends, and
third being pretty much everybody else. So it is entirely possible when someone
is searching on your company that one of your employees who's not usually
customer-facing and may not have the best account on LinkedIn, could still
show up as a brand representative. And that's why it's really important for you
to create a template that you can share with them. And then you can either just
do a quick training, or send them an email asking them to add certain features
to their LinkedIn profile. Again, the easier you make it for them, the more likely
they are to do it. Things I would recommend including in this template are the
background images we spent so much time talking about so they can easily click
on the pen and add that background image. Make sure you give them some
options for a headline so that it doesn't just say, Title at Company, or, worse,
nothing at all. And then, give them some options for the summary
section. Again, most people don't realize that you actually have 2,000
characters to work with. If they have anything at all, it's a line or two, and it's
more like a resume. This is an awesome opportunity for you to brand your
company and for your employees to become brand advocates. And finally,
make sure that they've added your company to their experience section. Now,
as I mentioned in the previous video, they own their profile, so they don't
necessarily have to add the branded copy and visuals you provide. But, let them
know that it could benefit them, and it would certainly benefit your company if
they do. For those non-customer-facing employees, you probably don't need to
encourage them to share content updates. If they do, however, please make
All materials based on LinkedIn Learning

sure that they review and sign the social media policy. If they know there are
advantages, and you make it easy, they may be more willing to do so.
Attach yourself to the company page

- [Instructor] I've mentioned several times already that your employees should
attach their profiles to the company page. So here's how to do it. Have them go
to the Me Section that should be a little picture of themselves on the top right
hand side of your menu bar. And then scroll down to View Profile. This is not
only going to allow them to view the profile, but this is actually where you edit
your profile, as well. Scroll down. To where the Experience Section is. Now, if
they don't have your company listed at all, you're going to have them click on
the plus sign, put in their title, and then start typing in the name of your
company. And when your company name comes up have them click on that
link. Fill out the rest of the section and then click on Save. If they see the
company name but there's no logo that means they're also not attached to the
company yet. So in that case, have them click on the little pen. They'll have their
title and the rest of the information in their Experience Section. But what you'll
want them to do is type in the name, and of course, pick the company from the
drop down. They might think they've already done this and they might very
possibly have done it already. But when LinkedIn changed its user
interface some employees got disconnected from their companies. So it's good
to double check. Additionally, sometimes people attach themselves to the
wrong company. So you want to make sure that they're attached to your
company. And, as previously once they've completed this section, just click on
Save. Have them scroll down and double check to make sure that that logo is
there. I also recommend having your employees after they've added your
company click on the logo just to make sure that they are now listed on your
company page as an employee. Additionally, make sure that they are following
your company page if they're a manager or an admin of the company
page. You'll be able to follow the company page by clicking on the top three
dots. If they're not an admin it'll just say, Follow. So they'll both want to be
attached to the company page as an employee but, they'll also want to follow
All materials based on LinkedIn Learning

the company page to make sure that they get all the updates so they, in turn,
can share them. And that's all it takes. Feel free to share this video with your
employees.
Establish employee expertise in a personal summary

- [Instructor] Next to your background image, one of the key areas where you
want your employees to showcase your brand is in the summary section. As you
can see here though, only the first two lines show, so that's about 200 pixels on
the browser. And as you can see here on mobile, only about the first 60
characters show of your summary section. So it's really important that you put
some kind of call to action, a tagline, maybe even your contact information in
these first few lines. You could even add emojis if that's your audience to make
it pop a little bit more. Whatever you put, you need to make sure that these first
two lines are impactful. And you know if you leave it up to your employees, you
might not get anything in this summary section, or at the very most it might read
more like a resume. You need to create the content in a template that they can
then copy and paste into their summary section. Let me show you where to do
that. You'll have them go back to their profile. And you know it's in edit mode
with the pen. Once they click on that, they can scroll down to the summary
section. Now, it doesn't look like you have a whole lot of area here, a whole lot
of real estate to add your content, but in fact you get 2,000 characters. So as
you can see, there's actually a lot more here that they can work with. So when
you're creating your template for your employees, what do you want to focus
on? Well, address common issues that your typical customers or consumers
have. Address how you, your product, or your service can help them to solve
their problems and fulfill their needs. Let people know who you work with. Are
you a business-to-business? Are you business-to-consumer? Are you a
government agency? Do you work with education? Do you work with
solopreneurs? Do you work with men? Do you work with women? You basically
want to write your profile for your ideal client, for your ideal prospect so when
they read it they can identify themselves in it. If they can do that, they're already
going to be much more interested in you and what you have to offer. So as we
All materials based on LinkedIn Learning

