Good news! LinkedIn is finally getting on board the Video Train with the launch of the LinkedIn Professional Portfolio.
LinkedIn now lets you upload images, videos, presentations and documents to your profile to add a nice visual to the otherwise text heavy platform. You can add video and images to the summary, experience and education sections of your profile.
How to add video to your LinkedIn profile: video
Here’s a quick video on how to add video to your LinkedIn profile.
How to Add Images and Video to Your LinkedIn profile: step by step
To add images, documents, presentations or video to your LinkedIn profile, click “Profile” from the menu at the top, then choose “Edit Profile.”
Upload or embed your video
Under each of the entries in your Summary, Experience and Education sections is a new icon—a square with a (+) symbol. Click this button to upload a file or add a link to the video or image you’d like to share.
Adding links
If you want to add a link, type or paste the link to your content into the “Add a link” field.
The link can be simply a copied and pasted link from Youtube:
Titles and descriptions
To edit the title and description, move your cursor over Profile at the top of your homepage and select Edit Profile.
Scroll to the media sample you’d like to edit and click the pencil icon in the lower-right corner. Click inside the Title and Description fields to edit the text, then click Save. You can also move media samples from one section to another.
Do this by clicking the drop-down menu under “Move this media to” and choose the section of your profile you’d like to move it to.
Boom!
Click ‘add to profile’ and you’ll see your video appear in your profile.
To rearrange items within the same section of your profile, click and drag them to the spot you want. Any questions? Get in touch!
Good news,: your video is live! The ‘bad’ news is, your business video is not going to perform miracles by itself: you’ll need to put in a bit of work to get in front of the right people now!
What’s a result?
Getting a result is not about the amount of views you get: it’s about getting the right views. Your video needs to be seen by the right people, resulting in actions like contacting you, booking you on a speaking gig or asking for a quote.
Three steps towards results
To make sure you get results, we need to make sure your video: 1. On the right platform. 2. Easy to find by search engines like Google. 3. Easy to use, share and embed. Here are some good starting points:
Video platforms
Vimeo
At Hunting With Pixels, we love Vimeo because it’s free and high quality. Vimeo is a video platform that makes your video look much cleaner and crisper than Youtube and you don’t get annoying banner ads or related videos. https://vimeo.com/huntingpixels There’s a very reasonably priced Vimeo Pro option too.
Youtube
Although it’s a video site, Youtube is now the second biggest search engine and the place where your audience will look for content so you have to be there. Make sure you don’t just upload your video though; put a enticing title, a well written description and relevant tags on your video so your video actually turns up on search results.
Clickable links to your website from Youtube
Make sure you put the full url of your website in the first two lines of your description, so something like: ‘https://www.huntingwithpixels.com.’. Add the ‘http://’ bit will make the link clickable. It needs to be in the first two lines because that’s the only bit of text you will see without having to click the ‘more’ button, which almost noone does.
One load – video seeding
There are dozens of other platforms out there, but Youtube is the one with the biggest reach by far. If you want to be on a number of video platforms at the same time, you may want to look at video seeding software like One Load: http://www.oneload.com/ One Load will automatically upload your video to dozens of platforms in one go. Personally, I’m not sure if that scattergun approach is going to get you a lot of relevant leads but it can’t hurt either. http://www.oneload.com/
Places to send your content so it can be found by prospects
Assuming you’re in the B2B space, here are some good places for your content the be.
Seems like a no brainer, but I see a lot of our clients send links to Youtube to their database. Don’t. Use this opportunity by getting the video to create traffic to your site: that’s where your contact button is! Write and article around your video and post on your site. The article can provide additional information and useful links; video and written content really complement each other well.
Sourcebottle
SourceBottle is an online service that connects journalists, writers and bloggers with ‘sources’. Make sure you become a source by post the similar article to the one you make for your site on Sourcebottle: don’t simply copy the article and paste it on Source Bottle. Google has software that checks for duplicate content online, and once that’s been flagged your article will not turn up in search results so take the time to reword. http://www.sourcebottle.com/
Slideshare
Slideshare is like the Youtube of slide decks. Create an interesting looking slide deck with a good title, then embed your video in it. You’ll be surprised how much traction this can potential get. It’s also a good place to find slides and ideas for future presentations. http://www.slideshare.net/
Social media
Here are some thoughts on what platforms are useful for you.
LinkedIn
Great tool for B2B engagement (engagement, not hard selling) and reaching specific groups of professionals. Great for the services industry. A good place to start B2B collaborations. LinkedIn now has a blog tool that allows you to write articles and embed Youtube videos easily; this is where you need to be for B2B.
Facebook
Facebook works well for B2C engagement and any events you may be running. We’re not convinced about B2B engagement.
Twitter
If you have a decent amount of followers, send a tweet linking to the article on your website. Twitter is generally useful for collaboration, engagement with other professionals and regular updates to your clients. Twitter needs a lot of quick responses to work for you, so only worth doing if you have the time or if you just love the quick fire responses. I’m not a huge fan myself.
Other platforms
And then there’s a gazillion other video/social media platforms. All very clever and interesting, but not likely to get you results unless you put a lot of effort in. I’d recommend sitting on the fence for now.
Wait, there’s still the world outside social media
Newsletters
Never call your newsletter ‘newsletter’. Do that and you can pretty much guarantee noone will click. If you’re going to use your database to update your clients on a regular basis, offer something that’s one page, well designed and relevant. Add a video to that and on average your click through doubles.
Events
Video is being used on displays a lot. My view is that for it to have any effect it better be good, and it needs a tangible; something to do right there and then. If you use video as a nicer version of a bill board, you’ll get the same results as bill boards; not a lot of traction unless you’re everywhere.
Get personal!
Ultimately, what your video needs to do is engage people. Getting people engaged is not a process that you can automate or templatise; the more targeted and personal you are, the better your response rate. So instead of sending the same thing to your entire database, think about how you can add a personal message like: Hey Robert, how’s life at the Hunting With Pixels HQ? Just did a talk on the Curse Of Knowledge at Ignite Sydney, knowing you’re a bit of a psychology buff I thought it might interest you:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E64gxVhDUQI I don’t know about you, but I’d click on that. Good luck!
Click inside the Title and Description fields to edit the text, then click Save. You can also move media samples from one section to another.
