Executive Summary

On this episode of Startuprad.io, host Jörn “Joe” Menninger interviews guest Daniel Alfon on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile to generate leads for your startup. They discuss the importance of having a professional-looking profile photo, creating engaging educational content, and utilizing the “Featured” section and Experience section to showcase your work and personality. The speaker emphasizes storytelling as a crucial factor in creating a compelling user profile and suggests turning on creator mode on social media platforms to enable followers and add hashtags. They also recommend checking the privacy settings on your profile photo and customizing your banner to enhance your company’s online presence. Tune in to discover practical tips for effectively marketing your startup on LinkedIn.

The Importance of Individual Profiles: “Don’t neglect your individual profiles. And one of the most common mistakes is that customer facing executive the VP, marketing, the co founders, the CTO, the Vprnd their profile will often be under optimized.”

— Daniel Alfon

Questions Discussed

1. What are the key takeaways from the episode in terms of optimizing one’s LinkedIn profile?

2. How does early engagement on important posts improve visibility on LinkedIn?

3. What is the value of evergreen content in generating leads for startups?

4. How important is storytelling in creating a compelling user profile for a startup?

5. What are the advantages of turning on creator mode on social media platforms, and how can it benefit startups?

6. Why is having a professional-looking profile photo that is visible to everyone important on LinkedIn?

7. What is the “Featured” section on LinkedIn, and how can it be used to enhance one’s profile?

8. How can startups effectively promote educational content on LinkedIn?

9. How do you strike a balance between promoting your own brand on LinkedIn and connecting with potential clients or investors?

10. Why is it important to have at least two active administrators for a LinkedIn company page?

Maximizing Your Company’s LinkedIn Presence: “Engagement early on can give that post a lot of extra exposure.”

— Daniel Alfon

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Creating Evergreen Content: “Yes, there is some type of content that’s evergreen, so you could have content that will generate leads for you years down the road.”

— Daniel Alfon

It Ain’t Bragging If It Is True

On the day of the publication of this interview, we also discovered that we have cracked the Global Top 100 Technology Podcast Charts, of analytics company Chartable. Thank you very much to all our listeners who made this possible!

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“Enhance Your Company’s Presence with a Visual Banner on LinkedIn”: “I know it sounds like a no-brainer, but still, most startup employees and even some of the startup founders did not take the time to upload a banner.”

— Daniel Alfon

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“The Importance of a Professional Profile Photo on LinkedIn: “Can you imagine the difference between a profile that has a photo and a profile that doesn’t have one? LinkedIn says that up to 24 more people click when there’s a profile photo.”

— Daniel Alfon

Starturpad.io’s Entrepreneur Tools

From time to time we come across individuals who solve some common problems or have developed tools of some kind we find useful. In our series, we have already introduced you to some of them and due to popular demand, the series is back on Startuprad.io. Expect more Entrepreneur Tools this year on your podcast!

Find all Entrepreneur Tools episodes on this playlist:

Maximizing Your LinkedIn Profile: “Adding a Featured section is quick, free, easy. It will take you less than 40 seconds…make sure that that page is easily seen early on by anyone visiting your profile.”

— Daniel Alfon

The Video Interview is set to go live on Thursday, June 22nd 2023

“Crafting Your Professional Story: Your profile, Joe, is a story, and it’s our responsibility to try and make it interesting and to make it storyline, because people love to read stories, so they want to discover more about you.”

— Daniel Alfon

The Audio Interview

You can subscribe to our podcasts here.

“LinkedIn Company Page Management Tips: Make sure there are at least two active administrators who are allowed to share content here. I’ve worked with a number of companies that could not access their company page because one person left. It’s really a pity.”

— Daniel Alfon

The SME

Daniel Alfon (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfon/) is a LinkedIn marketing expert. He shares his insights into effective lead-generation strategies on the platform. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on educational content rather than just promoting a product or offer and highlights the significance of having an on-brand and visually appealing profile. Apart from discussing key strategies for lead generation, Alfon also touches upon important aspects of managing a company page, such as having multiple administrators, creating engaging content, and leveraging evergreen content. Through his expert insights and deep knowledge of LinkedIn marketing, Daniel Alfon provides valuable advice for startups and entrepreneurs on how to effectively leverage this powerful platform for growing their business.