look at this summary section, the first thing that Petalia does is ask a
question. And so if I was reading this summary and I went, "Yes, I wish there
was a subscription plan "for floral arrangements," (laughs) and there's the
answer; there is. And here's how much it's going to be. And that's really
reasonable. So already I'm a little bit bought in. And then I read a little bit
more. And as I read about Petalia and her business, I'm like, "Yeah, a gardener,
environmentalist. "Yeah, this is someone I could definitely support." And then I
read a little bit more about the benefits of flowers and why I really should be
getting this subscription plan. And then as you can see here, the call to
action, contact us today, and even the contact information. Here's some calls to
action you can use. Read our website. Kind of a no-brainer. Now, you can put
the URL to your website right after this call to action, and people will have to
copy and paste it in. At this time, those websites are not hyperlinked in the
summary section. You could say something like, "Keep on scrolling to read my
testimonials," or "to read my recommendations." You could say, "Look at our
Company Page "for special promo codes," or even "Follow our Company Page
here." And again, put in the link to your Company Page. This is just a few
examples of calls to action. Call us today for your best deal. Make sure to
connect with me. I'm open to invitations. Please let me know how I can help you
and connect to me. So you can see there's a lot of calls to action that you can
add in your summary section. Now, I want to dive a little bit deeper into this
contact us. I think what most people don't realize is just because you're on
LinkedIn doesn't mean people can send you an email. They have to be
connected to you. And so you're probably missing out on a lot of
business. People find your profile, they might even look at it, and they go, "Yeah,
I'd love to connect with that person "and have a conversation about how they
can help me," and then maybe they send you an invitation and you never accept
it, or maybe they just get distracted by something and get off your profile and
never find you again. If you put your contact information in your summary
section, then there's a much better chance that they can reach out to you, and
of course that's why we have your contact information in your background image
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as well. So make sure both of your bases are covered. Now, having said that, if
you don't want to be easily contactable, don't put your contact information where
the general public can see it, up here in call today in your headline
section, (laughs) and then down in your summary section. But if you're in sales,
if you're in marketing, if you own your own business, you probably do want to be
contactable. So of course it's your employee's choice whether they want people
to be able to contact them or not. But you know what, if they're in sales, they
should strongly consider adding their phone number, their email address to their
summary section. So the final thing that you want your employees to add to their
summary sections is media. And you might need to provide that for them. To
add media, you just go back into that edit mode. And down here you'll see
upload or link. So what are uploads? Uploads are PDFs, Word documents,
images, smaller files, smaller documents. You can also link to websites, blog
posts, Vimeo videos, YouTube videos. So what I recommend is providing your
employees with the content that they need, the external documents, photos,
sites, videos, and presentations, as long as it's okay for that content to be
shared publicly of course. Make it as easy as possible for your employees to
optimize their profiles. When it comes to your employee's profiles, I strongly
recommend creating a template for them. Some things I include in the
templates that I use with my clients, a place where they can put their name and
their password, because guess what? They're going to forget their
password. Make sure they know that this is private, that no one else is going to
see it unless they want them to. I have them add their email addresses and then
the photo that they're going to use, or, better yet, have a company photo
shoot and get good photos of your employees. This is where I create different
versions of the headline so they can choose one that works for them and where
I'll put in the company description and some copy in the summary
section. Sometimes I just ask them questions, and when they answer the
questions, we work that into the summary section. Sometimes we write it word-
for-word. So whatever you think is going to work best with your
employees, that's what you should do with the summary section. Ask them
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questions, work with them in forming a new summary section, or just writing it
for them. And this is where we add the media as well. So if you create a
folder, you put all the media that they can upload in the folder, and then just
share that link. That's one of the easiest ways to share content. And then it's
really just a copy and paste from the template to their profiles. Once you've done
that, be assured that your brand is going to show beautifully through your
employees' profiles.
Align to your corporate culture with updates

