Expand Your Fempire Podcast #106 Transcript

How to Stand Out Online Using LinkedIn with Kate Paine

Welcome to Expand your Fempire with Caterina Rando, the podcast for women in business on a mission. Sharing ideas to support you to grow and thrive. Now here’s your host, Caterina Rando.

[00:00:00] Caterina Rando: Welcome back to another episode of the Expand Your Fempire Podcast. I am blissing to be with you and I have a very special guest today, the amazing, the fabulous, the super smart, Kate Paine. Kate is the founder and CEO of Standing Out Online, and we are gonna have a discussion today to support you to stand out more online and build more influence. Kate, blissing to have you with us today.

[00:00:59] Kate Paine: Thank you so much for having me Caterina. I’m so excited to be with you.

[00:01:03] Caterina Rando: Well, I’m excited to have you! Everybody, Kate and I met, we have the same business coach, and we have spent some time together, and we’ve gotten to know each other over the last several months. And Kate has massive value to bring you. I’m so excited to share with you her super tips and insights today. Kate, before we do that, let’s hear a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey.

[00:01:28] Kate Paine: Okay, it’s gonna sound scary cause I’m gonna go back to seventh grade, so it really isn’t that long there. But in seventh grade, when I used to watch the news and 60 minutes with my dad, I used to watch Diane Sawyer, who was one of the only female broadcasters on television at the time. It was like her and Barbara Walters. And I thought that’s what I wanna be when I grow up.

[00:01:50] So fast forward to college in New York City, I ended up getting an internship at the CBS evening news with Dan Rather, this was back in the late eighties. It was that time when I thought “oh great, I’m gonna have this fabulous internship and I’m gonna learn how to be a journalist.” I actually had the internship for two years, which was unusual at the time. I actually learned that I did not want to be a broadcast journalist, but that I wanted to be behind the scenes, I wanted to do research, and I wanted to write, and I wanted to help people tell their stories.

[00:02:19] And so fast forward yet again, I ended up working in public relations and marketing, and a lot of that of course required a lot of writing and telling stories. But when I was in public relations, I wasn’t like the spin doctor. I didn’t just try to sell things from the standpoint of, like, because they were the best thing. I was always involved with nonprofits or mission-driven companies who had something or a service that I could really wrap my head around and could really, you know, be out there trying to market that and using PR practices.

[00:02:51] So now, today, I have Standing Out Online. My business before this was Kate Paine Associates and I did PR, and didn’t wanna do PR anymore, and so here I am. I’m going into my ninth year of Standing Out Online, where I help entrepreneurs and executives do just that, stand out online, by using digital marketing strategies. And my sweet spot is helping people learn how to develop their personal brand and how to also stand out online using the LinkedIn platform.

[00:03:20] Caterina Rando: Kate, I know you are a LinkedIn enthusiast, expert. Why should people bother with LinkedIn?

[00:03:28] Kate Paine: Great question Caterina. I get that a lot. So LinkedIn is actually technically not social media. You know, it’s not Facebook, it’s not Instagram, it’s not Twitter and TikTok, thank God. LinkedIn is an online professional networking platform. And it kind of gets glommed in to all the other social media, but you know, it’s not the place for like pictures of your kids and what you ate for breakfast and dogs, unless you’re like a teacher, a vet or a chef.

[00:03:57] So the reason why you wanna pay attention to your LinkedIn profile is LinkedIn has come a long way since it was founded in 2003. It’s not just a job-seeking platform anymore, it is now a lead generation tool. It’s where people can find clients. It’s where people can network. It’s where they can build relationships. It’s become something so different than it used to be. When you fill out your LinkedIn profile and you optimize it and put all the information out there about who you are, what you do, and how you help, like show the outcome you can provide by the service or the widget that you sell, that’s a place where you can create your digital footprint. Your about page of your website only has a little bit of information, but your LinkedIn profile shows all of your background, your volunteer work, all of the people who have given you recommendations. Like it’s a one-stop shop on your background. And it’s also a really great place to get social proof.

