During this article, I will explain how LinkedIn creator mode works, and how you can use it to get more eyes on your content, attract more people to your profile, and build your following on LinkedIn.
Learn how to use LinkedIn creator mode to boost your photography business with just a few simple changes.
You’ll also learn how using LinkedIn creator mode optimises your profile, making it more attractive to the algorithms.
What is LinkedIn Creator Mode anyway?
Perhaps you’ve had some emails from LinkedIn about this, or you’ve heard people mention it? At the beginning of 2021, LinkedIn started rolling out its new creator mode feature. Creator mode is essentially a way of showcasing you as a content creator and a thought-leader in your niche.
And it doesn’t really take too much effort. Would you believe that only about 1% of the 800 million users of LinkedIn worldwide actually create the entire newsfeed content for the platform?
This does mean that competition on LinkedIn is really low, LinkedIn class someone as a content creator who posts around 16 times a month. So, with only four posts per week, you can really start seeing your content getting out there.
How does LinkedIn creator mode help you promote your photography business?
LinkedIn creator mode helps content creators like you and me to get more eyes on their content, to grow your followers in some five really easy ways and I’m going to explain those and show you the benefits of LinkedIn creator mode below.
Why did this come about, and how does it work?
The whole purpose of LinkedIn creator mode is to encourage users on the platform to move away from simply connecting and towards being much more collaborative. They want to reward people for being more active in discussions, following one another and building relationships.
They’ve also limited the number of connection requests that you can make to around 100-150 per week. This encourages people to follow you rather than connect if they don’t know you.
By switching your profile, you’re able to position yourself as a thought-leader in your niche. You are also encouraging more people to “follow” you, without having to actually connect with you. More on this in a moment.
What happens when you “Flip the Switch”?
It can feel daunting sometimes when you don’t know what’s going to happen when you try a new thing that gets rolled out on social networks.
It’s really not terrifying, and actually pretty clever. You can switch LinkedIn creator mode on and try it for yourself. You can always switch it back if you don’t like it – but I hope you’ll leave it on once you’ve read a little more.
Why not try switching it on, and see what happens while you read this article? Or you watch along with me on YouTube here, where I show you both my profile and a couple of my clients’ profiles too.
Ready to give it a go? If you go to the activity section on your LinkedIn profile, then to the resources section, you’ll click on the LinkedIn creator mode. It’ll ask you whether you want to add your “talks about” hashtags. You don’t need to do that straight away. Just click on through and you’ll see that there are five main changes to your profile.
Five changes. Five Easy Ways to grow your following.
1.) Follow – rather than connect, by default.
The first big change that you’ll notice is that the connection area changes from connect to follow. Dead easy, people don’t have to feel that they need to send you a connection request, they can just follow and get access to your content.
2.) Follower count displayed.
Your follower count is shown on your profile. This immediately gives people an idea of how well you are trusted in your niche and helps to establish your authority on the network.
3.) Talks about hashtags.
This is where you can highlight areas of content that you talk about that would be of interest to your ideal clients. Note: pick ones that relate to problems that you solve for them.
4.) LinkedIn cover stories.
A nice little feature. It allows you to upload a 30-second video to introduce yourself alongside your profile photograph. It’s so much more friendly.
5.) Featured and activity moves up.
The featured section is now at the top – so you can give people more useful and valuable content right at the top of the page.
Here’s what I’ve done with my LinkedIn Creator mode profile.
The first major difference is a default from “connect” to “follow”. So, you won’t see a connect button on my profile, you will see a Follow button. Hitting “follow” is dead easy for people, they don’t have to feel that they need to send a connection request. Once they’ve done that, they’re going to start seeing your content. They’re going to start being aware of what you do.
Since I’ve had LinkedIn creator mode switched on, I’ve noticed my follower count has really, really gone up. Literally every week, hundreds of new followers come along and follow my content.
The second thing you’ll see is your follower count is displayed on your profile. This means that when you start to get a decent-sized follower count, people can quickly see that you’re considered worth following, that you have authority in your niche.
I now have close to 32,000 followers. So, if somebody finds my profile, they’ll immediately realise that I really know my stuff on LinkedIn, they can see that I’m very active.
The next thing is your “talks about” hashtags. The purpose of these is to let people know what it is you talk about and the type of content you create. You’ve got to be careful with your “talks about” hashtags because you want to be picking hashtags that are relevant to your ideal clients, not to other photographers. I’ll show you a little more about that in my examples below.
In my case, I’m trying to reach photographers, so I’ve got the word ‘photography’ in there and ‘photography business’ because that is what I talk about, and what the people I am trying to reach will be searching for.
The next thing that changes is LinkedIn cover stories. You’ll get a little ring around your profile picture. It’s a bit like one of those Harry Potter moving picture things. In this section, you can upload a short video clip from your mobile phone to your LinkedIn profile. And in that video, you can introduce yourself, who you are and what you do. Perhaps you might say that you do branding photography or portrait photography, but more importantly, you can explain what you do for the client and the benefit you bring to them.
The next part that changes in LinkedIn creator mode is your featured section. Prior to using creator mode, your page showed your activity section, and the about section. Now visitors just see your headline.
And the next thing you’ll see below that is the featured section. With the featured section, you can add different pieces of media. You can add a post, you can add an article that you’ve created on LinkedIn. You can add a link to your website, and you can also add media, such as video content and documents.
