A lot of changes are going on in social media, particularly on Facebook and LinkedIn. There is a growing need for entrepreneurs to be on multiple platforms. LinkedIn consultant, strategist, and social media manager Angela Dunz helps people get more familiar with LinkedIn. As a former marketing director, an MBA Grad, and an entrepreneur herself, Angela has a keen sense of how LinkedIn can fit into your goals and strategies for online networking. Whether you’re using LinkedIn for career development, attracting recruiters, or ideal employers, or just keeping your context warm, she can help you formulate a plan to amplify your efforts. Angela talks about what she does for people at LinkedIn and the biggest mistakes she sees people are making on LinkedIn. She also outlines some of the things that people consistently miss that they should have done on their profile.
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Optimizing Your Profile On LinkedIn with Angela Dunz
We have a fabulous guest. Her name is Angela Dunz. Angela has been working for a few years as a LinkedIn Consultant, Strategist and Social Media Manager. As a former Marketing Director, an MBA grad and an entrepreneur herself, she has a keen sense of how LinkedIn can fit into your goals and strategies for online networking. Whether you’re using LinkedIn for career development, attracting recruiters or ideal employers or keeping your contacts warm, Angela can help you formulate a plan to amplify your efforts. She has also written and contributed to the curricula for entrepreneurs and job speakers at the Renaissance Center, YMCA and Marin Professionals.
She has cross-generation mentorship programs that she has accomplished and is passionate about. She is the author of the book, Conversations With Skunks. She’s been a teacher, a mentor, a coach, and curricula designer on four continents and she’s also active in speaking around the Bay Area. She speaks on LinkedIn, marketing, co-generational collaboration and negotiation. She is a former rock-climbing guide and enjoys travel, writing, hiking, kayaking, NFL football and gardening. Welcome, Angela Dunz.
I’m excited to be with you.
I’m excited to have Angela because she and I have been talking a lot about the changes that are going on in social media. Particularly the ones that are going on Facebook and the need for entrepreneurs to be on multiple platforms and getting more familiar with LinkedIn because Facebook and LinkedIn work differently. I’m excited to have you on. Talk a little bit about what you do with people around LinkedIn.
I work in two different markets. I work mostly with small businesses and solopreneurs. Helping them get their profile optimized so that they get found for the right thing and then helping them with a little bit of their strategy. Once you have a great profile, what are you going to do with it? What’s the purpose of that? What’s it good for? My other market is corporations and I do ongoing content marketing for larger organizations from CEOs, CMOs and company page profiles to do lead generation for them.
Content generation is important no matter what platform you’re on. How is LinkedIn content a little bit different from Facebook content?
A lot of that stuff is merging these days, but the good rule of thumb for LinkedIn is to keep it professional. You want to make it personal. Nobody is on LinkedIn to be pitched to. People can see a pitch from ten miles away and you might shoot yourself in the foot so bad, no one will ever look at your stuff again. On LinkedIn, the etiquette is you want to add value. You want to be providing something that might be informational. You want to allow people to get to know who you are personality-wise and as a professional in a way that’s comfortable for them. It’s, “Entertain me, educate me and inspire me. Tell me something I don’t already know in a way that’s interesting and brief.”
How many times does someone send to you an invite on LinkedIn and the minute you say yes, you have an inbox with an invite to connect with them? They find out about your publishing needs. There’s even been, “Are you single? Can we date?”
No one wants to talk to you until they know what you can do. Share on XI asked someone that did that to me and I always send them a brief note and I say, “I’d rather get to know you before you start pitching me. Please don’t ever contact me again. This is not the way LinkedIn is supposed to work.”
I don’t do that on Facebook, even though I’m a Facebook expert and I should sometimes say, “Learn how to use this right and maybe we can talk.” What’s the biggest mistake you see people out there making on LinkedIn?
Avoiding it altogether. The way algorithms and search optimization are set up, unless you have a well-optimized website, someone’s working on it week by week. Keeping up with the algorithms for the optimization and keywords that are trending. Most people if they Google your name, they’re going to find your LinkedIn profile first, not your website. Me as a LinkedIn consultant, that’s an incredible opportunity because who has control of your LinkedIn profile? How easy is the access to change things and keep it up to date on your LinkedIn profile? It’s not like you have to call a web developer and make all kinds of decisions. You can try things out quickly, see if they work and then change it if you feel different than the next day.