[00:04:48] Caterina Rando: With LinkedIn, what do you see are some of the biggest things people wanna put their attention on to get the most out of it that you would recommend? But also what do you see as some of the biggest mistakes people are making on LinkedIn?

[00:05:05] Kate Paine: Well, let’s talk about like job titles, for example. So when you introduced me, you read some of my bio, and I said that I’m the founder and CEO of Standing Out Online. No one is going to go into Google or LinkedIn and search for the founder and CEO of Standing Out Online. They’re not gonna search for the vice president of marketing because they’re gonna get a gazillion results in search. So what you wanna do is pay attention to like the keywords for the services, the credentials, and the expertise that you have. So for example, a keyword for me would be like LinkedIn profile coach or personal branding consultant. People search for something like that.

[00:05:41] So when you learn how to use keywords sprinkled throughout your LinkedIn profile, then you’re making it more likely to show up in a search result. And that’s kind of half the battle to be discovered online because there’s so much noise online, and I’m trying to help people stand out from that noise online. But also incorporate like a nugget of your personal story so that you stand out. So if you incorporate a little bit of your story that is an alignment with what you do, then that makes you unique, because no one else has your story. So you wanna be kind of thinking of a couple of these things to make you stand out.

[00:06:17] Now, the biggest mistakes that people make on LinkedIn is that they don’t pay much attention to it, or they put up stuff that’s very generic, or they do what I call like a cut and paste version of their resume, and that’s like giant yawn material. You know, it’s generic.

[00:06:33] Caterina Rando: Avoid the giant yawn, that is a very good super tip my friend. You mentioned your story, I know this is an area where you shine the spotlight a lot with your clients. Take a little bit to explain how do people figure out their personal story.

[00:06:51] Kate Paine: So when you think about your personal story at the very beginning of your show Caterina, I said, I’m gonna go back to seventh grade, but I didn’t talk about it for 10 minutes. I didn’t go from seventh grade to graduation to college- you know what I mean? Like, think about your story and maybe it does take you back. Maybe it takes you back to college.

[00:07:08] There’s different ways, there’s different ideas and ways to get your creative juices flowing to think about what your story might be. The easiest one from the standpoint of using it in your LinkedIn profile is to think about like, how did you get into doing what you do?

[00:07:23] For example, if you went to college and you were like a political science major and you ended up being the executive director of a nonprofit, what is the story arc or the bridge that takes you from one thing to the next? Because there’s gonna be a really interesting story there about something that motivated you or transformed you into becoming this executive director of a nonprofit. Let’s say it’s for, you know, something to raise money for cancer research or a certain type of cancer. Probably that individual has a story about a loved one, who they went through a really tough time with, a challenging time. And then they thought “you know what? This is my calling and this is what I wanna do with my life.”

[00:08:00] So that’s kind of an extreme example, but for the purposes of illustration, to kind of realize, like, what is it that makes you unique about what you do, and go back and kind of figure out that little story nugget. It’s only a few sentences. Takes a little work to figure it out, but it’s not multiple paragraphs here.

[00:08:18] Caterina Rando: This is really good because sometimes I’ll say to somebody “what do you do?” and 20 minutes later they’re still talking, right?

[00:08:24] Kate Paine: Exactly.

[00:08:25] Caterina Rando: We wanna keep our answers brief, succinct, and the same thing of course online. People are not gonna read thousand words. What can you give them in short soundbites that will pique their interest? And one of the things I love about personal stories, Kate, is that it has people get to know you a little bit.

[00:08:45] Kate Paine: Exactly.

[00:08:45] Caterina Rando: They feel like they know you when you share a little bit. And it also can create that emotional connection.

[00:08:52] Kate Paine: Absolutely.

[00:08:53] Caterina Rando: We’re gonna have people do that. Let’s say they have their profile sprinkled with the keywords you’ve said. They’ve got their story. What are some other things that really work for people on LinkedIn?

[00:09:05] Kate Paine: Well, just to your point before I answer that, when people can relate to you because their story hooks you in, that actually builds trust. And once you’ve built trust and connection, then it’s more likely for a person to want to learn more about you and perhaps pick up the phone or send you a message to talk to you about what your service is. And that’s where the relationship-building part starts, so that part is important.

