Your LinkedIn Profile: It’s Not About You with Sandra Long
Dr. Russell Strickland [20:32]
Now, it’s something that I have not fully looked into on LinkedIn. And I’m going to go ahead and embarrass myself here for everybody else who’s asking the same question. What is the difference between a post and an article on LinkedIn? I’ve seen some folks that, that write articles and other folks that, you know, create posts, and I don’t know what the real difference is how you you set one up versus the other? And what the purpose of a post versus an article is?
Sandra Long [21:00]
Okay, that’s a fantastic question. So a post is something that you do right into your home feed. And you’ll this, this is what you normally see, as you scroll down the timeline, or the homepage, and a post is something that is typically more time based. You can add a link, you can add an image, right, you can even now add a document, you can add a PDF or PowerPoint to a post, right, that’s all a post an article is completely different. Because you’re actually going to a different part of LinkedIn, it’s, you know, when you click that you’re going to do an article, there’s a new, it’s a blogging platform. And so an article is something that will stay long term on your profile. So it’s what I what I believe is if you have First of all, it’s going to be longer, it’s set up completely differently. And it’s set up for long term. So if you think about a piece of content, is it you want to ask the question, is it time bound? Or is it evergreen content, evergreen is something I could write about it now. And it’s still gonna be relevant in 12 months, 24 months. So I’ll give you an example: I wrote an article about it’s called Why CEOs Need To Be On LinkedIn. And I wrote it four or five years ago. And I use, oftentimes, people will call me and they’ll say, oh, we’re doing all this training for our employees, but we really want to get our CEO involved, and I just send them that article. So it’s something that is always there for me as a resource, or people can find it and read it. Whereas your posts, once you post it after, you know over pretty quickly, you’re going to it’s going to be gone, right, it’s going to be hard to retrieve hard to find, you’ll be able to go and find someone’s post by going to their activity section, and you can see their latest posts. But if they’re doing a lot of posting, and something they wrote a year ago, you’re not gonna be able to find it. So it’s about about being able to retrieve it, and the long term use of it, and it’s a different platform, so you don’t, so if I’m going to post about something coming up next week, or I just read someone’s book, that’s probably going to be a post. But if it’s something that’s you know, more educated, they all should be educational and helpful, by the way, like everywhere, all of this. So the one thing I’ll say, when articles first came out, there was a lot of excitement. And they were quite strong from an algorithm perspective, meaning we got people were notified when your articles were published. And LinkedIn stopped doing that. So technically, posts get, typically more views than articles do. But it’s not to say that aren’t you can, you can still do a lot with articles. And they’re still extremely powerful, because they’re there on your profile really forever until you take them off. So there’s trade offs. They’re both great. I think it’s good to use both. Does that help?
Dr. Russell Strickland [23:59]
It does to some extent, how many articles? Would you say it would make sense for a professional expert, a coach, consultant, a counselor? How many articles would it make sense for them to have to feel like okay, I’m represented in that particular space on LinkedIn now? Is it one or two good? Or do they you want to create over time, a large collection of articles? How do you How would you advise people on that?
Sandra Long [24:22]
Well, I mean, it’s really very individual, but what you’re doing with these articles is you’re creating your body of work. And then there’s the question, some people have them on their website, and they can put them in both places, and there’s all that kind of question about things. But, you know, I would say, you know, if you want to maybe do an article a month or something, I mean, come up with a system of how you want to do that. You don’t need to have, you know, hundreds of articles. That’s not really what’s required. And you you know, even if you have two really powerful I mean, it depends if you have two amazing articles, three, three articles that’s probably good. So, you know, and the other thing is you can do posts later that point to the articles, maybe there’s some kind of a little update or a little twist on something you can do a post to, and then you can also recirculate those articles. So that article that you wrote in 2017, you know, you can then decide that you can kind of recirculate that, and reshare that. So there’s different there’s different things you can do.
Dr. Russell Strickland [25:26]
Post pointing back to that article.
Sandra Long [25:29]
I’m sorry, your question?
Dr. Russell Strickland [25:30]
When you say, resort, collate the article, you mean like writing a post? That would point to that article?
Sandra Long [25:35]
Yes, you can do that. You can do that.
