First Impressions: LinkedIn – Renée Veldman-Tentori
At our last meeting, Renee Veldman-Tentori graciously filled in at the last minute for an ailing Petra Fisher, to talk to us about LinkedIn. Renee brought her usual positive, ebullient energy with her and gave us lots of useful ideas to take home with us.
Renee began by asking us what our impressions of her were, to flip the traditional introduction. What we came up with was pretty accurate. She is a university lecturer at the Haagsche Hogeschool, a communications consultant, an EdTech enthusiast, and a Dutch Australian.
Next we discussed the communication challenges we are facing, such as information overload, too many tools to choose from and fast paced technological changes. She asked us which tools were most useful to us, to get us to think about simplifying our social media use. Most of us found WhatsApp and a mail app to be the apps we would most want to keep if we had to choose just one. Our skills and interests play a big part in this choice.
She wanted us to consider this question: Who are you? She gave us a handout to help us better understand how to start thinking about our LinkedIn profiles. Too many people leap in before they know what they’re trying to communicate. This is crucial to start with!
Next Renee gave us her very condensed LinkedIn presentation, which she very effectively explained.
Her 10 top tips for LinkedIn are:
- Where are you at? Are you a beginner, intermediate, or advanced? Are you ok with this? Do you wish to change? How and why? Everyone is different. Be aware that everyone is using LinkedIn differently.
- Complete your profile. Block an appointment in your agenda to update it.
- You are in control. Why are you using it? Privacy and security, and level of comfort are all important issues to consider.
- What’s your strategy? Do you want to connect to as many people as possible, or just those you have met?
- Hashtags and Tags: Tags are a specific way to highlight people, notifying and thanking people. Hashtags are a way of following and filtering information. They are a great tool to use to get info on that subject. They connect to other content that filters information that you’re interested in. She recommends choosing three hashtags and following them. Two of hers are #socialmedia and #dutchaustralian.
- Watch and Learn: Find and follow 5 people you admire. Analyze what they do. Ask for feedback. Get training if you need it. Ask others to help you out.
- Engage: Lift others up. Take part in conversations and community, stretch your comfort zone, find your people, learn from others, write recommendations, comment, reach out. It can make a huge difference, and you can get noticed!
- Create content, don’t just consume it. Set yourself a challenge to do it by the end of the week. Tag someone you know. Try a new type, record and share videos. Videos are very powerful. She made a short video of us and posted it, and many at the meeting reposted it the next day.
- Combine online and offline, #LinkedinLocal. Combine meeting people online and in person. More and more organizations realize they can’t just be online.
- Done is better than perfect: Face your fears. Just get started and learn as you go. HAVE FUN!
Renée has very kindly shared her presentation with us here.
Next we heard a short presentation from Ebere Akadiri who created and ran the recent Rise and Lead Women conference.
Ebere spoke about the reasons why women want to start their own businesses. For some it’s because they’ve been fired, others want freedom, many because they have children, and others because they want to control their working life. A problem for many entrepreneurs is that our businesses don’t grow because they are too small, and we’re on our own. What we need is entrepreneurial confidence, to take risks, and scale things up. If not, it’s just a hobby. Women can be afraid of talking about profit and money. We need the right mindset to grow our businesses. If we start changing our mindset, we can make more out of our lives, and we can start to change society.
To succeed in business as a female entrepreneur you need:
- Permission to yourself to build a business and still maintain your female vision.
- A vision, desire and a commitment to growth
- The knowledge that as your business succeeds, you can have enough money to fund the changes you want to see in the world.
Next we got into small groups and discussed how we used LinkedIn. There was lively discussion, and good connections were made and shared.
Ebere will be hosting 4 Mentoring Circles Meetings at the WBII office.
Dates are:
Thursday, May 16
July 4
October 10
November 14
from 17:00 – 20:00.
These meetings will be open to members of WBII. There is a maximum of 8 people per meeting, and the cost is 50 euros.