[00:09:28] So another thing that you can be doing on LinkedIn is also sharing some of your background about perhaps your volunteer work. There’s a section you can actually add to your LinkedIn profile, people don’t realize this. It’s called volunteer experience, so if you’ve done two or three or five things, if you’ve served on a board, or maybe you’ve, you know, rolled your sleeves up and worked in a volunteer capacity at a nonprofit, share that. And there’s a description box where you can share a few sentences about that experience. Share about why this cause is important to you, share about what this volunteer work meant to you, because it’s similar to the story piece, it’s another sort of peak behind the curtain and to who you are as a whole person.

[00:10:11] So even though LinkedIn is an online professional networking platform, it’s okay to tell a little bit of your story. It’s okay to let people peek behind the curtain and see you as a whole person, because of what you said, Caterina: it builds connection, it’s authentic, and it builds trust.

[00:10:27] Caterina Rando: Love that. Kate, one of the things I love about LinkedIn, one of the super tips I share a lot is about using the event feature. That LinkedIn allows you to invite a thousand people a week to whatever event you’re having. Can you talk a little bit about how people can effectively or not effectively use that event feature?

[00:10:47] Kate Paine: Sure. So the events feature’s been around for a little over a year now, and there’s different types of events. So if you have a virtual event you’re holding on Zoom or Microsoft teams or whatever, you can create an event and put the link in. You can also do live events, so if you do live in-person events, you can create an event on LinkedIn through your profile for that in-person event and sell tickets.

[00:11:10] Also what’s coming, rolling out to people over the next few months is LinkedIn audio. And that’s gonna be done through events, which if you know what Clubhouse is, LinkedIn audio is social audio very similar to Clubhouse, but way better. And that’s being rolled out right now. So the events feature is a way for you to invite people.

[00:11:31] Caterina Rando: Now Kate, I just wanna jump back to LinkedIn audio because when you say audio makes me think of podcasting or audio recordings, but that’s not what you’re talking about. You’re talking about live virtual audio-only events. Is that right?

[00:11:49] Kate Paine: Correct. So this is something, Caterina, that I’m trying to figure out. But for now, when LinkedIn audio rolls out to everybody, it’s been in beta for about six months, and so it’s basically like Clubhouse where people can create an audio event and then people can show up and be put on stage and talk about something.

[00:12:07] Caterina Rando: My friend, that is very exciting.

[00:12:09] Kate Paine: It is very, very exciting. It’s gonna be a game changer. So if anybody knows Clubhouse, do you remember like if you clicked on someone’s picture, you’d see their little bio in the clubhouse app? Well, with LinkedIn, when you click on their picture, it’s gonna take you to their LinkedIn profile, where there’s so much more information. It could end up being a really great lead gen tool to get people to your profile. So events are huge. You can also now do them from company pages. It used to only be from personal profile pages, but you can also do events from LinkedIn company pages, too.

[00:12:44] Caterina Rando: That’s fabulous. And you know, I wanna say what I love about LinkedIn events is when we invite people to our events on LinkedIn, it shows up in the same place as the connection requests show up, which is great because everybody’s looking at their connection requests and then they’re gonna see the event requests, unlike on Facebook when you do that, it shows up in their notifications, which a lot of people don’t look at and there’s 150 notifications per day. So even if they’re looking, they might not see it. That’s why I love LinkedIn events as a tool for inviting people.

[00:13:26] And I do wanna encourage everyone, as standard operating procedure, make sure you are using this feature on LinkedIn for any of your virtual and live events. Now, the other thing I’ve seen, Kate, is people are using the events opportunity, but they’re using it differently. They’re using it to invite people to join their newsletter. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:13:57] Kate Paine: Sure. So newsletter is another new, fairly new feature, but there’s a little background before I can tell you about newsletter.