You can learn more about him on his website:

You can even learn more with his book (AL):

Social Media Strategy: “So what we could take from that is the importance of adding a visual element to what we share on LinkedIn…reread it and make sure that first sentence is close to a cliffhanger, maybe a question you’re answering, or maybe something interesting for you to make people start reading in their busy feed.”

— Daniel Alfon

Tune in to our Internet Radio Station here:

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Key Topics Discussed

• Importance of profile photo visibility and professionalism
• Two important points to consider: individual page and individual profile
• Encouraging employees to turn notifications on for important company posts
• Early engagement on important posts can give extra exposure
• Educational content works best on LinkedIn
• Example of a successful LinkedIn page to learn from
• Importance of including banner, description, and specialties on a company page
• Need for at least two active administrators on the company page
• Understanding audience preferences is important for effective content marketing
• Use of evergreen content and engaging questions
• Summarizing multiple companies under one entity on a user profile
• Storytelling as crucial factor for compelling user profile
• Adding a visual element to the content shared on LinkedIn
• Benefits of creator mode on social media platforms
• Importance of utilizing the “Featured” section on LinkedIn profile
• Incorporating media into the Experience section
• Importance of optimized profile for customer-facing executives
• Visually appealing and on-brand banner on LinkedIn profile

Feedback

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The Interviewer

This interview was conducted by Jörn “Joe” Menninger, startup scout, founder, and host of Startuprad.io. Reach out to him:

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Topics Discussed in this Interview

LinkedIn, profile visibility, profile photo, professional-looking photo, company page, notifications, early engagement, educational content, company page banner, description, specialties, multiple administrators, audience preferences, evergreen content, leaderboards, engaging questions, personal brand, visual element, creator mode, Featured section, Experience section, lead generation, customer-facing executives, on-brand banner, Canva template, privacy settings.

Automated Transcript

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:00:05]:

Welcome to Startup Rad dot IO, your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startup scene with news interviews and live events. Hello and welcome everybody. This is Joe from Startup Rate IO, your startup podcast and YouTube blog from Germany, as well as host of the world’s number one Czech entrepreneurshipradio startup, Radio. You can subscribe to us everywhere you get your podcasts, especially our newsletters. Also strongly recommended we write once a month and wrap up everything that was important in five minutes or less reading time. Today, due to popular demand, we bring the entrepreneur tools back and therefore I would like to welcome Daniel here with us. Hey Daniel, how are you doing?

Daniel Alfon [00:01:00]:

Joe? Thank you very much for having me.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:01:03]:

Totally my pleasure. Can you tell our audience a little bit more about you?

Daniel Alfon [00:01:12]:

With pleasure. I signed up to LinkedIn early in 2004. I made all the possible mistakes in the book and I came back to help people because I didn’t find any good cookbook when I started using and helping entrepreneurs. So I’m doing this today and what.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:01:29]:

We will talk about is how to set up your personal LinkedIn profile a little bit, the company profile and what mistakes people usually do and what you should do. We may add to our audience that we have already talked on my podcast, Starting Wide, that I co host together with Michelle. We talked already about my LinkedIn profile there and I made a lot of changes. And the most important piece of information I have gotten from you, it’s basically on LinkedIn. You also have to do your search engine optimization, meaning you have to have the keywords for what people should be able to find you. For example, for me, Startup Radio, podcast consultant, Startup Scout and stuff like this. Can you give us a little bit of kind of overview, the broad topics, the broad ideas that will guide us through this Entrepreneur Tools episode today?

