TRANSCRIPTION

Four must-know, LinkedIn settings for financial advisors. In this video, we're going to cover the key settings that all advisors, planners and wealth managers want to get right on their LinkedIn profile in order to make sure that LinkedIn is working really hard for them. Now, if you haven't already please like this video, subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell notification so that you get notified every single time we put a video on going to give you a little bonus at the end of this video, in order to help you really make sure that your LinkedIn profile is optimized. So make sure you stick around. So they get to see that we're also going to jump at the computer and show you exactly. Step-By-Step how to make these changes to your profile. So by the end of the video, you should have everything ship shape and set up, okay. Setting number one, getting your contact details set up correctly. This is so simple, but I would say about 70% of the advisors that I talked to their contact details. Aren't right. And what do I mean by aren't? Right? I mean, for example, the email address that they have in there is a g-mail or a Hotmail, some form of a personal address, or they might even have an email address from an old company that they used to work with. Okay. So all you got to do is go into the email setting area, putting your current and up-to-date professional email address and save that in there. So when people are checking you out and people will check you out on LinkedIn and they'll click on the contact info section, they'll see the correct details. Let's jump on the computer. I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. And here we are, my LinkedIn profile, what I've done is I've clicked on me and gone to a view profile to bring up my profile page. As you can see, you can see all the different details that are on my main profile page now to update your contact details. As you can see, everybody can very easily see your contact info by clicking that, in my case, it has my profile URL, my website, and my email address. And it's this email address that you really want to get, right? If it's a Hotmail or Gmail or any form of a personal email address or an old dress of a former company that you deal with, you want to change it the way that you change. It is again, you're going to drop down the me tab and you go to settings and privacy, wait for that, just to open up and over here, you've got the account tab, just click on that. And here you can see email addresses. Now, in this case, when you click on it, in this case, I have two email addresses affiliated with this particular account, and we've just black them out to, to protect my privacy. But you get the idea. And what you would do is you would just click, add new email address here and add the new email address, which is your professional one, and then make it primary. Just click on, make primary, once it's been added and it'll make that email address primary. And then when you go back into your contact info, you should be able to see it in there. That it's the professional email address on there that you need. Number two, privacy settings. These settings are super important on LinkedIn because it's how people see you, whether they're connected to you or not connected to you on what of your content and of your connections that they can actually see. So we're going to run through these. There's a really simple thing you can do to make your profile even more visible. You can set up, what's called a custom. You are out, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. I'm going to show you how to make sure that you're visible for certain things, but also you're protecting your network and that your competitors, for example, kind of just jump in and see all of your connections as well. So let's jump over to the computer. I'll show you exactly how this works For privacy settings is going to be a couple of things that I'm going to run through here with you, as I just said. So the first one not as much privacy, but again just important is edit your public profile and you are ELLs. You can have a dedicated LinkedIn, you are L for yourself, and you can edit that. So if I just click on that, it's going to bring it up and it's going to show me my public profile, but I'm interested in this ad at your custom URL up here. So everybody set of having linkedin.com four slash 11 numbers letters can actually edit it to say your name or your business name, whatever you want it to be, as you can see, in my case, it's, it's my name. And you would literally just click on the little pencil here and you would edit it. And as long as it was actually available on LinkedIn, you can select that. I absolutely recommend that you do that if you haven't done it already. And then when you add your link to your LinkedIn profile to your website or to your email or anywhere else, it makes it much easier. And it's not such a big ugly link, and it's a little bit easier for people to follow. So this is just a little tip just to get yourselves started, but in terms of privacy, can we just go back here again, we're going to drop down, go to settings and privacy here. And you can see as a whole host on LinkedIn of privacy settings, you don't need to worry about all of them. There's a few that I want to really highlight for you. Okay. So editing your public profile, you can tell how non-members of LinkedIn are actually going to see this, okay, so you can actually click in here and you can tell them what visibility