How to Build your Network with Analytics Professionals on LinkedIn - SAS
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Experts and business leaders are advising us to build our professional network because opportunities often present themselves to those who have the strongest networks. However, very few share with us how. In the post-COVID-19 world that we currently live in, it is much harder to build your network at networking events. On this webinar, Jason Tan, the host from The Analytics Show podcast, will show you how you can build your network with analytics professionals around the world on LinkedIn. What impacts would this have on your analytics career, if you have a trusted network advocating and vouching for you when you need it? On-demand presentation available here: https://www.sas.com/en_au/webinars/build-network-analytics-linkedin.html
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How to Build your Network with Analytics Professionals on LinkedIn - SAS
- 1. LinkedIn for Your Analytics Career Success How to Build Your Network with Analytics Professionals on LinkedIn 23 Sep 2020
- 2. And why you? 2 Are you visible?
- 3. Are you making yourself the go-to expert? 3 Reach and Visibility
- 4. Investing in Your Future 4
- 6. LinkedIn Building your network and personal brand 6 Social Media
- 8. the Expert Make people come and follow you 8 You’re
- 9. LinkedIn Statistics for 2020 9 Why you should care?
- 10. Become the Top 1% 10 the Equation Change
- 12. The Challenges What to post When to post How to post Contents Visibility 12
- 13. 50k - 100k views per month 13 It is possible to have 50k - 100k views on any given month.
- 16. 3-Step Framework Post Engage Give Back Step 1 16
- 17. 3-Step Framework Post Engage Give Back Step 2 17
- 18. 3-Step Framework Post Engage Give Back Step 3 18
- 19. Visibility and Reach 19
- 20. Measure Your Success 20
- 22. 22 Research, filter, select and connect
- 25. Engagement 25
- 26. 26
- 27. 27 Any questions? Thanks! Advice from business leaders around the world on data science >> kite.link/TheAnalyticsShow
Editor's Notes
- . . Hello and welcome - thank you so much for accepting our invitation and joining me for this virtual event. Presented to by SAS Squad and The Analytics Show podcast. My name is Jason Tan and I’m chatting to you from sunny Brisbane. Now today, I want to share with you about the power and potential of LinkedIn and how to use it to help your analytics career. This is a pre-recorded session but I’m going to give you the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. So, if I could ask that you make a note for your question and save it till the end. Thank you! Now, let’s get started! .
- I want to begin by asking you a question... How much are you visible to your targeted employers in the marketplace? Let's face it... the market is full of graduates, analytics professionals, and talents - onshore or offshore, who are directly or indirectly competing with you in many ways. Every single one of them is working hard to improve themselves everyday. So, are you keeping up with this competition? Are you doing enough to make yourself more employable for getting your dream job? To land your dream job or project, -- your skills and abilities matter, but equally your network and visibility in your network matter. Whether you like it or not, it's vital you build your network and keep reminding them about you and your strengths. This is particularly important for young people who just started their career and often compete against more experienced professionals. Yet, even for those professionals, who claim to have strong reputation, building a strong personal network is still critical for long term success. .
- In order to be trusted for an important role or project, you need to establish yourself as an expert with good track record. You also need to build your network to become visible! Without reach and visibility, no one will know you exist and no one will give you your dream job. That’s why many technical people are always struggling and chasing one role after another. There are a TON of really good people running around with expertise but they are not being recognised, not making enough, and some struggle financially. The reason they never make enough is not necessarily 100% correlated to their technical expertise or skills. Instead, the problem is they don’t have enough network and visibility. No matter how great their work is, they are not the first person to come to the mind. Hence, it's crucial to make yourself visible with a strong network. And to do that effectively, you need to position yourself as a well-rounded analytics professional in your field and appeal to the people you want to attract. If you don't, you will always find yourself in the position of having to chase jobs, and it’s only getting harder each day. You will never have the kind of career and freedom you want. .
- Now even when you are not actively seeking opportunities, you should still work to build your reach and visibility. You should actively invest yourself in building your authority and a strong network. It’s not for today but for the future. Most importantly, a strong presence and network will undoubtedly strengthen your position in the organization where you are currently working. This means, faster promotions, raise or opportunities! .
