Top 5 Tips to Develop your LinkedIn Personal Profiles for Life Sciences
Traditionally, the life sciences sector has been slow on the take up of digital marketing platforms – despite being one of the most innovative and technical disciplines.
Linkedin is particularly relevant for life sciences and healthcare, with the focus here being more 'business-centred' it's a powerful place to share your story, make connections and find the best talent.
We often see fragmented activity or no digital marketing at all. Medical, healthcare and life sciences are topics often discussed on LinkedIn. This is a missed opportunity to present your credentials and make connections. The LinkedIn network is divided into two categories: members and organisations. Both provide you with a valuable platform.
What is a Personal Page on LinkedIn?
A personal profile page or “member profile,” is your personal area on LinkedIn. And different to a "company page". Here are our top 5 tips to consider when developing your LinkedIn personal profile.
LinkedIn was one of the earliest social media platforms, launched in 2003 and it benefits from being the most trusted and the largest online network for professionals with over 600 million users worldwide.
The platform is well-optimised, has changed very gradually over the years and has an excellent search function, based on keyword search: names of businesses, colleges, universities or people. It also hosts lots of user-generated content, so topic-based search works well too.
This means that you can find just about anyone you want to connect with, research any company you want to work with (or for) and target prospective customers, employers and recruits specifically.
Your target audiences are likely to include customers or clients, suppliers, potential partners, future recruits and investors. 2,5 million LinkedIn profiles contain ‘biotechnology’ 6 million life science, 2.2 million life sciences. It is a great place to look for clients, customers and the people who work for them.
Due to FDA and EMA regulations (see below) you cannot promote your products or devices easily on social media, but you can promote the credentials of your team. This should encompass your board of directors or any advisory panels who work with you, likely to be highly-regarded individuals in your sector and their field. Their involvement in your company will add kudos and reassure investors and customers alike.
Why you should invest time in developing your personal profiles
LinkedIn gives you free tools on the platform to create personal profiles, not just groups and company pages. It’s a great way to enhance your own credentials, as well as raise the profile of your life sciences or biotech company.
The benefit to the company of having quality personal profiles on LinkedIn of team members include:
- raising the profile of your company in the marketplace
- employee advocacy through sharing of company news
- tapping into employee networks to expand the reach of company news via the multiplier effect
If everybody in the company is sharing content with their connections, it can reach thousands, maybe tens of thousands, in a way that it wouldn't do necessarily just from the people who are following the company page.
LinkedIn Free Accounts
LinkedIn is free to use and you can create a personal profile, company pages, groups and content (posts and articles) easily. You can publish articles directly onto LinkedIn, post and share video, text, graphics and audio.
Along with your personal profile, you get a free InMail address, allowing people to communicate with you within the platform.
More importantly, you can present your experience, skills and pedigree all on one page – making it very easy for potential clients or investors to find you.
Content shared on LinkedIn is more trusted than on other platforms (including Facebook) and you are ‘hanging out’ with a more affluent set of connections – LinkedIn is a predominantly ‘white-collar’ network.
Top 5 tips for enhancing your life sciences and biotech LinkedIn personal profiles
#1 About You section
This is one of the most valuable pieces of information about you. It is your sales pitch: worth taking time over it and consulting colleagues to gain feedback on the content. Essentially, it should include:
- personal statement
- how you add value to clients
- how you add value to your team
- how your company adds value to the supply chain
You can include presentations, video, documents, etc (screenshot options) in this section - the things you are most proud of. You can also have multiple versions of your personal profile in the languages of the countries that you're targeting.
Don’t be afraid to talk about your passion. It is reassuring, when we are working with specialists, to hear their passion for the work they do, the field of science or medicine they have chosen and why.
#2 Employment History and Projects
Do you have an extremely high calibre team of people involved in your company? Do you have board members or an advisory panel who command respect?
Clients, partners and investors will want to see the track record of all the key people in the business before making their selection. can your personal profile show how you’ve developed in each role and what you’ve achieved?