- [Narrator] Above and beyond the content that you feed to your employees via
the company page or your personal blog, it's important that they curate some of
their own content too. Now the easiest way for them to share information on
their LinkedIn profile is just to go through their timeline and find something
interesting, oh yeah, and compliant, that they can share with their
audience. Once they click on share, describe the article, and post it, they have
now become content curators for your industry and your company. And as you
can see, it literally can take less than a minute a day. I also recommend that
your employees follow some of the company principals, especially if they are
creating content, if they are publishing on LinkedIn. So, whether it is your CEO,
you CMO, just those individuals who represent your brand. Have your
employees follow them, and to do that, all they have to do is click on their
name, and they don't have to be connected, Click on their name, go to the three
dots on the right hand side here, and then click on Follow. And so then, the
content that these individuals share will show up on your employee's
timeline, and then again, it's just a matter of clicking on Share. Another very
useful tool for curating content is LinkedIn Pulse. Now the LinkedIn Pulse icon
or link is no longer found on LinkedIn anywhere so you could look at all over the
place here and under work and that Pulse icon is gone, but, if you go to:
www.linkedin.com/pulse/discover then you can find channels of information that
you might be interested in, and you just click on Follow. You can find publishers
that you would be interested in and more importantly, that your audience would
be interested in. And click on Follow. You can even find individuals to
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follow. And again, what happens is, once your following, those channels, those
people, and those publishers, their content will show up on your timeline and
then it's just a matter of finding the content that you want to share, and sharing
it. Here's a little ninja trick that you might want to share with your employees. On
Chrome you create folders, on other browsers, you can create bookmarks, but
it really is the same thing, it's just a way to create a place where you can easily
pop these different feeds, these different URLs into, so that you can find them
again. So, I'll do that again for you. Find a person, or content that you like. So
here's the technology feed. Grab ahold of that URL, and then just place it into
the folder and then it's super easy to find content to share from people, places,
or channels, that you're already interested in, that are compliant with your
company culture and your industry and it will take less than a minute a day to
share that content. It's already been partially curated for you. On your browser,
go to the Me tab, to where it says Settings & Privacy. And you can do the same
on mobile as well. From there, the page that you land on, which is account, scroll
down, and click on Feed Preferences and Change. What LinkedIn is going to do
is look at your activity, look at the people that you follow, look at the content that
you share, and it's going to begin to curate content and people for you and, then
again, all you have to do is follow those individuals and those channels of
information, and that content will show up on your feed. So LinkedIn is really
trying to make this as easy as possible for you and as easy as possible for your
employees to start to engage more on LinkedIn. Now, why is this
important? Because, when you share content, you're positioning yourself as
someone thoughtful, and knowledgeable and if you remember back, kind of to
the beginning of this whole training, all things being equal, people do business
with, and refer people they know, like, and trust. So this helps to build that KLT
factor. Now, not only that, but, when you share content and other people engage
upon that content, you can find that in your notifications. It gives you an
opportunity to engage with those individuals, so now I have the opportunity of
thanking Cheryl for liking my article, or if someone left an update on an article, or
on a post I shared, again, it gives me an opportunity to engage with those
All materials based on LinkedIn Learning

individuals. And that's what this is all about. Branding! (narrator

laughs) LinkedIn, it's all about increasing the opportunities to engage with your
audience, with your clients, and with your prospects so that you can build your
business. So all of this content sharing is really just to build that Top-of-Mind
Awareness. By sharing these strategies with your employees, you ensure that
they always have content to share at least one time a day on LinkedIn. Just
make sure they're aware of your policy so they don't share any content that will
negatively affect your company brand.
Mine your inbox

