How to at LinkedIn
Win
This module explains why you should use LinkedIn® networking services as part of running your regular business. Here you can benefit from tips on how to optimize the time and effort you dedicate to using this valuable business-building tool. You will also learn how to identify content that can enhance your online voice and pick up tips on expanding your network.
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Getting Set Up
Module Menu
Before You Start
Advanced Tips
Posting Effectively
Content and Analysis
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Fred Alger & Company, LLC makes no representation as to the accuracy of the information herein contained and shall have no liability with regards to such. The following positions represented the noted percentage of Alger’s assets as of June 30, 2020: Microsoft Corporation (parent company of LinkedIn) 5.7%, Hootsuite 0%, Buffer 0%, Falcon.IO 0% and Canva 0%.
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Compliance First
How Other Financial Professionals Are Benefitting
Why Alger Thinks You Should Use LinkedIn® Networking Services
• With 303 million monthly active users, it is the most popular social media site in financial services. Forty percent of its active users visit the site daily. • It provides open access to everyone on the site including important decision makers. • Your clients are likely to have a page and by using this platform you’ll be able to reach them in addition to their networks. • Your clients and prospective clients are visiting the site to learn about you—what does your public profile say?
• By using the site effectively, you may acquire new clients and engage existing ones. • You can also reach more people to create warm leads and nurture your relationships. • Many financial professionals report that using the site has shortened their selling cycle. • Sharing valuable content, such as high quality economic and market- related insights, with your network and communicating with both existing clients and prospective ones can sharply increase your visibility among your contacts and establish yourself as an expert.
• Before you get started on this social media journey, check with your compliance team to learn about your company’s social media policies. Don’t hesitate to contact your compliance counterparts with any questions that come up. • Your company may offer its own unique social media training; participate if something is available.
Share Interesting Content to Engage Your Connections
Getting Started: Create Your Profile
Connect with People Once You’re Up and Running
How to Write an Effective and Actionable Post • Write your message as clearly and succinctly as possible. It’s ok if your message is long as long as it doesn’t ramble and gets to the point. • Avoid selling your services. The goal of a post should be to educate or start a conversation. • Post relevant content that interests your audience and demonstrates your expertise. Building the trust of your audience is critical to your success.
Interacting with Contacts
Define Your Personal Brand
Setting up a profile is easy and the site guides you through the steps you need to take. Be sure to follow any guidelines or requirements your compliance team has instituted.
Location
EDUCATION
WEB ADDRESS
SUMMARY
EXPERIENCE
HEADLINE
Images
Industry
sKILLS
• Use a high-quality, professional headshot of yourself. • If you don’t have one, it is worth investing in a session with a professional photographer to obtain one. • Users are likely to ignore profiles without photos or view them with skepticism. • Your headshot should depict you in a professional manner, i.e., how you appear when meeting with clients, not how you look when you ski or relax with friends.
• Select Financial Services.
• Keep your summary limited to one short paragraph and highlight important industry keywords and the key points that you most want your audience to know about how you bring value.
• Your headline should be about 10 words and reflect your professional role. • Adding keywords, such as your specialty, will make you more searchable. • Convey your value to viewers.
• List all of your higher education achievements along with dates, degrees, field(s) of study, awards and any notable activities and/or membership in societies.
• List your current position and at least two positions preceding it. Consider eliminating any positions that are not relevant to your current career path. • Also, be sure to update your position if you receive a promotion, win an award, etc. • Each position should include start and end dates as well as a summary (bullets are ok) of each role that includes your accomplishments and responsibilities.
• List your current location or the territory you cover.
• You can also customize the web address of your profile by clicking Edit public profile & URL in the upper right corner of your profile page. • Your profile will be easier to find and promote if you change the URL (web address) to something short and memorable such as your name. • An example would be: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsmith
• Use all of the 50 skills available if possible, including industry-relevant skills.
• Connect with people you know in person. Friends, former classmates, family members and colleagues will likely want to connect with you and read your content. No need to send a personalized note when connecting with people you know in real life. • To invite someone you don’t know well, click on Connect and then Add a note to compose a customized introduction that might remind someone of how you know him/her or how you could provide value. If the person accepts your invitation, send a thank you note. • Limit your search for new connections to second degree connections as much as possible so that you can ask your mutual first degree connection for a referral if necessary.
