How To Improve Your LinkedIn Profile: 7 Tips for Success
Many businesses and their employees look for guidance when it comes to setting up and improving their LinkedIn pages. LinkedIn can help individuals and businesses get connected within their field. Therefore, it’s very important to keep your LinkedIn page up to date. Here are a few things you can do to make sure you stay connected.
1. Look Real. Make sure your profile picture is up to date, professional and approachable. You don’t want to use a personal photo of you at last year’s New Year’s Eve party, but you also don’t want a professional picture that doesn’t represent what people will see when they meet you in person.
2. Optimize Your Headline. There are a couple of different options. You can list multiple titles, such as “Branding Specialist and Consultant, Online Marketing Expert and Author.” Or, you can optimize your headline with keywords for your business and specialties.
3. Where Have You Been? It’s important to have your current employment listed as well as at least two to three past positions. You also want to make sure you include what exactly you did in those positions to better your expertise. And, of course, you want to have your education updated.
4. Make Yourself Accessible. Make sure your contact information is correct, especially your social media and website. You’ll also want to make sure your profile is easy to find through the url. For example, “www.linkedin.com/in/johndoe” is a lot easier than “www.linkedin.com/pub/john-doe/45/626/9b.”
5. Who Are You? Make others want to read your profile by drawing them in with a quick, simple summary. There’s no limit on length, but if it’s going to be more than a few sentences, include a few bullet points of your skills, for example.
6. What Makes You Great? Get recommendations and endorsements from your connections. Having even just a few recommendations from people who have worked with you in the past can really boost your credibility and the desire to connect with you on LinkedIn.
7. Use Your Connections. Make sure you are getting connected with those you work and have worked with. The more connections, the more referrals and recommendations you’re likely to get. Once you connect, browse a couple of profiles that look impressive and generate some ideas from them that might be good for improving your own profile.
LinkedIn can be a great professional tool if used properly. Once you improve your personal profile, it’s important to keep it up to date. One easy way to do it is to take 10 minutes a week to jump on and check your news feed and glance over your profile to make sure it’s still accurate. There might be a skill you learned or a new experience you had in your position you want to add.
What other impressive features have you seen on LinkedIn profiles? Share your thoughts below!
Published on: June 28, 2013