You need a good LinkedIn Headshot

You need a good LinkedIn Professional Headshot. Lucky for the tens of thousands of people that have sat in front of our New York corporate headshot photographer, they now have one. And let me say it is never endingly gratifying when we see our headshots posted to your LinkedIn profile. It is a real point of pride to us and our hope is that one day we will see a Booth headshot every time we do a LinkedIn search.

Okay, you have your headshot. You know what else you need? A well written and fully completed LinkedIn Profile. We are non-stop talking about the importance of a headshot on your LinkedIn profile, telling you it is the first chance you get to tell the world that you are a straight up professional. But now that you have hooked them with your super pulled-together and businesslike looks, you ought to have a super competent and businesslike profile that backs it all up.

Why? What is LinkedIn for?

There was a time that LinkedIn was all about job search. You would mostly go there to post a profile and employers will come find you. Not so much anymore.

There is the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions service to build brand awareness and to generate leads. There is the Sales Solutions service that will help you target the right people and close deals. The job search and recruiting functions are still key features, as they have amped up other services, the job search has become a much smaller fraction of why people sign up for and regularly use LinkedIn. The opportunities and ways you will want to showcase that photo our corporate headshot photographers took are numerous. Specifically, the B2B opportunities are VAST.

Let's look at some statistics compiled by FoundationInc.com:

There are 660+ million registered LinkedIn users worldwide and the company's goal is to increase that to somewhere around 4 BILLION. Your small, tiny targeted audience, the people that are potential clients, is, inevitably, a huge number. We are New York corporate headshot photographers who serve midsize and large companies. The title that we look for as a potential client is very specific. But on LinkedIn there are thousands of people in that specific position.

80% of B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn. Twitter is responsible for 13% and Facebook, 7%. To be fair, LinkedIn is a network focused exclusively on professional relationships, while the other two are not. But the numbers still skew in LinkedIn's favor. People spend far less time on LinkedIn than the other 2, yet it has a fraction of the number of users. Facebook alone has over 2.6 billion users. So, to sum up, the pool is very targeted and you need a comparatively shorter time to get a new lead. As a B2B company providing business photography to companies, we would not even consider advertising on any social media channel but LinkedIn.

Here's another one – 46% of social traffic to corporate websites come from LinkedIn. Getting customers to your website is an important goal and LinkedIn's ability to do that in very large numbers is compelling.

65% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through LinkedIn. If you are in sales, you know that acquiring a new customer is very difficult. Getting 1 new customer might seem like a small thing and, sure, if the positives were limited to that 1 customer, this data point would be less interesting. But buoyed by the other positive items, this strengthens the case considerably.

Marketers love LinkedIn and users love genuine, helpful content. So, the fact that LinkedIn has 15x more content impressions than job ads tells me that LinkedIn is an effective place to market your business and circulate good, genuine content that will make people notice.

Finally, there is this: 61 million LinkedIn users are senior level influencers and 40 million are in decision-making positions. The right people are looking at LinkedIn. Depending on your industry and whether you are making good connections on LinkedIn, you are likely getting your content in front of the right eyes. When we are trying to get in front of our New York executive headshot photography clients, we appreciate that, using LinkedIn, we can get right to, or closer to the decision maker.

If you are into this kind of data and want more, check out this very useful link: https://foundationinc.co/lab/b2b-marketing-linkedin-stats/

Businesses, Pay Attention!

This might seem like a giant advertisement for LinkedIn, but like our LinkedIn blog posts, it is honest, genuine and authentic.

LinkedIn offers significant reach for companies that offer B2B service and it is also highly visible. If you have met us, you already have your corporate portrait from your favorite New York corporate headshot photographers. Your LinkedIn profile text is the next must for most professionals. There is a huge opportunity here and you want to make sure you and your staff are presenting yourselves properly. It makes sense for companies to help polish and offer guidelines on how their client-facing employees are represented on LinkedIn. The corporate headshot is a must. It's the first thing people register as they look at your profile. But a cohesive profile that is clearly written and crafted will bring create an atmosphere that encourages trust and confidence to click through to your website.

Employees and Profiles

The first level of polish comes from having a great business headshot with a well composed Headline and About section. This is your tag line and elevator pitch respectively. It is your chance to explain what it is you do using your own words and perspective. Be descriptive, but clear. You are not making a sale here but you definitely want to intrigue people and get them asking for more. Everything below your headline and about section is the underpinning for what you claim in your About section.

Employers, it pays to help your employees make the most of these sections. No matter where they were before and where they might go after, right now, at this time, they are representing you. While there are different lines of thought of how tied an employee's LinkedIn profile should be to their employers, it should at least evoke the same level of professionalism that you strive to evoke for your business.

Show Employees You Value Them

We get called in to do corporate headshot for in-house staff appreciation events all the time. People love the photos, can't wait to use them, and post them onto their profile, often before the day is over. Helping them improve the language in their profile is the next step in this professional development. It is another great way to show appreciation and it has the added benefit of ultimately, reflecting back well on your company.

A Professional and Unified Message

Having staff with consistent and professional LinkedIn profiles reflects well on your business. It tells the world that you are paying attention to each area of your client facing communications. If you are choosing LinkedIn as a place where your company is active and well represented, encourage your staff to pay the same attention to their profile.

In photography we always say, we are only as good as our last photograph. As a company, you are only as good as the client's last impression and that last impression can be a sub-par online profile.

LinkedIn for Sales and Marketing

Your staff's new and improved profile, will lead to a better, overall, impression on your clients. Now they can leverage LinkedIn for all of the amazing things it has to offer with more confidence. We know from our experience with professionals that they feel embarassed about a bad corporate headshot. You all are great about bringing us in to correct the corporate headshot issues. Now take it further in a way that benefits you and your team. Whether it is sales or marketing or networking or otherwise, it pays for your to invest in better LinkedIn profiles for your team. Next they will be asking for content to share, topics to blog on, ways to search out more leads, etc.

But we can have a conversation about that some other day...