Lewis Howes - LinkedIn Guru

I've been on LinkedIn for a while, but never bothered to finish filling out my profile and didn't often recommend it to my clients to use.  Big mistake.  After attending the Social Media Summit 2010 presentation on LinkedIn by Lewis Howes, my eyes have been open to the power that LinkedIn offers businesses who want to market to an affluent and educated pool of decision makers. 

I didn't think I was going to get anything out of the Lewis' presentation, especially when he started with a story about his record holding athletic career cut short by injury, and slides of himself on the couch with his sister's golden retriever.  My first reaction was "what the $%*! is this guy talking about?"  But, it turns out that his 6 month recovery on his sister's couch with a dog named 'Lady' is what turned him into the LinkedIn guru that he is today. While injured, he spent 8 hours a day for 6 months figuring out LinkedIn and has used it to start and market several successful businesses.

LinkedIn vs. Facebook/Twitter

Lewis very passionately defends LinkedIn as the most powerful social network available to businesses for several key reasons, the most important of which is the ability to export your LinkedIn contacts to use off-network.  You may have thousands of Facebook friends or a million Twitter followers, but you have no way to export that data. If Facebook or Twitter go down, you lose those contacts.  With LinkedIn you can export and own that information.

As of this post, there are 65 million business professionals on LinkedIn with an average household income per user of $109,000. Forty-five percent of them are actual business decision makers.  Meaning, one out of every two people you connect with on LinkedIn have the power to act on what you have to offer.  According to Lewis only 25% of users on Facebook and Twitter are actual business decision makers.

Power up your profile

His first tip was to power up your profile by strategically placing your target keyword in 5 key places on your profile page.  You want to choose a keyword or brief keyword phrase that you want to be found for when people do a 'people search' on LinkedIn.  If you are familiar with Search Engine Optimization, it is a similar concept to using keywords throughout your website or blog to rank higher in Google. In the image below you can see that Lewis shows up #1 when you do a 'people search' for 'sports'.

This is important for Lewis because it generates 25-30 invites daily from people who are top executives in the sports industry and solidifies his authority as a influential persona in the sports industry.

5 key places to place your target keyword on your LinkedIn profile page

1) Headline
2) Current Work Experience
3) Past Work Experience
4) Summary
5) Specialties

This is the first thing people see when they search a keyword or your name is your name, your headline, your city and one of your current and one of your past work experiences.  It's here you make your first impression, so make it count.

In general the more you use a keyword and a few relative keyword phrases throughout your profile, the higher you will rank.  But, you have to remember that it also has to make sense and be interesting to the reader, so you can't just list keyword after keyword after keyword. 

Just by placing keywords in those 5 areas, you should see an increase your amount of leads and opportunities, and it will brand you as a leader in your niche or industry.

Summary

Lewis also explained how to format your profile and how to write your summary and specialties.  I'll elaborate on that in the next post.  I still have to watch Jason Alba's take on LinkedIn and compare the two, but at the moment, Lewis Howe is definitely my favorite for all things LinkedIn.

As he stated in his presentation, he is definitely "bringing sexy back to LinkedIn."

Lewis Howes is the co-author of LinkedWorking: Generating Success on the World’s Professional Networking Website, and the author of the online newsletter, Sports Networker, where he draws from his experience, knowledge and contacts as a professional football player.

Do you use LinkedIn for your business?

 

 

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