Daniel Alfon [00:02:34]:

With pleasure. So we’re trying to help entrepreneurs leverage their LinkedIn presence. And this Joe, has two main points. One that you mentioned is our individual profile, in other words, the co founder, the team themselves, and the second is the page. You need to set up a page. But for most startups, lead generation will not happen through the page, it will happen through their individual profile.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:03:05]:

And that is something really interesting. That’s something I also learned from you because for me it was like, oh look, there is the LinkedIn page for me personally, but most leads will be generated by the company website and that’s exactly the wrong way, right?

Daniel Alfon [00:03:24]:

Yeah, it’s natural to think that like that even if you consider your page and your company page, then you Joe, as an individual, you have more followers, a lot more followers than the page. And this may be the case for most founders listening to us. Their page has to be set up. It’s fine, do it, check it every couple of months. But usually lead generation will not happen through that page. Because think about the difference. If a prospect sends you a connection request and you joe decide to accept the invitation request, then you have access to that person’s email and you can communicate with that person. However, if the prospect follows you, your page on LinkedIn, you as the manager of the startup have no menninger way to contact them. LinkedIn holds that data, you can’t do anything with the followers and most of them will not even see what you share using the page. So set up a decent page, check it out, check startup Rad IO page to visually see the elements you can incorporate into your page. But don’t neglect your individual profiles. And one of the most common mistakes is that customer facing executive the VP, marketing, the co founders, the CTO, the Vprnd their profile will often be under optimized. And whenever you deal with people who deal with clients, deal with the prospects, it makes sense to go back and make sure that the team has an interesting and on brand presence, including their individual profiles.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:05:16]:

And we hear talking mostly about the senior management team, the founder team, right?

Daniel Alfon [00:05:26]:

Yes. But it’s very easy to simply guide your staff, whether you have only three co founders or when you have 20 or 60. Most startup staff will be glad to showcase and to show that they’re part of that startup. Some of them don’t know how to do it. So it’s your responsibility as a co founders to simply guide them and help them and to see the difference. You can visit your own profile, anyone can visit your own profile and see the wealth of information that is available to anyone. And that information allows people to convert. Better to check out startupradio, to reach out to you and ask them to help them as a digital consultant or to do something else. So the page itself has to be set up, but the money that’s easier to collect will be through our individual profiles. Make sure that your staff and your employees represent the company and the startup. Well.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:06:35]:

One question here with the onboarding handouts that everybody gets, like how do you file travel expenses? What can you do with the travel expenses and all this stuff, all those guidelines, all those policies, would you also, I think big companies already do that, but would you also, even as a small startup give maybe suggestions for descriptions of the company that people post in their LinkedIn profile? What level of help of guidance would you think is proper here?

Daniel Alfon [00:07:18]:

Wow, that’s an excellent question. So let’s start with the easiest one. The easiest one is to add the startup in the experience section and every new employee can do that within the first days or weeks. And even here, imagine I would join startupradio and I would go and enter the name of the company it’s not enough. I need to select the right logo for me to be incorporated into the page. So founders listening to this, check out your staff and your employees and make sure that the logo shows the correct startup. Because if you have 15 employees and you have only twelve employees on your page, that means that three employees have entered, may have entered the name of the employer, but it doesn’t relate and it doesn’t link to the startup page.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:08:16]:

And I would add here, don’t underestimate this. When I’ve done professional company profiles in the past, when I still do it, when other people in banking, in investment management, in consulting are doing this, they are looking at the current employee count on LinkedIn and maybe also take those statistics, like growth, like total hat count and stuff like this, and put it in their profile. So that may be a very important piece of information here.