[00:14:05] So first of all, the opportunity to have a newsletter has been around for quite some time on LinkedIn, but it was only available to like the Richard Bransons and the Brene Browns of the world. And then when LinkedIn started changing that just in the last year or so, there’s a setting now that you can choose to turn on your profile, it defaults to off. So if you’re on your personal profile page and you scroll down just a little bit, there’s a dashboard, what’s also called resources now. And there’s a little line of text there that says “creator mode” and it says “off.” If you choose to turn creator mode on, you get instant access to newsletters and you get instant access to LinkedIn live, which is like the live streaming version of LinkedIn. It’s not like Facebook live where you can just like pull up your phone or your laptop and go live immediately, you do have to use a third-party tool to do LinkedIn live, like Streamyard or Restream, those are a couple that you may have heard of.

[00:15:02] So if you choose to turn creator mode on, there’s a number of things that happen automatically that you can’t control. So first of all, it takes that connect button and it turns it to a follow button, which means people can follow you without sending an invitation. it also allows you to add five hashtags for the topics that you talk about the most, and those will show up on the intro card at the top of your LinkedIn profile. And then it automatically gives you access to LinkedIn newsletters and LinkedIn live. And that’s where you’re gonna at least see LinkedIn audio. So if you have creator mode or you choose to turn it on, all of a sudden you might see LinkedIn audio, which means you’ve got access to that to create a live audio event.

[00:15:43] Caterina Rando: This is so exciting. Kate, thank you for this. Now, let me ask you another question. So on LinkedIn, one of the things that I really don’t like, and I want your opinion on this, is every Tom Dick and Harry, Mary Jane, and Sheila is reaching out to book an appointment before they even have talked to you or know who you are. And sometimes I have people asking me things like “Hey, would you like to start speaking?” or “Hey, would you like a book?” And “hey if you looked at my profile, you’d see I’ve got three or four books and I’ve been speaking for 28 years.” so obviously there’s a lot of farming for leads without building relationships. What are your thoughts about all this?

[00:16:30] Kate Paine: Well, you’ve hit on a very, very important topic. And it’s the, the, if there’s anything that people ask me the most, it’s exactly what you just asked me. Yes. LinkedIn can be seen some people as a very like spammy way for people to reach out, just because they’re wanting to reach out to you and they wanna build their numbers.

[00:16:48] So, let me let you in on a little bit of a secret that people don’t realize: most of the people who are doing that to you are using some form of an automation tool, any kind of automation. Any kind of automation, especially something that has a Chrome extension, that scrapes data from your LinkedIn profile goes against LinkedIn corporate’s user agreement. There are over 80 banned apps. Now that doesn’t mean that the app is illegal. They can still operate, but if they get caught by LinkedIn’s algorithm, cuz LinkedIn’s trying to really, really crack down on this for exactly the reason you stated.

[00:17:24] People are like “why should I go on there when all I do is get pitched stuff that I don’t want and they haven’t even read my profile.” So it’s really, really frustrating. So LinkedIn is working really hard to try to diminish that. There’s always gonna be some, because people find a workaround for something. If any of your listeners are using any kind of an automation tool that says it’s safe to use with LinkedIn, it most likely is not and you should stop using it, because you really have to build relationships on LinkedIn the old-fashioned way. And that is through connections and invitations and building a conversation and starting a relationship and just doing it that way. That’s the way it works.

[00:18:01] So that’s important, but I will share one more thing. So if you go into your privacy and settings on your LinkedIn profile, there’s over 220 settings and people don’t realize that either. So if you go in and spend maybe 10 minutes of focused time going through every single one and setting them to the user experience you want, that will actually also help reduce all of this spammy stuff. And Caterina, when you get those people who do it, just click ignore and move on. Don’t even reach out to them and say “if you’d read my profile…” cuz I’ve tried it and it doesn’t do anything.

[00:18:34] Caterina Rando: We don’t have time for that. We just keep the party moving.

[00:18:36] Kate Paine: Exactly, exactly,

[00:18:37] Caterina Rando: Exactly. And it’s okay for people to be doing their thing, but we have to put our attention on where do we want to put our attention, which is exactly on connecting with people that we want to connect with. I will say Kate, one of the things that we do when I meet people out networking or speaking is that we always send a direct message to invite them to connect. “Hey, met you at the XYZ Networking would love to stay connected with you here.” And then we invite them to come to one of my free workshops that I do twice a month.

[00:19:12] Kate Paine: Great.