Dr. Russell Strickland [25:38]
Yeah. And obviously, if we go back to thinking strategically, you know, the article you mentioned seems like it’s a very good example, who do I want to talk to? What problems do we need to solve for them? And if you know that your gatekeepers are the people that hire you want their CEOs involved? Because they know what that’s what’s gonna make them successful? And you’re like, well, I wrote an article two years ago, exactly how you do that, you again, become the person who’s helping them and and kind of the de facto choice to be hired to help them further.
Sandra Long [26:08]
Right? It is, like you say all about the other person, it’s about you, like, I’m never gonna post about how great my training is, or, you know, sign me sign up, sign me up for as your speaker, I don’t, I don’t post about that. I basically want to bring value, and helpfulness. And then people ask me to speak. I mean, it’s just, it’s exactly what you said, being focused on the other person.
Dr. Russell Strickland [26:32]
And that’s something that I know a lot of folks with their doctoral degrees, have a hard time they don’t, they feel like they’re above selling to some extent. And I’ve learned a lot that if you run a business, you’re in sales. So get used to that, get happy with that. But it’s a way that’s very comfortable for experts to sell, is to go out there and give and to to help them to teach in a way that’s entertaining, hopefully, because people don’t want to be taught but they do like to know things. They don’t want to learn things. So if you can do that in an entertaining way, that’s very helpful as well.
Sandra Long [27:05]
Well, and also, if you can think about what are the questions that your prospects ask, like, what what do they care about? What are they concerned about? And then then then you can write helpful articles or posts that that they would care about.
Dr. Russell Strickland [27:21]
Makes sense. Makes sense. Okay, so we talked a lot about folks with with their their doctoral degrees, something that a lot of our former students like to do is to become published authors. How does LinkedIn help with folks who are, you know, just wanting to get their book out there and get their message out? Maybe again, as a way of lead generation to help attract new clients and customers and patients? How’s LinkedIn a good platform for authors?
Sandra Long [27:47]
Oh, it’s fantastic. Well, I’m an author. And I’ll tell you how I use it. So I have it. First of all, it’s in my headline that my, the name of my book, and then I’m the author of LinkedIn, for personal branding, right in my headline, you look, if I hope you will look at my profile, you’ll see my background banner has an image of my book, both of my books actually is in my background banner. And if you go into
Dr. Russell Strickland [28:11]
Anybody, wherever you’re listening to this, go to dissertationdone.com/blog, find Sandra’s episode, and we’re going to connect you to her LinkedIn profile and other things we’ll talk about later in the episode. But if you want to see her example of what a LinkedIn profile looks like, we’re gonna connect you directly to that. So definitely check that out.
Sandra Long [28:30]
Oh, thank you so much, Dr. Strickland, so and the other thing is I have, there’s a new feature that I love called the Featured section. And if you go into my profile, and you just scroll down just a little bit, you’ll see a big image of my book, that’s a link to Amazon. So people, so they see my headline, they see the banner, right off the bat, they can see it’s very visual, the image of my book, the link, I also listed in publications, there’s a publication section under accomplishments. And you can even put yourself as an author as one of your experience sections, which I do. So there’s a lot of any, and you can write about it in your essay. So there’s a lot of ways and of course, being you know, connecting with other authors, if many authors or speakers, other authors and speakers. You know, and I I love to mention when my friends write a book, like I, I often will post about a friend’s book and, you know, say how it what it what I enjoyed reading about my friend’s book, and so I’ll do that whenever anyone I know is is doing that. I think it’s really important. It’s building your network. And it’s they really appreciate it. It’s sort of that giving forward thing.
Dr. Russell Strickland [29:42]
Yeah, great, awesome. Awesome. Um, what? Going back to the to the book specifically, do you? Are you aware of any strategies or have you used LinkedIn when you first launched your book because one of the things a lot of authors like to do is to really get some interest in the book right away. It does a lot of them nice things for you, in terms of, you know, making the book go a little viral in your community, your avatar community. Any any thoughts about using LinkedIn for a book launch?
