 Hey, good morning everyone. Welcome to Tuesday tea with Leigh Ann. So glad that you could join us today Things look a little bit different as far as my little broadcast setup here as I've just obtained a stream yard So stream yard is the platform that you can use to stream video like this to Multiple platforms and so that is what I'm doing right now is I'm streaming to My Facebook page my Facebook group and my YouTube channel So it's an experiment of course and who knows I might decide in time that this isn't the right tool for me but so far the experience on my end the I Guess the administration experience has been beautiful and I'm quite enjoying it so far But we'll see time. We'll tell if this is something that I hang on to So it's a little bit of Weather report from Kelowna, BC today, so I'm located in Kelowna, BC, which is about four hours East of Vancouver and we our winters tend to be very mild Temperatures hovering around, you know minus five to plus five degrees Celsius So around the 32 mark for the American friends, but today it's minus 15. It's sunny It's beautiful, but it is minus 15. So I Kind of want to punch myself in the face because as a I lived, you know, most of my adult Childhood and adult life in Alberta where you know minus 25 minus 30 was a regular Winter experience and now at minus 15. I'm I'm complaining so I think I've gotten soft in my old age and definitely soft in the five years that we've lived here Because it's I feel like it's bitter cold today, but it's not so yes, my Ottawa friends and my Alberta friends I'm sure you're rolling your eyes at me and with good reason because you're right It's not that cold here, but it sure feels cold for For us who live here and don't usually get these kinds of temperatures So a lot has been happening Over in my business the last couple weeks. I've been doing some speaking engagements, which has been Fantastic and really enjoying it Most of my speaking engagements right now are on LinkedIn, which is what we're going to talk about today So it's kind of been a LinkedIn week But didn't want the other social media platforms to feel left out So I'm also working on some Facebook stuff trying to learn Facebook ads Don't know if you've ever had experience with Facebook ads if you have I would love to hear your experience because It's a bear and I'm not enjoying it But I'm going to I am going to master Facebook ads by the end of this calendar year And I'm going to know enough to be dangerous through February and through March So that is definitely one of my big bucket goals But like I said, most of my training has been around LinkedIn and just Coincidentally today we're talking a lot about LinkedIn It's a LinkedIn month over here at Leanne Calderwood comm we have the LinkedIn challenge, which is a Five-day challenge that starts on each Monday in February where you can Challenge yourself to increase your network by 50 connections by the end of the week and each day of the week You're given a different task in the challenge and you're off to the races And then my blog posts have all been around the LinkedIn theme and what we're talking about today It's probably the mediest of all the blog posts and it's about how you can engage with the platform LinkedIn has 760 million users now it just keeps on jumping up and up and up But of those 760 users only really three million of them are active on a Monthly basis, which is a really low amount Which is really unfortunate because there's so much value in the platform and I feel if someone was Created some intentional time on the platform and went into the platform with a bit more of a strategy I think they would see the value return to them, especially if you're in a B2B Space so that's what I wanted to talk about today Was really to compound on the blog posts that I launched last week about how to build your personal brand on LinkedIn and there's 10 different ways that you can do it. So I'm I'm going to kind of jump into the 10 ways and Would welcome your comments if you've tried these things if you've tried these strategies and They've worked out for you in increasing your LinkedIn presence So the first one and probably the most important one is to complete your LinkedIn profile whatever activity you do on LinkedIn The person who sees your engagement is going to check you out And it's not cyber stocking. This is what's done on this professional looking platform But in checking you out you need to ensure that they have something to read And something to look at so if you haven't taken time to complete your LinkedIn profile That that could be one of your goals for this quarter is to take some time and to update your LinkedIn profile The second thing that you can do obviously to build your brand is to start engaging by creating content So on your home feed, obviously, there's a few ways that you can do it. You can create content With either just the written word or with an image or with a short video all of them seem to have Their time in their place But certainly anything with images and videos will get more attention then post that that lack those two components and Remember these don't need to be professionally edited photos or edited videos by any stretch of the mean People are looking for authenticity, but they're also looking for that visual engagement along with your written work So start to your hand at posting on a regular basis LinkedIn it's it's recommended that you post no more than five times a week on LinkedIn on your personal profile So it's different from Twitter in that way where you can vote post, you know, five or ten times a day Unlinked in the algorithm will favor five times a week so once a day once a business day is is typically the The consistency that I would suggest starting with now If once a day is is just too much of a task right now, especially if you're just starting out My key piece of advice would be just be consistent And if that means right now for you to post once a week Then start for once a week go for a couple months See if you're still able to keep the schedule of once a week and maybe at that time you want to re-evaluate and add Another post per week So posting content obviously and posting on a regular basis again Not every single day, but on a consistent regular basis will help build your brand on LinkedIn There's also the LinkedIn messaging feature which is on the top bar again And that's when you can connect with other people in your network or maybe people outside your network and While the messaging feature is obviously a lot clunkier than your outlook or your Gmail It's a great place to start conversations with Network connections that you want to further the relationship with I kind of look at LinkedIn Messaging's goal as that's where you want to start the relationship But the goal of that message is to eventually pull it off of LinkedIn and pull it into your own email service Email service like outlook or Gmail so the relationships start on LinkedIn But again the goal of the relationship is to pull it out of messaging and put it on to your outlook or Gmail where you can Message more freely there and of course keep track of your messages Better because LinkedIn messaging is is terribly clunky There's also a Content feature on LinkedIn Called LinkedIn articles so when you have the option to post on the home feed It will ask you if you're going to post or if you'd prefer to just do an image or a video And then there's an option to write an article and these are the long-form articles So consider LinkedIn articles as a blog platform This is