[00:19:12] Caterina Rando: And that’s been really great for building relationships, making connections and getting clients.

[00:19:18] Kate Paine: Right.

[00:19:19] Caterina Rando: Now. I have a question for you. How much would you suggest that any service professional should be posting on LinkedIn, and what would you like to see them posting, and what would you suggest that they are not posting?

[00:19:37] Kate Paine: Okay. So as far as posting, you know, if you’re on Instagram or Twitter or something, people are posting multiple times a day because that’s kind of the nature of those platforms. LinkedIn, happily is not like that.

[00:19:50] So I would say if you haven’t been doing much on LinkedIn, and you wanna get a good sort of rhythm going, you know, and kind of a consistency, then if you could post, you know, one to three times a week, that would be really good.

[00:20:04] And it used to be that with LinkedIn, you’d only post on like certain days of the week. Well, so many people are on LinkedIn seven days a week now that posting any time is a good practice. Actually, Sunday afternoons and evenings are a great time to post because people look at LinkedIn as they like plan their week. And so that’s a good time to get content out there.

[00:20:23] As far as what you post there’s different types of content. So, first of all remember, this is you as the professional, you as the thought leader. So share your thought leadership about an aspect of what you do. So use it to educate. Share some content that inspires people, that helps build around awareness and is congruent with your brand. Okay? Maybe some quotes, but use those sparingly. And then some self-promotion from the standpoint of like “here’s my upcoming class” or “here’s my podcast” or “Hey, I just won this award” or “Hey, I’m headed to speak at this event.” That’s good to put out there too. So you kind of want a little bit of each of those, spread out over time. Those are usually the kinds of things. Ask people questions in your post to try to encourage conversation on LinkedIn, because that’s partly what you’re trying to do through posting is to build conversation.

[00:21:13] Caterina Rando: Love it, Kate. Now, Kate, let me ask you a question. Many years ago, cuz I don’t know how long I’ve been on LinkedIn, been a long time. I was co-moderator of a group. I haven’t really participated in groups much on LinkedIn in a really long time. Is there still value there? What are your thoughts?

[00:21:32] Kate Paine: Great question. So the group experience on LinkedIn used to be fabulous until LinkedIn took away all the capabilities of the moderators, and basically what happened is everybody bailed. If you go into a lot of groups that you used to be active in, it’s pretty much crickets in there now. And that’s really unfortunate because the group experience, it was probably five, six years ago, was awesome.

[00:21:55] And so, LinkedIn is claiming that they’re trying to make the group experience better again, but every time they say that we expect cool things, it’s still not so hot. But there are people who are building groups there again. The funny thing is I’m in this great LinkedIn experts user group, and we’re people like me from all over the world. We were on our group there, we actually took our group to Facebook, to a private group on Facebook because it was just easier.

[00:22:20] So, I would say that if you’ve had groups that you were in, don’t bail on them, hang on because they could make it better. I am seeing more people starting groups again, and it seems to be a little bit better, but it’s still not, you know, it’s not the greatest place for a group experience and I’m hoping, you know, dot, dot, dot yet. .

[00:22:39] Caterina Rando: Thank you, Kate. I’m glad it’s not just me. I it’s got not you as the expert. Okay, good. Are there any aspects of LinkedIn that we haven’t touched on that you think are really awesome that we wanna shine the spotlight on?

[00:22:54] Kate Paine: Yes. So I don’t know if your listeners realize this, but Microsoft actually owns LinkedIn. A lot of people don’t realize that Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016 for $26 billion. And so all of the changes and the features that you’ve seen over the last few years are being driven by Microsoft.

[00:23:14] And at first, when that happened, I thought “oh boy, I hope they don’t ruin it,” but they’ve actually been giving it a lot of value. And they’re really trying to give small business people like us, more opportunity out there.

[00:23:25] And so they’re coming up with new features. So like LinkedIn live, which is a great feature. If you already write a newsletter or a blog, repurpose it as a LinkedIn newsletter, don’t reinvent the wheel, but get extra traction. Audio is coming. There’s another new feature, fairly new, that’s called the bell. And you don’t see it on your own profile, but if you go to someone else’s profile up in the upper right corner, underneath the banner, there’s a little bell. And if you click on the bell, that means that anytime, like if I went to your profile, Caterina, and I clicked on the bell, anytime you post something, I would get a notification that you’ve posted.