that you want. You can say that people can see your name, number of connections. And so on. You can say that certain people can see your photo or can't see your posts photo. In my case I work a lot on LinkedIn, so I want to have it public. So I keep most things public and people can see most of what's on my LinkedIn profile. And that also helps with our SEO as well. So you can decide what, where you want to go with that. But I definitely recommend that you have a fairly close, fairly close, look at it back over here, who can see your email address. Again, this might be important for you or not, not important for you as the case may be, which we edited the email address a little bit earlier in the, in the video. So you can decide who you want to actually see your email address or not. So you can just click in there and you can edit how that works in my case, first degree connections and so on can see it. That's how it's actually yeah. Set up. Okay. Who can see your connections. And this again, can be very important if you've got competitors, for example, and you don't want to show all of your connections to your competitors, and you can edit that in my case, I've got over the over 6,000 connections. So most of the time, it's just me who sees my connections rather than competitors, to be able to come in and farm through their connections. If you're a in financial advisor, financial planning is probably a good idea to to check it so that maybe on year or only first-generation connections can actually see that. And that's where you would see that this setting here is quite important, as well as the viewers of this profile also viewed. So you've probably seen there, sometimes the recommendations come up on the right hand side beside somebody's profile. It just sort of comes up down here. I'm saying people also viewed these other people in my case, I don't really want that to, to show up. So what I do is I just I just leave that off. I guess a view of this also prove it's off. So, so it means it keeps people on my profile who can see your last name again. You can look at that profile visibility off LinkedIn. Again, I, I keep that set to yes because that is important for me to be able to see it. But again, you can decide yourself what makes the most the most sense for you and what you're trying to do with your business. So you can also see here on the left hand side, who you're maybe blocking and hiding and also make some choices about how LinkedIn actually uses your data. So you can see LinkedIn give a huge amount of options around privacy, those top sort of three or four ones. They're the ones I would definitely make sure that you like,Gotcha. Number three, profile setup, the most important parts of your entire sort of LinkedIn set up is going to be your, your photo and your name. And whatever's written under your name. A lot of people really under-utilized this bit of real estate. They just put it in their title like financial advisor or bank manager or whatever it is, but that doesn't tell the viewer anything about you. And every time you comment or post an article or link or connect with someone, this is what they see. So it's very important real estate. It has to do some hard work. We would use a formula set up what we call a tagline, which essentially is I help X with Y using Zed where X is, who you help. Why is the primary benefit that you bring to the table? And Zed is how you go better. It's a really powerful and simple way to do it. The other thing that I see all the time is people having a poor photo photo is very simple. It has to be from your shoulders, uncovering your head. It needs to be well lit. It needs to be professional and set up. It can't be too far away. It can't be too dark. You don't want it to be you with a bunch of people. Are you with a particular Vista in the background? People just want to see your face. Ideally, you want to have a smile and you want to be well lit. It's the too far away or too dark photos that I see all the time and that are really going to help you. Let's jump over to the computer. I want to show you exactly how to change these and how to make sure that you get them to stand out. So with your profile setup, as you just said, there's two really important things. One is what I call your tagline. As you can see the most important things at the top of your profile is your photo, your name, and what's written under your name. And a lot of time, people just have something very bland, like financial advisor or something that which doesn't tell him anything, anybody, anything about you. So I absolutely advocate using a bit more of a formula. As I mentioned already, I help X with Y using Zed. So, so who you're actually helping a primary benefit that you bring to the table and how you go about doing it. And as you can see, that's exactly what I have there. And the reason why that's important is people. If you comment in somebody's article, if you messaged them, if you send them a connection request, that becomes really important. The second thing on here of these sort of top three, obviously your name is your name. And the second most important thing is, is your photo. Okay? So your photo needs to be of you smiling. It needs to be fairly close up. So literally might just include your shoulders and your, and your face. It needs to be clear to see and well lit in this case, I've put a little sort of red halo on it. And that again, that's just to make it stand out. You can see over here, it stands out a little bit when I'm commenting