I recently had coffee with a friend when she suddenly said: “hey Mary, did you watch my recent presentation on Ted Talks?” I did and it was so informative and good that I even took some notes from it. It was about designing. “Where to add speaking engagements? I couldn’t find a section for that.” she continued.
I sipped my coffee and said: “LinkedIn is a business-oriented social platform and you think it should have a dedicated section for these kinds of stuff, right? Except they never added one. I know that is odd, but it still has this traditional base that we used to see in 2003, which is even more surprising. What were we then? Eight? I mean, yeah the UI and the UX are a lot better now but we still do not have a lot of presumably important sections.”
That was an overwhelming truth for my friend, I could see the disappointment in her eyes so I said: “hey, but you still can shove it somewhere in your profile!”
“ You can?” she said, wondering.
I took a “the girl who knows it all” gesture and said: “Yeah, it is no easy task to talk before so many strangers about something they already know a lot about, and in a Ted session? I don’t know what does if that doesn’t show your expertise, knowledge, confidence, or oratory. And since profiles are considered very important, you should find a way to add a speech like that in it.
I mean, there are a lot of people who do speaking engagements as a job these days, and they need to have it in their LinkedIn profile. It is a great honor to get invited to an event as a keynote speaker or even the guest speaker to simply ignore adding it to your profile.
You have no idea how it makes trusting you and your brand easier, you are proving to them that you are an expert and a thought leader. There is no bigger trust green light on LinkedIn than making people see you as a thought leader.”
“How do you show presentations on LinkedIn?” she asked.
“There are some ways, since it is gonna be long, maybe we need another round of coffee.”
So I am going to tell you exactly what I told her over that second round of coffee, but not in a conversational tone.
Where to add speaking engagements on LinkedIn?
So, let me tell you how to add your presentations to your profile. As I mentioned, there is no section dedicated to things like successful presentations, so should we give up the idea? No way.
Did Edison give up the idea of inventing a lamp just for a few failures? No, and that was a harder one to achieve. LinkedIn never thought of adding a speaking engagement section to its platform. So what? We still have a lot of other sections, don’t we?
We have an experience section, which is my first suggestion for adding speeches you had in it because almost everyone who ever reviews your profile will take a detailed look at this part; I recommended this one to my friend since she is a professional speaker and she had tons of presentations around the world in different events, conferences, etc. I suggested she group her most important speeches under one company page that she recently created to help her share the presentation videos she had.
Can we do the same if we had quite a few presentations at not-so-important events? You could, but I really prefer to take them under the project or honors section.
Nothing really wrong about not being a professional speaker, it is just the problem of time and date. So if you had some sporadic speeches now and then as an honored guest, maybe it is better to consider taking them under the project or honor section.
If you have a video of your speech, please add them to both your company page (if you have one) and to your featured section for people to see and please post them to your newsfeed. Your connection should know if you have the power to have a successful speech in front of so many strangers. Now that you know how to add speaking engagements on LinkedIn, create that snowball effect.