- According to payscale.com, 85% of open positions are filled through networking. This brings us to the topic of why networking is more important now than ever before. Thanks to the internet, we have much more dynamic and different ways of networking than older times. However, in online networking, there remains a distance that creates a new challenge. But before that, I want to remind you once again about why you should be doing it: It’s about being able to summon up jobs or new opportunities when you need it the most. It’s about being able to share your thoughts and ideas to grow and expand your perspective. It’s about rapidly progressing your career. I can go on forever. But you get the point! Now, let’s get back to our main discussion of using LinkedIn to build your network with the analytics professionals from around the world. .
- I know I am not the first person to tell you about the power of social media but I may be the first to actually show you exactly how it could work for you. Like it or not, social media are here to stay. I am an advocate of social media and in particular, LinkedIn for building our career but more importantly building ourselves a strong network that we can rely on. And above all, to establish our personal brand. Through LinkedIn, it is possible to build a strong network of professionals who can help each other in a number of ways. The best bit is it’s completely free and it is highly effective when used well. And - this is now a really good time to make this platform work for you, because as a result of Covid 19, there are more active users online than ever before. .
- As the venture capitalist in Silicon Valley - Sanjit Singh rightly points out, “Success is 50% due to what you know, and 50% due to who you know. You have to work on both fronts, one without the other is not enough.” And LinkedIn offers the solution to help with the part of who you know, and get them to know you better. It is a really amazing platform. It’s amazing that you can filter, identify and connect with the analytics professionals and key decision makers within any organization. With over 690 million members, I am not that surprised to read that 75% of hiring managers look at LinkedIn profiles to learn more about candidates and 85% of employers say that a positive online reputation influences their hiring decisions. You see, hiring itself is actually quite a big decision for hiring managers and organisations. That’s why they sometimes rely so heavily on LinkedIn to vet the candidates. Then there are 4 to 9 interview sessions. All of which are designed to understand who you are and what you can do. Now, if you have a network that already knows you well, you may not have to go through those tedious interview cycles ever again. The questions are, how can we build our network and build that on LinkedIn? .
- For today, one of the key strategies that I want to focus and share with you is the content marketing strategy on LinkedIn. I will show you how to use it to build your network, make yourself visible and build your personal brand at the same time. You see, making a post on LinkedIn is like a TV commercial - It’s there to remind your targeted audience about you and your expertise, which helps to improve your credibility. For LinkedIn, creating and publishing content that is relevant and based on your expertise will allow you, with time, to build your visibility and brand. And not to mention help people remember who you are. So, whenever you put a shout out for opportunities, those audience are already familiar with who you are and what you stand for. This increases the chance of finding more and better roles. .
- But why LinkedIn, I hear you may ask. A recent study has shown there are: 63 mil decision-makers 90 mil senior-level influencers 10 mil C-level executives on LinkedIn Now imagine how powerful this is if you can connect with some of these decision makers, whilst building your personal brand and authority on LinkedIn. The only catch is that you have to start doing it now and do it right. The results can be simply rewarding! .
- Did you know, of the total 630 million LinkedIn users, just less than 1% of them share content every week? Therefore, If you start posting consistently, you are automatically in that top 1% pool and stand the chance of having more eyeballs on your content than the other 99%. Yes! Competition is that low! Now, this is the second thing I want you to understand about the content marketing strategy on LinkedIn. If you can cast your minds back to the old days before we had social media or even the internet, the only way to have credibility in the industry was to be speaking at events or being interviewed by the media. This was however only available to a very small group of people. In the post internet era, social media allows anyone to share their views and build up credibility within their niche. All of us, including you, can use LinkedIn to articulate and share our thoughts and expertise. And with consistency, you will start to build your own authority and position yourself as an expert in your industry. And remember, you are not writing for every single person in the room and you don’t have to appeal to every single employer in the marketplace. What you should be focusing on is, writing for those who value your beliefs and your ways of working. Then you build the followers that want to listen to what you have got to say. It’s much better to have 100 true followers, than 10,000 non-active contacts. .
- Now, like anything in life, consistency is the key! Let me ask you this. Have you ever woke up in the morning, watched one advertisement and said, I totally believe what I’ve just watched and I am going to buy this product? Or, have you ever woke up in the morning, read one post and said, I totally agree with what I have just read and I am going to become one of their followers? No. It takes multiple touch points. And remember, the higher the role you aim for, the more touch points it will be required before someone believes in you. Even people like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Bill Gate still post and share their thoughts every day. Because they know that they need to consistently remind us all how awesome they are, and educate the world about what they believe in. If you look at this from the hiring manager perspective, before they hire you, they want to know who you are, what you know, what you think of the subject, why you are the expert. And how you can help them. With this in mind, you need to consistently educate them week in week out and like a business, you can do this with a content marketing strategy at scale. When you do it with consistency, you will begin to stand out from the crowd and eventually start being seen as a thought leader with your own followers. .