Daniel Alfon [00:08:54]:

Thank you very much. So we mentioned two points to think about. One is the individual page and the second is your individual profile. Perhaps we could go over this sort of post you’d like people to share when they own board or when they join the company. Whenever you join a company and you associate with the company as an employee by default, Joe, you will follow that page. Okay? So if you just recruited five software engineers and they’ve added the name of your startup to their profile, they will become automatically followers. However, it does make sense to ask, to suggest, or to show them that they can turn the little bell on. Which means that if your company, if your startup has an important post or something they’ve shared, then they will be notified and they will be able to see it. As, you know, engagement early on can make that post, can give that post a lot of extra exposure. So you want your employees to at least know that you have been selected as a startup solution for that your segment, or there’s an important release going out or there’s an interview or anything else. So help them make sure that they discover the content that you share on LinkedIn. And if you have educational content that helps your prospect, that sort of content works best on LinkedIn. Imagine I run a company called Exprsvpn Sponsor. So I would try to explain first why, what are the risks of not having a VPN system and what is a VPN in general? And instead of just saying, we have a hot offer and you can get it here, and if you help people understand the problem, they’re likelier to visit your website, subscribe, download, pay, become premium subscribers. So try to identify the question you’re trying to answer and the problem you’re trying to solve. And that sort of content can be shared across your LinkedIn presence via the page or the individual profile in many, many ways. Mmhmm.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:11:35]:

Do you think it is also good in terms of the link in algorithm, if you ask your employees to like and comment or share as much as possible of the company they are hired for.

Daniel Alfon [00:11:54]:

Yes, of course. But I’d like to remind our watchers and listeners here, you can’t force it because there’s a clear cut you.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:12:11]:

Sorry, we do have a little time like here. That’s why we are interrupting each other all the time. I was also not suggesting really to force them or to force the algorithm, but only hey guys, keep in mind you’re working for this company. We would greatly appreciate every time you see something from our company, you like to also give us a like on LinkedIn, something like this.

Daniel Alfon [00:12:34]:

Excellent. I think that’s a great idea. And in terms of engagement, maybe two quick tips. Comments that drive the conversation forward are best appreciated today. So adding a comment, a meaningful comment, maybe asking a question, is likely to make more people discover the original content and answer your question and go in and make the conversation more viral, if you’d like. And if possible, ideally you want to make people comment and share and like or repost in the next 60 to 120 minutes after you shared. The longer they wait, the smaller your ROI is. So if you manage to have many employees comment, share and like that content 20 minutes after it’s gone, then a lot of their network is likely to discover the post you had.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:13:36]:

Oh, I see. There have been some posts that have been liked. In one case, I do believe 18 months after they have been published. That’s completely neglected in LinkedIn, when I understand it correctly.

Daniel Alfon [00:13:54]:

Yes, there is some type of content that’s evergreen, so you could have content that will generate leads for you years down the road. My first article was published maybe eight years ago. It still drives me business, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Most of things you share are a bit more time sensitive, so it would make sense to suggest some companies have either cheer employees by having a leaderboard or showing who has shared or like or commented the most. But you can try and ask a question that will drive the conversation forward. You mentioned travel expenses. Say my startup is dealing with the issue of travel expenses. Travel expenses doesn’t sound like fun. You just returned from Munich. Now you have to go into that paperwork and deal with it. So if you want to create a brand around yourself and strengthen your thought leadership, then a question you could ask Joe is if you travel to five plus countries in the last two to three years, can you share with us the most exciting or the most fun or the funniest episode you held in a business? Travel. This is a very simple way to make people weigh in and comment and some of them will tell you amazing stories and everything is associated with your brand. But instead of saying when you return from Bavaria, please fill in that form, you associate your brand with something that’s more fun and more engaging.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:15:45]:

I see. Can we showcase, for example, my LinkedIn profile a little bit here and then we can talk about what I’ve been doing right, what I’ve been doing wrong since our last interview, where basically this was an audio only podcast. And basically what we did is we went through my LinkedIn profile and you hinted at everything that I was doing wrong and I was using eight Itool, not chat GPT, and generate content on the keywords that I want to have and filled it in on LinkedIn. And I have to admit, I didn’t get a lot of leads from that, but my visitors numbers have been going up constantly since.

