March 1, 2016 / in LinkedIn / by Jason Terry
Author: Jason Terry
I wanted to quickly follow up on all the great feedback Mic and I got on my post, “We do it because we love you. And we need your feedback!” two weeks ago. We heard validation on some key topics and we got some great ideas for future topics. Thank you so much to everyone who got back to us with comments and suggestions and for taking the time to read our stories. It means so much to us!
Ernie StraubThis week I wanted to cover some LinkedIn topics with you. The inspiration for this story comes from work I did last week with Ernie Straub at Straub Construction. He has a great story, which he goes into in his LinkedIn summary. He also asked some great questions. I thought you might like to hear the answers.
For those of you that don’t know, we’ve been working closely with Straub Construction for more than a year. We created their new website and blog. We also execute their monthly blogging program and set up an email newsletter system that automatically sends out their new blog stories to hundreds of people every month. I love hearing how their storytelling efforts are raising awareness in their industry and in the Kansas City community.
One of the reasons Ernie and I spent some time together was to update his LinkedIn summary. Mic and I show Ernie’s profile as an example of what a great profile looks like when doing LinkedIn training for other companies. We were doing another LinkedIn training class with our friends at Alterra Bank when I noticed that Ernie’s summary said, “For 91 years and three generations, the core values of Straub Construction have remained the cornerstone of our success. Those core values are as follows: Honesty, Integrity, Work Ethic, Respect and Accountability.”
The problem is that they’re celebrating their 96th year of being an award winning general contractor in Kansas City. We did LinkedIn training with Straub Construction about five years ago, and Ernie hasn’t had to change much on his summary since then. I recommended the change to Ernie at our February blogging session and he asked to do a full review of his profile with me to make sure it was up to date.
We ended up future proofing that sentence a bit by changing it to, “For almost 100 years and three generations…” And we made a few other changes as well together to get Ernie’s profile up to date.
When was the last time you reviewed your summary on LinkedIn?
The next thing Ernie asked me about was how to see the total number of connections he had on LinkedIn. Ernie is well known and respected in this city. He definitely has more than 500 connections on LinkedIn. And once you have over 500 connections, LinkedIn displays your connection count as 500+. But what if you want to know the actual number of connections you’ve got? It used to be easy to find this number on the right hand side of your LinkedIn home page. And then LinkedIn moved it into the Connections area of their web site.
But I couldn’t find the number of connections there either! LinkedIn had once again made a change. And the way to find the total number of connections you have on LinkedIn is not obvious.
Log into LinkedIn and click “My Network | Connections” in the main menu at the top. You will see the screen below… and over to the right is a gear icon. Click the gear icon, and on the resulting page you will see your total number of connections towards the top of the screen.
The last thing I covered with Ernie was how to look at his profile as the public would see it. To view your LinkedIn profile, you click Profile | Edit Profile. But if you are wanting to review your summary, you might not be able to see it easily because you’re in edit mode. All you have to do is click the blue “View profile as” button to see your profile as someone else would see it.
I recommend you review your LinkedIn profile summary if you haven’t in a while. And I hope you found the additional LinkedIn tips interesting and helpful. Talk to you soon!
We have worked with Blue Gurus for almost 10 years now. He and his team are incredible to work with.
Among other things they have helped us get a blog team together so that we are blogging regularly and it is a nice variety of viewpoints in the blog posts. All of us have stellar LinkedIn profiles thanks to Jason. There are many many other things they've helped us with over the years… too many to mention in one quote. They're so knowledgeable and so helpful and are a positive energetic addition to any project. I would highly recommend Jason and his team!!!!
Kandy Meehan
Owner of Home Rental Services