LinkedIn is an incredible opportunity for you to reach your target market or multiple target markets by using the correct optimization. Every conversation that I had, it would go something like this, “I’ve been on LinkedIn for many years, but I don’t know what to do with it. I feel I’m the only one that doesn’t understand it.” That was every conversation. Everybody feels they’re late to the party, they’re underdressed, and they don’t know how to act. It’s not something that people are alone. People have avoided it for years and they’re deciding, “It’s not going to go away.” It’s a tremendous opportunity. How can I get up to speed?
One of the reasons people have not used it as well as they use Facebook as well as the ad targeting on LinkedIn is not as good as Facebook. That definitely may change because of the radical changes that happened on Facebook on August 15th. They cut out about three-quarters of their targeting mechanisms on Facebook. You have to look at where is the better place for a lead generation, Facebook or LinkedIn?
What’s interesting is that paid advertising on LinkedIn does not work that well. I have yet to meet someone that tells me that it’s effective. What I do for a lead generation is all free. Free company pages, content marketing strategies that don’t include paid ads, and it works great for lead generation.
If I had a brand-new profile or even if I have a profile, which I do, what are some of the things that people consistently miss that they should have done on that profile?
Background photo, number one. Background photo is behind your profile photo. There’s that space that has those blue little dots that are connected to each other. It’s supposed to simulate being connected to other people. Here in the Bay Area, we’re at ground zero for social media. People will judge you for the tiniest little things. That is part of your lead generation strategy. I have a friend who’s a copy editor. He bought a cheap box of number two lead pencils, threw them on the wooden kitchen table, took a photo of that and popped it in his background. What does that do for him? It gives him credibility off the bat. He’s a copy editor. They are number two lead pencils. You’ve begun the emotional connection and the credibility.
I’ll throw a bunch of books on the floor and take a picture of them.
Stacks and stacks of them next to your bed or something. A comfortable reading chair, that’d be ideal.
What are some other things that people typically don’t do well on their profiles?
Number two would be optimizing your unique URL on LinkedIn. LinkedIn will assign you random numbers and letters after your name. It might be your name, it might be your full name but then it’s buried with all these numbers, letters and asterisks. When somebody types in your name after they meet you at a networking event, it’s going to be difficult to find you, especially if you’re Barbara Smith. Being able to customize your unique URL so that people can find you easily is another one that people miss.
That one I have done. They do that well on Facebook as well when you have communities and business pages. That translates over. What’s another big mistake?
Ignoring the optimization. When I talk to solopreneurs, small businesses, they don’t know who their target market is. They haven’t taken the time to consciously think about whom it is they’re trying to attract with their social media strategies. Until you get a focus, you’re not going to reach anyone. Think about your keywords. The coaching space is oversaturated here in the Bay Area. How do you choose a coach for anything? If you’ve got some special words that are your own words, you want to make sure that you’re using those and optimizing your profile so people understand exactly what you do, “You’re a coach. There’s no clarity in that.” You have to tell me the result that you’re going to bring me. What is the problem that you solve? What particularly is it that you can do for me? No one cares how much experience you have until they know how you can help them.
The optimization is everything. If you’re a life coach, do you help people with their relationships? Do you help them get rid of blocks so that they can achieve the things they want at work? It could be anything. Are you a business coach? Do you help people with setting up their systems? Do you help them figure out what their programs and packages are? What exactly is your sweet spot? No one wants to talk to you until they know what you can do. Generic is the kiss of death on LinkedIn.
I think just about anywhere, you have to have those. We’ve done some testing around the word life coach and people don’t care for the term life coach. As one person puts it, “Is this someone who decided to hang out a shingle and tell me what to do with my life?” There are many people out there calling themselves life coaches that putting yourself in as the life coach may not be your best path.
Generic is the kiss of death on LinkedIn. Share on XA performance coach, a lot of that stuff doesn’t work anymore.