Add enough detail to all of your past employment roles to cover the areas worked in, key dates and achievements. Don’t worry if it looks like an online ‘CV’. You aim is to help your target audiences find the right people, with the right skills, technology and resources to help them solve their problems.
Why not add in the 4 or 5 most recent projects you have worked on. This can help to promote work (and results) already in the public domain, as well as highlighting partnerships and collaborations with other specialists. This could include clients, customers, suppliers, partners, research teams (and facilities) and competitors. You may have helped to develop the roadmap for the platform technologies in your industry along with key industry players, for example.
You can add multi-media to your personal profile so you could upload slideshows, videos, pdfs of poster presentations or abstracts from pertinent journal publications with the links to the source materials.
#3 Publications
The Publications section helps to give visitors to your personal profile page an overview of who you are, your background and key achievements. Many of your colleagues will have been published at some time in the past, whether it's in scientific journals, research journals, or on the marketing and communications side of the company.
Your profile can carry up to 50 joint or solo publications and whilst it can’t carry the same amount of detail that your entries on academic libraries, university or research institute staff profile can, LinkedIn search works on keywords so you are easy to find.
Your clients and customers may be looking for specialists within your field. They are likely to do a ‘topic-based’ search (for example XXXXX) so adding detail to Publications helps to find you.
Put simply, you need keywords on your profile to present you to the person who is searching for someone like you, with skills and experience like yours.
#4 Blog, Post and Articles
great way to share your ideas, topics you are interested in, discuss recent or current work in a way that may be difficult elsewhere. you may not want to clog up the company website with personal blogs and it’s so hard to talk about the impact or results of the work you do - too much red tape.
You cannot always talk about how effective your products or devices are, or share customer feedback but you can discuss the things that your team have been working on, for example:
- updates on current or recent clinical trials
- updates on research findings or developments
- challenges or barriers your industry is facing
These updates should be optimised with the keywords your target audience would use - just as with your website blogs - so that they can be easily found on LinkedIn.
#5 Education
If you give LinkedIn the necessary data, it will do all the hard work for you.
Alumni associations the world over understand the power of affinity - “we both studied at the same institution so we already have common ground” - and you can benefit from it too.
Your profile should include the ‘schools’ (universities and colleges) where you studied, what subjects or fields and the time period. LinkedIn will then index this data to find possible connections and present them to you. You can then choose who to re/connect with.
A percentage of your peers will have achieved great success in their careers and may have a network of valuable connections that you can only see by connecting with them. Likewise, you may have a valuable network who can be of service to them.
Should you include everything?
Certainly include your undergraduate degree and above, along with any fellowships, research posts or other recognised qualifications from well-regarded institutions.
This helps to demonstrate your progression as well as establishing your credentials to speak (or write) on your chosen topics. It also shows your peers who you’ve worked (or researched) with and where your expertise lies.
Where to start
We hope this has inspired to open up your personal profile and develop it further. If you help LinkedIn to find and categorise ‘you’ it will help you to find and connect with the people who can help you and your company achieve your goals.
By providing LinkedIn with the keywords it needs to understand and categorise ‘you’, it becomes easy to build a range of networks depending on your objectives, including clinicians, public health leaders, scientific and clinical researchers, academics or peers working in life sciences or pharma.
You may also build a network of investors, advisors and mentors interested in the world that you operate in. Be open-minded about those you connect with and those you accept a connection request from. This way you’ll be able to tap into the multiplier effect of powerful online networks.
Now sit back and watch LinkedIn do the ‘heavy lifting’ for you.
Resources
If you would like more information about the FDA regulations click here
If you would like more information about the EC regulations click here
European Commission
https://ec.europa.eu/health/human-use/legal-framework_en
European Medicines Agency (EMA)
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/marketing-authorisation
The Takeaway.
Want to see what else you can do on LinkedIn?
Why not speak to Arttia Creative about LinkedIn training for your team. We can help you develop strong personal and company profiles, build your network and find target customers all on the free tools within the LinkedIn platform. Where ever your location across the world, we can organise virtual LinkedIn training and guidance for you and your colleagues.
Social media marketing and website content working together create a powerful way to reach new audiences.
Belinda White | Creative Director