If you were attending a sales pitch, or an important meeting you’d turn up smart, you’d be polite and you’d have all the right information to hand, right?

Well, showing up on LinkedIn shouldn’t be any different.

People WILL view your profile on LinkedIn before they physically or digitally meet you. It’s only natural to know a bit more about someone before they spend time with you on a call or in a meeting. 

I’ve done it myself, my reasons for checking someone out on LinkedIn is to view their work experience, see how long they have worked at the company that’s of interest to me, see if we have any shared connections, and whilst I’m on their profile I view their recent posts and by doing so, it gives me an overview of how professional the person

As an individual, your LinkedIn profile is more than likely the first thing a new prospect will see.

So, you could say it’s your new first impression.

But it is the right first impression?

If you are a company owner, are you happy with how your staff look to the outside world? 

Remember that business-oriented platforms like LinkedIn are professional sites that can be leveraged to help you: 

• * to be seen as a trustworthy, industry-leading organisation
• * keep in touch with customers past and present
• * collate new prospects and start them on their nurturing journey 
• * promote your professional products and services 
• * generate leads and 
• * make money! 

The above can and does work for many companies on LinkedIn. Just make sure you or your staff are not the missing cogs when it comes to your company’s creditability. Consistency is key when working in harmony with your staff to drive forward together on the same LinkedIn path. 

We regularly hear that our staff are our best asset. If this truly is the case, then we need to show them off on LinkedIn. Make all their profiles consistent, credible, and identifiably you (as a company). 

I mean, what would it tell you if your staff’s profiles were inconsistent, messy, have their job titles missing in the headline, were not connected to the company page, some had blurred photos, and the ones that weren’t blurred has been taken in a pub, and some photos were missing altogether? 

Does this sound familiar?

An outsider’s glimpse of such an organisation would be careless, messy, unorganised, whereas by monitoring your staff’s profiles and making the right changes now, you could look the opposite!

So, where do you start? 

On LinkedIn, monitoring all of your client-facing staff’s profiles and provide a list of amends you‘d like them to make.

Audit the following:

• The profile images - is it professional, can you tell it's them, do you want a branded colour background?
• Their headline - does it include any product, service or locational information you'd expect to see
• Their current job - have they tagged in the company page? Can you see your logo?
• Their job summary - is it up to date, does it tell the viewer what part they play in the customer journey?
• Their list of skills - remember potential prospects may search for a company to work with via certain skills
• Their contact details - is it their work email, do you have a work Twitter account, add this so any posts can be shared
• The all-important privacy settings.- you will need their log-ins to check this.

OR, take an easier route and let us audit them for you and afterwards if you like we can run a workshop showing your staff how to make these all-important changes and tell them why it’s important they keep everything as up to date as possible.

Then sit back.

Once all your staff profiles are uniformed, you can start looking slick, organised, on-trend, on-brand, consistent and most importantly, look like a team that people want to do business with.

If you are getting more serious on LinkedIn and carrying out staff profile checks etc, you might benefit from a bespoke LinkedIn course. We can tailor this around your customer-facing staff experience levels, your services, your company LinkedIn page, policy do's and don'ts, use of hashtags, how your sales team can utilise the search feature etc.

We'll even give you tips on finding industry-related content and providing details on how to engage and be social while being informative and being seen as an industry leader. 

We have run lots of tailored LinkedIn workshops for a number of customers, more recently for a large team at Leeds Mind the mental health charity and also a large northern Fire and Security company amongst others. All have found the online sessions invaluable.  To see more on the bespoke course and to read their reviews click here.