or doing some posting as well. And you don't necessarily have to have the red, red halo. That's just a little thing I put in fairly recently, but what I'm trying to show you is it has to be, make sure that you look approachable and that's really what it, what it comes down to. A lot of the profile photos I see are too far away. A lot of the time you can see, you know, maybe a picture of someone and there's a big background, or there's a load of different things going on or different colors. And it just doesn't make sense that it's kind of distracting. It needs to look professional. It needs to come across well and you need to look approachable. I think that's really the key things that don't underestimate on LinkedIn, how powerful it is to get your photo right, to make sure your name is nice and clear and to make sure you've got a simple tagline that engages with people. I always say that generally you have between three and five seconds to get somebody's attention. And if you don't get their attention in the first three to five seconds, they're going to hit the back button and they're going to be gone. And they've got a head on about their day. That's just, just how things work. So don't assume that people are going to scroll down and read the rest of your profile, or look at the rest of your content or anything else. So you got to get their attention very, very quickly in order for them to actually then scroll down and look at things in a little bit more time. Now, the fourth must know LinkedIn setting is the about section on your LinkedIn profile. The mistake I see a lot of advisors planners and wealth managers make here is they write their profile a little bit like a CV or resume. So it reads like a sort of a work history document. But again, if you're trying to appeal to potential clients, they're not really interested in your work history or what you were doing 10 or 15 years ago, they are only interested in whether you understand the problems and challenges that they have in their current situation. So your about section has to be about the problems and challenges of your ideal target audience. Let's jump over to the computer, show you how to tweak that and what to do with it. The about section: this is the more detailed section of the profile. When someone gets past your photo, your name and your tag on the get down to your about section. You can have a lot more detail in here, as you can see, mine is relatively long, a few important tips and the mistakes I see people make in relation to their profile. Particularly advisors, planners, and wealth managers, they tend to write their about section a little bit like their CV or their resume. So it kind of talks about what they've achieved in their, in their career or what they were doing over the last 10 or 15 or 20 years. And that's fine if you're trying to get a job, but most of the time, you're not going to be trying to get a job. You're going to be trying to attract clients and your clients don't really care about what you were doing 10 or 15 years ago, or what your accomplishments in your role have been. They're much more interested in whether you understand their problems, their challenges, and you can potentially provide some form of a solution. That's really all they want. They're going to have a quick flick of your profile. If your tagline's engaging, they'll check out your about section, your about section again, needs to be engaging, and it needs to be particularly the early part of it. A lot more about them, a lot less about you. Okay? You can talk about yourself and your accomplishments further down, or the solutions that you're bringing. It needs to be about their problems and challenges and advisors often ask me, what do I write, or which problems and challenges do I address? And I would normally say, well, think about the top three or four or five questions that, that a prospective clients would ask you in your first meeting with them, and then try and sort of add those into your profile here and sort of engage in relation to those type of problems and challenges. In other words, the things that are already rattling around in the back of their heads. Okay. So I absolutely encourage you to think a little bit more clearly about your, about your, about section and putting in some detail. The other thing which is important here is the layout. You'll notice I've got quite a few white spaces going on here. I've got bullet points going on, I've laid it out and made it easy. I've got different questions to engage the person who's reading the bottom. I've got a clear call to action saying what to do and where they should go next. Okay. So that is really important in your about section. Think about how you actually lay it out, make it simple and easy to read and give them a call to action or encourage them to do something next. Okay. So that kind of concludes our section here in relation to the about section. I hope you got a lot out of this today for must know, LinkedIn settings for financial advisors, as an added bonus for staying till the end. We have in the description below, or in a comment below, we have a link we can go across and get a template that you can use for your LinkedIn profile. These are tested templates that we've used extensively. So go and check that out. It's a PDF download. You can download it and start really optimizing and getting your profile working straight away. So click the link and make sure you check that. I think you'll find it gracious. Thanks very much for your time.