where you can you know spew off 400 words all the way up to however long you can I don't even know the limit actually LinkedIn articles I can look into that But I think the longest article I did on there was roughly around 15 to 2000 words and and there was no issue You can also insert images and videos in that long-form article And then you have the opportunity to provide a bit of an intro or an update to the article as you post it to your network So the article feature again is a commitment If you can do one article a month and again the goal is to stay consistent That's something that would definitely grow your brand on LinkedIn And here's one of my little backdoor strategies with articles Is if you write a really great compelling article on LinkedIn You can feature that in your featured section, which is on your profile So the featured section falls right below the about section Not everyone has the featured section But if you have the featured section you can create one of your features as Your linked in article so there's the little hack about if you write a blog article It can live not only in your activity, but it can live in your featured section Which when people visit your profile, they'll see that you've created this article and they may take a read of it So that's a really compelling one really great Tool in your toolbox for growing your personal brand and getting eyes on your content The other way you can grow your brand is to jump into groups Another very clunky feature of LinkedIn is LinkedIn groups It's not the most well laid out feature of LinkedIn for sure And there are not a ton of people providing valuable insights in groups But if you find the right group and there's actual Valuable content in there Jump in get engaged see who else is Creating and providing great insights and content and start to build your network inside of groups Again, it's a great way to build your brand because you can provide value in groups the the rule of groups though is to stay away from Self promotion and of course spam Um, so if you can follow those rules everything else you can post discussion questions. You can post Tips and tricks best practices Uh, you can look for advice on certain things So there's a lot of things that you can do inside of a Facebook or a LinkedIn group. Sorry Um to build your brand just got to find the right group where there's some engagement there um All right, so we are on to number seven already and another rarely used feature are hashtags So including some hashtags in your content and following discussions Discussion topics through hashtags is a great way to get industry intel It's a great way to learn who's talking about those Topics You'll need to do some research when you start getting into hashtags to see what hashtags people are actually following And you can use the search bar to do that research and and find out how many people are following different hashtags And use different variations of a hashtag In fact, the other day I was doing um some filming for a course. I'm launching And the example was administrative assistance And so I was doing some hashtag research around Administrative assistance and I was finding that administrative professionals was actually the more popular hashtag Literally by tens of thousands of people So take some variations of different hashtags that you'd be looking for and and see which one's pop-up is being more popular than others um The eighth tip is to ensure that you go into your settings and set your profile to full and public I I believe There was a misconception back in the day that LinkedIn was Not a platform where you invited everyone into your world similar to Facebook. And so a lot of us have settings um blocking people from seeing our last name or even blocking people from seeing our profile picture But linkedin is so so different from Facebook and instagram because it is the business platform And if you're growing your brand you obviously want to invite people into your business world So ensure that your settings allow for that and if you haven't checked out your settings in a while It might be time just to ensure that they are set to full Um, in fact, I've seen some incredible brands on linkedin But I couldn't see their profile picture and it checked me forever to figure out why they were doing such great video But didn't have a profile picture up on their profile So I finally brought it to their attention that that is that was what was happening So that they could change their settings um The ninth thing that you can do is obviously to grow your network through connections And of course the more connections you have the more intentional connections you have The more eyes you'll have on your content And those people obviously can engage with your content and um It it just opens doors to opportunities as of course they see you continuing to promote your brand and promote valuable content on linkedin I mentioned the five days to 50 connections challenge uh, there's a Bunch of people going through it right now and hopefully some more Go for it next week next week is the last week of the challenge And then i'm going to retire the challenge for the season So if you're interested in growing your connections five days to 50 linkedin connections challenge You can find more information about that over at leanne calderwood.com forward slash challenge And you can get ready for next monday's challenge Uh, the last tip I want to leave you with today and to be honest. This is my favorite Is to continually update your profile And you can update a few sections in a few different ways that keep it fresh Keep it visually engaging for those who visit your profile and always give something someone something new to read And there's three areas that I think you can do this Uh regularly and that is your banner. So the banner is the big block behind your head On your linkedin profile Creating visuals are creating calls to action on your banner including once we get back to attending conferences and speaking at conferences Putting those things in a banner is a great visual hook for people Uh, the second place is your headline, which is kind of that that prominent statement right below your name You can update that as well I used to update it when I was attending conferences and letting people know what cities or what I was going to be at and I I look forward to doing that again some day And of course the third thing is your featured section. So that's that Roll a dex of different things that you want to feature about your work and your brand I mentioned that you could tag one of your articles as part of your featured section But you also may want to tag some videos that you've created Other websites, maybe a pdf that you've created or a pdf about your business So capitalizing on your featured section and keeping content rolling through that little carousel of featured content Is a great way to keep your up your content and your profile continually fresh through those updates So those are 10 very quick ways that you can capitalize on your brand Using linkedin next week. We're going to talk a little bit about linkedin groups I mentioned linkedin groups today. It is a clunky clunky feature But I think there's some things that we can all try to capitalize on linkedin groups and so we're going to look at that next week Thank you for joining today's broadcast if you have any questions at all Certainly, let me know through the the facebook or youtube comments And I do hope to see you next tuesday for t same time same place. Bye for now