Daniel Alfon [00:16:38]:

Okay, good, thank you. Yes, it would be great if you could share your, your profile. Let’s, let’s discuss this and, and maybe mention the, the profile page, the company page as well. So if you look at Joe’s profile now, you see the banner, and the banner says the Authority on German Startups. This is a simple and very powerful way to show startupradio. And your slogan in a nice visual banner, it will take you 20 seconds to upload. If you’re not sure about the pixels, there is a free canva template where you can play with that and move elements around. Suggest to your staff to upload a banner and you can ask someone to create two or three banners and that means that the company’s presence will be enhanced simply by adding a visual banner. I know it sounds like a no brainer, but still, most startup employees and even some of the startup founders did not take the time to upload a banner. So start with what we’re seeing right now. When we go to Joe’s profile, we see the banner. Make sure your banner is visually appealing, attractive, and on brand. And the second element we see is your profile photo. So another quick thing I would suggest, would you mind clicking Joe on your profile photo in the lower left area? When you visit your own profile on LinkedIn, you have a setting on the top in the lower left area saying, who can see that profile photo? Would you mind clicking on that option and showing us the other options?

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:18:39]:

Yes. We may add that it’s now in German, but only direct contacts, your network, all LinkedIn members and everyone.

Daniel Alfon [00:18:49]:

Thank you very much. So I suggest that everyone picks one of the lower two. Either all LinkedIn members or everyone. There’s not much difference. However, if you realize that your profile photo is only seen by your network, that means that even if you have 3000 connections, then 900 million people will not see a profile photo. So change it. Just check your profile photo just like you’ve shown us Joe, and make sure that everyone can see a profile photo. Can you imagine the difference between a profile that has a photo and a profile that doesn’t have one? LinkedIn says that up to 24 more people click when there’s a profile photo. So if you run a search and you see Joe a no photo and Joe B with a photo, most people will click on Joe B with a photo because we know that the person without a photo usually have not add information to their profile. So make sure you have a decent photo that’s professional looking and make sure that the profile photo itself is visible to everyone. Can you share with us maybe your thoughts about the new headline that you added Joe to your profile?

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:20:17]:

Yeah, before that it was pretty long text and maybe a little bit confusing and now I just have bullet points. Digital Consultant Startup Scout and host Global Top 20 Startup Podcast. Because we scored in Apple’s Global Top 20 Entrepreneurship podcasts.

Daniel Alfon [00:20:38]:

Excellent. The headline is probably the most important real estate we have on our profile. So I suggest you visit your profile headline and make sure it’s visually text wise. Interesting. What do I mean by that? Most founders have a headline that says I’m co founder at XYZ Company. But if the name XYZ does not open the door then instead of saying I am the co founder of XYZ GmbH whatever you say. We help SaaS companies achieve X, Y or Z or we disrupt travel expense field by enabling A, B and C. Whatever your promise is. And if you have more space add co founder XYZ. But the profile is not made for us. Our profile should help our ideal reader and for startup co founders the ideal reader is usually a prospect or a talented engineer or a talented software menninger. They want to join the company so make sure they understand why. Click and view your profile.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:22:04]:

Understood. Then we do have a link. Actually what I currently do is I link to my personal Twitter account.

Daniel Alfon [00:22:17]:

When you turn on the creator mode, a number of things happen. The default action is no longer to connect, but to follow you. This could be a good idea for many people who want to keep their network close and trustworthy while allowing people to discover their content. And that also allows you to add hashtags and that also helps you highlight one link. And Joe, nothing prevents you from checking and deciding that in two months time, when you have something important and time sensitive, you simply change. Instead of Twitter, you point to the latest playlist you had or an upcoming event you mentioned when you had one of the latest video you mentioned a tech conference that was wise enough to be held during October Fest. Yeah, and that’s an amazing idea. So you can change that link and if you have a very important event or conference then you can change it to link to that event. And when the event is over, you go here and you switch back to Twitter or whatever link you wanted people to discover. Scroll down a bit, look at the Featured profile. Excellent. What made you pick those elements as the featured element in your profile?

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:23:57]:

It was the newsletter is pretty important to me because I put a lot of effort into doing it once a month and making it available for people to scan through what we’ve published in a month in just five minutes. Also of course, that’s a big achievement for us to have broken the Global Top 20 Entrepreneurship podcast charts on Apple. But I do believe there are some highlights I should update.