In my own featured section, I’ve uploaded my Six Steps to Success brochure. This is all about my programme, it explains all the benefits and tells photographers how they can really change their business, how they can make a lot more money, through my Six Steps to Success programme. It’s a 15-page brochure. It’s a great PDF that gives them all the information they need to know and the prices.
The other thing I’ve included is a link to my online diary. When clients click on this, they can go across to my online diary and book an appointment for a free mentoring call with me.
What are the advantages of that? Most social channels want to keep you on their site, and LinkedIn is no different. If you use outbound links in your posts, so if you say check out my website and then put your website link, or if you said book a free consultation call and then put your website link in there, or a Calendly link, that is going to reduce the organic reach on your post because you’re sending people away from LinkedIn.
However, if you load these up to your featured section, you can reference them in your posts instead. You can tell people that if they’re interested in finding out more about your services, they should check out the brochure in your featured section or suggest that they book a call with you (and again, point them to your featured section for the details).
I quite often come down on a morning, log into my email, and find out that people have booked a free consultation call with me. People who I’ve never even heard of before. They’ve done that through LinkedIn. They’ve just gone to my profile. They’ve seen it and booked a consultation call.
Some more LinkedIn Creator Mode Examples.
Still not sure what all this really means? Let me show you some examples. These are clients of mine who are using LinkedIn creator mode to boost their photography business.
This is Olivier, who’s over in Switzerland. He’s one of my personal branding clients. He’s fairly new to LinkedIn and has really just started utilising it to its full potential. He’s done a fantastic job with his profile. Because he’s in Switzerland, he puts a lot of landscape photography out, as well as his personal branding stuff to try and engage and connect with people.
He’s also chosen hashtags for entrepreneurs, content marketing, personal branding, and corporate branding. These aren’t photography-relevant hashtags, because his ideal clients aren’t going to be following hashtags talking about photography. If you take a look at his profile over on LinkedIn, you’ll see his featured section has some of his posts and also a link to his website as well.
Another of my photographer clients is Emma. She’s a personal branding photographer for the food industry. You’ll notice with Emma’s hashtags she talks about baking, cooking, photography, food and drink and the food industry. If you’re a food producer, you own a restaurant, or you’re a cook or a chef, these are the sort of hashtags you’re going to be following – cooking, baking, food and drink. You’re not going to be following personal branding, photography, or food photography.
This means that people who come to Emma’s profile can see exactly what she does. They’ll also see that she’s got a big follower number – close to 5000 followers, so they know that people listen to her, she has authority in her niche. You can have a look at Emma’s profile here.
I teach all of this, and more, to all the photographers in my 6 steps to success mentoring programme.
Why LinkedIn for Photographers?
I’m a massive advocate for photographers using LinkedIn to build thriving, and incredibly successful businesses. LinkedIn has allowed me to grow a following of almost 32,000 photographers and has helped most of my mentoring clients transform their businesses, positioning themselves as the Go-To-Photographer in their niche.
- You don’t need a premium subscription.
- You don’t need to spend money on LinkedIn ads.
- You don’t need a sales funnel or landing page.
All you need is a fully optimised profile, posting the right type of content that connects with your ideal clients. You just need to get your profile sorted, show up each day and be consistent.
Don’t try to sell. Instead, help, motivate, inspire and be yourself, then you’ll start to see BIG results.
It really is my preferred channel, and I know both that it works, and HOW it works, so much so that I wrote a book, especially for photographers. This is probably the ONLY LinkedIn book just for Photographers.
LinkedIn is an absolute goldmine for photographers, but sadly, many photographers fail to utilise the platform and often those who do haven’t really got a clue how to use it.
The Photographer’s Missing “Link”edIn.
This is the 3rd Edition 2022 of my book – I revise it each time there are major changes on the platform, it’s doubled in size since its last edition in 2019. I cover everything you need to know to build a fully optimised LinkedIn profile and start attracting more of your ideal clients, without spending a penny on advertising.
LinkedIn saw a lot of changes in 2021, including changes to the algorithm, the introduction of LinkedIn Creator Mode, LinkedIn Live Events, LinkedIn Polls becoming popular and LinkedIn posts character limit increasing.
The book will allow you to learn all there is to know about the platform. You’ll find out how to build a fully optimised LinkedIn profile that appeals to your clients, create highly engaging LinkedIn Company Pages that stand out from your competitors.
Once you’ve put into action my LinkedIn success steps, you’ll be posting the right type of content correctly, ensuring more connections to your profile, maximum engagement on your posts, and more enquiries hitting your inbox.
You’ll learn everything you need to know about the platform, right from the very basics through to LinkedIn Live, Hashtags, LinkedIn Polls, Video, Company Pages and much more.
- Fully optimise your LinkedIn profile.
- Create your own LinkedIn hashtag for greater reach.
- Understand what hashtags to use and when.
- Find out what to post and how to post it.
- Switch on LinkedIn Creator Mode and grow your following.
- Use your Featured Section to attract more leads.
- Understand the different types of content and what works best.
To grab your copy, either click below, or head over to Amazon and search “The Photographers Missing Link-edIn”.
"If you would like a FREE social media and marketing review of your business, click to book a call, and we can chat.
I'll give you some great tips and advice and answer any questions you may have about my six-step photo shoot program.
I'm not going to hard-sell my program itself; if you feel it's time to take your business to the next level, please think about it and get back to me after we talk.
I have a great relationship with all my clients, and I'm honest with you. You can't build relationships on hard selling; that's what gives marketing mentors a bad name, and that's not me."
Thank you, and I hope to speak to you soon, Jeff