Sandra Long [30:11]
Yeah. So I mean, I would say that, first of all, any overall book launch, you know, you probably have a team of people, I mean that you have a team of people that are your fans or your friends, and or your readers, or that have somehow signed up or agreed to, you know, usually, sometimes it’s formal, sometimes it’s informal, just a few people that are, like, excited with you. And I would say enlisting them to post about your book. And I was very fortunate, because, you know, I had, I had people putting these amazing posts up, some of them put videos up for me. And they just, they just did that some of many of them did that on their own. And a few people I had, I had asked a few people, oh, you know, when I posted, could you could you comment, in fact, I was planning on doing a big post about my book, and I ended up not even doing it, because so many other people posted about it, I felt like it was
Dr. Russell Strickland [31:04]
That’s amazing.
Sandra Long [31:05]
It was too much, you know, I didn’t want to, but because all these people were posting, and I thought, well, I’ll just, I’ll just enjoy it. And of course, commenting if you’re if your friends are posting about your book, make sure every one of those you’re going to comment back, thank you for thank you for this thank you for posting answering their questions. Because if you’re not engaging, you’re you’re missing out on a lot of the opportunity to be seen and to have it go farther. So make sure you’re liking and commenting all of those posts.
Dr. Russell Strickland [31:34]
Absolutely. That’s, that’s awesome. I, I would say there’s no such thing as too much, particularly if you’re trying to get a message out there. Yeah. But when you get to the point where you’re like, okay, I’m happy, and I want to sit back and go for the ride. That’s amazing. That’s congratulations. That’s really cool. I really appreciate that. One of the things that always I always wonder about when people say I wrote a book on a social media platform, stay current, like, doesn’t it change a lot? And and how does that how does that work?
Sandra Long [32:09]
Well, it does. And so a couple things. So instead, my book is LinkedIn For Personal Branding. So it’s not just a book on LinkedIn profile or LinkedIn content. It’s LinkedIn for personal branding. So what that means is that a lot of my book is about how to position yourself. So how do you position yourself does not change? True? Right. So I actually originally wrote my book in 2016. And then I updated it for 2021. So I had it out there for four, and I was selling quite a lot of books, even the 2016 version at the end of 2020. Because I had a lot about positioning. But yes, things change for sure. And so that means I’ve got to keep, I’ve got to update it on a regular basis. But I’m very conscious of the fact that a lot, you know, a lot of the content I want to make sure is is evergreen content, because of all the changes.
Dr. Russell Strickland [33:01]
Now, obviously, you know, I think a lot of folks who are listening to this are going to be familiar with LinkedIn. But the big behemoth out there is Facebook, how is Facebook different? Or how’s LinkedIn different or similar to Facebook?
Sandra Long [33:16]
Well, I mean, I think the biggest thing is that, of course, Facebook has more users. We know that. Facebook is. Yeah, I mean, they’re more it’s more of a consumer type place. But I would say this, that the mindset is different. When you go onto Facebook, you’re typically going on there, what are my friends doing? You know, what, what what are they saying in my specialty groups that I’m interested in? It’s it’s much more personal like the in that regard. You know, what’s happening at my college? Like, what are my neighbors doing? Things like that, when you have the mindset when you’re going on to LinkedIn is completely different. It’s usually what’s happening in my industry. You know, what can I learn? Who can I connect with who’s who’s looking at me who’s connecting with me? It’s just a different feeling. It’s it’s more professionally oriented. So it that changes everything about how people engage and what so so, you know, a lot of people I find, tell me that they’re nervous because of that. They know, this is business. This is professional, I’m nervous. I don’t know what to say, I don’t, I can’t post I don’t even want to comment, like people are nervous and scared. That’s the fear factor. That’s one of the things I deal with, whether it’s a company, a student, university, Professor, whoever. And so I tried one of the things about my teaching is to give them confidence that yeah, these are the things that that you can do successfully and how to try these things out and and and yes, you can be yourself but It’s your professional self. And that will work amazing. So once you get over that teeny bit of fear, it’s it opens up every kind of professional door for you.
Dr. Russell Strickland [35:12]
And how would you bridge that gap between, you know, sharing and educating and entertaining and selling. Because obviously, you’re there like, if you’re an expert, let’s say you’re a coach or consultant or, or something like that, the way that you’re really going to help these people is by working with them professionally. And that’s one of the things I had to get over as a, you know, like I said, an expert who’s thinking I’m above sales, so to speak. No, actually, the whole reason you’re in this business is to help people and the only way you can do that is if you sell them something. So how do people do that without coming off as too, you know, pushy or, or any of those sorts of things on LinkedIn?