Take the quiz below to learn about connecting
REJECT
OR
TAKE THE QUIZ
Take a gander at which potential connections are appropriate for your business use:
Software engineer based in India whom you do not know
Recruiter at a firm you don’t know
Member of an industry group to which you belong
Home repair contractor
Client of yours
• Your brand is a dependable reflection of who you are. Post content with your unique talents and areas of expertise in mind to convey how you can help your clients and prospects succeed. • Maintain consistency in your voice to boost trust and reliability. • Write in a professional manner in posts and replies.
• When you send a direct message to a connection, be clear and concise about why you are contacting him/her. Summarize your value proposition. • If you see on the site that someone has received a promotion, landed a new job, has a birthday or started retirement, consider reaching out by phone to congratulate him/her and catch up.
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• Posting content to your account can include sharing third-party content or writing something original.
Personalize a piece of third-party content you post by pointing out what you find most interesting and useful about it. A personalized perspective or commentary can be extremely valuable and establish you as an authoritative figure.
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Header images are optional but they can help you stand out and make your profile look complete. Images that pertain to finance, e.g., a stock graph, or to your company, e.g., an office or a skyline of buildings, can work well.
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ACCEPT
How Often Should You Post?
Advice on Posting Content
Post at High Traffic Times
• Read articles before you share them to make sure they are appropriate. Stick to publications you know and that your connections are likely to know. • Your company may offer pre-approved content you can share. Do so if the material will be of interest to your connections. • To drive engagement, post thoughtful questions that relate to your business or how you can help clients and prospects. • Be careful regarding posts on politics, religion or other controversial topics to avoid excluding or offending anyone. • SEC regulations prohibit sharing investment advice via social media. • Refer to your firm’s social media policy for guidelines on acceptable content.
POSTING EFFECTIVELY
How to Use Images
• Strategically post at the times of day that on average generate the most impressions and engagements on LinkedIn® networking services.
Can you guess which days and times are best?
10:00AM-11:00AM Monday
8:00AM-9:00AM Tuesday
12:00PM Wednesday
5:00PM-6:00PM Thursday
2:00PM-3:00PM Friday
(Hint: There are multiple correct answers)
Every other day
Once a week
Whenever you can
can you guess how often you should post?
• Keep in mind that quality is better than quantity. The site is not as time sensitive a platform like Twitter, so anywhere between a few times per week or daily is plenty. It is better to be thoughtful about content than to post just to post.
Twice a month
• The ideal image ratio is 1200 pixels x 630 pixels but an image of any size can work. Depending on the device, the service may crop an image or add white space. • If you don’t know how to maneuver photos, you can simply share third-party content that contains images. Alger’s posts always include a graphic or chart.
Click here for expert tips
If you know how to resize and crop photos, you can access high-quality photos at no charge through royalty-free image sites such as Unsplash.com or Pexels.com. Video content tends to perform well. You can either upload your own videos or repurpose videos from content providers.
Check Analytics
Vary Your Content
How Alger’s Content Can Benefit You
Make Your Content as Interesting as Possible
• Finding compelling content is the biggest challenge of a successful social media plan. • At Alger, we promote our robust thought leadership and you can share these materials with your network rather than hunt for new and relevant content each day. Some of our materials include: - Capital Markets presentations on the markets and economy - Alger On the Money investment charts - Alger On the Record videos featuring our investment team and themes we follow - Blogs from our CEO/CIO and market strategist - Podcasts featuring portfolio managers and analysts discussing key topics If your profile is already set up, share your first post now!
• By sharing Alger content, you will increase the engagement of your account and further deepen your relationships. • Alger is a leading expert in asset management and not only highlights information that investors seek out but also points out key takeaways.
• Post original thoughts and ideas. • Repost relevant articles from well-known periodicals and insightful content providers. • Don’t be afraid of commenting on other people’s posts and providing value with helpful information if your company permits this type of interaction. • Use a strategy for coming up with new content. Perhaps you can provide weekly commentary on an interesting statistic or newly published data. Consider setting up Google Alerts to track relevant industry topics and stay on top of timely news to share. You can also feature colleagues at events and indicate what they learned. Readers may be interested in advice from senior leaders on how they can succeed in the field. Consider creating a short explanation video on an interesting or complex topic that would be useful to your audience. Or, celebrate your own achievements and your firm’s accomplishments
• Underneath one of your posts, click the number of people who reacted to your post to see a full list of individuals. • The site will also show you the companies of those who viewed your post, the professional title of those who viewed your post and the location of those who viewed your post. • In addition to showing how many total views you received and how many reactions and comments your post garnered, the site will also show the number of shares you received and who shared it.
