Why should a business be on LinkedIn?

Grant Leboff: So Danny, why should a business think about going on LinkedIn?

Danny Bermant: Businesses should go on LinkedIn for a few reasons. I think the first thing to consider is that if you are business to business, the likelihood is that your clients are going to be there already. And even if you’re not a B2B business, you’re still going to be in a situation where a lot of the staff you are going to recruit are going to be on there, and a lot of the suppliers you are looking to work with are going to be on there. It’s got something like 300 million people on there, so it’s a place where, if you’re looking to meet other professionals or you’re looking to meet other influences who can introduce you to clients. LinkedIn is going to be your first port of call.

Grant Leboff: So let’s say that a business has decided that they’re going to go onto LinkedIn for one of the reasons you said; make connections, suppliers, recruitment… and there are a number of nice issues that you’ve highlighted there, it’s not necessarily just about business development all the time. They are setting up a profile, how important is it to get that right and what are the things that they should be thinking about?

Danny Bermant: The profile is absolutely fundamental. Where people go wrong with LinkedIn is that they treat the profile as ‘This is me’ in terms of my professional development – you know, I want to get another job. What it is supposed to be used for is actually; you as a representative of your business. Every single employee who is on LinkedIn is potentially the public face of that business. So how you are represented on the profile is fundamental.

Where a lot of staff go wrong is that they don’t have a proper headshot. I’m not even talking about family photos and stuff like that, I’m talking about having a professional headshot. It’s just not taken seriously enough. You can’t take a ‘selfie’. That’s not going to be good enough.

The other area where a lot of people go wrong, is in terms of your professional headline – that’s what appears on LinkedIn under your name. Typically people think about their status, that is; when you ask them what do they do, people will say ‘Well I’m an accountant or I’m a lawyer’. What you should be thinking about is not what you do but, ‘how does what you do, add value’ and that’s what you should be doing in your professional headline. So rather than put ‘Partner at law firm’, you should be putting ‘Solicitor, specialising in property enabling business owners to get planning permission’.

So it’s actually thinking in terms of the fact that when people look at your profile they have an attention span of about seven seconds. You’ve got that amount of time to convince people to look further than your profile. So it’s what are you are saying, right at the top, that’s going to convince users to stay a bit longer.

Grant Leboff: So you get the headshot right, and the title right, what about the biography? How would you advise people to start to look at the way they write their biography? Should they write short sentences, bullets?…

Danny Bermant: Bullets is a very interesting one. People often think of it as a covering letter to their CV. So a lot of LinkedIn profiles will start off like ‘I am a very dedicated and hard-working professional’. Again, because of the seven second thing I spoke about, it needs to be really concise and to the point. You should be grouping it into a series of bullet points that people can understand. They’ve looked at your professional headline – let’s say you are a solicitor specialising in property – so what you then do below, is break it up into a few bullet points, so what does that mean? For example, ‘I help businesses get planning permission by doing this, this and this’ and the following few bullet points here are the results achieved – here, here and here. People looking at your biography can see, maybe, in about 15 seconds; I get it. I get what you do. I see how you can help me. I need to speak to you.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English