An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Fill out your profile. Fully. Spend time going through your profile and fill out everything as fully as you can with the aim of getting ‘All Star’ status. LinkedIn believes that you’re much more likely to be found in searches if you do this, helping you to get seen by the people you want to see you! I personally spent quite a lot of time on this and I have seen more and more profile visits as a result. It also means that if someone finds my profile, they get to find out more about me and can then decide whether or not what I do or who am I is a good fit for them and what they do.
As part of my series of interviews about “How to Use LinkedIn To Dramatically Improve Your Business”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Rhea Freeman.
Rhea Freeman is a social media expert and small business coach based in the UK. In addition to running a membership group, Rhea is also the founder of the Small & Supercharged Podcast and a Facebook group of the same name designed to help small businesses and influencers in the equestrian and rural space. She’s an award winning PR adviser, #SheMeansBusiness accredited trainer and Facebook Certified Lead Trainer.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I didn’t take the most direct route to get to this point, let me tell you, but equally I think that all the experiences that happen to us are there for a reason! I started off working outside, with horses, and became a riding instructor. This led me to write for magazines around my specialist subjects, which allowed me to write for brands, which led to traditional PR (obviously these transitions took a long time!). Over the years, social media started to provide brands with other ways to reach their target market- and that really interested me as I have always prided myself on being able to help brands promote themselves on a budget. As social media continued to grow, there was a real shift away from spending on traditional media in line with the drop in circulation, and so I started to improve my skills and learn all I could about social media too. And this naturally increased my interest and knowledge around all other forms of digital marketing too. Now, I coach a handful of business owners one to one to help them develop their businesses and grow with help from social media and digital marketing, and I also work with a greater number of small business owners through my groups.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?
Ohhh- interesting is funny as I’ve had a lot of interesting experiences! I guess that the last 18 months have certainly been interesting with the huge shift in how we do business and teach! From speaking at in person events to becoming best friends with platforms like Zoom, it’s been a real learning curve! I think one particularly surreal experience was at Enterprise Nation’s awards last year, which was virtual to celebrate the top advisers across the UK. I’d made it to the final few, which was amazing, and was sat in my kitchen with a glass of fizz sent to finalists watching the awards, as my children watched something completely different on the TV. My category came up and I look at all the names and realised that I really didn’t stand a chance of winning. So I started typing my congratulations message to the winner on the Hopin platform. Anyway, next thing, my face is on the screen as the winner. I very quickly deleted my message while struggling to catch my breath from the shock of winning, as the children carried on watching the TV. It was very strange. And interesting. And really is and was a sign of the times.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I think I have blocked these out! I try really hard to reframe mistakes as learning opportunities to help me deal with them a bit better and find the positives! That’s not to say I haven’t made mistakes- I’ve made a lot!
Which social media platform have you found to be most effective to use to increase business revenues? Can you share a story from your experience?
This is an interesting question as the three I spend the most time on — Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn- have all helped in different ways. With LinkedIn, I have the opportunity to connect to people that are hard to reach usually, and they get to see my experience, expertise and my connections via the professional content I share. This has opened a lot of doors to me from a teaching and speaking point of view. With Facebook, I’ve been able to create Groups and grow memberships through one Group in particular, which has clearly been very good. And with Instagram, I have the ability to connect with individual business owners better, which helps to grow my one to one side and sell my courses too.
Let’s talk about LinkedIn specifically, now. Can you share 5 ways to leverage LinkedIn to dramatically improve your business? Please share a story or example for each.
- Fill out your profile. Fully. Spend time going through your profile and fill out everything as fully as you can with the aim of getting ‘All Star’ status. LinkedIn believes that you’re much more likely to be found in searches if you do this, helping you to get seen by the people you want to see you! I personally spent quite a lot of time on this and I have seen more and more profile visits as a result. It also means that if someone finds my profile, they get to find out more about me and can then decide whether or not what I do or who am I is a good fit for them and what they do.
- Post content natively. As with any platform, sharing a link with no context is unlikely to result in the engagement you want on the post. Don’t just share a link- add context that makes that content work as a standalone piece too, and ideally whets people’s appetites to encourage them to take the action you want them to. I’ve had some lovely engagement on many of my posts, but the ones that do the best are the ones that I have tweaked and adjusted to work properly for the platform.
- Engage on people’s content. Yes, it’s nice to engage on people’s content as per any other platform, but leaving thoughtful, relevant, useful comments on people’s posts will help increase your visibility with them and their fans and followers too. I’ve had people I’ve connected with mention how they saw how active I was on other posts and that led them to find out more about me.
- Ask for recommendations. LinkedIn has a great facility that allows people to recommend you… and the great thing is, you can ask them! Pick people you’ve worked with who can honestly endorse your skills. And why not reciprocate and talk about what that person is like to work with? Recommendations are a great way to build connections, strengthen bonds, and also allow people to see what you’re made of it!
- Use Messaging… but use it well. No one likes a spammy message asking them to buy or share something with no intro- so don’t do that to others! However, LinkedIn’s Messaging function allows you to get chatting and deepen connections with people who you’d really like to get to know better. I’ve had some incredibly positive exchanges through Messaging that have led to opportunities and work.
Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I think taking a breath before you message someone through social media with anything less than positive. Many forget that there is a real person at the end of a DM.
Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
Yes! Jasmine Star. I think she’s truly inspirational and I love how she just calls it as she sees it. I have a HUGE amount of admiration for Gary Vee too- the fact he’s a practitioner rather than a preacher really speaks to me.
Thank you so much for these great insights. This was very enlightening!
Rhea Freeman: How to Use LinkedIn To Dramatically Improve Your Business was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.