Daniel Alfon [00:24:36]:

Okay, so don’t be too harsh on yourself, you did great. And in fact, my guess is that most founders looking at this and listening to this will not have featured elements at all in their LinkedIn profile. Adding a Featured section is quick, free, easy. It will take you less than 40 seconds. You basically go on desktop to add profile section recommended feature plus paste ad. And that means that anyone visiting your profile will see the link that you highlighted. It will be visually appealing as well. So ask yourself, who’s my ideal reader? What is the link I want them to see first? And if you want them to see first your demo or your Talk or your home page or your RSVP, then make sure that that page is easily seen early on by anyone visiting your profile. What we mentioned so far are things, elements that people see within the first 5 seconds. Maybe one quick thing we could do, if you’d like Joe, is to scroll down a bit to the Experience section. Thank you, we’re getting there. And here, would you like to enhance the startup Radio? Or if you scroll down to add some more media to another element in your profile because when people see this, you also incorporated media into your Experience section. Okay? So anyone who visits your profile and sees the text on their startup red dot IO, when they scroll down, they see the visual links, they see the Global 20 Top 20 Entrepreneurship, global Top 100 Business and when they click on that, they can do it. This is a second way to highlight content in your profile and my suggestion would be simply to use the featured section to show the most the best link, the first link you want people to see. But some entrepreneurs and some startup founders have dozens of good links. So here you can add two, five more and they will enhance and make reading your Experience section more interesting, better and more converting. People who visit this are likely to reach out to you and say, hey, what you do is interesting, let’s have a chat, maybe we could cooperate it and maybe we could work together.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:27:28]:

Sounds good. And I also learned from you, you have to work on the order of your experience. You can edit this with this pencil here and basically then you can move back and forth between all the stuff you have been doing and people may notice that I have a lot bigger descriptions here than that are seen on first side background is that this includes a lot of keywords. I want to be able to be found by other people pretty much like a search engine optimization on websites, right?

Daniel Alfon [00:28:13]:

Absolutely. And going back to the reordering idea, your profile should help you by highlighting the first position you want people to see first and in some cases that’s not the case because LinkedIn will generally put them in reverse chronological order. However, if you want people to see first the startup IO, then you reorder them and they will first see this and only then starting Y and then deloitte and whatever you did before that. So take control of your LinkedIn presence, don’t stick to the LinkedIn defaults and make sure it serves you. If you’re happy with the order, excellent. If you’re not happy with the order, it takes 20 seconds to select the element you want people to see first and to make sure that everyone within 5 seconds anyone visiting Joe’s profile will see the exact order that Joe has selected. You can do the same thing, you should do the same thing.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:29:19]:

I see. In terms of what else is important, as I said, including all the right keywords here, getting a little bit longer description with all the stuff that is important for you to be found it’s not about bragging, it’s about being able to be found. And in terms of what you would add or not add, I know some people who have something like 40 different positions on there. Is that a little bit too much?

Daniel Alfon [00:29:57]:

Well, for most people it might be a bit too much. You know what I want to tackle the angle of investors actually like a VC fund associate or an angel could have 20 or 30 companies they invest on. So it doesn’t make sense to say I’m a board member in company A and I invested in company B because your experience section will have 30 names. Most people cannot handle that. So what you could do is have one entity, say board membership as a board member. These are the name of the startups I am on the board of or if I teach at a certain university then I would try to put everything under under teaching or public speaking and not add a separate experience. Section for every month you held a position or did some tempting. You have to make the story easier to understand. And you also recorded when you were in Barcelona, you had a talk about storytelling. When startup raise funds. The importance of the seven steps of storytelling. Your profile, Joe, is a story, and it’s our responsibility to try and make it interesting and to make it storyline, because people love to read stories, so they want to discover more about you. And ideally, at the end of the funnel, they will reach out to you and say, we need your help. Could we jump on a call and see whether you could help us?