- Now you might be wondering that what should you post? Haven’t everything that needs to be said has been said already? Yes possibly, but you actually have a lot of value to add. Everyone of us has something useful to say. So, start telling your story and sharing your views right away! Start by posting twice a month. If you are really not sure what to post, then share a LinkedIn post or article you find interesting. But remember, you should also share why you find it interesting. As for when to post, I would suggest to post it when your audiences are online - and most of the time, it’s when people are commuting. Knowing what, when and how to post is really important, because effectively it drives your contents’ visibility. For those of you who are already posting, what’s your view count and engagement like? I am guessing your view count is low - max of 200 views per post with just a few likes and a comment here and there. Unfortunately, that's the all-too-common story for many who try to grow their personal brand on LinkedIn. You pour so much effort into a piece of content -- and nobody sees it. Its soul destroying, I know exactly how you feel. .
- At this point - Most people will say: “ LinkedIn content doesn’t work. LinkedIn is dead”. But that's not true. LinkedIn is actually booming and we're only at the beginning of it. On any given month, my LinkedIn posts will reach anywhere between 50k to 100K views. Now, do you think this is possible on Facebook or Twitter? Absolutely Not. Or let me ask you the same question but in a different way. How much would 100k views cost you in terms of advertising dollars? Let me do the math for you here: Cost per thousand impressions is about $25 dollars so 100 thousand views will cost you around $2500, on the view count alone. On average, cost per click (CPC) is about $5. A good rule of thumb is 0.1% as your click-through rate (CTR). This means you get as close as possible to one click in every one thousand impressions. This will be another $5000 dollars in cost on the CPC alone. In total, you will need to spend $7500 dollars to get the same result. .
- Third thing I am going to share with you is how the LinkedIn algorithm works so that you know how to use it to your advantage. Here is how it works. Since there is so much content to show, LinkedIn needs to prioritize the posts and show only the valuable and interesting ones. Because if there are more great contents on LinkedIn, people will stay on LinkedIn longer, and the more valuable LinkedIn can become and of course the more money they can make. So the algorithm monitors posts on the content quality based on engagement, and if a piece of content doesn’t get a lot of interest during the first 2 hours, it decides it probably won’t get it later. So next time you make a post, remember you need to get initial engagement to conquer the algorithm. And this is why the timing is so important. .
- Now, in more detailed level, this is how it looks on LinkedIn’s newsfeed of your network. You write a post, and if one of your 1st level connections likes it, it will be visible to more of your 1st level connections. And if more people engage, it will be visible to even more of your 1st level connections and then also your second or third level connections. So more likes equal to more views. The algorithm also looks for a higher level of engagement quality such as longer and more in-depth comments, and comments on comments chains. And as mentioned before, engagement velocity is also important. If you don’t get initial engagement fast enough, your post simply won’t spread. .
- The fourth thing I am sharing with you today is my 3 step framework which I use everyday on Linkedin. Step 1- Write your post to showcase your expertise whilst being interesting. Tell a story. Evidence shows that storytelling is often more engaging Use white space between sentences to increase the reading time because the algorithm measures the time people spend on reading your post. Use the hashtags that are relevant to what you do but remember, any post should have a maximum of 3 hashtags Use a variety of format - image with text, text only, video, poll, and, etc. .
- Step 2 - Engage your post and commenters. Reply with an intent to help the commenter or learn something. The more engaging the conversation is, the better they will remember you. Effectively, you want to turn the comment section into a conversation thread. The increased number of comments will trigger the algorithm to show your posts to more people. By now, your post will be more visible on the news feed. This will increase your visibility to your network on LinkedIn. .
- Step 3, give back and help others become visible. You can help them by liking and commenting on their post. Give them encouragement. When you comment on other people’s posts, you are not only building rapport with them, but you are making yourself visible to their network. In fact, this is exactly the same strategy that many American entrepreneurs build rapport with potential investors on Twitter. This way, when they finally pitch to the investors, investors are already familiar with them. Finally, Keep repeating the cycle of posting and engaging. I know it will be difficult but gradually, you will find it easier with time. Remember you are building your personal brand here, and building a brand will always require time and consistency. The rewards will be worth it! .