[00:24:00] So you wouldn’t wanna do that with everybody, or are you gonna get hundreds of notifications. But like, for me, I ring the bell on thought leaders that I like to follow. I ring the bell on my clients so that I can follow them, because that’s partly what I’m teaching them and I wanna see what they’re putting out there. So, you know, it’s a great way to be able to see people’s content without following them or connecting with them. So that’s kind of a nifty new feature. The events feature’s getting stronger. The company page experience is completely being overhauled right now. It’s not rolled out to everybody. So the company page is supposed to be even better for really small businesses, instead of just like the Nikes and the Apples of the world.

[00:24:37] Caterina Rando: My friend, you’re getting me so excited about LinkedIn. I love it.

[00:24:40] Kate Paine: Good!

[00:24:41] Caterina Rando: I love it. Kate, one of the things I know is that, you know, we talked a little bit about your personal story. Sometimes people feel like they don’t have any stories and sometimes we hear speakers and you know, they’ve been shot in the head or they’ve been arrested and had a terrible disease. And sometimes people feel like “oh my God, nothing ever happened to me in life, I don’t have any stories.” I know that’s not the case, we all have great stories. You have a free gift for everybody to support them in pulling out their stories. Let’s tell them about it.

[00:25:14] Kate Paine: I do I have a free ebook and it’s a short one, but it’s How to Discover Your Personal Story. So it’s sort of what I talked about, but there’s some exercises in the ebook that will help you kind of come up with your little story nugget. And remember for the purposes of your LinkedIn profile, you’re only coming up with one, it’s only one story. We may have several, but from the intention of like using it in your about section of your LinkedIn profile, that ebook will help you really maybe narrow that down and how to develop it.

[00:25:42] Caterina Rando: Wonderful. Now you, you wanna get this book, you wanna do the exercises, because for your speaking you’re gonna want several stories. This will support you with that as well. Wonderful. We will put your link in the show notes. Kate, please tell everyone where can they connect with you?

[00:26:01] Kate Paine: Well, they can absolutely connect with me on LinkedIn. So linkedin.com/in/katepaine, P A I N E. Or people can feel free to message me through LinkedIn, or they can email me at kate@standingoutonline.com.

[00:26:17] Caterina Rando: Love it, standing out online. Kate, any final super tips or wisdom for our listeners.

[00:26:24] Kate Paine: I thought of one thing. There is a section you can add to your LinkedIn profile called Featured, and you can add links and media and things, and it creates a visual component in the middle of your LinkedIn profile. You can have a number of links going to like maybe your podcast or to maybe a newsletter that you’ve done or maybe it’s another article that you’ve written on some other, you know, person’s blog or something like that.

[00:26:48] So it allows people to see visual, not just text, but visual resources that you can send them to and drive them to your website or other types of digital assets. So add the featured section. It’s one of the few visual components of a LinkedIn profile.

[00:27:03] Caterina Rando: And where do you find your featured section? Where do you find that?

[00:27:06] Kate Paine: So you actually have to add it. So at the very top of your profile, where it has your name and your headline, there’s a button there that says “add profile section.” You just go in there and they’ll find the one that says “add featured.” Click on it, and then follow the prompts to upload that content.

[00:27:21] Caterina Rando: How exciting. Alright my friends, run don’t walk to make these upgrade that Kate has discussed with us. You probably wanna listen to this episode again, because there’s so much here for you.

[00:27:35] Kate, thank you so much for being with us today. Everybody go upgrade your LinkedIn profile so you can stand out online, get Kate’s free gift, connect with her so that you can sell more, serve more, and most importantly, uplift more lives with your massive value.

[00:27:56] This is Caterina Rando. Hopefully you’re gonna right after this listen to another episode of the Expand Your Fempire Podcast. We are here to support you as a woman on a mission. Be with you next time. Bing bing bing!

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Expand Your Fempire with Caterina Rando.