- [Instructor] While this training has been about employee branding, the fact is
for most of you your business still needs to make money. And since many of
your employees generate revenue for your company, you don't want them to
miss out on opportunities on LinkedIn. Three areas on LinkedIn that they
might have opportunities just waiting for them are in your network, messaging,
and notifications. So let's take a look at those three. First of all,
notifications. This is where LinkedIn lets you know when people have been
engaging with your profile in some way. So searches you've been found in, or
people who are having an anniversary or a birthday. People who viewed your
profile. People who have engaged with your posts or your articles. All of that is
going to show up in notifications and every single one of these are an
opportunity to engage. Obviously, if you're showing up in searches, then you
can look at the people and the companies that have been searching you. And
there might be an opportunity to engage with a prospect there. You can see
who's having a birthday or a work anniversary. And that's an awesome
opportunity to engage. Of course, if someone's viewed your profile, you might
want to see who they are and say hello. And then, of course, if anyone has
engaged with a long forum post or article or even an update, you can thank them
and take the conversation on from there. If you're getting a lot of activity on a
post that you're not interested in, or if you're not interested in seeing if it's
someone's birthday or not, you can always delete, unfollow, or turn off
notifications. It's completely up to you. But do keep an eye on those
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notifications. It's only going to take about a minute or two a day to click on that,
see if there's anyone to respond to and then respond. Now, the second area
that's usually full of opportunity is the inbox, which is now called messaging on
LinkedIn. And it's really more like Facebook Messenger than it is a email
inbox. So these are private messages. These are not public. This is like a
private message or an email, as I just said. And so if someone reaches out to
you in a private way, it's usually to ask a question, to try to sell you
something, but there's often messages here that could lead to more
opportunity for you and for your employees. Now what I like about this
messaging inbox is that there are ways of sorting the messages. So by default
it's All Messages, InMails, regular messages from your connections, messages
you've sent. It's all lumped under All Messages. But you can also sort by
archived, so messages you kind of saved. You're done with them, but you've
saved them. You know, just in case you forgot someone's name or you forgot
their contact information. You can look at those old messages, so that's good to
know. If you don't want to look at InMails, those are messages that people
outside of LinkedIn sent you, you can sort by just your connections and that will
keep the messages from people who are not connected from you from showing
up in your inbox. The one I use all the time is unread. So, because of the way
that LinkedIn notifies you that you have messages, it's possible that you might
have missed some. So you can just click on unread, LinkedIn will pull up all the
unread messages to the top, including ones from a year ago, (laughs) five years
ago, and then you have an opportunity to respond. And then as I mentioned
before, you can sort by InMail and that's just people who've paid to send you a
message. And sometimes there are some real opportunity there. And I guess
you can sort by blocked messages as well, although I'm not entirely sure why
you'd want to do that. Now what's kind of interesting is LinkedIn also has a
premium account called Sales Navigator. And it has a separate inbox. This used
to drive me crazy because I thought the two of them could be combined, but in
reality, I am so grateful that LinkedIn keeps these two inboxes separate because
the people that I engage with in my Sales Navigator inbox are really hot
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prospects and in my LinkedIn inbox are just people that I'm connected to on
LinkedIn. So if you purchased Sales Navigator for yourself or for your
company, do let your employees know that there are actually two inboxes that
they need to keep an eye on. If they have Sales Navigator they can see both
inboxes in both the messaging section in the free LinkedIn and also in Sales
Navigator. The third place I want to show you is My Network. And this is where
your invitations live, both the ones that you've sent and the ones that you've
received. I can't tell you how many times I've opened this up with a client for the
first time and there are thousands of invitations, many of them from
prospects, current clients, and past clients. On LinkedIn, when you are first level
connections, it is so much easier to engage. So it is so important that you check
your network and check for those invitations. You don't have to accept them
all, but you should definitely review them to make sure that there's no missed
opportunities there. This is also where you can go to see all your
connections. And again, it's an opportunity to review who you're connected to
and possibly send them a message. Hey, you could send them a message
about your new branding. So these are just a few extra tips as far as engaging
on LinkedIn. And why your employees might want to utilize these different
features. They not only help you build your brand, but of course, might help you
to build your business too, and let's face it, that's really what this whole thing
has been about.
Next steps

- Congratulations, you've finished your course and are well on your way to
building your company's credibility, visibility, and opportunities. You now have
the tools you need to create stronger company and employee branding on
LinkedIn. It might seem like a lot of information, but you'll be surprised at how
quickly you can effect real change within your organization, rather than trying to
conquer this all in one sitting, tackle one initiative at a time. First, make sure that
your company page leads by example, both in branding and content. Second,
make it easy for your employees by creating templates and images they can
easily add to their profiles. This will immediately build credibility in no time
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flat. Third, give your employees access to content they can share, and
encourage employee advocacy. You want to have a policy in place, so your
employees know what they can and cannot do. Fourth, use the exercise files to
help you begin your trek into the space of powerful company and employee
branding. Make sure to follow my company, vengresso.com, for the latest in
LinkedIn strategies, and, of course, always feel free to reach out to me on
LinkedIn. Your employee's LinkedIn profiles are representation of your
organization. Go forward with confidence, your going to rock it.