LinkedIn is one of the most fertile grounds for career and business growth. It’s your opportunity to get noticed by recruiters hunting for talent, colleagues looking to connect, or businesses seeking potential partners.
To shine the spotlight on you, it’s essential that you correctly set up and optimize your profile. In a word, your LinkedIn profile must impress if you’re to stand out from 350 million plus professionals on LinkedIn.
Here’s how to do it.
What Your Profile Must Include
Display your achievements and skills, as well as all the building blocks of your professional brand, such as:
- Name and headline - Use your professional name and a creative, succinct description of who you are and what you do in your industry. Example: John E Smith, app developer, built some of the most popular apps in the smart home industry. Don’t put anything other than your name in your name field. Symbols, acronyms, company names confound the search engines.
- LinkedIn URL - Create a unique URL to get found quickly and easily
- Professional headshot - Get 14 more times profile views with a professional-looking, professionally shot profile picture
- Background information - Provide a concise description of
→ Present and future career goals
→ Job experience, including position titles and links to slides, videos, podcasts, articles, and other professionally relevant information
→ Projects you’ve participated in that demonstrate your talent and skills. Include links for added credibility
→ Educational background, including schools attended, degrees earned, qualifications acquired
- Skills and recommendations - Get more profile views when you include your skill sets, competencies, expertise, and endorsements and recommendations from fellow professionals on specific skills
- Connections with peers, clients, or customers - Improve your visibility within your industry
- Groups that reflect your interest - Join groups to increase your networking opportunities
Make sure you complete every aspect of your profile to gain more visibility, as search algorithms prioritize complete profiles.
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Profile Dos and Don’ts
Now that you’ve completed your profile, here are some dos and don’ts to help you maximize it and effectively build and maintain LinkedIn relationships:
- Update your profile regularly, especially when you complete an important project, receive an award or commendation, or are promoted to a new position.
- Make use of hidden LinkedIn features to boost your profile, including adding relationship notes, creating a showcase page to promote specific products to specific prospects, embedding media files within your profile, or saving job searches.
- Don’t make your profile unprofessional by putting in a lot of personal data
- Don’t post sales or marketing messages within your profile
- Don’t include anything you wouldn’t say in a job interview
- Don’t use buzzwords such as driven, dynamic, motivated, etc. to describe yourself. The proof is in the pudding, so use sales figures reached or awards achieved instead.
An optimized LinkedIn profile is the most important seed you can plant to nurture and grow more visibility, more career opportunities, more business connections. Call us at K2 for all the help you need to optimize this critical professional networking platform.
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