- Let me share with you how it works for me so far. Here are two posts from myself that have got 8500 and 4600 views respectively. Would you say this helps the visibility in my own network? So, what are the results you can expect with consistent contents marketing strategy: More eyeballs on your profile More people are reaching out to you and connecting More conversations are coming into your inbox .
- The way to measure success is never just about the engagement on the posts. Rather, it’s about how much our networks are listening to what we have got to say consistently. In fact, some of the people that I have the best conversations with, they never engage on my posts. But, they read it. With consistency, They continue to be reminded of who you are, what you do, and what you stand for They are gradually warming up to you and stop treating you as just another connection on LinkedIn They understand how you can help solve their problems Eventually, they may even reach out to you to discuss how you can help them. Or when you speak with them in real life and discuss opportunities, they will warm up to you a lot more and be ready to listen how you can help solve their issues because they will feel like they already know you. .
- So, we have been talking a lot about the content posting on LinkedIn. How does it relate to building your network? Well, it’s actually a very important part for our overarching strategy in network building and this the very next thing I am about to share with you. Before I do that, Let me explain: It is about the perception of who you are and what you can do for your network. Suffice to say, if you are the CEO of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, I bet you will have 100% strike rate in connecting with others. But what if you are just starting your career, and whether we like it or not, some people will judge you based on your title alone and would never connect with you. So, you got to give them a reason or a possibility on how you could be helpful to them. This is where content posting comes into play, because it helps to add strength to your online profile. .
- So, assuming that you follow my suggestion of actively posting on LinkedIn, it’s time now to work on the 4th or final strategy. It’s about outreaching to connect with other people and grow your network on LinkedIn. Use the filters function to find the people you want to connect with. Consider upgrading to premium account, it gives you a lot more filters to fine tune your searches. Literally, you could filter down to the level of seniority, years of experience, years at a company or even the university they went to. Move past the initial hesitation and start sending out connection requests to industry folks who can make a difference to your career. Don’t be put down if they are not accepting your connection request. If your profile is reasonably strong, you will have about 25 - 50% chance of getting connected. .
- Also, don’t be afraid to reach out and connect with the people at higher positions. You will be surprised how open they are for connecting and even having a conversation. I can assure you this from my personal experience. A lot of times this has happened to me when I was too afraid to send connection requests to people who I admire so much. I feared that they would ignore me. But I still sent out the request with my fingers crossed. And, to my utter surprise and joy, they received the request right away! On the other hand, if you simply do not send out the connection requests, you never know what chances you are missing out. .
- Also, keep these general rules in mind while sending out the connection requests: Rule 1, don’t just click the connect button but always always personalise your connection request message. Keep it short and simple. .
- Most people don’t take this part seriously but treat it like antique collection. They connect and put it on the shelves for display. So rule 2, always follow up with a message after you are connected. At this point, you could highlight a few details about why do you want to connect. It could be because you read a post from them or you find something very interesting about their profile. And remember, never ever pitch them for anything. A simple rule of thumb I would often use is, whatever you type on the messaging, ask yourself- would you have said it in your real-life social interactions? If not, don’t say it. Again keep it simple and short. No one really wants to read an essay in their inbox. When you have time, comment on their post. You can also share their posts on your profile, if you think that can also help your other connections. Gradually, when there’s an opportunity, try to meet offline over a coffee. This way you will complete a full cycle of relationship building. This will help you forge a stronger and authentic connections. .
- So, we are almost at the end of our session here! Now, let’s have a quick recap - Whether you are just starting out in your analytics career or you are a seasoned professional, LinkedIn is the best platform to grow your network and build your personal brand. There is never any overnight success. Success comes from a good amount of preparation, a ton of perseverance, and a dab of luck. And I believe you can make your own luck by following the strategies I shared with you today. I am confident this can build your brand and a reputation as an analytics thought leader in the industry. I know this because I use the same strategy to build my The Analytics Show podcast. And it’s never too late to start working on your brand. Best of luck! .
- I hope all this has been useful for you, and I thank you for your time. If you want to learn more to grow your career in analytics, make sure you join us more often at the webinar provided by SAS Squad or follow my podcast - The Analytics Show. Last but not least, you can always reach out to me with any questions you might have. Thank you! .