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:31:41]:

Yeah. The page, the pictures, the headline, the links, the experience, are there other important section of your personal LinkedIn profile in terms of being a founder, being an entrepreneur? But keep in mind that may also, especially in Germany, trigger something different because when you held like 20 positions within two years, investors may think that he’ll also move on within the next two years to the next company. So you’re not only conveying a message with that, but also how many positions you have in there. And when you talked about being a board member, I’ve seen this on other profiles, they have just one position, multiple board members and then basically they put in all the names.

Daniel Alfon [00:32:44]:

Simplicity is helping people understand what you bring to the table and the point you raised is very important. From my perspective, your profile should speak for itself. Anyone googling most founders will go to their LinkedIn profile because their LinkedIn profile will be one of the top results. So make sure you don’t have to explain it. You don’t know. My profile says A, but actually I’m doing B. My profile C still has my corporate job but I’m actually now in a startup. It doesn’t make sense. You own it, manage it or delete it. Don’t let it become obsolete.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:33:29]:

Yes, I’ve seen for example, one person who still has as active a position in a startup podcast that is now defunct for more than five years. So this person also doesn’t pay a lot of attention to his or her to his or her LinkedIn profile. Now we moved a little bit into the company page and since we’re talking for already more than 30 minutes, can you give us a little bit of an idea what is also of importance here including, but not limited to the pictures and having all the important keywords, all the important headlines on there.

Daniel Alfon [00:34:10]:

Right? So I think this talk to you example you’re showing is a very good example for people to look at and then duplicate and tweak it to their own startups. So you have from top down, you see the banner and then there’s a description and there are specialties description could be taken from your website, the about section or slogan like that. And the specialties, you can think about them as a bunch of keywords and if you have conducted a keyword research and you know what terms are used by people when they’re looking for solutions such as yours, then those type of specialties could be added to your LinkedIn page. Make sure that people are associated with your company and try to have more than one company page administrator because Joe, when the co founder leaves and goes to start another startup, if there is only one person, it will become very difficult for the startup to manage the page. So make sure there are at least two active administrators who are allowed to share content here. I’ve worked with a number of companies that could not access their company page because one person left. It’s really a pity. Just like the example you mentioned about someone showing podcast from that was dead for five years. It doesn’t make sense. What sort of content do you engage with as a reader when you go to LinkedIn to the LinkedIn feed? Do you like seeing videos, images, quotes, interviews, personal stories? What makes you take as a reader?

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:36:16]:

Personally, I scan through most of my attention is called usually by pictures and then read sometimes the attached stories, and sometimes I see other people reacting to LinkedIn posts. And that’s also where I pay a little bit more attention.

Daniel Alfon [00:36:37]:

Great. So what we could take from that is the importance of adding a visual element to what we share on LinkedIn. If it’s the link, LinkedIn tries to automatically show the picture itself. And if you start writing text, LinkedIn will usually cut that text and there will be a small print saying Show more. If you manage to make more people click on Show More, then the LinkedIn algorithm decides that your post is worth sharing with more people. So it could be that you’ve written 20 lines, but if the first two are not engaging, then many people will not click and they will never discover what you had to say there. So reread it and make sure that first sentence is close to a cliffhanger, maybe a question you’re answering, or maybe something interesting for you to make people start reading in their busy feed. And the more people click on that, the more people discover your content. Go to your website and convert.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:37:55]:

Understood? Understood. Final words where can people learn more? As always down here in the Show Notes, we have linked your LinkedIn profile. Of course we have done that as well as your book on Amazon.

Daniel Alfon [00:38:18]:

Thank you very much very much. My website is Danielalphone.com that has plenty of content and it’s a pleasure to speak with you and thank you very much for what you’re doing to the startup ecosystem and startup community.

Jörn “Joe” Menninger [00:38:31]:

Thank you very much, was a pleasure talking to you. That’s all folks. Find more news streams, events and interviews at www dot startuprad IO. Remember, sheriff is caring.