Performance coach is another one. Performance where? Am I an athlete? Do I have a business? I love Debbie Hoffman, Power Up Your Follow Up, it tells you everything about what she does.
I have a friend who’s a business coach, “Amp up your business badassery.”
What does he do?
He does business coaching. He helps you with what your business is, what you are doing with it and who you are you talking to. It is more clarity and focus so that you can do what you do and not worry about the structure underneath you.
What about putting video on LinkedIn?
Video is all it. Video is great. LinkedIn is a funny platform because it’s a professional platform, but if the things that you put up there are too polished and too professional, you lose some credibility. Having it like Facebook Live. Something that’s raw, gritty, honest, and in the moment and that you’re passionate about is going to be ten times more successful than something you spend hours trying to produce.
Even interviews like this, I tell people coming in what happens here stays here. I don’t edit. I had a YouTube professional that I interviewed and she’s like, “You should never do that.” I’m like, “People love that.” People like it when you’re authentic and you stumble over someone’s bio as I did. It makes you human. As entrepreneurs, we understand that there’s a lot of humanness. We mess up and people want to see it. Nobody wants that person who is perfect, “I did six figures in six months and it was darn easy and you can do it too.” We all know we’ve been in business for a while that doesn’t happen.
There are some lies in there somewhere.
You have a free gift for us. How can people find that free gift?
My URL is customized on LinkedIn. If you type in Angela Dunz, you should go right to my profile.
Do they go to www.LinkedIn.com/in/angeladunz/?
They could do that. What’s easier is to use the search bar on the upper left-hand corner in the toolbar on the top and type in my name. LinkedIn is super case sensitive. Please capitalize the first letters of both names. It’s hypersensitive to capitalization and all sorts of things. Angela Dunz in the top search bar. When you get to my profile, go to my summary. Click see more and there will be three documents at the bottom of my profile or the summary for my profile that you can download. One of them is a checklist. A lot of people don’t know what all the different categories are for sections on your profile and they are not using all of them. That’s more SEO. It’s more density, it’s more findability, the more sections that you add and it’s a checklist. Once you get one done, you get to check it off.
The second one is a writing activity. Most of us struggle with writing about ourselves and to promo for ourselves. This is designed with some great questions to get you to think about some of that juicy material that people are looking for in your summary instead of, “I have fifteen years’ experience,” that thing. It’s like, “What are you passionate about? What are you the proudest about? What is the situation with a client that was challenging and you turned it completely around?” I could see myself in that story if I’m looking for what you’ve got. The third thing is a two-page document on ideas and tips for lead generation.
It’s definitely what a lot of us need on social media as well. Is there anything relating to content?
Not yet. I’m going to be working on an optimization checklist. All the different things that you need to do on your profile so that it’s fully optimized. When you write the summary, I have two formulas for how it can be written so that it’s super effective. What should the first paragraph be? What should the second paragraph be? You can ad lib from there, but these are the key elements that each of those pieces needs to have.
You know where to find Angela over on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for being here and talking a little bit about it. I’m definitely going to go over and do something with that second image. I didn’t even know it was there, so I better get something done. Thank you.
It’s such a pleasure to be with you and everyone else in the audience. Thank you so much, Juliet.
You’re welcome.
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About Angela Dunz
Angela Dunz has been working for 4+ years as a LinkedIn Consultant, Strategist and Social Media Manager. As a former Marketing Director, MBA grad and entrepreneur herself, she has a keen sense of how LinkedIn can fit into your goals and strategy for online networking. Whether you are using LinkedIn for Career Development, attracting recruiters and ideal employers or just keeping all your contacts ‘warm’, Angela can help you formulate a plan to amplify your efforts.
She has also written and contributed to curricula for Entrepreneurs and Job Seekers at the Renaissance Center, YWCA and Marin Professionals. Cross Generational Mentorship programs are also something she is accomplished at, and passionate about. She is also the author of the soon to be published book, Conversations with Skunks.
She has been a teacher, mentor, coach and curricula designer on 4 continents. Angela is also very active speaking around the Bay area on LinkedIn, Marketing, Co-Generational Collaboration and Negotiation. A former Rock Climbing Guide, she also enjoys global travel, writing, hiking, kayaking, NFL football and gardening.
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