Sandra Long [35:51]
Well, it gets back to what we were talking about before showing interest in the other person. I mean, your profile should be doing your selling most of your selling for you. So I’m not a bully, I don’t believe in you know, you connect with someone, and then you send them a message, like sign up for my webinar, or buy my book, or hire me, I would never ever do that. But I get people approaching me. So the whole thing is showing interest in them being engaged on the platform, and then having this profile that does the selling for you. So your profile should, yes, it should be a combinate: personal professional, but there should be ways where people can say I want to work with her, I want to work with him, and that they can absolutely make that happen. So for example, if you like my comments, and you like maybe what I’m all about, you go to my profile, you can buy my book right off my profile. Okay, that’s just an example. You can I clearly say how to email me, I clearly say how you can work with me, how I help people. So my profile is set up. So that, you know, it’s not, I hope that people think it’s it’s friendly, and approachable. But it’s also they can work, they can do business with me from my profile. But I’m not going to message someone like that. And I’m not going to put a post up and say, sign up for my stuff. I’m not going to do that. That’s me. That’s how I do it.
Dr. Russell Strickland [37:13]
Okay. Well, I know Sandra, I want to thank you for being here with us today. I know that you’re really busy really quickly. And like we said, there’s a lot of business in on Facebook, on LinkedIn, but also some of the personal side. What do you do? Personally for fine. You know, when you’re not knee deep in LinkedIn
Sandra Long [37:34]
Oh my gosh, I’m on the computer so much. So I love it when I get off the computer. And yeah, I love the water. I love being an a boating, I like anything to get my getting myself in the water in any capacity, whether it’s swimming or exercising in the water. I love outdoors and hiking around and I love being with friends and family. And yeah, I’m very, very fortunate.
Dr. Russell Strickland [37:55]
Yeah, we’re not close enough to a lake for my taste. But I’d like to try to go out at least a couple of times a year and rent a boat and go out. That’s something I find a lot of fun, too. So wow, this has been just so amazing. And awesome. I want to thank you so much for being here with us today for sharing all of this about LinkedIn. If people want to reach out to you and and continue this conversation in any way. What’s the best way for them to do that?
Sandra Long [38:21]
Well, LinkedIn is the best way.
Dr. Russell Strickland [38:23]
Well that’s a surprise.
Sandra Long [38:24]
So yeah. So when you come to my first of all, when you search for me, you can go either through the website that Doctor Strickland’s mentioning, or if you’re searching for me, you put Sandra Long. I’m in the New York area to make it easier. It’s probably the easiest is to go through his website. But yeah, send me a message when you sent, when you connect, I mean, you’ll see the Follow button. But in order to connect with me just click on the More and then click on Connect and send me a note because and say you say you heard on the podcast, so I know where you came from. That would be great.
Dr. Russell Strickland [38:53]
Awesome. Um, so I’ll thank you once again, for being here with us today. Sandra, I really I’ve learned a lot and I hope that other folks have as well. I’ll just take this moment to remind everyone that today’s episode is being brought to you by Dissertation Done. If you think you might be stalled, stuck, or just in need of a little bit of guidance and support, reach out to us at DissertationDone.com/done. If you’re interested in me, having your own book that’s published that you can put on your LinkedIn profile, then reach out to us at dissertationdone.com/book. Either way you and I’ll have a conversation. We’ll see if it’s a good fit. Again, Sandra, thank you so much for being here with us today and for sharing this wonderful information about LinkedIn. And I hope everyone goes out to LinkedIn today looks at their profile and find at least a couple of things they might be able to tweak off of what they learned today.
Sandra Long [39:42]
Thank you so much. It was so much fun.
Dr. Russell Strickland [39:44]
Oh, that’s awesome. And listen to everyone else. I want you to have a wonderful day and go out and live your unconditional life. Bye for now.
Outro [39:58]
This has been An Unconventional Life. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, subscribe now to keep getting inspirational stories of unconventional lives as soon as they’re released. Until then, go out and live your best unconventional life.