Downloadable Social Media Scheduling Tool
Downloadable Action Item Calendar
Use Articles
Consider Upgrading Your Account to Premium
Break Up Long-Form Content
Use an Easy Design Tool
Use an Automatic Scheduling Software
Coordinate with Your Team
• You should see a "Try Premium Free for One Month" call to action in the upper righthand corner of your screen. You can explore various premium plans based on your needs, i.e., whether you want to primarily find a new job or drives sales, etc. You can also access these options by navigating to Settings & Privacy under the Me dropdown in the top right part of your screen. Then navigate to Account and finally Subscriptions. • A premium account is recommended for anyone looking to expand his/her audience and/or connect with prospects. It can help you drive sales and establish partnerships. A premium business account will afford you many options that are either limited or unavailable with a basic account, such as: - Search and view unlimited profiles - Use advanced search filters - View anyone who has viewed your profile in the last 90 days - Send InMail messages
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Content drafted via the Articles tool will be prioritized over external blog content via the platform’s algorithm and can be a great way to display long form thought leadership directly on your profile. You can then cross-promote the content on your blog if you have one or your website.
Use the arrows to learn more. Click the exit icon to go back
• Click Write an article near the top of your homepage.
• Click the Headline field to type the headline of your article.
• Click the Write here field to type the content of your article. You can add a cover image, images and other rich media to enhance it visually.
• Click the Publish button in the top right of the page. You won’t have the opportunity to preview your content before publishing it.
• Once your article is published, you can edit or delete it at any time.
• If you set your public profile visibility to everyone, your article will be searchable on and off the site. • You can disable the ability of users to leave comments on your published articles if you so wish. – In the pop-up window that appears before you publish, click Allow comments on this article if you like. You can always change it later. Then click the Publish button
hELPFUL STEPS TO WRITE AN ARTICLE
• Here you will find a downloadable action item calendar you can reuse throughout the year to remind yourself of all the things you need to do to keep your program up and running. Before you get started, be sure to: • Check with your compliance team on your company’s social media policy. Also, learn whether your compliance team will need to review each of your posts in advance and customize this calendar accordingly. • Set up your profile using the instructions in the main guide. • Search the site for connections and send out as many invitations as possible. Comb through the suggested connections and groups under the My Network tab. Also be sure to look up influencers you admire and companies that interest you to follow. Finally, for more ideas, be sure to follow Alger!
• You can plan your posts in advance for one or two weeks at a time using this Excel spreadsheet. • If your content will be reviewed or edited, a content scheduler like this is very helpful. You will find columns for your team to provide edits included in the spreadsheet. • Additionally, you will find an area to mark if the post has been scheduled or posted; this is helpful to keep track of content as situations change. • Don't forget to keep track of holidays and major events that may require special posts.
• If you have a team of colleagues helping you with your initiative, break down responsibilities and create a process. • Someone creates content. That person or someone else creates images. Add posts to a draft schedule. • Submit the draft schedule to editors and if necessary, get approval from compliance too. • Schedule posts for two weeks using the scheduling tool found in the Advanced Tips area of this module. • Analyze the results of your posts with the tool you use. • Galvanize your team to embrace social media. Everyone should like and share posts. This will help posts reach new audiences in employees’ networks.
• Several systems exist and some offer free functionality for basic scheduling.
Hootsuite
At no cost this service will allow you to schedule up to 30 messages and monitor your LinkedIn® networking services stream. With a paid subscription, you can receive unlimited publishing and analytics.
This service can also be free but first you must do a trial with one of Buffer’s paid plans. Only then you will have the option to downgrade to the basic free plan. Buffer will take care of scheduling and help you plan your content calendar. If you pay it will also allow you to collaborate with other members on your team.
Buffer
This site does not provide a free service but for a fee you can gain access to services such as publishing, monitoring the social web for insights, tracking your performance, viewing all your audience data and creating automated ad campaigns.
Falcon.io
• Canva is a website that will create outstanding graphics for your posts and you need little to no design experience to use it. It is also free!
• If you or your firm produces a long piece of content, consider breaking it apart into more digestible nuggets you can post in a series on the site. • You’ll gain multiple posts from a single piece of content and maximize the traffic that content receives. • If someone misses your post the first time, he/she will have other opportunities to view your valuable content. • Be sure to check with your compliance team before altering approved content.
Click here to download the tool
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