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Treat the LinkedIn profiles of your executives like individual ads in one campaign.
Many companies know the value of a LinkedIn page. Some even know the benefit of having employees on LinkedIn to serve as ambassadors. Yet, few companies actually recognize the remarkable branding opportunity of their leadership team’s collective profiles.
By presenting a strategic and unified front, a company’s key players can provide yet another touch point in a comprehensive branding campaign. Nevertheless, even those companies with media-worthy LinkedIn pages seem to be overlooking so important an opportunity.
For instance, last year, Hubspot applauded the business pages of a dozen companies. Among them were large enterprises like Coca-Cola and l’Oreal. Yet, while the pages were impressive, the individual summaries of their management teams were inconsistent and even non-existent.
Worse still, some were just boring. This is despite the fact that many of these professionals have inspiring accomplishments and unique personalities that aren’t being promoted in that important space.
One exception was Chris O’Neill, CEO of Evernote (one of the companies Hubspot featured). His individual profile reflects well on his company. His photo has him standing tall and confident with a big welcoming smile. He also added the words “we’re hiring” next to his title, which is unique and light-hearted detail. What’s more, his summary has anecdotes that add a personal touch.
See profile writing tips for LinkedIn users.
Though I could have made the copy more engaging (it’s what I do, after all), his individual LInkedIn profile demonstrates good personal and company branding. If you’re on an executive team and have a leadership role in company culture then the two types of branding are inseparable. Furthermore, each profile should be treated as one ad in a broad campaign.
That’s just good marketing.
Each member of a management team brings unique experience and personality. Together, they can combine to create a vibrant and unified presentation. Here’s how:
Better executive presentation. Better use of LinkedIn.
- Review all key profiles to ensure they align with the values and personality of your brand. If you’re an innovative tech company, profiles should be written with some originality (ban the use of “outside the box”). If your brand personality is about adventure, then profiles should be dynamic and exciting. Whatever personality defines your brand is the personality that, ultimately, your team should exude.
- Make sure every person in your executive team writes a summary in the first person. Among the many benefits of social media is the way in which it can humanize a brand. If you’ve worked hard to create an engaging business page on LinkedIn that actually engages, then don’t let your executives sabotage it with profiles devoid of all humanity.
- Be consistent in format and word count. When I explored (or rather, skulked) a number of executive profiles for this blog, I saw some that were complete with actual paragraphs versus others that had nothing but the experience section filled out – and even then, too sparsely. Ironically, a companies most junior employees have more to say about their positions the highest level executives. If that’s true of your company, you need to ramp it up.
While the summaries of your team as a whole should complement or exude your brand’s personality, each member of your leadership team should have a profile that engages its target(s) and meets objectives.
So learn more about setting objectives for your LinkedIn profile and check out the suggestions on how to write your LInkedIn profile using marketing (personal branding) techniques.
Of course, you can always achieve optimal presence and make it easy on yourself and your team – just contact me for corporate rates.
